Walter Lippmann

An Intellectual Biography

Tom Arnold-Forster

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691266251, 9780691215211
• eBook ISBN: 9780691266244
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Mind and Pen
• Chapter 1. Democracy in the Great Society
• Chapter 2. Liberty and the Newspaper Industry
• Chapter 3. Stereotypes and Pseudo-environments
• Chapter 4. Intelligence Testing and the Politics of Expertise
• Chapter 5. A New York World: Urban Liberalism
• Chapter 6. The Great Depression and the Politics of Crisis
• Chapter 7. Constitutional Turmoil in the New Deal State
• Chapter 8. From Neoliberalism to Military Keynesianism
• Chapter 9. The Imperialism of Realism: US Foreign Policy
• Chapter 10. American Conservative Liberal
• Conclusion: Lippmann Agonistes
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index