Sublime

Thomas Sowell

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of

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Government, he explains, has a “threefold right and duty”: first, to adjudicate disputes between spheres, “compel[ling] mutual regard for the boundary-lines of each”; second, to defend the weak against the strong within each sphere; third, to exercise the coercive power necessary to guarantee that citizens “bear personal and financial burdens for

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