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2026
Reviews 2026-1

Tom Arnold-Forster, Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025. Pp. 368. ISBN: 9780691215211.
David Ekbladh
Bibliographical reference

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025. Pp. 368. ISBN: 9780691215211.

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1Wither the newspaper columnist as superstar. In a twenty-first century where newspapers and “traditional media” are declared in decline, it can be forgotten how vaunted a position that was in the twentieth century. One of the brightest of that now endangered species was Walter Lippmann. Unlike peers like Westbrook Pegler, Drew Pearson, or Joseph Alsop his name has endured. This is because in contrast to the others, Lippmann’s legacy is based on not just being a “thought leader” but a public intellectual whose ideas still resonate.

2 Tom Arnold-Forster’s vibrant new biography casts Lippmann as a searching public intellectual. He was a liberal in an age when its basic assumptions were not just questioned but dismissed. Liberals like Lippman had to make a case in the face of rival ideologies that societies based on their ideas could best deliver the figurative goods promised by modern life.

3 Lippmann’s remarkable career was bookended by the idea of a “great society.” Marking a fine tendency to site Lippmann in his time Arnold-Forster sees the young Lippmann emerging from a comfortable upbringing and the privileges of an early twentieth century Harvard education. There he was deeply influenced by the work of the Fabian Socialist Graham Wallas whose book The Great Society (Wallas, 1914) offered a program to just that end. For Arnold-Forster, the early introduction to the challenge of what constituted a “great society” animated much of Lippmann’s lifelong search.

4 Arnold-Forster is an able guide through Lippmann’s thinking and a career. He incisively sees Lippmann as among what he sees as a class of liberal modernizers. This astute categorization is why Lippmann’s intellectual contributions can seem varied to the point of dilettantish. But issues he dove into surrounding media, economics, foreign policy, and the idea of a public in a mass society are interlinked and indispensable if you are trying to build a more perfect modern world.

5 The author keeps faith with his title. The book is very much an intellectual biography. Arnold-Forster keeps the focus firm on Lippmann’s books, rightfully as this is undoubtedly where some of his most enduring contributions were offered. Indeed, books like his Public Opinion (Lippman, 1922) and The Good Society (Lippmann, 1937) are relevant to present discussions of the media, news, government intervention, economics, rights, and an informed citizenry as much as for those staggering out of the propaganda-soaked Great War or staggering through the Great Depression.

6 There are times, particularly regarding foreign affairs, where Lippmann the newspaperman gets lost. A bit more on his columns and his magazine writing would show how Lippmann’s ideas rolled with the punches thrown in a pugnacious time—and how he could get things wrong. Beyond his syndicated column which reached millions, he was a regular contributor to influential and mass circulation magazines like Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and Life. Arguably, it was in such media where some ideas had their longest reach, a grasp that can extend to the present. He lay down the idea the Atlantic Ocean had sustained historical and strategic linkages between the US and Europe. This was first launched in World War I and rechristened in Life as World War II began. These writings became an early vessel for the concept of an “Atlantic World” that frames whole regimes of scholarship in the present.

7 The intersection between the personal and professional is treated as secondary. The impact of some interpersonal (and frankly bad) decisions, particularly Lippmann’s affair with the wife of Hamilton Fish-Armstrong which ended not only a marriage but a mutually beneficial friendship, are not weighed. But effects were tangible. Armstrong edited the influential magazine Foreign Affairs and Lippmann found himself banned.

8 Lippmann’s Judaism is mentioned but his faith is not presented as foundational to his identity or beliefs. It remains an interesting facet of twentieth century liberalism that someone outside a relentlessly white and protestant elite could become a leading spokesperson. Still, bias and bigotry always lay below the surface. An establishment gatekeeper, Isaiah Bowman, after Lippmann married Fish-Armstrong’s ex-wife, dismissed Lippmann’s whole career in bigoted terms like “treacherous” and backhandedly characterized the new union as betraying the “complex conditions” of a “mixed marriage.” Such views may not have effected Lippmann’s ideas but for a figure who lived through the extended networks that make establishments work there were costs.

9 Still, gatekeeping is harder when you are dealing with a member of the club and Lippmann managed to remain in good standing beyond World War II. He unloaded on George Kennan’s earliest statements on containment in his book The Cold War (Lippmann, 1947), presciently seeing Kennan’s program as enabling a potentially limitless global commitment. Such views did more than popularize a term for the global struggle between the US and USSR it also provided intellectual earthworks for others to challenge Cold War assumptions from a liberal position.

10 Through Lippmann, Arnold Forster reveals liberalism to be an unsettled thing. Lippmann wrestled with the ideology even as he propounded it. As opposed to systems that seek a “theory” or unified approach, liberalism lives in the fragmentary. It is in the debates, policy papers, current-affairs books and, yes, even daily columns that liberalism can be best seen. Lippmann evolved in the midst of the bruising, unforgiving public debate over the shape and direction of the world. It is also here that the ferment, change, and frankly the errors and contradictions that beset those struggling with how to make a great society can be seen.

11 The trials of the “Great Society”—US president Lyndon Johnson’s effort to implement the promise of the liberalism that had come out from the progressive era and the New Deal—which crumpled under the weight of the Vietnam War is the other bookend for Lippmann’s career. He lived until 1974 as liberalism experienced another crisis. What Arnold-Forster has dramatized through his serious and absorbing intellectual biography is the fact 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 US in the world. All are elements of something bigger, the perpetual search for how societies must adopt to while attempting to channel the relentless change of the modern world. That Lippmann remains relevant in that hunt, despite profound change, reminds that the riddle of the modern world has no final answer.

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Bibliography

Bowman, Isaah. Diary Entry, 5 October 1939. Series 13, Box 2, Isaah Bowman Papers. Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Lippmann, Walter, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1937.

Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.

Lippmann, Walter, The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy. New York: Harper, 1947.

Wallas, Graham, The Great Society a Psychological Analysis. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914.

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References

Electronic reference

David Ekbladh, Tom Arnold-Forster, Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual BiographyEuropean journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, Online since 07 April 2026, connection on 06 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25733; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/166fy

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David Ekbladh

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