Walter Lippmann - Böcker

In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. He wrote to convince readers that they could balance these tensions: they could be organized, efficient, and functional without sacrificing impulse, choice, or liberty. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Democracy, Lippman wrote, is “a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.”Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. It remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. Distinguished historian Walter Leuchtenberg’s 1986 introduction and notes are retained in this edition.In a foreword for the 2014 centennial edition, Ganesh Sitaraman contends, “A century later, Lippmann’s classic has much to say to twenty-first century progressives. The underlying solution for our time is similar to that of Lippman’s. We must regain mastery over drift by reforming finance and reducing inequality, by rethinking the relationship between corporations and workers, and by embracing changes in social life.”

In Public Opinion, what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication.Public Opinion is Walter Lippmann's is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists.

Liberty and the News is Walter Lippman's classic account of how the press threatens democracy whenever it has an agenda other than the free flow of ideas. Arguing that there is a necessary connection between liberty and truth, Lippman excoriates the press, claiming that it exists primarily for its own purposes and agendas and only incidentally to promote the honest interplay of facts and ideas. In response, Lippman sought to imagine a better way of cultivating the news. A brilliant essay on a persistent problem of American democracy, Liberty and the News is still powerfully relevant despite the development of countless news sources unimagined when Lippman first published it in 1920. The problems he identifies--the self-importance of the press, the corrosion of rumors and innuendo, and the spinning of the news by political powers--are still with us, and they still threaten liberty. By focusing on the direct and necessary connection between liberty and truth, Lippmann's work helps to clarify one of the most pressing predicaments of American democracy today.

A great editorial commentator of the twentieth century, Walter Lippmann, was a major contributor to the central periodicals and journals of the age, including the Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and Yale Review. Men of Destiny, a set of biographical essays on leading figures of Lippmann's day, is arguably the best single source for understanding the persons and the policies of the post-World War I period.In a series of vignettes, the reader is introduced into the lively world of Al Smith, Calvin Coolidge, William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Warren Harding, Andrew Mellon, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The collection offers a rare glimpse of the first truly modern generation of American politics and society, and also a type of serious, detached writing that presumes a literate audience, but also one not given over to bias and hostility.The magic of this volume, however, is not in its litany of figures great and small, but Lippmann's comprehensive understanding of the place of America in world affairs. His essay on American imperialism remains a classic: "All the world thinks of the United States today as an empire, except the people of the United States." His advice to Americans is not to continue being evasive and grandiose with the rhetoric of equality, but to recognize the changing conditions and get on with the task of rule in as honorable a state as is possible by a holder of power.In his perceptive essays on the League of Nations, the efforts to outlaw war through international law, debt and reparations policies, Lippmann appeals to "time and a sense of reality" in examining all matters political. This volume, graced with a new introduction by Paul Roazen, will enable readers now well into the first decade of a new millennium to do just that.

The acclaim for Lippmann the political thinker has at times obscured the equally impressive accomplishments of Lippmann the journalist. His output was prodigious, his influence on journalism significant. According to James Reston: "He has given a generation of newspapermen a wider vision of their duty." Early Writings provides a unique opportunity to rediscover this journalistic Lippmann and to observe the formative years of a brilliant mind.In 1913, just three years out of Harvard, Lippmann was asked by Herbert Croly to help plan and edit a new "weekly of ideas," the New Republic. Beginning with its first issue in 1914 and continuing through the following six years, Lippmann wrote numerous signed and unsigned articles. Here are the best of them, written during the exciting political era that began with the trauma of World War I and ended in the stasis of Republican Normalcy.Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., places Lippmann in historical context while recreating the intellectual ambiance of the Wilsonian era. His annotations identify little-remembered personages and clarify issues that time has befogged. But in another sense, the issues and personages of 1910-1920 are only too familiar. Our world is still a world of war, ineffectual international political organizations, disappointed idealism, nerve-wracking platitudes, social unrest, and slinking politicians.

Today it is assumed that we understand contemporary nationalism and nation-building. Researchers rarely consider the very different traditions from which such state-building emerged. Instead, there is almost too much discussion of the "global village," with its supposed uniformity and inevitable trajectories. We need to view modernity as something other than a single condition with a preordained future. New visions of a modern civilization are emerging throughout the world, calliing for a far-reaching appraisal of the older visions of modernization.Following Eisenstadt's and Schluchter's introduction, Bjorn Wittrock explores the varieties and transitions of early modern societies, noting that only by looking at societies' collective identities and their modes of mediating in the public sphere can the distinguishing factors between modernity be appreciated. Sheldon Pollock discusses the use of vernacular language in India through its literary culture and polity, 1000-1500. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, sums up major developments in the recent historiography of South Asia from 1400 to 1750. David L. Howell focuses on the boundaries of the early modern Japanese state, including its political boundaries and the boundaries of collective identity and social status. Mary Elizabeth Berry examines public life in authoritarian Japan. Frederic Wakeman, Jr. probes the boundaries of the political game and how they were affected by the increased political centralization that developed after the disorder of the Ming-Qing transition during the seventeenth century. Alexander Woodside discusses territorial order and collective-identity tensions in Confucian Asia. Bernhard Giesen argues that the French Enlightenment can be described as an extension of absolutist court culture. Finally essay, Victor Perez-Diaz examines the state and public sphere in Spain during the Ancient Regime contrasting two ideal types of states--a "nomocratic" model and a "teleocratic" model.This volume addresses cultural and political practices not only from outside the European and American spheres but also over long periods of time in which the internal dynamics of other civilizations become visible. Its broad-ranging use of empirical materials enables us to think comparatively and historically about the ways in which different modernities took shape.

The Good Society is a critical text in the history of liberalism. Initially a series of articles published in a variety of Lippmann's favorite magazines, as the whole evolved, it became a frontal assault against totalitarian tendencies within American society. Lippmann took to task those who sought to improve the lot of mankind by undoing the work of their predecessors and by undermining movements in which men struggle to be free. This book is a strong indictment of programs of reform that are at odds with the liberal tradition, and it is critical of those who ask people to choose between security and liberty.The Good Society falls naturally into two segments. In the first, Lippmann shows the errors and common fallacies of faith in government as the solution to all problems. He says, "from left to right, from communist to conservative. They all believe the same fundamental doctrine. All the philosophies go into battle singing the same tune with slightly different words." In the second part of the book, Lippmann offers reasons why liberalism lost sight of its purpose and suggests the first principles on which it can flourish again.Lippmann argues that liberalism's revival is inevitable because no other system of government can work, given the kind of economic world mankind seeks. He did not write The Good Society to please adherents of any political ideology. Lippmann challenges all philosophies of government, and yet manages to present a positive program. Bewildered liberals and conservatives alike will find this work a successful effort to synthesize a theory of liberalism with the practice of a strong democracy. Gary Dean Best has provided the twenty-first century reader a clear-eyed context for interpreting Lippmann's defense of classical liberalism.The Good Society is the eleventh in a series of books written by Walter Lippmann reissued by Transaction with new introductions and in a paperback format. As with other major figures of the twentieth century such as Thorstein Veblen, Peter Drucker, Margaret Mead, and Richard Hoggart, these are classic books with contemporary perspectives.

After an eloquent and moving analysis of what he sees as the disillusion of themodern age, Lippmann posits as the central dilemma of liberalism its inability to find an appropriate substitute for the older forms of authority - church, state, class, family, law, custom - that it has denied. Lippmann attempts to find a way out of this chaos through the acceptance of a higher humanism and a way of life inspired by the ideal of "disinterestedness" in all things.In his new introduction to the Transaction edition, John Patrick Diggins marks A Preface to Morals, originally published in 1929, as a critical turning point in Lippmann's intellectual career. He also provides an excellent discussion of the enduring value of this major twentieth-century work by situating it within the context of other intellectual movements.

Begun in 1938 and completed only in 1955, The Public Philosophy offers as much a glimpse into the private philosophy of America's premier journalist of the twentieth century as it does a public philosophy.The basis of Lippmann's effort is "that there is a deep disorder in our society which comes not from the machinations of our enemies and from the adversaries of the human condition but from within ourselves." He also provides a special sort of legacy to liberalism in its broadest sense - as the root approach to human existence that could provide civility and accommodation against incivilities and extremism, and that uniquely stood against the totalitarian counter-revolutions from Jacobism to Leninism. This work is a masterful defense of the public philosophy as a constitutional tradition, and can be easily read as such today.Paul Roazen, long identified with the analysis of Lippmann's work, points out that no matter how trenchantly Lippmann dissected democracy, and the populist faith in the people's wisdom, he still sought to study the world in order to help govern it. His constant flow of journalistic writing had the educative intent of raising the level of the public's knowledge. His rationalist conviction that clearheadedness on public matters can be effectively relayed to people is nowhere more evident than in The Public Philosophy. In this sense it is an argument for the democratic ideal that people can be rallied in defense of the public interest.