Walter Lippmann (1889鈥�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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 ideas played a formative role in the twentieth century and resonate powerfully with our fraught present.
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.
“In this magnificent book, Tom Arnold-Forster rescues Walter Lippmann from the pantheon of misunderstood thinkers. Brought to light is the commanding, versatile, and fallible intellect who shaped debates about liberalism, democracy, journalism, foreign policy, public opinion—and yes, expertise—from the Progressive Era through the Cold War. A tour de force and essential reading for anyone interested in the prospects for democracy in the modern world.”—Deborah Cohen, Northwestern University
“With a career spanning six decades and intersecting with every public debate of the day, Walter Lippmann is no easy quarry for the intellectual historian. But he has met his match in this superbly wrought biography. Arnold-Forster gives us Lippmann in all his political complexity—and along the way, new purchase on the dilemmas of modern American liberalism.”—Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
“Closely tracking the character and reception of Walter Lippmann’s writing, this assertive, often provocative intellectual history is filled with acute judgments about this significant figure. Taking us into Lippmann’s world and evolving perspectives, Arnold-Forster’s unfailingly interesting book illuminates key questions about democratic political culture.”—Ira Katznelson, Columbia University
“What an achievement. Walter Lippmann was a towering figure in American life who has been virtually forgotten today. Tom Arnold-Forster demonstrates what a mistake this has been. By placing Lippmann in his time, Arnold-Forster restores him—brilliantly—to ours.”—Timothy Shenk, George Washington University
