Tom Arnold-Forster: Response to My Critics

I am deeply grateful to Nick Witham, Angus Burgin, Sam Klug, and Kathryn McGarr for their generous and incisive comments on Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography. I’ve learned much from the work of all my co-panelists, and the S-USIH conference has meant a lot to me over the years, so it’s a real honor to publish these papers here.[1]

Before responding to these comments, let me briefly summarize what my book offers and argues. In essence it offers a new historical account of Walter Lippmann’s intellectual life and political thought from the early 1910s to the late 1960s. By analyzing his texts in a range of contexts, I make two main arguments. The first is that Lippmann was a political rather than technocratic thinker, whose ideas about public opinion were focused on understanding modern democratic politics rather than legitimating expert rule. The second is that, by taking off the technocratic lens that has clouded scholarship on Lippmann, we gain access to a wider and more interesting set of debates about twentieth-century American liberalism. For Lippmann, thinking about politics meant thinking beyond concepts of expertise and technocracy, and instead understanding the broader relationship between liberalism and democracy. It was this relationship, and the place of public opinion within it, that really animated his writing.

I’m pleased that all my critics accept the book’s core interpretive claims about democracy and technocracy, and that they engage so productively with some of the wider debates about liberalism that Lippmann shaped. In this response I will focus on what I take to be their main questions. These concern the genre of intellectual biography, Lippmann’s international thought, his Washington life and media theory, and his current resonance.

To begin with the questions about biography: why write one about Lippmann? And how should we understand the relationship between his ideas and his embodied life in particular cities? There are many kinds of biographical writing, and my book provides an intellectual portrait that focuses on Lippmann’s public work and engages with larger historiographical debates when and where he matters to them. What this approach offers to intellectual history more broadly are fine-grained analyses of particular texts, debates, and encounters. These can then affirm, challenge, or complicate larger narratives and frameworks, such as the so-called “Lippmann-Dewey debate” in the history of American political thought. A biographical approach strikes me as especially relevant for a subject, like Lippmann, who has long been encrusted with received scholarly wisdom.

Burgin sketched five possible rationales for writing intellectual biography, and within his taxonomy I would see my book as mixing numbers two and five. The book is strongly committed to historicization, and Burgin is right to observe that my central goals are to engage with and revise “present-day assumptions… about Lippmann himself.” But I would also challenge the distinction Burgin draws between journalists and intellectuals, and his suggestion that synthesizers and “in-between figures” are not deep enough thinkers for intellectual biography. My sense rather is that, in terms of historical significance, “the political thought that mattered politically” is more than enough material to warrant close contextual readings and biographical study.[2] Lippmann’s intellectual life was no less historically significant because it was also a journalistic life. In fact he mattered precisely because the twentieth-century United States was a society where much political thinking happened through public argument in the mass print culture that Witham highlights.

McGarr asked about the relationship between practical considerations and epistemological positions within my focus on Lippmann’s published writing. Here I think both matter to the book. My Lippmann is largely a series of texts because this is how millions of people encountered him in the past, and because his influence operated most clearly and traceably at the level of public argument. This does involve an epistemic stance in the sense that I see public discourse as genuinely shaping politics, and my book explores Lippmann’s commitment to and engagement with public debate over the long run. But practical concerns felt no less pressing to me when writing, not least because I wanted the book to be relatively concise and readable. I took my task as to analyze Lippmann’s texts and contexts historically, both in their own terms and in ways that did justice to existing historiography. Lippmann was sufficiently wide-ranging and embroiled in past debates that just keeping track of what he said and when—let alone why—is not straightforward. Nor is it easy to specify his precise impact beyond a broad public influence on both mass and elite audiences. This is not to suggest that alternative approaches, focused on place or reader response or particular modes of influence, cannot shed valuable light on Lippmann.[3] But for both practical and scholarly reasons, my book centers on the argumentative content of his published output.

What can this approach offer? Lippmann’s international thought provides an example. As Klug’s comment outlines, a close contextual reading of Lippmann’s foreign policy writing challenges orthodox accounts of his realism and liberal internationalism. By exploring the significance of concepts like civilization and empire to Lippmann, my book shows how and why his foreign policy realism was underwritten by ideological commitments to US imperialism. So, “what would the intellectual history of American foreign relations look like,” Klug asks, “if we took the persistence of civilizational thinking as our guide?” My sense is that such histories would be better able to name and engage with themes like race and empire, and better placed to understand the highly-charged ideological freight that lies beneath the surface of concepts like “power” and “interest.” The point of my chapter on Lippmann’s international thought is to explore how imperialism and realism were conceptually entangled, both in the work of a leading foreign policy writer and in ways that shaped broader categories like the Cold War. None of this is normatively attractive, but it remains historically significant and historiographically relevant for ongoing debates about the interwar origins of Cold War liberalism.[4]

Klug also asks how international thought relates to urbanism, and has done much in his excellent book The Internal Colony to explore this relationship in broader histories of Black radical thought and US social policy.[5] From the particular angle of Lippmann’s intellectual biography I would say that his ideas about liberal modernization sometimes moved between the urban and the international, but not very clearly or consistently. While he found 1920s New York a fertile context for thinking about urban liberal modernity, wider links with international themes seem to have been drawn more clearly by modernization theorists and their critics in the 1950s and 1960s.[6] In the early phase of his career Lippmann also showed an interest in alternative visions of world order, asking W. E. B. Du Bois to send him material from the 1919 Pan-African Congress.[7] But these interests faded and—to answer Klug’s other question—I have found no evidence that Lippmann engaged with Black critics of the Cold War in the late 1940s. This is symptomatic of his particular intellectual trajectory and the Washington foreign policy elite that he had joined.

On this score, McGarr is right to suggest that Washington mattered for Lippmann’s shifting views. As her book City of Newsmen has so luminously argued, the social geography and professional culture of Washington journalism had wider political consequences.[8] From the late 1930s, Lippmann’s increasingly conservative liberalism was encouraged and facilitated by the city’s patterns of elite sociability. He belonged to the best clubs, liked and lived in Georgetown, and was comfortable with the closed-door culture that McGarr describes. Still, the causal links here are hard to pin down, and I am not sure how much explanatory weight can be placed on Washington alone. After all, Lippmann’s New York was also a clubby place with many closed doors and a stark psychogeography. “I live in New York and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn is interested in,” he wrote bluntly in 1920.[9] So while I certainly do see room for place in intellectual biography, I would also say that Lippmann felt at home in many cities and moved smoothly through sundry elite spaces. He knew his way around Georgetown and the Upper East Side, but also Back Bay and Cambridge, Bloomsbury and Chelsea, and the sixth arrondissement in Paris.

There is also a sense, I think, in which Lippmann really was a disembodied authorial presence, a public voice in print. This is how and why he mattered to millions every week in all sorts of places: San Francisco, Chicago, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Detroit, Marseille, New Delhi, Moscow, and elsewhere. In the end, my book puts Lippmann at his desk because this place offers the clearest overall perspective on the main currents of his intellectual development. As Witham suggests, this approach means treating Lippmann’s life as “a public life on the page,” sustained by and responsive to the mass print media.

Let me say a word here about Lippmann’s media theory. It is absolutely true, as McGarr notes, that his most interesting press criticism belongs to his early career, and its decline surely does have something to do with his later Washington life. But another reason why Lippmann wrote less media theory in late career was that the American newspaper industry remained broadly stable and became increasingly professional across the twentieth century. In other words, Lippmann remained a theorist and practitioner of mass print media in an early-twentieth-century mode, despite the rise of radio and television. His 1920 book Liberty and the News engaged with and emerged from a specific historical moment for American journalism, in which the commercial viability of mass-circulation newspapers could be assumed. This was roughly the same media environment that existed in 1960, when Lippmann gave a lecture at the National Press Club on “The Job of the Washington Correspondent.” He argued here for the political significance of truthful newspaper journalism “if the country is to be governed with the consent of the governed.”[10] Liberty and the News had made the same argument in 1920, though in a more urgent mood. Lippmann wrote here that “[many] are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an exact sense,” he stressed, “the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”[11]

This brings me finally to the issue of Lippmann’s relevance now. Burgin asks how Lippmann can “help readers navigate our current moment”? Here my answer is necessarily ambivalent, because normatively Lippmann was such a mixed bag, and because multiplicity was central to his intellectual life. Parts of his work can illuminate present media pathologies by clarifying broad conceptual questions about journalism and democracy. How free can democracy be without what Lippmann called “a steady of supply of trustworthy and relevant news”?[12] Can democratic liberty exist if the public sphere is suffused with lies and propaganda? Still, Lippmann’s answers to these questions were premised on a newspaper industry that no longer exists, and we live in a radically altered media environment. So efforts to extract normative insights from his media theory need to account both for his distance from and resonance with the present.[13] Other parts of his work resonate in more troubling and less useable ways. As Klug’s comment indicates, Lippmann’s international thought was structured by an imperial and civilizational politics that cannot sustain visions of global justice or postimperial world order. Still other parts of his work may seem too bound up with bygone domestic conjunctures, like Al Smith’s New York or Franklin Roosvelt’s New Deal.

Because Lippmann wrote so much about so many subjects in such a wide range of contexts, his liberalism is a moving target and his story lacks a simple upshot. In the book I argue that his political thought can be understood best through a historical analysis of the debates from which it emerged. So I would stress that Lippmann’s current resonance cannot be separated from a historical understanding of his significance. To me this seems unavoidably complex, because historical understanding as I see it means grasping both the pastness of the past and its presence in the present. Lippmann lived in a twentieth-century world that is very different from ours, and that nevertheless shapes and haunts us. His intellectual biography cannot solve our problems today, but it can help generate a better sense of the stakes both then and now. Another way to put this is to say that Lippmann’s significance is primarily historical, and that we should be doing our own thinking for ourselves, with or without him as we prefer.

[1] This paper also draws on, and repeats sentences from, my response to a forthcoming H-Diplo roundtable about the book.

[2] Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (Yale University Press, 2011), 3.

[3] A good example of reader response scholarship is Kathryn J. McGarr, “‘The Right to Voice Your Opinions’: A Historical Case Study in Audience Members’ Emotional Hostility to Radio Journalists,” Journalism 24, no. 9 (2023): 1863–79.

[4] e.g. Andrew Preston, Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security (Harvard University Press, 2025); Anders Stephanson, American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters (Verso, 2025).

[5] Sam Klug, The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025).

[6] e.g. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press, 2015).

[7] Walter Lippmann to W. E. B. Du Bois, 20 Feb. 1919, at https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b014-i273.

[8] Kathryn J. McGarr, City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

[9] Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 52.

[10] Walter Lippmann, “The Job of the Washington Correspondent,” Atlantic, Jan. 1960, 47–49, at 49.

[11] Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 5.

[12] Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 11.

[13] A good model is Sam Lebovic, “Fake News, Lies, and Other Familiar Problems,” Knight First Amendment Institute, 18 Nov. 2022, at https://knightcolumbia.org/content/fake-news-lies-and-other-familiar-problems.