February 15, 2007
Latour, Dewey and Concept work
I’ve just come off of a week of discussions with Bruno Latour, (more on that over here) who was a “distinguished visitor” for a week. In particular, I roped him into teaching in my class on the topic of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems and Lippman’s The Phantom Public. The discussion was electrifying, not least because Latour has recently read both books extremely carefully. His current work, which is increasingly in the domain of metaphysics, takes the Dewey-Lippman debate as an occasion for theorizing “political truth”–or the possibility of achieving a distinctive form of truth in politics. The diagnosis and critique from which PP proceeds is the debate with Lippmann on the status of publics and public opinion. Contrary to the wikipedia version of things, it’s clear that there is more agreement than disagreement between these two, and the Lippmann is almost as radical a thinker (perhaps more) than Dewey. Lippmann is usually branded as a conservative, a theorist of elitist democracy–but he was as much a pragmatist as Dewey, it was only his solutions that differed. Latour gave a fantastic lecture on the debate.
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