Announcement: 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize for the best article in U.S. intellectual history: Tom Arnold-Forster, “Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion,” American Journalism 40:1 (2023): 51-79.” This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as a current graduate student or a scholar within five years of receiving the PhD. The article must have appeared in an academic journal in the 2023 calendar year and may be submitted by the author, editor, or others. The winner receives $500. We are grateful to our committee (Jennifer Burns, Natalie Mendoza Gutierrez, David Sehat) for their thoughtful work.

The committee writes: “This year’s award goes to Tom Arnold-Forster (King’s College London), “Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion,” American Journalism 40:1 (2023): 51-79.  Lippmann’s writings are staples of American intellectual history, so it might seem surprising that anyone could have anything new to say. But in this fascinating reappraisal of Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion, Arnold-Forster presents a more tortured early Lippmann than scholars have previously perceived. Most treatments of Lippmann’s career portray him as a progressive liberal theorist whose faith in democracy was tested by the experience of the First World War. Seeing that democratic majorities were easily manipulated by wartime propaganda, Lippmann wrote Public Opinion, many scholars have said, to expose the limitations of democratic decision-making and to propose instead the technocratic rule by experts. But using Lippmann’s archives, Arnold-Forster shows that Lippmann began writing Public Opinion in June 1914, the same year that he published his classic book, Drift and Mastery. Lippmann’s concerns about the fragility of democratic decision-making emerged through his reading of the “Great Society” concept put forward by Graham Wallas and the social psychology of William James. Wallas in particular caused Lippmann to wrestle with the vast transformation of modern society that made it increasingly difficult for the citizenry to deliberate in any meaningful way, a disturbing aspect of modernity that Lippmann had not fully confronted in his previous work. Lippmann’s resulting challenge to democratic faith in Public Opinion, then, was not merely an expression of personal or generational disillusionment that emerged from the war. Instead, as Arnold-Forster shows, Lippman’s 1922 book offered a more sober and demanding assessment of the limitations of modern democracy, an appraisal whose troubling analysis continues to resonate in the present.”