Walter Lippmann - by Tom Arnold-Forster (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The life and ideas of one of the twentieth century's leading political thinkers

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was among the most influential and wide-ranging political writers in modern America. As both a journalist and political theorist, he shaped ideas about liberalism and democracy, the nature of public opinion, US power and empire, and the roles of journalists, experts, and citizens. Tom Arnold-Forster provides a bold historical reassessment of Lippmann's intellectual life, offering fresh perspectives on a career at the intersection of daily news and democratic theory.

This incisive book shows how Lippmann helped define the public debates of American liberalism from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. By exploring his ideas in their historical context, Arnold-Forster challenges the claim that Lippmann was primarily a theorist of expertise and technocracy. Instead, Lippmann emerges as a strikingly political thinker, public-facing and multifarious, who focused on what politics meant and how it worked in modern democracies. Covering subjects from press freedom to urban reform to economic and foreign policy, while tracing the evolution from his early liberal socialism to later conservative liberalism, this book explores Lippmann's thought as reflecting the protean character of liberal politics and the crises and paradoxes of democracy.

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography is a richly historical account of a complex political thinker. Lippmann's ideas played a formative role in the twentieth century and resonate powerfully with our fraught present.

Review Quotes

"Luminous. . . . Takes a problem-centered approach to intellectual history. . . . Arnold-Forster's is a great biography."---Ned O'Gorman, Review of Politics

"Deftly written and delightfully artful in its exposition of Lippmann's thought, Arnold-Forster's work deserves a wide readership."---Heidi Tworek, H-Diplo

"Vibrant. . . . What Arnold-Forster has dramatized through his serious and absorbing intellectual biography is the fact [that the] questions Lippmann investigated across the twentieth century remain startlingly relevant in the twenty-first: the role of the public in a democracy, the place of the media, and the position of the US in the world."---David Ekbladh, European Journal of American Studies

"The most influential political commentator of his generation . . . [Lippmann] became the patron saint of American liberalism. . . . The summaries of his writings are lucid, rich in context."---Samuel Earle, New York Review of Books

"Winner of the History Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication"

"A brilliant intellectual history. Arnold-Forster has assembled an impressive study, based in both published and archival sources, that sets Lippmann's thought in a number of historical contexts that help us understand his ideas more clearly.... [Lippmann] needed a great intellectual biography, and now he has got one."---Alexander Jacobs, Intellectual History Review

"[This book] will change the way Walter Lippmann is understood. It makes significant contributions to the history of American liberalism, the histories of journalism and social science, and the history of international thought--not simply because of the wide-ranging career of its subject, but because of the author's erudition, fluid and exciting narrative, and well-founded belief that a much-covered figure in U.S. intellectual history was ripe for reexamination."---Sam Klug, Society for US Intellectual History

"A clear-eyed assessment of Lippmann as a thinker."---Kathryn McGarr, Society for US Intellectual History

"An engrossing, revisionist account of Lippmann as a proponent of democracy. . . . Arnold-Forster's valuable intellectual biography succeeds in revising our understanding of Lippmann and demonstrating his piercing insights."---Paul Murphy, American Political Thought

"A comprehensive evaluation of Lippmann's commentary on politics, journalism, and culture. . . . It is an important corrective. Far from an anti-democratic technocrat, Lippmann's work shows him to be attuned to the complexities of democracy and liberalism. While he insisted on the primacy of the public, he grappled with the problem of creating the context of valuable and trustworthy information that would produce a healthy, well-informed public opinion."---Michael Buozis, Journalism History

"Scholarly and absorbing....[An] altogether fascinating book."---Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Times Literary Supplement

"The book does what it says on the tin: it's an intellectual biography, well timed for our own period's tussles with democracy, free speech and new ways of mobilising public opinion.... Lippmann was early to the table when it came to explaining that reality is not a choice one might make, not a thing to opt in and out of as suits your self-interest, but a bulwark against propaganda and censorship, the essential currency of a free press.... Arnold-Forster leaves us to see how this might apply not only to Lippmann's Cold War era, but also to our own."---Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books

"Tenacious, well-researched . . . Does a masterly job in making Lippmann make sense as a holistic thinker. . . . a fine book for anyone interested in the relationships among journalism, democracy, and practical governing."---Susan Herbst, Political Science Quarterly

"What Arnold-Forster does well in this fascinating biography is to account for Lippmann's move from a liberalism fostering an enabling state to a conservatism wary of robust progressive movements."---James Walter, Australian Book Review

"A hard-to-top history of not just the man but also the liberalism that he was the most visible figurehead of over the decades."---Gerald Howard, Nation

"A rigorous and reflective portrait."---Angus Reilly, Financial Times

"Arnold-Forster's terrific study restores Lippmann to the position that he deserves in the history of 20th century letters and ideas."---Matthew d'Ancona, The New World

"[An] admirable book. It is not so much a defense of Lippmann as a fair hearing for him. The research is excellent, the command of complex ideas apparent, and the style clear and concise--qualities that are all the more impressive for this being the author's first book."---Richard Aldous, Wall Street Journal

"A new biography by Tom Arnold-Forster offers a salutary challenge. . . the vicissitudes to which Lippmann was responding are still those of our own world. In his time as in ours, an increasingly complex political, economic, and social landscape and an ever-evolving array of media technologies posed fundamental questions about the viability of American democracy."---Geoff Shullenberger, Compact

"A welcome addition to the literature of both journalism and the rise of the anti-communist left and modern liberalism. A long-needed biography of a once-influential figure who merits rediscovery."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

About the Author

Tom Arnold-Forster is the Kinder Career Development Fellow in Atlantic History at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute. His writing has appeared in the Historical Journal, Modern Intellectual History, American Journalism, the Journal of American Studies, and Dissent.