[1] As Carl Bybee wrote, "For Lippmann the public was a theoretical fiction and government was primarily an administrative problem to be solved as efficiently as possible, so that people could get on with their own individualistic pursuits".

Lippmann’s book is a forceful critique of what he takes to be mistaken conceptions of "the public" found in democratic theory like that it is made up of sovereign and omnicompetent citizens (21); "the people" are a sort of superindividual with one will and one mind (160) or an "organism with an organic unity of which the individual is a cell" (147); the public directs the course of events (77); it is a knowable body with fixed membership (110); it embodies cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition (168-9); and it is a dispenser of law or morals (106).

Lippmann counters that the public is none of those things but a "mere phantom," an abstraction (77) embedded in a "false philosophy" (200) that depends on a "mystical notion of society" (147).

Against the idealizations and obfuscations, Lippmann posits that society is made up of two types of people: agents and bystanders (also referred to as insiders and outsiders).

It can exert force upon those capable of direct action only by making a judgment as to which group is better able to address the problem at hand: "When men take a position in respect to the purposes of others they are acting as a public" (198).

The public must be put in its place [...] so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.The fundamental difference which matters is that between insiders and outsiders.