Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd 12/15/2008 9:49 AM Page 8

Don Michael Randel

The public good: knowledge as the
foundation for a democratic society

While we have much to celebrate,
our democracy needs continuing atten-
tion.1 We might well take the view that
it needs more attention now than it has
in some time. Consider the terms “the
public good,” “knowledge,” and “a dem-
ocratic society,” for example. Who could
possibly be opposed, in principle, to
these concepts? But they are incomplete
as we have assembled them and require
a deeper foundation worthy of serious
discussion.

Let’s start with knowledge. A profes-
sor of philosophy in my undergraduate
years once said that in answering an ex-
amination question on topic X it is never
wrong to begin by saying, “That depends
on what you mean by X.” Indeed, any
discussion of knowledge does depend on

Don Michael Randel, a Fellow of the American
Academy since 2001, is president of the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation. He was president of the
University of Chicago from 2000–2006, and
before that faculty member, dean, and provost at
Cornell University. He is the editor of “The Har-
vard Dictionary of Music,” 4th edition (2003),
“The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and
Musicians” (1999), and “The Harvard Biogra-
phical Dictionary of Music” (1996).

what you mean by knowledge. Even with-
out plunging into a deep discussion of
epistemology and post-epistemological
views of what the term might mean, we
would almost certainly wish to question
the role in a democratic society of what
a good many people would insist on call-
ing knowledge. What, for example,
about divine revelation? Our democra-
cy protects the right of people to believe
in divine revelation and to regard that
revelation as knowledge. But some of
the most contentious issues before this
country today are rooted in clashes over
whether what some regard as divinely
revealed knowledge can be the founda-
tion for laws that must be obeyed by
everyone in a democracy. And no one
viewing the history of Christianity
should feel entitled to single out Islam
or any other religion for criticism in
this context.

1 This essay is modi½ed from remarks given on
the opening night of The Public Good: Knowl-
edge as the Foundation for a Democratic Soci-
ety, a conference organized by the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Ameri-
can Philosophical Society on April 27–29, 2007,
in Washington, D.C. The original remarks were
published in the conference proceedings, The
Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a
Democratic Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Ameri-
can Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008).

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Perhaps what we mean by knowledge,
as a foundation for a democratic society,
is instead the product of something like
the scienti½c method, the set of propo-
sitions that we regard as accurately de-
scribing the world outside of ourselves
–the “real world,” in short. Here again
let us avoid a deeper discussion of phi-
losophy that might wish to explode this
whole notion. Let us instead settle for
common sense. We probably mean
something more like the phrase used
by the American Philosophical Society,
namely, “useful knowledge”: the set of
propositions that work for going about
the world, making things, causing cer-
tain things to happen.

This then raises the question, useful
for what purposes? Today, and perhaps
even in Benjamin Franklin’s day, the an-
swer to this question is most likely, in
one way or another, “To keep the Amer-
ican economy stronger than any other.”
A close corollary is “To keep the nation-
al defense strong so as to keep our de-
mocracy strong so as to keep our econ-
omy strong.” Advancing efforts toward
this end, the National Academies recent-
ly published Rising above the Gathering
Storm: Energizing and Employing America
for a Brighter Economic Future. The report
argues powerfully for increased invest-
ments in education and research in sci-
ence and technology:

The United States takes deserved pride in
the vitality of its economy, which forms
the foundation of our high quality of life,
our national security, and our hope that
our children and grandchildren will inher-
it ever-greater opportunities. That vitality
is derived in large part from the productiv-
ity of well-trained people and the steady
stream of scienti½c and technical innova-
tions they produce. Without high-quality,
knowledge-intensive jobs and the innova-
tive enterprises that lead to discovery and

new technology, our economy will suffer
and our people will face a lower standard
of living.2

Economic strength, which is to say
global competitiveness, and national
security are the twin motives for en-
hancing the production of knowledge,
and this will enable us to remain free
and democratic. (Medical knowledge,
which is not entirely unrelated to eco-
nomic strength and competitiveness,
is the only other kind of useful knowl-
edge that has anything like so strong a
claim on the national attention.) If you
doubt that these are the principal mo-
tives for the production of knowledge
–or at least the motives most likely to
gain traction in this country–consider
some of the kinds of useful knowledge
in which we do not invest. Everyone
knows that the design of acoustically su-
perior concert halls is far from being an
established science. I have long feared
that this is principally because the de-
sign of acoustically superior concert
halls has never been seen as essential to
the national defense. Perhaps if we can
relate concert halls to the national de-
fense we can make the case to the Amer-
ican people that perfecting acoustics in
those halls is a matter of national con-
cern.

This instrumental view of knowledge
is surely not suf½cient, however, and we
ought to want to make that clear. Even if
we were content with this as our operat-
ing de½nition, it would be insuf½cient as
the foundation of a democratic society.
This has to do with our beliefs about the
uses to which any kind of useful knowl-

2 National Academy of Sciences, National
Academy of Engineering, and Institute of
Medicine, Rising above the Gathering Storm:
Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter
Economic Future (Washington, D.C.: National
Academies Press, 2007), 1.

Knowledge
as the foun-
dation for a
democratic
society

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Don
Michael
Randel
on the
humanities

edge can be put. The production of use-
ful knowledge reached extraordinary
heights in Germany in the second quar-
ter of the twentieth century and in the
former Soviet Union in the third; in nei-
ther case did it provide a suf½cient foun-
dation for a democratic society. In short,
useful knowledge can be employed in
the commission of the most heinous
crimes and in the maintenance of the
most repressive governments.

There, too, are some kinds of knowl-
edge that we believe should not be accu-
mulated in the ½rst place because they
are nobody’s business. The right to pri-
vacy is fundamental, and yet the inva-
sion of that privacy is sometimes
thought to be justi½ed on grounds of
the protection of our democratic socie-
ty–as we know only too well these days.
Another implication of the term knowl-

edge, in relation to the foundation of a
democratic society, is that knowledge
and truth are somehow linked–that is,
it cannot be knowledge in at least the
instrumental sense if it is not true and
subject to some reasonable veri½cation.
Thus, one should not lie. Democracy
fails if the citizenry is not told the truth.
We have too many cases readily at hand
in which the citizenry simply has been
lied to or in which powerful pressure has
been placed on science to dilute or sup-
press altogether its public-policy ½nd-
ings. In a democratic society we must
insist on living by “prodigious hones-
ties,” in the words of the poet Richard
Wilbur.

Now we come closer to what is miss-

ing when we say that knowledge is the
foundation of a democratic society. The
narrow, instrumental view of knowledge
that often dominates our thinking needs
at a minimum to be expanded or sup-
ported by ideas and values about which
we may also reason, and which may even

be thought useful, but which are ulti-
mately taken as axiomatic. Ultimately,
the foundation of a democratic society
is a shared commitment to a democratic
society and all that it entails about the
rights and duties of individuals. This
commitment to the rights of individu-
als arises not out of the application of
instrumental reason to the production
of knowledge; it is more nearly a matter
of faith or belief, often in the face of cru-
el reality. Above all, this commitment is
of a piece with love, the manifest power
of which I would decline to attribute to
its mere usefulness.

This commitment leads us to the mat-
ter of the common good and its relation-
ship to a democratic society. Unfortu-
nately, that relationship is not unprob-
lematic. To the extent that democracy
values, indeed celebrates the rights of
individuals to their own difference, it
makes more dif½cult widespread agree-
ment about the commitment to any par-
ticular de½nition of the common good
–at least any de½nition that would be
the basis for collective action. This dif-
½culty is very much before us today,
and Tocqueville warned of it long ago.
The citizenry lapses into a complacency
about the collectivity on the one hand
and a preoccupation with individually
de½ned spheres of identity on the other.
Low voter turnout is evidence of the for-
mer; the inability of public institutions
to take forceful action on pressing social
problems is often evidence of the latter.
In the face of this, a strong economy
and the national defense are simply the
lowest common denominators to which
a broad appeal can be made, never mind
the great many devils in the details even
here. The danger for people who care
about the life of the mind is that in mak-
ing the argument for knowledge as the
foundation of a democratic society in
instrumental terms, we adopt the modes

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Book_Winter2009:Book Winter 2007.qxd 12/15/2008 9:49 AM Page 11

of thought of the enemy, as it were.
A strong economy is of course a good
thing–if we can ½gure out how to dis-
tribute the wealth humanely–and a
strong national defense is of course
essential–if we can ½gure out who our
enemies really are and how to deal with
them by means that need not always in-
clude the force of arms. But we ought to
produce knowledge in our society simply
because as human beings we cannot help
but do so. The ultimate foundation of
any society ought to be the human imag-
ination, honed to the greatest degree and
in the company of its faithful compan-
ion, curiosity.

Our failure to maintain the national
investment in the physical sciences has,
without a doubt, been myopic for all
kinds of highly practical reasons. But
every bit as tragic has been to hear peo-
ple in high places sometimes contem-
plate the possibility of merely ceding
U.S. leadership in high-energy physics
to the Europeans, for example. This is
as contrary to the spirit of this nation
and to the foundation of its democracy
as anything could possibly be. We ought
to want to build the International Linear
Collider in this country simply because
we are desperate to know what it would
enable us to learn; job creation in Illinois
and elsewhere should be strictly second-
ary. Let us all remember American phys-
icist Robert Wilson’s remarks to Con-
gress when asked about the contribu-
tion of the Fermilab accelerator to the
national defense. He said it would be
among the things that made the coun-
try worth defending. If we were in fact
the most imaginative nation on the face
of the globe, much else that we worry
about today would be far along the way
toward solution.

What to do about this? By all means

let us strengthen the teaching of, and re-

search in, science and mathematics at
all levels. But the study of what makes
these undertakings truly worthwhile;
the study of the values that support the
production of knowledge and its proper
application in society; the study of, con-
templation of, and exploration of what
it means to be a human being and why
and how we should want to organize our
lives in relation to one another around
the globe: these are the domains of the
humanities and the arts. And talk about
underinvestment!

This is not even principally about
money, because the amounts in ques-
tion are so utterly pathetic. The Nation-
al Endowment for the Humanities and
the National Endowment for the Arts
together made grants of just over $200
million in 2007. There are defense con-
tractors who have grave dif½culty keep-
ing track of amounts so small. We
should spend more at the national level
certainly, but also locally in K–12 educa-
tion, where the decline in arts programs
has been precipitous. Above all we need
to talk and act as if we truly believe that
the humanities and the arts matter and
underlie the deepest foundations of a
democratic society. Thinking about
such things does not really cost much
money; it requires making the space
for them in our national life and then
trying to live by what we ½nd there,
no matter the method or the size of
our contribution to the gross domestic
product. William Carlos Williams, in
one of his longer poems, helps make
clear what is at stake:

It is dif½cult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

Knowledge
as the foun-
dation for a
democratic
society

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Don
Michael
Randel
on the
humanities

Later in the same poem he writes,

Only the imagination is real!

I have declared it

time without end.

If a man die

it is because death

has ½rst

possessed his imagination.

But if he refuse death–
no greater evil

can befall him unless it be the death of love
meet him

in full career.

Then indeed

for him

the light has gone out.
But love and the imagination
are of a piece,

swift as the light

to avoid destruction.3

Let us strive to ½nd the common good

among our differences. Let us lay and
maintain the foundation of a democrat-
ic society. Let knowledge grow. But may
knowledge be amply and generously im-
agined, useful at times to be sure, but
grounded always in a compassionate
and restless human spirit.

3 William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That
Greeny Flower,” in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
(London: Agenda, 1963).

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