Angus Burgin: Lippmann’s Past and Present

Tom Arnold-Forster’s superb intellectual biography of Walter Lippmann ends on a bit of a dour note. “Lippmann spent his final years in despair at the United States,” Arnold-Forster writes. “He clung to old hopes about the need for public debate and liberal opinion formation. He wanted America to confront its imperial hubris and domestic political malaise. But these were frail hopes now, hard to maintain as liberalism decayed and the conservative movement built power. So he found solace in fatalism” (267).

These sentiments continue to resonate. Lippmann observed a populist conservatism swallowing established norms and institutions and worried that liberal institutions were collapsing. He was anxious that the media had created an environment that led public opinion to become unmoored from lived experience. He criticized those around him for their lack of action while falling into his own sense of fatalism. Over a half-century since his passing, his predicaments still ring familiar to an uncanny degree.

Lippmann has always been a confusing figure to teach, in part because his interests and views shifted so dramatically over the course of his long life: the progressivism of Drift and Mastery is difficult to reconcile with the market enthusiasms of The Good Society or the traditionalism of Essays in the Public Philosophy. But his central concern — how to structure a liberal democracy in ways that would preserve the political authority of its citizens without falling prey to populist excess — remained consistent amid all these variations. That clarity of focus has kept his writings relevant to our preoccupations today, in ways that have eluded many other progressive intellectuals.

Given that his central concerns remain so vital, readers might wonder what role an intellectual biography of Lippmann is intended to play. The decision to write an intellectual biography, after all, is never solely historical — it is always also a way of acting in the present. Arnold-Forster nevertheless downplays the book’s potential relevance to contemporary politics. He does write on the third page: “Lippmann’s questions were sharply put and seriously debated. They mattered in the past and resonate with the present” (3). But he doesn’t explain precisely how he wants them to resonate, or what the normative force of this intellectual history should be for readers who are interested less in Lippmann than in the problems he addressed.

One of the most familiar justifications for intellectual biography is the attempt to resurrect an author’s ideas – to use the author’s life as a vehicle for converting readers in the present to the views they advocated in the past. But it is safe to say that Arnold-Forster’s rendition of Walter Lippmann is no hagiography, and he seems largely uninterested in convincing his readers of the rightness of Lippmann’s perspectives. The book is unflinching in describing some aspects of Lippmann’s worldview that are likely to trouble most readers in the present – ranging from his “chilling indifference to anti-Semitism” (154) to his representation of African-American communities as “inferior and underdeveloped” and his advocacy of “race parallelism” (118). If anything, the Lippmann presented here seems to validate many of the aspersions that scholars have long cast on the reflexive elitism of many Progressive intellectuals. Resurfacing his partialities may do more to foreclose than to rehabilitate his social theory.

Other intellectual biographers may forego hagiography or normative advocacy while still seeing the ideas expressed by subject as deep and original enough to reward extended reflection – that is to say, whatever one makes of a major thinker’s ideas, the enterprise of exhuming and exploring them can be presumed to enrich contemporary sensibilities. But like many scholars who have written on Lippmann, Arnold-Forster represents him as less notable for the depth and originality of his ideas than their influence. Lippmann is depicted here more as a journalist than an intellectual—someone who was uniquely skilled at pulling strands of academic research performed by others into the public conversation, and whose most characteristic and influential ideas were commensurately synthetic. He was, as Arnold-Forster cites Jan-Werner Müller to claim, one of the “in-between figures” who produced “the political thought that mattered politically” (2).

If the validity or depth of Lippmann’s ideas don’t provide an animating purpose for the book, another possibility would be an interest in the mechanisms of Lippmann’s impact. And Arnold-Forster repeatedly emphasizes that Lippmann’s defining characteristic was his extraordinary clout: through syndication in around 100 newspapers, he had over 10 million weekly readers, ranking as one of America’s most popular columnists and helping to shape the national conversation across decades. Consulted by Franklin Roosevelt, admired by Charles de Gaulle, transformative for Friedrich Hayek, lauded by Kennan and Schlesinger Jr., Lippmann’s milieu traversed across the academic and intellectual worlds like few other figures in the twentieth century. But while Arnold-Forster is quick to observe these extraordinary and enviable mechanisms of influence, the book doesn’t dwell on the task of examining them. It doesn’t share the fixation of the vast literature on the mid-century social sciences with the question of how ideas migrate from academic seminar rooms into the boardrooms and legislative chambers where public and corporate policies are determined. Craufurd Goodwin’s book on Lippmann as a public economist took his facility at traversing across these boundaries as its central problematic, but Arnold-Forster treats this aspect of his career more as background than as an object of analysis in itself.

Another reason to write biography is characterological: a simple interest in understanding a single person’s motives, psychology, experiences, and contexts, in order to recreate the worlds they inhabited, and thereby gain some insight into the genesis of their ideas. But Arnold-Forster shows more interest in intellectual than institutional or personal contexts. Lippmann’s complicated family life is almost wholly elided; having been well-covered in Ronald Steel’s classic biography, it’s not brought into the foreground here. The book shows little interest in speculation about the motives that impelled Lippmann’s extraordinary productivity, and in that sense forms a striking contrast to Mark Thomas Edwards’s recent book on Lippmann’s spiritualism. For Edwards, Lippmann was driven by a yearning for moral order in a twentieth-century world marked by an erosion of religious belief. But for Arnold-Forster, Lippmann’s private views and experiences remain largely enigmatic. As he writes, Lippmann struck many as “eerily detached from human concerns,” his journalism was marked by “a public mask of cool and impersonal sobriety,” and he “routinely concealed or suppressed feelings of fear, joy, guilt, pleasure, shame, doubt, and turmoil” from the world around him. “The mask became his face,” Arnold-Forster writes. “Over the years, Lippmann’s public self displaced the person within to produce a wholly public consciousness” that was “comically incapable of genuine introspection” (11). For Arnold-Forster, Lippmann’s private life is separated from his public persona by an almost unbridgeable chasm—a void of his subject’s own making that he remains reluctant to cross.

That leaves a final possibility that, as one might expect from a scholar trained at the University of Cambridge, Arnold-Forster is foremost a Skinnerian, interested in exhuming perspectives from the past as a way of expanding and challenging our own political assumptions in the present. But I’m not sure that the Lippmann presented here held enough of a settled worldview to fulfill that role. Arnold-Forster repeatedly calls attention to Lippmann’s contradictions, his inconsistencies—the tensions between his public columns and his academic books, and between his acute descriptive accounts of public opinion and his sometimes less convincing prescriptive solutions. Arguably the central claim of the book is that the common perception of Lippmann as an advocate of expertise and a skeptic of mass democracy is itself an overwrought stereotype—that Lippmann was a more complex and conflicted figure than many have given him credit for being. The principal present-day assumptions that this portrait of Lippmann seems designed to challenge are those held about Lippmann himself.

In that respect, Arnold-Forster’s intellectual biography will hold immense value for anyone who teaches on Lippmann. In reading it I quickly realized that nearly everything I’ve previously told about my students about Lippmann was a little too easy and glib—Lippmann was not really a progressive dogmatist, but rather was extraordinarily skilled at yielding confident insights out of an uncertain and unstable environment. There is a fascination in learning about a journalist who managed to deliver ambiguous and sometimes self-contradictory views with such authority, eschewing the meekness and diffidence more characteristic of scholars.

But with all due acknowledgment that intellectual history is by nature a complexifying subdiscipline, the question remains of what we should make of the messiness and multiplicity of Lippmann’s ideas. How might reconsidering Lippmann’s remarkable life and distinctive worldview help readers navigate our current moment? Admittedly, the contours of Lippmann’s age were very different from our own, in their fixation on the problems of massification rather than the perils of individuation, and on the manipulation of broadcast networks rather than hidden filters and algorithms. But does his story provide an example, a cautionary tale, a forgotten path, a hidden depth, or a means of transformation that speaks meaningfully to the current nadir of public respect for expertise? How, if at all, does a deeper knowledge of the ideas and contexts of perhaps the most influential media theorist of the last century speak to the increasingly pathological media environment of our own?