PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

conclusions of a sort that could not be suppressed or ignored. They
convinced themselves and acquired dignity, and knew what they were
fighting for. The social scientist will acquire his dignity and his
strength when he has worked out his method. He will do that by turning
into opportunity the need among directing men of the Great Society for
instruments of analysis by which an invisible and made intelligible.
But as things go now, the social scientist assembles his data out of a
mass of unrelated material. Social processes are recorded
spasmodically, quite often as accidents of administration. A report to
Congress, a debate, an investigation, legal briefs, a census, a
tariff, a tax schedule; the material, like the skull of the Piltdown
man, has to be put together by ingenious inference before the student
obtains any sort of picture of the event he is studying. Though it
deals with the conscious life of his fellow citizens, it is all too
often distressingly opaque, because the man who is trying to
generalize has practically no supervision of the way his data are
collected. Imagine medical research conducted by students who could
rarely go into a hospital, were deprived of animal experiment, and
compelled to draw conclusions from the stories of people who had been
ill, the reports of nurses, each of whom had her own system of
diagnosis, and the statistics compiled by the Bureau of Internal
Revenue on the excess profits of druggists. The social scientist has
usually to make what he can out of categories that were uncritically
in the mind of an official who administered some part of a law, or who
was out to justify, to persuade, to claim, or to prove. The student
knows this, and, as a protection against it, has developed that branch
of scholarship which is an elaborated suspicion about where to
discount his information.
That is a virtue, but it becomes a very thin virtue when it is merely
a corrective for the unwholesome position of social science. For the
scholar is condemned to guess as shrewdly as he can why in a situation
not clearly understood something or other may have happened. But the
expert who is employed as the mediator among representatives, and as
the mirror and measure of administration, has a very different control
of the facts. Instead of being the man who generalizes from the facts
dropped to him by the men of action, he becomes the man who prepares
the facts for the men of action. This is a profound change in his
strategic position. He no longer stands outside, chewing the cud
provided by busy men of affairs, but he takes his place in front of
decision instead of behind it. To-day the sequence is that the man of
affairs finds his facts, and decides on the basis of them; then, some
time later, the social scientist deduces excellent reasons why he did
or did not decide wisely. This ex post facto relationship is academic
in the bad sense of that fine word. The real sequence should be one
where the disinterested expert first finds and formulates the facts
for the man of action, and later makes what wisdom he can out of