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SCIENCE AND WALTER LIPPMANN

By
John A. Palen

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State university
in partial fUlfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

School of Journalism

198h

ABSTRACT
SCIENCE AND WALmER LIPPMANN
By
John A. Palen

The role of science in Walter Lippmann's social thought
has been noted but not extensively analyzed. Using historical
methods of research. this study traces the relationship of
Science to social thought in Lippmann's 11 books of domestic
political theory. The study finds that Lippmann's lifelong
effort to construct a social philosophy with science at the
center failed because of his inability to resolve two related
problems. One was the gulf between science and the lay
public. The other was whether a scientific basis could be
found for morality. In his final book. The Public Philosophy.
he skirted both problems by asserting that all reasonable
people could reach objective and moral truth that was self-
evident in the nature of things. He had finally relinquished
the belief that only science could solve the dilemmas of

modern times.

ER“ ‘ ‘....

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is grateful to the thesis director. Dr.
Stanley Soffin. and to the members of the thesis committee.
Dr. Howard Bossen and Prof. John Murray. for their aid and

encouragement.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Review of the Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Method . . . . . . . .'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1“

Chapter II: The Discipline of Democracy . . . . . . . . 16
Mgflhasterx.........‘.......21
Liberty and thg Eggg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Chapter III: Years of Doubt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
The Phantomngplig,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Chapter IV: High Religion Incarnate . . . . . . . . . . 59
American Inguisitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Chapter V: Toward Natural Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
22£.2221l2 Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Chapter VI: Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

iii

 

"Fi . . gin-‘1

Chapter ;

Introduction

Walter Lippmann was not only an influential figure in
American journalism for almost six decades. he rose to influ-
ence at a crucial period in the formation of modern journal-
ists' definition of their craft and its role in society.

Born in 1889, Lippmann began his journalistic career
in 1910 and his career as a political theorist in 1913. with
publication of A_Preface 32 Politics. By 1923. ten years
later, he had become editor of the New York Egglg. one of the
nation's most prestigious newspapers. and had published six
books and served as an editor of the Ngg_Republic. A little
more than a decade after that, he was well launched into his
column in the New York Herald-Tribune. ”Today and Tomorrow,”
and the list of books had lengthened to a dozen.1

Thus the first third. roughly. of his career spanned
World War I, which Michael Schudson identifies as a turning
point in the way American journalists defined their craft.
and extended into the 19308. when. according to Schudson. the
”new objectivity” came into conscious focus among journalists.2

It is one of Schudson's principal theses that jour-
nalists reacted to skepticism and doubt about the reality of

 

1Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American
Century (Boston: Little. Brown & 00.. I930}. pp. 301. 633.

2Michael S. Schudson. "Origins of the Ideal of Objec-
tivity in the Professions: Studies in the History of American
Journalism and American Law 1830-19fi0" (Ph.D. dissertation.
Harvard university. 1976). p. 267.

2

"facts“ by erecting an ideal of objectivity. The ideal was
”not so much an extension of naive empiricism and the belief
in facts as the assertion of 'method' designed for a world in
which even facts could not be trusted.'3

Schudson finds evidence that before the war journal-
ists saw the world through robust and naively empirical eyes:
Facts were facts and spoke for themselves: reporters of the
18908 like Idncoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker saw them-
selves as scientists uncovering the economic and political
facts of industrial life.“

With the war. however. uneasiness set in. Propaganda
was interposed between reporters and the war. and they ”began
to see everything as illusion.”5 The contemporaneous rise
of public relations also undermined reporters' confidence.
Public relations was a threat to reporting because news could
now be conceived of as merely the reprinting of those facts
which the wealthy could hire an agent to pass out.6

Disillusioned reporters and editors sought certainty
in the news process with such safeguards as detachment. non-

involvement. separation of news from opinion, and balanced

reporting. ”Journalists responded to anxiety about reality

 

31bid., p. 232.

l’Schudson. Discoverin the News: A Social Histor 2;
American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books. I978 . p. 71.
51bid.. p. 1&2.

6Ibid.. p. 138.

3

with allegiance to rules and procedures.” Schudson found.7
He suggests that journalists thus created for themselves a
framework within which they could take their work seriously.
And he identifies Walter Lippmann as "the most wise and
forceful spokesman for the ideal of objectivity."8

Schudson observes -- and this study of Lippmann's books
on domestic political theory confirms -- that his thinking
about journalistic objectivity was bound up with his
thinking about science.

Schudson notes that science was Lippmann's answer to
the problems raised by manufactured consent and propaganda
in a democratic society. He quotes Lippmann's assertion in
Liberty gpg,ppg’gg!§_that the unity of the scientific method
-- "the unity of the disciplined experiment” -- is the only
kind of unity possible in a diverse world.9

It was in the same essay. published in 1920. that
Lippmann held up science and scientists as ideals for jour-
nalism and its practitioners. '... The true patterns of the
journalist apprentice are not the slick persons who scoop the
news. but the patient and fearless men of science who have

labored to see what the world really is."10

 

71bid.. p. 7.

81bid.. p. 151.
91bid., p. 152.

10Walter Lippmann. Libert and the News (New York:
Harcourt. Brace and Howe. . p. .

u
Forty years later, Lippmann was still defining the task

of journalism in terms transferred from the realm of science.
"Because we are newspapermen in the American liberal tradi-
tion.“ he told the National Press Club on his 70th birthday,
”the way we interpret the news is not by fitting the facts
to a dogma. It is by proposing theories or hypotheses. which
are then tested by trial and error."11
But what precisely did Lippmann mean when he urged
journalists to pattern themselves after scientists and adopt
the scientific method in their work? Are journalists. for
example. to submit each story for peer review before publi-
cation? Are they to reject anecdotal evidence and use only
statistically significant data in their stories? Are they
to include both sides of a story if only one of the sides is
based on data considered scientifically admissible in the

12 Even a cursory

current state of the science involved?
attempt to relate journalism and the scientific method
indicates that Lippmann's prescription requires analysis and
explanation.

The beginning of that endeavor must be to determine
what Lippmann meant by science and what interaction it had
with his political and social thought. This study will

examine Lippmann's books of domestic political theory to

 

11Lippmann. "The Job of the Washington Correspondent.”
Atlantic. January 1960. pp. 48-h9.

12For a discussion of changing standards of admissi-
bility of data. see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure pf Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1932’.

5

determine the answer to these questions:

1) What did Lippmann mean by science?

2) What role did science play in Lippmann's analyses
of American society and politics?

There are two reasons for undertaking such a study.
One is that it will contribute to the effort to understand
more about the origins of the ideal of objectivity in jour-
nalism. scholarly interest in which is evidenced by the work
of Schudson and Schiller.13 The second is that it will
contribute to the understanding of Lippmann himself. Although
the Lippmann literature is immense. only one scholar has
looked specifically and at length at the role of science in
Lippmann's political theory. and that study was restricted

to the early book Drift and Mastery.1u

Review pp ppg Literature
Science has had a major impact on American society.
both on the way people live and the way people think.
Several works that deal with that impact have been helpful
in providing a background against which to investigate
Walter Lippmann's work as a particular instance of the inter-

action of science with American social thought.

 

13Daniel T. Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The
Public and the Rise of Commerc a JournaIi§m_TPhiIEdelphia:
university of PennsyIvania Press. 1931).

1“David A. Hollinger, ”Science and Anarchy: Walter

Lippmann's Drift and Mastery.” American Quarterly 29. No. 5
(1977). pp.T€‘3'-h' ’23?

6

The multitudinous ways in which science-based tech-
nology has changed daily life for Americans since the Civil
War have been detailed by Daniel J. Boorstin in Tpg Apgpiy
gppg: gpg Democratic Expgrience. Commenting on the meaning
of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad,
Boorstin writes: "The century after the Civil War was to be
an Age of Revolution -- of countless. little-noticed revolu-
tions ... so little-noticed because they came so swiftly.
because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not
merely the continent but human experience itself. the very
meaning of community. of time and space. of present and future.
was being revised again and again...."15

In Egg Search {pp nggp, 1822-1920, Robert H. Wiebe
finds a pattern in these changes: As the ”island communities”
of the 19th century became linked by new networks of communi-
cation -- of which the railroads were but one example --
Americans came to find less sense of identity in place and
more in such other characteristics as skill or occupation:
specialization and professionalization increased: local
autonomy gave way to more centralized government: and the old
personal, informal power structures were replaced by hierarchy.
regulation and bureaucracy. The bureaucratic ideal of a

rational society gained sway.16

 

15Daniel J. Boorstin. The Americans: The Democratic
Experience (New York: Random House. I973). p. ix.

16Robert H. Wiebe. The Search for Order. 1877-1920
(New York: Hill & Wang. I937}. PP. 111-133.

7

Science. both as technology and as way of thought. was
one of the driving forces behind these changes. but was also
affected by them. "Science,’ the basic word that every
school of thought claimed and worshipped, also altered in
meaning to accommodate the revolution. In all varieties of
classical theory. science referred to a grand design whose
fundamental principles men could comprehend and apply....
Bureaucratic thought, on the contrary. made 'science' prac-
tically synonymous with 'scientific method.' Science had
become a procedure. or an orientation, rather than a body
of results."17

Morton White. in Social Thought lg America: Egg Revolt
Against Formalism. finds a different but not necessarily con-

18 By the 18903,

flicting pattern at work in the same period.

he wrote, American intellectuals had become convinced that

the old formal tools of logic. abstraction, deduction. mathe-

matics and mechanics were too awkward and limited to work with

”the rich, moving current of social life.'19
Dewey, Holmes and Veblen -- three of the five thinkers

on whom White concentrated -- were the ”leaders of a campaign

to mop up the remnants of formal logic. classical economics

 

171b1d.. p. 1h7.

18Hollinger. "Science and Anarchy.” p. #75. shows how
the two patterns are brought together and reconciled in Lipp-
mann's Drift and Mastery.

19Morton White, Social Thou ht in America: The Revolt
Against Formalism (New York: Viking Press. I959: new ed..
Boston: Beacon Press. 1957). p. 11.

8
and jurisprudence in America. and to emphasize that the life
of science, economics and law was not logic but experience
in some streaming social sense."20

A central question for the turn-of-the-century bearers
of this ”anti—metaphysical strain in American thought,“
according to White. had to do with science. and specifically
with two philosophical questions: 1) What is the nature of
social science: and 2) What is the relation of social science
and moral value and obligation?21

Finally. Charles Rosenberg. in Np Qppgp‘gggg: 93
Science and American Social Thought. has suggested yet a
third way of looking at science and American society. one
that emphasizes the implicit rather than the explicit con-
tent of the relationship.

There are at least four ways in which science and
American social thought interact. Rosenberg wrote. "Perhaps
the most important has been the increasing emotional rele-
vance of science. its expanding role as an absolute able to
justify and even motivate the behavior of particular indi-
viduals.”22

Science also has been a source of vocabulary and

images for social thought. and the similes of science have

 

20
2

Ibid.. pp. 11—12.

11bid.. p. 20h.

22Charles Rosenberg. No Other Gods: On Science and
Ba

American Social Thought Itimore: ‘335ns napkins University
Press. 1973,. p. 1.

9

"variously suggested, explained. justified. and even helped
dictate social categories and values.” Rosenberg said.

A third relationship is the role in society of the
professional values and preconceptions of scientists. a role
that exists ”in the popular mind. as an intellectual construct
having only a problematic relationship with the scientist's
actual behavior....'

The fourth relationship is ”the obverse of the third
-- that is. not the effect of the scientific community's
values in bringing an element of change and diversity to
society. but that of society's attitudes and demands upon
the scientist's work and thought."23

This study will show that Lippmann's books of domestic
political theory manifest interactions of science and social
thought consistent with these patterns: for example, his
emotion-laden advocacy of science as ”the discipline of demo-
cracy” in Q;i§p,gpg_Mastery: in his borrowing of the concept
of taboo from Freudian psychoanalysis to help explain and
justify his critical analysis of American politics in A
Preface pp Politics: and in his advocacy of scientists as

role models for young journalists in Liberty and the News.2h

 

231bid.. pp. 1-2

2“Lippmann, Drift and Master (New York: Mitchell

Kennerly. 191“: new e3. With an ntroduction by William E.
Leuchtenberg. Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1961).

p. 151: A Preface pg Politics (New York: Mitchell Kennerly,
1913: new ed.. Ann Arbor: university of Michigan Press. 1962),
pp. hZ-hh. On Lippmann's misapplication of Freud, see Allen

I. Safianow. ”Walter Lippmann: The Quest for Disinterested-
ness" (Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell University. 1973). p. 118.

10

This study also will show Lippmann's persistent con-
cerns for the quest for order and discipline. the reaction
against lifeless formalism and the attempt to define the
moral life in a world in which scientific fact and moral
value are separate. Hollinger's characterization of Qpigp
app Mastery -- that it occupies the “terrain on which the
'revolt against formalism' and the 'search for order'
compete for the attention of historians” -- applies to other
of Lippmann‘s books as well.25

To move from background works to the literature on
Lippmann itself is to realize the extent to which his career
was multi-faceted. He was magazine editor. newspaper edi-
torialist and editor, author of books on domestic and foreign
affairs. philosopher, adviser to the powerful. and partici-
pant in significant events. The extensive literature on
Lippmann reaches into each of these fields. Secondary
sources examined for this study have been limited to books,
articles and dissertations that provide biographical back-
ground or that deal primarily with Lippmann's domestic poli-
tical theory.

Several book-length studies devoted exclusively to
Lippmann have been published. David A Weingast's ngpgp.
Lippmann: Augppgy pp Personal Journalism is an interesting
study. made midway in Lippmann's career. of his failure to

support in practice many measures of which he approved in

 

25Hollinger, "Science and Anarchy,” p. #75.

11
theory. Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier's Walter

Lippmann: Philosgpher-Journalist is biographical and
uncritical. Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: WgApgp Lippmann
gpg.ppg gpblic Philosophy. by Charles Wellborn. is an
admiring attempt to show that Lippmann moved increasingly
toward a theistic position as time went on.26

Lipppann. Liberty. gag ppglgpggp by John Luskin.
chronological in organization. presents Lippmann's views on
liberty and press issues with minimal interpretation.
Benjamin F. Wright's Five Public Epilosophies pf Walter
.Lipppgpp points out shifts and inconsistencies in Lippmann's
political thought. Steel's biography. the only account
written with full access to the Lippmann papers at Yale,
provides a wealth of detail and balanced judgment.27

Two other full-length studies have been helpful:

Safianow's unpublished dissertation. noted above, and Charles

Forcey's The Crossroads p: Liberalism: Croly. Weyl.

 

26David A. Weingast. Walte; Lippmann: A Stud 13
Personal Journalism (Rutgers. N.J.: Rutgers Un versity Press,
1959: new ed. Westport. Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1970):

Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Walter Li mann:
Philoso her-Journalist (Washington: Puinc Affairs Press.
1939): Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgpimage:

Walter Lippmann and the Puinc Philoso h (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press. 1939;.

27
John Luskin Li mann Libert , and the Press
(University, Ala.: 'University of AIabamE—Press. 1972):
Benjamin F. Wright, Five Public Philoso hies pf Walter Lipp-
mann (Austin. Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1973):

Ronald Steel. Walter Lippmann and the American Century
(Boston: Little. Brown & Co.. 1980).

12

28 Safianow's

Lipppann. egg pp; Progressive Egg. 1200-1225.
dissertation seeks the intellectual and biographical impulses
behind Lippmann's ideal of disinterestedness. Forcey's book
shows its protagonists leading liberalism. at a crucial time.
toward a position favoring nationalism and a strong state.

Although each of these full-length studies mentions
science as a factor in Lippmann's thought -- some at more
length than others -- none makes it a central concern. More-
over. their interpretations of the development of Lippmann's
thinking in regard to science are not unanimous.

For example. on the question of the difference between
A Preface pp Politics and Qpifp'gpg Mastery. Wright comments
on an ”insistent emphasis on being scientific and realistic”
in both books. while Wellborn finds ”remarkable differences”
between them. including a markedly greater enthusiasm in the
second book for the ability of science to offer answers to
society's problems. Drawing the sharpest contrast between
the two books is Forcey. who finds the differences ”astonish-
ing" and says that in 221;: Egg Mastery Lippmann had abandoned
the ”anti-scientific Bergsonian world” of A Preface pg

Politics.29

 

28Charles Forcey. The Crossroads of Liberalism: Crol .

Weyl. Li ann. and the PF? ressive EraT_1900-1925 (New Yori:
Oxford Un versity—Press. I9gi).

129Wright. Five Public Philosophies. p. 26: Wellborn.
Twent eth Centur Pilgrimage p. 25: Forcey Crossroads.
p—“"6_p. 1 7. 1TH . ' '

12

Lippmann. pad the Progressive Era. 1900-1925.28 Safianow's
dissertation seeks the intellectual and biographical impulses
behind Lippmann's ideal of disinterestedness. Forcey's book
shows its protagonists leading liberalism. at a crucial time.
toward a position favoring nationalism and a strong state.

Although each of these full-length studies mentions
science as a factor in Lippmann's thought -- some at more
length than others -- none makes it a central concern. More-
over. their interpretations of the development of Lippmann's
thinking in regard to science are not unanimous.

For example. on the question of the difference between
A Preface pp Politics and legp,§pg Mastery. Wright comments
on an ”insistent emphasis on being scientific and realistic”
in both books. while Wellborn finds ”remarkable differences“
between them. including a markedly greater enthusiasm in the
second book for the ability of science to offer answers to
society's problems. Drawing the sharpest contrast between
the two books is Forcey. who finds the differences ”astonish-
ing" and says that in Epigp Egg Mastery Lippmann had abandoned
the ”anti-scientific Bergsonian world" of A Preface pp

Politics.29

 

28Charles Forcey. The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly.

Weyl. Li ann. and the P53 ressive Brat—1900-i925 (New Yor :
Oxford Un versity—Press. i9gi).

29Wright. Five Public Philosophies. p. 26: Wellborn.
Twentieth Centur Pilgrimage. p. 25: Forcey. Crossroads.
pp. 167. 118.

13

Nor can consistent pictures of the overall development
of Lippmann's thinking on science be gained from these studies.
While there is agreement about the central place of science
in QEiil App Mastery. Wellborn finds science elevated to a
“miracle-working force” in A Preface pp Morals. but does not
give it a substantial place in his discussion of the last
two of Lippmann's books. 1A3 92 g Society and Essays Ap,ppg_
Public Philosophy. Wright. on the other hand. does not
mention science in his analysis of A Preface pp Morals. but
suggests that by the time of Tpg,§ppg Society Lippmann had
come to fear science and that by the time of 1A3 Public
Philosophy he had despaired of it.30 Why. however. would
someone who had despaired of science in 1955 hold up the
scientific method as a model for journalists in 1960. as
Lippmann did in his speech. noted above. to the National
Press Club?

The only study to focus specifically on science as an
element in Lippmann's thought is Hollinger's article. also
noted above. He proposes that QpAgp’ApQ Mastery offered
science as a key to two major intellectual impulses of the
time -- the search for order and the revolt against formalism.

“Few authors had so smoothly integrated apparently
conflicting aspirations of the age.” Hollinger wrote. ”Lipp-
mann encouraged people to believe that they could be organ-

ized. efficient. functional. and under firm control without

 

30Wellborn. p. 58: Wright. p. 142.

1U

sacrificing impulse. choice. fantasy. and liberty: and this
happy combination. he led them to hope. could be effected by
welcoming rather than resisting the 'impact of science' that
was felt by many to be inevitable."31
Hollinger notes that “the contrast between Qpl£p_§pg_
Mastery's dependence upon a positive view of science and the
ambivalence toward science in Lippmann's later works...has
been widely acknowledged. but not extensively analyzed."32

This study is an attempt to fill that gap.

Method

Historical methods of research were employed. The
approach was drawn from Paul D. Leedy's Practical Research:
Planning gpg Desigp and from ”The Logic of Historical Research“
by David Paul Nord and Harold L. Ne1son.33

Primary sources for the study were Walter Lippmann's
books of domestic political theory: A Preface 32 Politics.
93133.23g Mastery. Liberty App ppg Agyg. Public Opinion. 2A3
Phantom Public. American Inquisitors. A Preface pp Morals.

and The Public Philosophy.

 

31Hollinger. ”Science and Anarchy." p. 469.
321bid . p. #73.

33Paul D. Leedy. Practical Research: P1m ma
Desi (New York: MacmiIIan Pub11s g Co..2 25. ed. I 80):
David

Paul Nord and Harold L. Nelson. ”The Logic of Historical
Research. ' in Guido H. Stempel III and Bruce H. Westley. eds..
Research Methods in Mass Communication (Englewood Cliffs. N. J. :
Prentice-Hall.198i). pp. 278e30&. -

 

15

In each work. references to science. the scientific
method or scientific experts were isolated in the context
in which they appeared. They were interpreted in the light
of Rosenberg's suggested patterns for the interaction of
science and social thought. They also were arranged
chronologically and compared and contrasted with each other
to yield a description of the development over time of the

function and influence of science in and on Lippmann's

political thought.

16
9.1222221.

The Discipline 2; Democracy

For a work that. in Forcey's view. celebrates an ”anti-

1

scientific. Bergsonian world.“ A Preface 33 Politics has

quite positive things to say about science and scientists.
Scientists are classed with artists and philosophers. for ex-

2 and their work is contrasted

ample. as "the keenest minds.”
with the triviality of Progressive reformist enthusiasms:
Science was valid. art was valid. the poorest grubber
in a laboratory was engaged in a real labor.... But
politics was a personal drama without meaning or a
vague abstraction without substance.

Two of the concerns of reform were business and poli-
tics. and Lippmann thought science had much to offer each. in
attitude and temper as much as in specific knowledge.

No man can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a
new set of motives in business.... Given a nation
of men trained to think scientifically about their
work and feel about it as craftsmen. and you have a
people released from a stupid fixation upon the silly
little-ideals of accupulating dollars and filling
their neighbors' eye.
Scientific attitudes among businessmen would eliminate the
profit motive. he believed.
In politics. the scientific procedures of hypothesis

and experiment would help resolve a seeming paradox in

 

1Forcey. Crossroadg. p. 118.
2Lippmann. Preface pp Politics. p. 2.
3Ibid.. p. 3.

nlbid.. p. #9.

l7

Lippmann's political thought -- his desire to put human
nature at the center of his political thinking. “even though
we are densely ignorant both of man and of politics.” Plato
and Bentham had based their politics on a view of human
nature. but ”they made their political man a dogma -- we must
leave him a hypothesis. That is to say that our task is to
temper speculation with scientific humility.” A human-
centered politics. in other words. will err from ignorance:
but the scientific attitude will turn error to good account.
“Experience itself will reveal our mistakes: research and
criticism may convert them into wisdom.”5
Science. then. gave Lippmann hope that a human-centered
politics could be developed. It also. on a more prosaic level.
enabled him to make a neat distinction between Woodrow Wilson
-- whom he admired -- and William Jennings Bryan -- whom he
did not. Wilson. he wrote in the summer before the 1912
election. "has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect -- the

scientific habit of holding facts in solution.'6

The obser-
vation makes an interesting contrast with Lippmann's views on
Wilson and science in QpAfp_gpg Mastery. written only a year
later but after Lippmann had become personally close to
Wilson's rival Theodore Roosevelt.

Another scientifically oriented aspect of A Preface pp
Politics. noted by Luskin. Safianow and others. is Lippmann's

application of Freudian concepts to social problems. Looking

 

51bid.. p. 8#.

6Ibid.. p. 80.

1?

Lippmann's political thought -- his desire to put human
nature at the center of his political thinking. “even though
we are densely ignorant both of man and of politics.” Plato
and Bentham had based their politics on a view of human
nature. but ”they made their political man a dogma -- we must
leave him a hypothesis. That is to say that our task is to
temper speculation with scientific humility.” A human-
centered politics. in other words. will err from ignorance:
but the scientific attitude will turn error to good account.
“Experience itself will reveal our mistakes: research and
criticism may convert them into wisdom.”5
Science. then. gave Lippmann hope that a human-centered
politics could be developed. It also. on a more prosaic level.
enabled him to make a neat distinction between Woodrow Wilson
-- whom he admired -- and William Jennings Bryan -- whom he
did not. Wilson. he wrote in the summer before the 1912
election. ”has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect -- the

scientific habit of holding facts in solution.'6

The obser-
vation makes an interesting contrast with Lippmann's views on
Wilson and science in QpAfp Egg Mastery. written only a year
later but after Lippmann had become personally close to
Wilson's rival Theodore Roosevelt.

Another scientifically oriented aspect of A Preface pp
Politics. noted by Luskin. Safianow and others. is Lippmann's

application of Freudian concepts to social problems. Looking

 

51bid.. p. 84.

6Ibid.. p. 80.

18

at the reformist concerns of his time -- vice. gambling.
drinking. corrupt big-city political machines. the trusts --
Lippmann concluded that society tends too often to react nega-
tively. It creates a ”taboo“ by passing a law outlawing the
evil. Lippmann instead argued for frank acceptance of the
impulses at the root of the problems. and their civilization
through a society that provides constructive outlets. It is
the task of society. he wrote. to create the ”moral equiva-
lent” for evil. ”Instead of tabooing our impulses we must
redirect them.... The assumption is that every lust is capable
of some civilized expression."7 The logical outcome of that
analysis is a government more concerned with providing whole-'
some services than with passing restrictive laws. The states-
man's business. said Lippmann. is ”to surround childhood.
youth and age with homes and schools. cities and countryside
that shall be stocked with interest and the chance for gener-
ous activity.” The task of government ”is essentially to
carry out programs of service. to add and build and increase
the facilities of life. Repression is an insignificant part

.8

of its work.... Freudian psychology is put forward in

support of the political program.

The Freudian school of psychologists calls this
'sublimation.’ They have brought forward a wealth
of material which gives us every reason to believe
that the theory of 'moral equivalents' is soundly
based. that much the same energies produce crime

 

71bid.. p. #2.

81bid., p. 225.

19

and civilization.... Only by supplying our passions

with civilized interest can we escape their destruc-

tive force.9

Lippmann. of course. had no evidence that Freudian

analysis. which was rooted in medical treatment of specific
conditions in individual patients. could be applied to diag-
nose and alleviate the ills of society at large. Repression
and taboo were concepts he picked up from a friend who hap-
pened to be translating Ap Interpretation pf Dreams as Lipp-
mann wrote A Preface pp Politics. They were ideas that fit in

10 He may have been using

with his ideas. and he used them.
scientific concepts to analyze society. but he was not doing
so in any scientific way. Instead he was borrowing concepts
from a science. psychoanalysis. to rationalize a political
program for dealing with the items on the reform agenda. The
pattern of Rosenberg's model fits well -- science providing
to social thought ”a vocabulary and a supply of images” to

rationalize and communicate a conventional understanding of

11 Lippmann's program --

fundamental social realities.
government as provider of services to replace government as
policeman -- had the emotional authority of science placed
squarely behind it. It may also be significant that the
science involved was a relatively new one. ”The more tenuous
an area of scientific knowledge (and) the smaller its veri-

fiable content." Rosenberg theorized. ”the more easily its

 

91bid.. p. an.
10

11

Steel. Walter Lipppann. p. #6.
Rosenberg. No Other Gods. p. 1-2

20
data may be bent to social purposes."12

Lippmann. then. found both social example and social
analysis. political hope and political weaponry in the atti-
tudes and concepts of science. But his view was not uncriti-
cally positive. In a two-pronged critique. he charged science
with too often ignoring the human element. and. as consequence.
with being a poor engine to power the machinery of politics.

In his opening chapter. which traces the failure of the
politics of the time to attain relevance. Lippmann.wrote:
”We have elaborate governmental mechanisms -- like the tariff.
for example. which we go on making more 'scientific' year in.
year out -- having long lost sight of their human purpose."13
Economic reformers often forget the poor and the vagrant. and
some of society's best-intentioned schemes. "like reform
colonies and scientific jails. turn out to be inhuman tyrannies
just because our imagination does not penetrate the sociolog-
ical label.'1u

Ignoring the human element can also mean ignoring the
mental life of men and women -- their wishes and desires.
fantasies and errors. myths and beliefs. Lippmann notes a
reaction ”against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth cen-

tury science to the effect that the mental habits of human
beings were not 'facts'.”15 In his view. what nineteenth

 

12Ibid.. p. 10

13Lippmann. Preface pp Politics. p. 30.
1“Ibid” p. 87.

151bid.. p. 175.

21

century science would have classified as error becomes instead
a fact to be investigated. After Freud. Lippmann wrote. “no
one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically
inconsistent. superficially absurd. or objectively untrue."16

Conversely. the whole life of the mind -- irrational
and subconscious as well as rational and conscious -- is
important to the success of science. Creation of scientific
truth. Lippmann write. ”is no automatic product of logical
thought or scientific method . . . the greatest discoveries
in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence.”
In all great ages. ”art and science have enriched each other."17

But because rational. logical science is only a part of
the whole -- and a part that. at least before Freud. had not
been in close touch with the emotional. subconscious moti-
vators of human action. Lippmann believed science makes an
ineffective political tool. Slogans are what is needed to
incite the will to political action: ”So long as you rely on
the efficacy of 'scientific' demonstration and logical proof
you can hold your conventions in anybody's back parlor and

have room to spare."18

Drift and Mastery

 

A Preface pg Politics was Lippmann's declaration of

 

16Ibid.

17Ibid.. p. as.
181bid.. pp. 16u-165.

22

freedom from the idols and taboos of the time. A year later.
in Q;A£p,gpg Mastery. he pondered what comes after. "The
battle for us. . . does not lie against crusted prejudice.”
he wrote. ”but against the chaos of a new freedom.'19 The
old authority had been made impossible by 'scientific inven-

20 and something new must be

tion and blind social currents."
found to give humans assurance about their place in the scheme
of things and to hold society together. He proposed not a
unity of aim or of authority but a unity of method. and the
method was to be science. ”The discipline of science.” Lipp-
mann wrote. ”is the only one which gives any assurance that
from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the
same conclusions."21

There are differences in the treatment of science in
the two books.

For one thing. there is less emphasis in the later work
on a Freudian analysis of society. The idea is still present:
”It is sophomoric to suppose that the emotional life can be
treated as a decadent survival. Men's desires. . . are what

22 But there

make their lives. they are what move and govern."
is less talk in general in Drift and Mastery about the inner
life of the emotions. and more talk about the political issues

of 1913 -- business. property. the trusts. labor. the women's

 

19Lippmann. Drift 221 Mastery. p. 17.
20Ibid.. p. 16.

11bid.. p. 155.
22

2

Ibid.. p. 169.

23

movement -- with which the newly appointed co-editor of the
Ag! Republic was having to deal.

A more striking difference is the shift in Lippmann's
attitude toward Wilson -- and his appeal to science as an
emotional counter in the political game. In A Preface pp_
Politics. Lippmann had written that Wilson had ”the scientific
habit of holding facts in solution.” His purpose there was
to draw a distinction between Wilson and Bryan. whose mind
supposedly was not so scientifically habituated. In the year
after A Preface pp Politics. however. Lippmann had met and
fallen further under the spell of his hero. Theodore Roose-
velt. and the Egg Republic had begun life as a pro-Rooseveltian
critic of the Wilson administration.23 Acknowledging in Qpigp
and Mastery that Wilson had a more “critical mind” than Bryan.
Lippmann nevertheless leaves no doubt that Wilson and science
are no longer on the same side. The temper of the Democratic
Party. he wrote. ”has always been hostile to specialization
and expert knowledge. because it admires a very primitive
man-to-man democracy. Wilson's thought is inspired by that
outlook. . . ."2u Wilson. he wrote. shows

never a word of understanding for the new type of
administrator. the specialist. the professionally
trained business man. . . no hint that it may be

necessary to organize the fundamental industries of
the country on some more definite plan so that our

 

23Steel. Walter Lipppann. p. 75.

2“Lippmann. Drift App Mastery. p. 86.

2“

resources may be developed by scientifgg method
instead of by “men on the make“. . . .

Science. which had looked approvingly on Wilson's mental
habits in the summer of 1912. in a year's time had become a
firm Roosevelt Progressive.

Another difference in the treatment of science in the
two books is the place of science on the metaphorical stage
of Lippmann's presentation. In‘A Preface pp Politics. refer-
ences to science occur throughout as a general backdrop to
the iconoclastic attack on the old authorities. In QpAgp App
Mastery. the final chapters put science front and center as
the method that will enable society to solve its problems. but
there are fewer appeals to science earlier in the book. and
there is no discussion of why Lippmann's focus has changed
and science now has a more central role in the society on-
visioned in 251:1 éflQ Mastery. So when the final chapters
arrive. paeans to science as “mastery“ and “modern communion.“
they seem sudden and unsupported by what has gone before.
Perhaps that is one reason the difference between the two
books struck Forcey as “astonishing.“

But in their basic orientation toward science. the two
books also exhibit strong similarities.

There is the same positive general attitude toward
science and scientists. If in A Preface pg Politics scien-

26

tists are among “the keenest minds.“ we read in Drift and

 

25Ibid.. p. 8h.

26Lippmann. Preface pg Politics. p. 2.

25

Mastery that the businessman feels a sense of inferiority to
the scientist. “For at the bottom there is a difference of
quality in their lives. -- in the scientist's a dignity which
the scramble for profit can never assume.“27

There is the same attitude toward what science is. Only
vaguely defined in A Preface pp Politics. science is referred
to as a mental “habit. . . of holding facts in solution.“28
and as a process wherein “hypothesis is confirmed and modified
by action. and action is guided by hypothesis.“ Research has
the ability to convert error itself into wisdom. we are told.29
In 951;: Egg Mastery science sometimes is virtually indis-
tinguishable from the Socratic injunction that “the unexamined
life is not worth living.“ “When we cultivate reflection by
watching ourselves and the world outside. the thing we call
science begins.“ Lippmann wrote.3O under the discipline of
science. human beings “use language accurately. know fact from
fancy. search out their own prejudice. are willing to learn
from failure. and do not shrink from the long process of close

observation.“31 In both books. science is a frame of mind.

For all his emphasis on the need for experts and specialists.

 

27Lippmann. Drift 259 Mastery. p. 35.

28Lippmann. Preface 33 Politics. p. 80.

291bid.. p. 84.

30Lippmann. Drift and Mastery. p. 148.

311bid.. pp. 150-151.

26
the mental attributes of science remain open to any who will
adopt them.

In addition. although they are stated at greater length
in the earlier book. both works carry the same reservations
about the tendency of science to miss the point by leaving out
the human being.

If we try to ignore the desire that moves our
thought. if we try in short to be “absolutely
objective.“ we succeed only in accumulating
useless facts. or we begome the unconscious
victims of our wishes.3

Lippmann. however. would not have interpreted a critique
of science as being necessarily anti-scientific. as Forcey and
hothers seem to have done. For Lippmann. the saving grace of
science was its self-correcting self-consciousness. The
relatively new science of psychology. for example. opens up
new possibilities “for the conscious control of scientific
progress.“ Lippmann wrote. “It has begun to penetrate emotion-
al prejudice. to show why some men are so deeply attached to
authority. why philosophers have such unphilosophical likes
and dislikes.“33 The self-consciousness of science is its
“inner sanctuary of civilized power.“ When science becomes
its own critic. “it assures its own future. It is able. then.
'to attack the source of error itself: to forestall its own

‘timidities. and control its own bias.“3n

 

321bid.. p. 170.

331bid.. p. 150.

3“Ibiza.

27
That the future of science and the future of the country

were closely bound up. Lippmann made plain in the last three
chapters of pgggpqug Mastery. Taken together they made large
claims for science -- not. significantly. so much for the
physical. technological changes it may bring. but for its
capacity to free people from needless anxieties and bind them
in a common orientation toward reality. The old authorities
are dead. Lippmann believed. and “there is a terrible loneli-
ness that comes to men when they realize their feebleness
before a brutally uninterested universe.“35 At the very
least. science offers a common discipline. even though that
discipline may seem dry and laborious. But beneath science
itself are “luminous passions“ of the kind Lippmann believed
necessary for an idea to take hold in the world. As yet.
these impulses are “vaguely humanitarian.“ Lippmann wrote.
but they can be enriched by removing them from the realm of
fantasy and focusing them on a conception of the possibilities
of human life.36

In the drift of our emotional life. the genuine hope

is to substitute for terror and weakness a frank and

open worldliness. a love of mortal things in the dis-
cipline of science.37

 

35Ibid.. p. 152.
36Ibid.. pp. 15u-156.
37Ibid.. p. 17“.

28

Liberty gpg_pggԤgyg

1231;; AAA Mastery was Lippmann's last book of domestic
political theory before the war. Forced by the war to focus
his attention for the first time on events overseas. he wrote
two books on foreign affairs. When he returned to domestic
matters in 1920. it was with a slim volume comprising an
introduction and two essays originally published in Atlantic
Monthly. The topic was his own profession of journalism.

Liberty gpg_ppg Eggg asserts that “the present crisis
of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.“38 It is so
because in a society in which public opinion governs. public
opinion must be made “increasingly responsible to the facts.“39
Yet newspapers were not carrying out that responsibility ade-
quately. partly because their owners and editors too often put
their own visions of morality and patriotism ahead of reporting
the news: and partly because the complexity of society had
outstripped the ability of news organizations to report it in
any meaningful way.“0

The news process transmits information gained from eye-
witnesses of variable reliability and involvement. and the
news is written by reporters who probably have no special train-
ing or expert knowledge. It is then processed through a complex
mechanism by editors of limited knowledge who tend to share

 

38Lippmann. Libert and the News (New York: Harcourt.
Brace & Howe. 1920 . p. .
391bid.. pp. 63-6“.

"01bid.. pp. 7. hi-u9.

29
common professional and social mores. Intentional propaganda

“1 The result is that public

may further distort the message.
opinion on matters of the utmost importance is formed on the
basis of reports that no court would accept as valid “in a

suit to determine the possession of a donkey.”u2

Lippmann's offered solutio1 is a combination of formal
and informal controls on publishing. plus an effort to
increase the professionalization of news reporters and edi-
tors. Characteristically. the profession that supplied the
role model was science.

The role of science in Liberty and the News is a contin-
uation of themes from the first two books. As in QEiEE gag
Mastery. science is both a source of unity for a complex.
diverse society and an intellectual discipline that will help
democracy function by keeping public opinion in touch with
objective reality.“3

There is but one kind of unity possible in a world
as diverse as ours. It is a unity of method.

rather than of aim: the unity of the disciplined
experiment. There is but one bond of peace that

is both permanent and enriching: the increasing 4h
knowledge of the world 1n wh1ch experiment occurs.

Picking up a thread from A Preface pp Politics. the

difficulty of achieving a human-centered politics when we are

 

41
#2

Ibid.. pp. “1-50.
Ibid.. p. 51.
”31bid.. pp. 91-9u.

qubid.. p. 67.

30

"densely ignorant“ of human nature and of politics. Lippmann
also stressed a theme that will become increasingly important
in later books: The study of human nature and politics is a
young science with many more achievements ahead of it than
behind it. Generations in the future. Lippmann wrote. histor-
ians will find it ludicrous that democracies attempted to
function with so little guarantee of the integrity of their
news. Above all. they will be incredulous "that their political
scientists went on year after year writing and lecturing about
government without producing one. not one single. significant
study of the process of public opinion.“u5

The areas in which research is needed are numerous.
Lippmann suggests that a body of principles for scientific
investigation of journalism “must wait upon the development
of a psychology and political science." and that a psycholog-
ical study needs to be made of why newspaper editors are
possessed by a particular set of ideas“ in such a way that
their decisions about news selection and emphasis are "curi-
ously unanimous.”6 Nevertheless. science is progressive.
If Lippmann's prescriptions for journalism sound “like a
counsel of perfection.“ he wrote. “it is only because the
science of public opinion is still at the point where astron-
omy was when theological concerns proclaimed the conclusions

that all research must vindicate.“+7 Presumably. social

 

“51bid.. p. 15.

“51bid.. pp. 16-17. 48-u9.

"71bid.. pp. 88-89.

31
science will follow the path to greater certainty of astronomy

and the other physical sciences.

Lippmann's prescriptions for journalism are in line
with his assertions in Qpigp App Mastery that science is the
key to solving the problems of democracy. If the crisis of
democracy is a crisis in journalism. the solution for jour-
nalists is to pattern themselves after “the patient and fear-

less men of science who have labored to see what the world

#8

really is.“ If fact. journalism may be particularly

amenable to the scientific approach.

It does not matter that the news is not susceptible
of mathematical statement. In fact. just because
news is complex and slippery. good reporting re-
quires the exercise of the highest of the scientific
virtues. They are the habits of ascribing no more
credibility to a statement than it warrants. a nice
sense of the probabilities. and a keen understanding
of the quantitative importance of particular facts. 9

 

”81bid.. p. 82

“91bid.. pp. 82-83.

32
Chapter _AA

massages:

Like the two earlier books. Liberty and the News was
written in the hopeful conviction that human beings could
bring a measure of scientific certainty to the conduct of
their affairs by adopting mental attitudes available to all.
including journalists. At the same time. however. it raised
troubling questions about structural impediments in the news
process to full. accurate reporting. Public Opinion. pub-
lished in 1922. was a detailed examination of this problem.
It was written not with the buoyant optimism of the first
two books but with a grim tenacity. How can a democracy
function in a complex world. Lippmann asked. when the
sovereign public operates at several removes from reality?

In a sense. the problem was anticipated in Drift and
Mastery. Just as science and social currents had destroyed
the old faith in authority and brought in an era of chaotic
freedom. so had they shrunk the world and eliminated the
isolation in which politics had been conducted. American
democracy. born in a time when the field of public affairs
and the field of intimately known local conditions were more
or less coterminous. now had to deal with the larger world.
the Great Society. in which events half a world away must be

taken into account.1

 

1Li pmann. Public Opinion (New York: The Macmillan
Co.. 1954 . p. 29.

33
The trustworthiness of information about the reality

of that larger world is inherently limited. At the source
it is restricted by such factors as censorship and the
expectation of privacy. As a message on its way from source
to recipient. it is further transformed by limitations of
the media -- news hole. for example. or language itself.

Analyzing a news report of a Korean commission's charges of

Japanese atrocities. Lippmann commented:

. . . eyewitnesses. their accuracy unknown. report
to the makers of “authentic reports“: they in turn
transmit these to a commission five thousand miles
away. It prepares a statement. probably much too
long for publication. from which a correspondent
culls an item of print three and a half inches

long. . . .
It is doubtful whether a supreme master of

style could pack all the elements of truth that
complete justice would demand into a hundred word
account of what had happened in Korea during the
course of several months. For language is by no
means a perfect vehicle of meanings.

At the receiving end of the message a further trans-
formation takes place. The receiver sees not so much what
is in the message but what he or she is conditioned to see
or expects to see. That is true not only of messages but
of all perceptions. The layman looks at a piece of metal
and defines it through such qualities as smoothness. hard-
ness and heavy weight for its size. The chemist. on the

other hand.

. . . would likely as not ignore these esthetic and
utilitarian qualities and define a metal as “any
chemical element that enters into combination with
oxygen so as to form a base.“

 

2Ibid.. pp. 65-66.

34

For the most part we do not first see and then
define. we define first and then see. In the great
blooming. buzzing confusion of the outer world we
pick out what our culture has already defined for
us. and we tend to perceive that which we have
picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our
culture.3

In short. at every stage from source to receiver the
communications process tends to create and reinforce stereo-
types. those emotion-laden and simplified pictures in our
minds that stand for but do not replicate reality. The
stereotypes inhabit a “pseudo-environment“ that stands between
human beings and the real environment. It is a pseudo-
environment to which humans respond with actions that inex-
orably have impact not on the pseudo- but on the real world.

. . . when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results in
action on things or other people. contradiction soon
develops. Then comes the sensation of butting one's
head against a stone wall. of learning by experience.
and witnessing Herbert Spencer's tragedy of the murder
of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts. the
discomfort in short of a maladjustment.

The perfect stereotype. according to Lippmann. was
Aristotle's definition of a slave as one intended by nature
to be servile. The hallmark of the stereotype “is that it
precedes the use of reason: is a form of perception. imposes
a certain character on the data of our sense before the data

reach the intelligence.“5 And because the stereotype is

 

31bid.. p. 81.

“Ibid.. p. 15.

51b1d.. p. 98.

35

emotion-laden. whatever is perceived in its terms is per-
ceived with the emotion it calls forth. Stereotypes judge as
well as describe the world. They are at the center of moral
codes. and they explain why the same man may be a loving
father and a mean boss. a municipal reformer at home and a
jingo abroad: The compartments of his mind hold different
sets of stereotypes and. therefore. different codes of
behavior. Public opinion. rather than a moral judgment on
the facts. is a “moralized and codified version of the facts
. . . . The pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes
largely determines what group of facts we shall see and in
what light we shall see them.“6

Stereotypes have value as a kind of shorthand that
allows the work of the world to go on.7 But because they are
a partial representation of reality. they tend to break down.
to become increasingly misrepresentative of changing reality.
to censor out distinctions that need to be made. And “when
the day of reckoning comes. and the stereotype is shattered.
likely as not that which it did wisely take into account is

shipwrecked with it.“8

Stereotypes. then. are inevitable:
what matters is their character and the gullibility with which

they are held. Recognizing the pervasiveness of stereotypes

 

6Ibid.. p. 125.

71bid.. p. 90.

81bid.. p. 112.

 

36

is in itself an antiseptic against them. making us more
willing to modify them when necessary.9

The implication of stereotypes for politics led Lipp-
mann to his critique of what he considered to be orthodox
democratic theory -- the idea that political wisdom wells up
spontaneously from a public of omnicompetent citizens. That
concept. he believed. ignores the question of what the people
know about the world. By the time the American reached voting
age. the theory was. he “had his political faculties. What
counted was a good heart. a reasoning mind. a balanced judg-

10 Against this simple vision of the omnicompetent

ment.“
citizen. Lippmann placed his own portrait of the citizen: a
person of severely limited vision and knowledge. whose politi-
cal decisions are based on stereotypes. codes and symbols --
symbols which can be manipulated to enlist his interest and
support in political programs the real nature and impact of
which he can hardly judge. The role of the political leader
in such a system is not to carry out the will of the people.
which is too amorphous and uninformed to matter. but to use

11 And because

the techniques of politics to create consent.
the public could only judge after the fact whether its consent
was gained wisely or cynically. political leaders as a class

were in fact irresponsible to the public.12

 

91bid.. pp. 90-91.

1°Ibid.. p. 258.

11Ibid.. p. 2h8.

12Ibid.. p. 310.

6"“

37

For democracies to function. Lippmann believed. there
must be created neutral. expert agencies whose job it is to
organize intelligence into a form in which it will be useful
for running public affairs intelligently and responsibly.13
The experts. whOse neutrality would be protected by insula-
tion from politics. would assemble the pertinent facts. The
decisions would be made by the political leaders. the “insid-
ers“ whose function it is to make judgments. The press --
“the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about. bring-
ing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision“
-- would bring to the public's attention matters on which a
public decision is needed. And public decisions can be of
only one kind -- thumbs up or thumbs down. yes or no. But
because the facts of public life will have been organized 39;
the press by the experts -- not py the press for the public ~-
the spotlight will fall on information in useful. intelligible
form. not on the chaos of “episodes. incidents and eruptions.“1n

Against the picture of the omnicompetent citizen Lipp-
mann had placed another picture. that of a confused. ill-in-
formed citizen whose political interest was open to cynical
manipulation. But he also juxtaposed another image -- this
one normative. and not of the citizen but of the leader who
would use the experts' knowledge in the citizens' behalf --
“the perfectly sound ideal of an executive who sits before a

flat-top desk. one sheet of typewritten paper before him. and

 

13Ibid.. p. 31.

1“Ibid.. p. 36h.

38

decides on matters of policy presented in a form ready for
his rejection or approval.“15 This image. and all it implies
about the roles of public. public servant and expert. was
Lippmann's solution to the perplexing questions raised in
Public Qpinion. And as in the earlier books. both the solu-
tion and the problems were intimately bound up with science.

Many of the attitudes toward and uses of science in
EppAAg Qpinion are by now familiar. As in A Preface pp 22;;-
pAgs and QgAgp.Apg Mastery. science is generally viewed in a
positive light. In fact. the critique of science offered in
the earlier books -- that it had a tendency to ignore the full
richness of the human experience -- is no longer mentioned.
Instead. science. as opposed to authority and to observation
by the innocent or the lay eye. is put forward as the surest

16

epistemological link to reality. The same distinctions are

drawn as in earlier books between the older. “hard“ physical
sciences with their certainty of method. and the younger. less
established social sciences. Lippmann compares the reception
by business of the physical and social sciences:

The chemist. the physicist. the geologist. had a much
earlier and more friendly reception. Laboratories
were set up for them. inducements offered. for there
was quick appreciation of the victories over nature.
But the scientist who has human nature as his prob-
lem is in a different case. There are many reasons
for this: the chi f one. that he has so few vic-
tories to exhibit.

 

151bid.. p. 370.

16Ibid.. pp. 5-6. 13-19. 69. 71.

171bid.. pp. 371-372.

39

But Lippmann is confident that social science will
progress. because the need for it to do so is real. “The
social scientist will acquire his dignity and his strength
when he has worked out his method.“ and he will do that by
capitalizing on the need of those who run the Great Society
for trustworthy scientific instruments with which to analyze
society. Already. in the exchange of methods and results
among the expert staffs of state and municipal governments.
Lippmann could see the “beginning of experimental method in
social science.“18

There are other continuities as well. There is the
same hope. for example. as in 231;; App Mastery that the
public some day will actually come to AAAg thinking scien-
tifically -- that the pursuit of truth will become as
exciting as bread and circuses. Teach the principles of
science as the discipline of objectivity. Lippmann said. and
they will be dull. But teach them as victories over super-
stition. “and the exhiliration of the chase and the conquest
may carry the pupil over that hard transition from his own
self-bound experience to the phase where his curiosity has
matured. and his reason has acquired passion.“19

There is also the same analysis of self-consciousness

as the strength of science. Science is the surest episte-

mology precisely because it is humble. It operates through

 

18Ibid.. pp. 373. 377.

191bid.. p. #10.

ho
hypotheses which are either supported or contradicted and
are. even when supported. tentative and incomplete. The
person who “submits to the scientific discipline knows that
though he does not know everything. he is in the way of
knowing something . . . .“20 Lippmann. however. does have
an ambiguous attitude toward humility in science. One of
his criticisms of social science as opposed to the physical
sciences‘is that it is “apologetic.“ Social scientists
assemble their data from scraps of material gathered by
others for other purposes: and their hypotheses cannot be
tested in the laboratory. but only in the “real world.“ Thus
the social scientist “has little inner certainty about his
own work. He only half believes in it. and being sure of
nothing he can find no compelling reason for insisting on his
own freedom of thought.“ Social scientists will not be able
to “go to Armageddon“ until they have developed a scientific
method that will produce conclusions of which they can be
certain.21 Humility about one's conclusions is fine. appar-
ently. as long as one is certain of them.

Finally. and most important. there is the same key role
for science in resolving the difficulties raised in the book.
In 231;; gpg_Mastery. the old authorities had been weakened
and the problem confronting humans was what to do with their

chaotic new freedom. Science offered a way. on the personal

 

20
2

Ibid.. p. 122.
1Ibid.. p. 282.

#1

level. for humans to free themselves from needless anxieties:
on the social level. it offered a common orientation toward
reality. In Public Opinion. the problem examined is almost
wholly a societal one -- how is a democracy to be governed
when the obstacles in the way of an informed public are so

many and so intractable?

 

Science has the answer on several fronts. First. the 2‘
intelligence bureaus are to turn the nation's public institu- it
tions into a kind of huge research library. full of the 5
quantitative data that will allow analysis and comparison to t

be made.

When each school district and budget. and health
department. and factory. and tariff schedule. is
the material of knowledge for every other. the
number of comparable experiences begins to approach
the dimensions of genuine experiment. In forty-
eight states. and 2900 cities. and 227.000 school
houses. 270.000 manufacturing establishments.
27.000 mines and quarries. there is a wealth of
experience. if only it were recorded and
available. And there is. too. opportunity for
trial and error at such slight risk that any
reasonable hypothesis might be given a fair Eest
without shaking the foundations of society.2

Given such a “wealth of experience“ and the urgent
need of politicians. businessmen and others for expertly
organized information. the apologetic social scientist will
at last come into his own. Instead of working with unrelated
data spasmodically recorded as accidents of administration.
the social scientist will find and formulate the facts for
the “man of action.“ Later. the disinterested expert will

make “what wisdom he can out of comparison between the

 

22Ibid.. p. 377.

#2
decision. which he understands. and the facts. which he
organized.“23
Thus science has a critical role to play at the source

of information. finding and organizing the facts on which
decisions are to be based. It also. however. can alleviate
to some extent a major problem at the other end of the flow
of information. It can help soften the intransigence of moral
codes based on stereotyped views of the world. Every code
contains stereotyped conceptions about human nature. the
material world and tradition.

But in the codes that are under the influence of

science. the conception is known to be an hypothesis.

whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the

past or bubble up from the caverns of the mind. the

conception is not taken as a hypothesis demanding

proof or contradiction. but as a fiction accepted

without question.2

Lippmann's ambiguity about science -- when does humility

become apology? -- was noted previously. Something of the
same sort of ambiguity can be seen in a solecism Lippmann
commits in regard to the relationship between social scien-
tists and moralists. He comments that “whether the moralists
study economics and politics and psychology. or whether the
social scientists educate the moralists is no great matter.“25

Indeed it is no great matter. because it is the same. Although

the sentence structure seems to offer alternatives. in fact

 

23Ibid.. p. 37?.

2"Ibid.. pp. 122-123.

251bid.. p. 180.

#3
it does not: In each case. science is the teacher. and the
moralist is the student. The authority of science had a
strong hold on Lippmann's mind..

But if the similarities in the role and uses of science
are marked. Public Opinion introduces differences as well.
For one. there is less marshalling of scientific evidence to
support one side or the other in a current political debate.
In only one instance does Lippmann use science overtly to
support a partisan political view. Analytic psychology and
anthropology unite. Lippmann wrote without reference to
particular research. in supporting the conclusion that human
desires and behavior are learned. not innate. Thus both
psychology and anthropology undercut the “false determinism“
of socialism.26

But. unlike his two earliest books. PppAAp_Opinion does
not analyze contemporary figures in Washington in terms of
their sympathy with science or lack of it. Warren Harding.
president when the book was written and published. is men-
tioned only once in passing. This may be as much the result
of the subject matter of gppAAp Opinion as of any change in
Lippmann's thinking about the appropriateness of weighing
science in on the political scales. In later books. Lippmann
will use science both to support and to attack the New Deal
and to support the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and

attack the naive capitalism of 19th century businessmen.

 

26Ibid.. pp. 187-190.

on

Another difference from earlier books is that the
Freudian vocabulary of taboo and repression is no longer used
to analyze society. “Stereotype.“ the key concept in gppAAp
Qpinion. is a word drawn not from science but from print
journalism. Nevertheless. there is a marked increase in
citations to scientific research. much of it psychological.
For example. Lippmann cites Jung for laboratory studies on
the ability to “discriminate among crude perceptions and vague
analogies“:27 Locard and others on the variability of wit-

28 and Titchener on the per-

nesses' accounts of an incident:
ception of present time. “The longest duration which we
immediately feel is what is called the 'specious present.‘
It endures. according to Titchener. for about six seconds.“29
Other citations are to the psychological works of William James.
Joseph Jastrow. Cannon. Adler. Kempf and MacDougall. Clearly.
Lippmann tried to support his argument with reference to actual
data and specific research. Yet what endures in Public Qpinion.
its analysis of the function of stereotypes in human communi-
cation. does not rest on such references. and to the present-
day reader they seem an affectation.

Public Qpinion is the first of Lippmann's books to
achieve a genuine distance from the events of its time. Un-

like A Preface pp Politics. Drift and Mastery. The Method 2;
Freedom or The New Imperative. it has dated remarkably little

 

271bid.. p. 71.
28Ibid.. pp. 79. 82.
291bid.. pp. 138-139.

#5
and is frequently cited today. not as a piece of the history
of its time but as a work of enduring insight into its topic.

Yet for all the distance it obtained. gppAAp Qpinion
remains a book with a political message. The politics it
urges would place political power in the hands of an elite
of scientific experts and administrators. Thus as in his
earlier books. Lippmann continues to use science to ration—
alize progressive. middle-class. bureaucratic values. But
his doing so is less obvious because he no longer equates
those values with the programs of named political leaders
like Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. Lippmann's use
of science in PppAAp Qpinion is not less political. only less
partisan.

The most striking new theme in 232;;2 Opinion is the
conviction that there is a wide gulf between the public and
the experts. Although experts were acknowledged and praised
in A Preface pp Politics and QpAgp App Mastery. the scientific
way of thinking was considered to be an attitude of mind that
could be adopted by anyone. Scientific training for business-
men. for example. would release them from a fixation on accum-
ulating dollars. Lippmann wrote in his first book.30 “The
scientific spirit.“ he wrote in his second. “is the discipline
of democracy. the escape from drift. the outlook of a free
man.“31 In EppAAp Qpinion. there remain vestiges of hope that
scientific attitudes might bring some flexibility to the

 

30
31

Lippmann. Preface 32 Politics. p. #9.
Lippmann. Drift and Mastery. p. 151.

#6

stereotypes at the core of moral codes. and that science. if
taught as the victory of truth over superstition. might gain
emotional relevance with the public. But built into gppAAg
Qpinion's analysis of society is a troubling perception: The
public will always and inevitably receive only restricted and
transformed information about the larger world. There are
limitations at the source. such as censorship and privacy:
there are limitations on the time and attention span the public
has for news of the world: there are limitations on the ability
of language itself to represent reality: and the information
is received and perceived in terms of stereotypes which are
inherent and perhaps even inevitable. '

Some stereotypes are closer to reality than others:
some are useful in their time: and some people hold their
stereotypes more flexibly and more humbly than others. But
stereotypes are a structural part of the way the public per-
ceives the world. To attempt to look innocently -- that is.
without stereotype -- would in fact “impoverish human life“

32 They pre-

because stereotypes bring economy to perception.
vent humans from having continually to revisualize the wheel.
Do scientists working through the scientific method see
the world as it really is. unmediated by stereotypes? Prob-
ably not. although Lippmann doesn't directly address this
issue. In a passage cited above. he seemed to imply that a
chemist's technical perception of a metal is an example of

32Lippmann. Public Opinion. p. 88.

n7
stereotyping. of defining first and then seeing.33 At
another point he says that science makes use of “fictions“

which he defines as man-made representations of the environ-

ment.

The range of fiction extends all the way from com-
plete hallucination to the scientist's perfectly
self-conscious.use of a schematic model. or his
decision that for his particular problem accuracy
beyond a certain number of decimal places is not
important. A work of fiction may have almost any
degree of fidelity. and so long as the degree of
fidelity can be taken into account. fiction is not
misleading.3“

But a fiction. which the scientist in Lippmann's example uses
consciously and as a convenience or an aid to communicating
results. is not the same thing as a stereotype. which “pre-
cedes the use of reason“ and “imposes a certain character on
the data of our sense before the data reach the intelligence.35
In other passages. he describes the political science of the
Founding Fathers as functioning something like a stereotype.

The physical isolation of the township. the loneli-

ness of the pioneer. the theory of democracy. the

Protestant tradition. and the limitations of politi-

cal science all converged to make men believe that

out of their own cgnsciences they must extricate

political wisdom.3

But political wisdom. of course. is a social science which

 

33Ibid.. p. 81.

3"Ibid.. p. 15.

351bid.. p. 98. For an argument that science is just
such an activity. carried out under stereotype-like “para-

digms“ that alter the way data are perceived. see Kuhn.
Structure 2; Scientific Revolutions.

36Ibid.. p. 27h.

#8

had yet to find the method and certainty of the physical
sciences.

Lippmann appeared to consider the sciences to be cap-
able of development to a point at which their method and their
“humility“ could act together to discount their stereotypes.
Science was a way to overcome the limitations of human per-
ception and draw close to reality. if not directly perceive
it. Therefore. the more scientific a branch of science. it
would seem. the closer its experts are to knowing the real
world.

But expertness was not simply a matter of applying “the
scientific spirit to everyday life.“ as Lippmann had urged in
Drift and Mastery. The role of experts in a modern. demo-
cratic society had become as technical as it was crucial.

The Great Society had grown furiously and to colossal
dimensions by the application of technical knowledge.
It was made by engineers who had learned to use exact
measurements and quantitative analysis. It could not
be governed. men began to discover. by men who thought
deductively about rights and wrongs. It could be
brought under hgvan control only by the technic which
had created it.
Moreover. representative government cannot be made to work
successfully unless there is “an independent expert organi-
zation for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who
have to make the decisions.38 And by decision makers. Lipp-
mann does not mean the voting public. but instead the “men of

action.“ the leaders and administrators. In fact. beyond

 

371bid.. p. 370.
38Ibid. . p. 31.

#9
their and the experts' use of the data organized by intelli-
gence bureaus. there would be only “some study“ of it by those
organs of mass communication. the newspapers.
. . the outsider. and every one of us is an out-

older to all but a few aspects of modern life. has

neither time. nor attention. nor interest. nor the

equipment for specific judgment. It is on the men

inside. working under conditions that are sound. 39

that the daily administration of society must rest.
Politicians who appeal to the public on matters of detail

usually are trying to avoid criticism from knowledgeable

 

people by appealing to an ignorant majority. The winner in
that game is determined not by the facts but by who speaks '
the loudest or has the best publicity agent.“0
In sum. what had changed between 25:23 app Mastery and
Public Opinion seems to have been Lippmann's sense of the
realism of expecting scientific thought to effect substantial
changes in the fidelity with which the mass of people perceived
the larger world. There may have been. as well. a growing
sense of his own ambiguous position. He was a non-scientist
leading the parade for science. a generalist maintaining that
the experts had the most direct line to reality. In all but
a few aspects of life. he wrote. “every one of us is an out-
sider.“ In another passage. he wrote of the difficulty of
drawing a valid sample from a population: The task belongs.

he said. to the science of statistics. “and it is a most diff-

icult affair for anyone whose mathematics is primitive. and

 

39Ibid.. p. #00.

“01bid.. p. #01.

50
mine remain azoic in spite of the half dozen manuals which I

41 It is revealing

once devoutly imagined that I understood.“
that in his admission of mathematical inadequacy. Lippmann
felt called upon. perhaps defensively. to use a technical
geological term. azoic. The larger world that science had
opened up -- and—indeed science itself -- had proved to be
bigger than even Walter Lippmann could manage. And if that

were so. what hope for the public?

gAp Phantom Public

In Public Qpinion. Lippmann undercut what he considered
to be the orthodox democratic theory -- the notion that poli-
tical wisdom wells up spontaneously from a public of omnicom-
petent citizens. In place of that view. he suggested a theory
of democracy in which political leaders create public consent
for actions based on information supplied and organized by
independent bureaus of experts. The public's role would be to
vote yes or no when its consent was asked. The scheme left
the public open to manipulation by skillful but cynical poli-
ticians. and it failed to supply the public with criteria on
which to base its yes or no vote. Can members of the public
act intelligently even in the reduced role Lippmann felt appro-
priate for them? That was the question posed in his next book.
gpp Phantom Public. published in 1925.

The private citizen. as sketched in the book's opening
chapter. is “like a deaf spectator in the back row“ of a play.

 

”libid.. p. 1u8.

51
He knows his sovereignty in the democratic system is a fic-
tion. because he knows he lives in a world he can neither
fully perceive. understand nor direct.u2 He knows that the
theory of democracy expects the impossible of voters -- that
they “know what is going on and . . . have an opinion worth
expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing
community.”3 .

Nor is there hope that ideal democratic citizens can be
produced by eugenics. education or moral instruction. The
ideal of a citizen competent to direct public affairs is a
false ideal. unattainable in the sense that ballet dancing
is an unattainable goal for a fat man.

The actual work of the world. however. is done not by
voting publics but by individual people taking concrete.
specific actions in situations with which they are closely
involved. When the voters become involved. they do so not as
actors but rather in the attempt to influence the actions of
others from the outside.#5 The involvement most often is in
the form of an election. which is an expression of the force
of numbers in a society. a kind of sublimated war. the sub-

stitution of ballots for bullets."6

 

uzLippmann. The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt.
Brace e Co.. 1925). p. 13-15.

h31bid.. p. 20.
MIbid.. pp. 22-39.
“51bid.. p. 09-53.

u6Ibidoo ppo 58-590

52

Thus the public does not govern public affairs. Rather.
it intervenes. and its interventions can be counted on to be
neither well informed. continuous. non-partisan. creative or
effective. Public opinion deals with crisis. and its object
is to see that the crisis is ended. The aim of educating the
public is to give it the power to discern which side in a
conflict can best end the crisis through workable laws rather

47

than an appeal to brute force. “It is the function of pub-

lic opinion to check the use of force in a crisis. so that
men. driven to make terms. may live and let live.““8
When an issue arises that requires public intervention.
the public needs the answers to two questions: 1) Is the rule
that applies to the dispute defective? and 2) if it is. who
is best able to mend-it? In other words. the public is to be
concerned solely with judging whether a particular rule of
society needs to be reformed and. if so. who shall be the
reformer.“9
In this scheme of things. the value of public debate is
not to inform the public about the merits of the issue: The
public. since it is on the outside. is incapable of dealing
with the merits. The value of public debate is to identify

the advocates and partisans and so deprive them of the advan-

tage of sailing falsely under the colors of the general

 

“71bid.. pp. 63-70.

”81bid.. p. 7a.

“91b1d.. pp. 107-109.

53

public interest.50

Rules are challenged by being broken -- in effect. by
the substitution of new rules. The question for the public
is whether the new rule was substituted justifiably. and the
criterion is whether there was assent to the new rule by most
of the insiders directly concerned.51 If so. there is no
public question. But if there is significant dissent. the
public may profitably inquire which side is most willing to
submit its claim to inquiry and to abide by the result. If
all sides are willing to do so. the public can instead ask
which proposed new rule includes the means of its own clari-
.fication and amendment with consent and proper notice.52 If
these or some other reasonable tests cannot be made to apply
to the situation. the public is better off doing nothing. In
cases in which only an opinion on the actual merits of a case
would be of any use. “any positive action the bystanders are
likely to take is almost certain to be more of a nuisance than
a benefit.“53

The merits of an issue. then. are not for the public to
decide. The only useful role for the public is as a kind of
referee. judging whether the game is played according to the

rules and whether the rules themselves are amended in an

 

5°Ibid.. pp. 110-11».
511bid.. pp. 115-117.
521bid.. pp. 125-138.
531bid.. pp. 1u1-1u2.

5h
orderly way.

In Public Qpinion. Lippmann had stressed for the first
time the width of the gulf between scientific experts and the
lay public. He elaborates on that theme in 2A3 Phantom
Public. One of the reasons the public cannot be expected to
judge a public issue on its merits is that the public is
contemptuous of and bored with experts and with statistical
measurement. If it weren't that the insiders in government
and business find record and measurement necessary. “the
organization of intelligence to administer modern affairs
would probably be entirely neglected.“5“

But it is a mistake to believe that everyone can be an
expert about everything. That is the myth of the omnicompe-
tent citizen. Science does not equip one to be an omnicompe-
tent citizen. because science equips one to deal specifically
and concretely with an issue with which one is closely in-
volved.55 Science. in other words. helps insiders function
as insiders. but cannot help the public do its job as an out-
side influence. And one is an insider for only a narrow
spectrum of issues.

Only the insider can make decisions. not because he

is inherently a better man but because he is so placed
that he can understand and can act. The outsider is
necessarily ignorant. usually irrelevant and often
meddlesome. because he is trying to navigate the ship

from dry land. That is why excellent automobile
manufacturers. literary critics and scientists often

 

5nIbid., p. #2.
551bid.. p. 150

55
talk such nonsense about politics. Their congenital
zigiilgggeéciiv§gyeggsts. reveals itself only in

Nor will science. he noted wryly. be likely to develop
the omnicompetent citizen through genetic manipulation. He
had tried to imagine how the perfect citizen could be produced
from the conjunction of the right germ plasm. and he noted
the prescriptions by popular eugenists “as to just who ought
to marry whom. . . .“ Not being a biologist himself. he
noted. he kept an open mind. but observed that those who dis-
play the most certainty about the possibility of breeding
ability into the human race also have the slightest scientific
reputations.57 (Later. in gpgqupg Society. Lippmann was to
return glancingly to the topic of eugenics. but in that book
he was to suggest that the genetic improvement of the citi-
zenry ought indeed to be a concern of the state.)

Science is brought to bear as authority or metaphor to
support two major contentions in the book. One is that moral
education in itself does not equip a person to judge an issue
on its merits. Lippmann cites Pavlov's experiments on con-
ditioned reflexes in animals as support for an assertion that
a human being

responds quite readily to a glass egg. a decoy duck.
a stuffed shirt or a political platform. No moral
code. as such. will enable him to know whether he is

exercizing his moral faculties on a real and an
important event.58

 

56Ibid.. p. 150.
571bid.. p. 22.
581bid.. p. 30.

56
What that person needs to know. Lippmann wrote. is the facts.
The second contention is that all values are relative.

This is important for Lippmann to maintain in order to support
his proposition that the purpose of politics is not to deter-
mine right and wrong in an absolute sense. but rather to allow
conflicting interests to achieve a live-and-let-live accommo-
dation. Drawing his vocabulary from Darwin. Lippmann wrote
that social problems are not conflicts between right and wrong
but instead the result of uneven evolution. People and things
multiply. grow. learn. age. wear out and die at different
rates: a person and his friends. tools. institutions. beliefs
and needs evolve unevenly.

Instead of that one grand system of evolution and

progress. which the nineteenth century found so

reassuring. there would appear to be innumerable

systems of evolution. variously affecting each

other. some linked. some in collision. but each

in some fundamental aspect moving at its own pace

and on its own terms.

The disharmonies of this uneven evolution
are the problems of mankind.5
The use of scientific vocabulary and authority to

support propositions about society. and the consciousness of
a wide gap between science and the lay public are aspects of
Lippmann's thought that appeared in previous works. A new
element in his use of science emerges in The Phantom Public.
That is his attempt. which will grow more pronounced in later

books. to offer his insights as seminal ideas for future

scientific research.

 

59Ibid.. pp. 83-8“.

57

Of the criteria by which the public may judge which

side to back in a public dispute. for example. he wrote:

It goes without saying that what I shall present

here is no final statement of these principles.

At most and at best it may be a clue. with some 60

illustrations. that can be developed by research.
Noting that the public must make a judgment about public
issues based on “sampling an external aspect of the behavior
of insiders.“ and that criteria need to be established for
the public to distinguish reasonable from arbitrary behavior.
Lippmann concludes: “It is the task of the political scien-
tist to devise the methods of sampling and to define the
criteria of judgment.“61

A question that must have occurred to Lippmann as he

formulated his distinction between insiders and outsiders
was. where did he himself stand in regard to the issues about
which he wrote every day? As a journalist. was he inside or
out. an expert or a lay citizen? He knew he was not an expert
on all the public matters on which he commented daily. He
admitted that “although public business is my main interest
and I give most of my time to watching it. I cannot find time
to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy . . .
to have an opinion worth eXpressing on every question which

62

confronts a self-governing community.“ At the same time.

 

60
6
6

Ibid.. p. 79.
1Ibid.. pp. 149-195.
2Ibid.. p. 20.

58

however. he was hardly willing to restrict himself to the role
he set out for the lay public. that of a bystander and a ref-
eree isolated from the merits of the issues.

In offering his insights as fertile ground for scien-
tific research. Lippmann the non-scientist could stake out a
claim for himself within the territory of science. and thus
find an accommodation between being an insider and being an
outsider. He could exhibit due humility about the tentative

nature of his conclusions. while at the same time drawing

 

some of the aura of science around them. i

59
era-.2121!

High Religion Incarnate
ppppp App Mastery examined the impact of modernity on
both public and personal life. Public Qpinion and gpp Phantom
Public looked more specifically at the public aspect of the
problem. In 1929. Lippmann returned to the personal aspect in
A Preface pp Morals. The book deals with religion and with

1 In an age in which the acids of

“the problem of unbelief.“
modernity have destroyed faith but not the need for faith.
“the problem is how mankind. deprived of the great fictions.
is to come to terms with the needs which created those fic-
tions.“2 As in Qpppp_ppp Mastery and Public Qpinion. science
is both a cause of the problem and a key to the solution.
Religion is no longer believable because the modern
scientific viewpoint has destroyed the credibility of the
physical and historical truth of religion among the mass of
people. In the sense that unbelief has affected the masses.
the modern situation is different from that of earlier periods
in which science and orthodox religion were in conflict. In
the days of Plato and Socrates and again when the educated
classes of Rome accepted Christianity. a relatively small

elite translated popular theology into a ”higher“ religion
that their sophistication could accept: meanwhile. the popular

 

1L1 pmann. A Preface pp Morals (New York: The Macmillan
C00. 1929 0 p. 30

2Ibid.. p. 194.

 

60
beliefs remained intact among the masses. “This is the first

age . . . in the history of mankind.“ Lippmann wrote. “when
the circumstances of life have conspired with the intellectual
habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative
belief incredible to large masses of men.“3 People have lost
the sense that their lives are part of a rational order. and
their search for new religions. their adoption of cults and
their appeals for a reconciliation between religion and
science are symptoms of their unease.
Life used to have a unity. expressed alike in church.

state. family and school.

. . . The rights and duties of the individual in

society. the rules of morality. the themes of art

and the teachings of science were all of them ways

of revealing. of celebrating. of applying the laws

laid down in the divine constitution of the universe.5
But the unity is broken in the modern world. Science no
longer is expected to support religion. and religion no longer

6

dominates art. All the scientists agree: There is no evi-

dence of an anthropomorphic God anywhere in the universe.
And members of the lay public. trying to read the Bible liter-
ally as history. science and law. find it contradicted by “the

practical working convictions of their daily lives.“7

 

3Ibid.. pp. 11-12.
“Ibid.. pp. 18-19.
51bid.. p. 112.

6Ibid.

71bid.. pp. 27-28, #0.

61

Modern theologians have tried to separate religion's
ideal values from the historic account set forth in the Bible
-- but to do so means that in the view of the “common man.“
these ideal values no longer are based in the meat and po-
tatoes of reality. They no longer are “inherent in the very

8 The common people. in fact. need miracles

nature of things.“
to convince them of the truth of religion. But to them. n

science and not the church seems to be the source of modern

miracle.

 

The miracles which are recounted from the pulpit were. g
after all. few and far between . . . . But the miracles i
of science seem to be inexhaustible. It is not sur-
prising then. that men of science should have acquired
much of the intellectual authority which churchmen once
exercised. Scientists do not. of course. speak of
their discoveries as miracles. But to the common man
they have much the same character as miracles. They
are wonderful. they are inexplicable. they are mani-
festations of a great power over the forces of nature.9
The miracles of science. however. don't completely
satisfy the human needs that religion used to fill. Science's
"miraculous“ aspect has the defects of its virtues: Science
seems to be miraculous because it is difficult to understand.
and because it is difficult to understand it is somewhat re-
mote from the emotional life of human beings. It is as myster-
ious to most people as religion ever was. Even the “moderately
educated minority.“ the “disillusioned rebels“ don't understand

modern science because they “never learned enough mathematics

 

81bid.. p. 32.

91bid.. pp. 120-121.

62

and physics.“10 (Lippmann. himself a “disillusioned rebel.
had no courses in math or any of the physical sciences at
Harvard . >11

Science not only is difficult to understand. it also
answers radically different questions than those answered by
religion. Through religion. human beings have sought to
define a place for themselves in the order of things that
would relate their individual destiny to the destiny of the
universe. Science says that even the attempt to do so is
outside the pale.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely
in the rejection of the belief. which is at the heart
of all popular religion. that the forces which move
the stars and atoms are contingent upon the prefer-
ences of the human heart....

Therefore. science. though it has displaced
revelation. is not a substitute for it. It yields
a radically different kind of knowledge. It explains
the facts. But it does not pretend to justify the
ways of God to man. It enables us to realize some
of our hapes. Buf it offers no guarantee that they
can be fulfilled. 2

If science cannot satisfy the naive yearning for a
personal sense of connection with universal destiny. however.
it does point the way toward a new morality that will be based
once again -- as in the days of literal Biblical belief -- on
reality. Thus a characteristic pattern of Lippmann's thought
is continued: Science is at the root of modern problems. but

it also offers solutions to those problems: it destroys the

 

1°Ibid.. pp. 121, 18.

11Steel. Walter Lippmann. p. 1h.

12Lippmann. Preface pp Morals. p. 133.

 

63

old. but it also is the means through which the new can be
built. The scientific basis for the new morality will not be
biology and history -- the Creation. the Flood and the
Exodus -- but the science of psychology.13

Lippmann traces the modern sense of alienation. of
dissatisfaction with things as they are. of yearning for a
destiny. to an intuitively perceived memory of life as human
beings think it should be. Psychology. as it studies the
development of human behavior. begins to understand the source
of that memory. It is the period of very early infancy. when
the baby is closely cared for in a situation as much like the
womb as possible. For a short time the infant lives under the
illusion that “'his wishes are realized simply by imagining
the satisfaction of them.'“ Lippmann wrote. quoting Ferenczi.1u
In Ferenczi's scheme of psychological development. humans pass
through several stages in which they progressively learn to
accommodate themselves to the real world. The final stage.
maturity. is not dealt with in detail by the psychologists
because their concern is with pathology. The moralist. however.
is concerned not with pathology but with health. and for the
moralist the end result of natural human development offers a

norm for which human life ought to strive.15 Thus the science

of psychology. while it may not be developed enough yet to

 

1311510.. p. 1u3.

lulbid.. pp. 150. 178.

151bid.. p. 179.

6h

totally supplant imaginative insight. does establish on a
scientific basis the goal of moral effort: That goal is a calm.
disinterested maturity.

. . . With the help of psychology we are in position

now to construct reliable and useful pictures. which

confirm and correct our own intuitive understanding

. . . . We can. as it were. fix these two poles and

regard the history of each soul as the history of its

progress from infantilism to maturity. . 1 . We know

what we mean by the goal of moral effort. 6

Moreover. as psychology develops strength as a science.

the reality base for the morality of maturity will become
firmer. If scientific knowledge of human nature were adequate
to the task now. humanists could actually achieve what all
religions tried to achieve in the past -- a morality based on
tested truths.

They would be truths about the development of human

nature. and not. as in the papular religions. truth

of physics and of history. But our knowledge of

human nature is inadequate. and therefore. like the

teachers of popular religion. we have in place of

exact knowledge to invent imaginative fictions in

the hope that the progress of science will confirm

and correcti but will not utterly contradict. our
hypothesis. 7

The “progress of science.“ however. is regarded as a matter

of course. Granted. psychologists don't have an agreed-upon
terminology and still use a “literary language in which the
connotations of words tend to overwhelm their precise signi-
fication“: moreover. the science of psychology is split into
sects. each characterized by dogmatism. elaborate system-making

and headstrong generalization. “But all this is characteristic

 

16Ibid.. p. 179.

171bid.. p. 176.

65
of a young science.“ Lippmann wrote. "and if that is borne
in mind. there is nothing disconcerting about it.“ Physics
in the 18th century and biology in the 19th went through the
same difficulties. The implication is that. given time.

psychology will catch up to its more firmly established

sisters.18

The morality to whose establishment Lippmann looked
forward was a mature. disinterested understanding that the
universe did not exist to fulfill men's desires. By accept-
ing reality. humans could discipline their wills to bring
desire into harmony with it.

To be able. . . to follow what the heart desires
without coming into collision with the stubborn
facts of life is the privilege of the utterly
innocent and of the utterly wise. It is the privi-
lege of the infant and of the sage who stand at the
two poles of experience: of the infant because the
world ministers to his heart's desire and of the
sage because he_has learned what to desire. Perhaps
this is what Jesus meant when he told his followers
that they must become like little children.19

It is a morality that was intuitively perceived in the past
only by the spiritual elite. In addition to Jesus and Con-
fucius. Lippmann includes among them such men as Eckhart.
Origen. Dean Inge. St. Augustine. Luther. Erasmus and Mon-
taigne. They are the minority to whom religion is not a
guarantee of eternal salvation or earthly success. but a

“reconditioning of their own souls.“20

 

lalbido! ppe 173.17“.

19mm. p. 193.

2oIbid.. p. 196.

66

Lippmann concedes even to popular religion the ability
to intuitively perceive truths about human nature that are
later confirmed by science. Religion has always understood.
for example. the close connection between religion and sex
and the importance of early childhood for the transmittal of
traditional values.21 Likewise. the elite who practiced the
more difficult “religion of the spirit“ understood the value
of a disinterested maturity long before the advent of modern.
psychology began to lay the scientific basis for it. Pythag-
oras. for example. understood the relationship of disinterested-
ness in science to moral maturity. He tried to establish a
movement in which scientific study would be combined with
ascetic discipline. but lacked the “technical knowledge“ to
make the experiment work. “. . . The pursuit of science was
too much for the mass of the faithful.“22

Insights like Pythagoras' were comparable to the “pro-
phetic conceptions“ in the natural sciences which. after being
considered curiosities for years. were at last seen to be clues
to significant scientific advance. The idea of evolution. for
instance. was conceived often before Darwin. but nothing came
of it until “the rapid evolution of human affairs after the
industrial revolution had somehow brought this neglected in-
sight into focus with men's interests.“23 It is likewise with

 

211b18.. pp. 89. 91.

221bid.. pp. 204-205.

231bid.. pp. 209-210.

67
the new morality of disinterested maturity. What was intui-
tively grasped by an elite of wise men or mystics now is ripe
to be established on a firm scientific foundation.

The vision itself we can discern only faintly. for we
have as yet only the occasional and fragmentary testi-
mony of sages and saints and heroes. dim anticipations
here and there. a most imperfect science of human be-
havior. and our own obscure endeavor to make explicit
and rational the stresses of the modern world within
our own souls. But we can begin to see. I think. that
the evidence converges upon the theory that what the
sages have prophesied as high religion. what psycho-
logists delineate as matured personality. and the dis-
interestedness which the Great Society requires for
its practical fulfillment. are all of a piece. and are
the basic elements of a modern morality. 9

Indeed. Lippmann announces his own reconciliation between
science and religion. “It is no exaggeration.“ he wrote. “to
say that pure science is high religion incarnate.“25
The time is ripe for the new idea precisely because the
Great Society. with its dependence on science. now requires
that the scientific spirit spread throughout the mass of
people. Science may be difficult for the common person to
understand. It may even be difficult for the educated min-
ority like Lippmann. But the underlying realities of the
modern age will bring change. The machine technology “requires
a population which in some measure partakes of the spirit
which created it.“26

How the change is to come about is not clear. Lippmann

 

2“1bid., p. 323.

251bid.. p. 239.

26Ibid.. p. 240.

68

begins with the belief that. whatever the motives surrounding
the practice of science and technology. the motives at the
heart of the enterprise are disinterested and mature. The hope
of financial gain may have led to the establishment of a labor-
atory. but in the laboratory itself.“ the habit of disinter-
ested realism in dealing with the data is the indispensable
habit of mind.“ How is this habit of mind to spread beyond
the laboratory to the populace at large? Beyond stating his
belief that the machine technology requires it. Lippmann is
not sure -- and indeed expresses some skepticism. He notes
that the scientific spirit becomes “diluted“ the further one
goes from those who actually work in science. It is a long
way. he observes. from Faraday. Maxwell and Hertz to the
“broker who sells radio stock or the householder with his six-
tube set.“’ Still. he affirms. “it is a fact of enormous con-
sequences. cumulative in its effect upon the education of
succeeding generations.“ that the technology of modern civili-
zation is possible only with “the increasing use of a scienti-
fic discipline.“27

Lippmann believed. or at least wanted to believe. that
the disinterestedness at the heart of science would spread
throughout a mass population living in a technological society.
But he was not able to say clearly how that diffusion would
occur. Once more he called on science to solve the problem

-- suggesting that the concept of disinterestedness be accepted

 

271bid.. pp. 240-241.

69
by psychologists and educators as a kind of “theory of evo-
lution“ or “Mendel's law“ from which they could “thread their
way by dialectic and by experiment to practical knowledge
which is actually usable as a method of education and as a
personal discipline.“28
Meanwhile. the ideal of disinterestedness was already

implicit in three areas of human concern: sex. government and
business. In sexual relations. the impact of technology came
through the increasing use of birth control methods and through
the relaxation of old moral standards. Modern advocates of
sexual freedom. following the logic of birth control to its
end. were advocating a complete separation of sex from the
institution of the family.29 But the logic of birth control
need not and should not be followed to its end. Lippmann
believed. “One might as well argue that because automobiles
can be driven at a hundred miles an hour the laws should
sanction driving at the rate of a hundred miles an hour.“30
Instead. the convention of marriage correctly interprets human
experience:

In the home made by a couple who propose to see it

through. there are provided the essential conditions

under which the passions of men and women are most

likely to become msfure. and therefore harmonious
and disinterested.

 

281bid.. p. 231.

29Ibid.. pp. 293-294.
3°1bid.. p. 299.
31Ibid.. p. 311.

70
Marriage. however. will not survive as a rule of law backed
by coercion or as a moral commandment handed down from the old
to the young. nor will all persons in the Great Society live
together in marriage. But marriage will survive as the dom-
inant arrangement if it in fact corresponds to reality. What
was in the past a matter of authority and law now becomes a
part of the scientific temper. Marriage. “when it is clari-
fied by insight into reality. is likely to be the hypothesis
upon which men and women will ordinarily proceed.“32
In government. Lippmann saw the ideal of disinterested-

ness moving politics away from centralization and toward
“multitudinous mass leadership.“ or responsible decision-
making spread throughout the mass of people.

The essential point is that as the machine technology

makes social relations complex. it dissolves the habits

of obedience and dependence: it disintegrates the

centralization of power and of leadership: it diffuses

Egguizpiggence of Sssponsible decision throughout the

In business. the naive capitalists of the 19th century

are being replaced by salaried executives. technicians and
experts. The naive capitalists did not understand science
because they did not understand disinterestedness. Indeed.
Adam Smith told them they should be the apposite of disinter-
ested: that by each pursuing his own interest. the general

welfare would be served. The result was social disaster in

 

32Ibid.. p. 312.
331bid.. p. 274.

71
the cycles of inflation and deflation. the waste of natural
resources and the abuse of labor.3u

On the other hand. business is too complex to be admini-
stered from the top by legislation or a government bureau-
cracy. The only alternative is the self-control of the
disinterested business leader. “the man who has transformed
his passions by an understanding of necessity.“35

Thus in sexuality. government and business. Lippmann
saw common forces at work. Science and technology were press-
ing in all three areas for men and women to adopt a mature
disinterestedness as the central orientation of their lives.
The new orientation. moreover. was not only carried on the
tide of the times. It was certified by the science of psycho-
logy as the goal toward which human development naturally
moved.

In his study of Qpppp ppp Mastery. Hollinger saw a
contrast between Lippmann's early positive view of science and
a later ambivalent attitude. especially in A Preface pp flppppp.
Hollinger's article dealt primarily with the early period and
not with the place of science in Lippmann's overall work: but
in a footnote Hollinger briefly characterized what he saw as
the main relationships between the earlier and the later books.

Both. he said. pose a common problem. the search for

stability and fulfillment without resort to tradition or

 

Bthido. ppe 2h2'2u3o

351bid.. p. 258.

72

authority. And both present science as a “Promoethean and
experimental enterprise grounded in the insight that we live
in a radically contingent world.“ But Preface pp_!ppppp. he
said. “specifically doubts the viability of science as a
social and spiritual ideal.“ Humanism and maturity take the
place of the discipline of science and of mastery. and there
is a greater willingness in the 1929 work to “attribute to
human experience a stable moral structure which 'the progress
of science cannot upset.'“ In the later book. Lippmann
stressed the difficulty and not the ease with which the
bridge between science and lay public could be eased. Hollin-
ger wrote. And finally. Lippmann “associated his own efforts
as a critic not with the methods of science. but with the
spirit of classical philosOphy.”36

There is no question that both Qpppp_ppp Mastery and
A Preface pp pppppp see science as both a destroyer of old
restraints and a key to unlocking new ways of ordering exper-
ience. But in other respects. this study finds evidence to
support an interpretation of A Preface ppqupppp that differs
from Hollinger's in emphasis if not in substance. Far from
questioning science's viability as a social and spiritual
ideal. for example. A Preface pp uppppp elevates it to a
lofty position as “high religion incarnate.“

Modern science . . . is the actual realization in
a practicable mode of conduct which can be learned

and practiced. of the insight of high religion.
The scientific discipline is one way in which the

 

36Hollinger. “Science and Anarchy.“ p. 973.

73

insight. hitherto lyrical and personal and apart.

is brought down to earth and into direct and

decisive contact with the concerns of mankind.37

To be sure. humanism and maturity have a function
similar to that of scientific discipline and mastery in the
earlier book. But they are not put forward in place of
science and mastery. They are offered as outgrowths of
science and as ways to achieve mastery by incorporating the
ideals of science in personal life. Humanism is based on
human psychology. Lippmann wrote. and maturity is put forward
as the moral goal of human life in part because it is the end-
point of healthy human development as determined in the psycho-
logical work of Freud and Ferenczi.38 The quality of the
mature mind. Lippmann wrote. is that it knows that in action
it is “only testing an hypothesis.“39
Hollinger noted that Lippmann wrote of a stable moral

structure that cannot be upset by the progress of science as
belief in the literal truth of the Bible was upset by Darwin-
ism. But the moral structure of which Lippmann wrote is
stable precisely because it has incorporated the spirit of
science into itself. Its indifference to what the facts may

be is “the very spirit of scientific inquiry.“l’o

 

37Lippmann. Preface pp Morals. p. 239.
38Ibid.. pp. 143. 176.
391bid.. p. 329.

uolbid.. p. 237.

74

Rather than stressing the difficulty of bridging the
gap between science and the layman. A Preface pp Morals seems
to argue that the bridge will be built as a natural result of
the extension of the machine technology. The existence of
the gap is acknowledged: Modern men and women don't under-
stand science: but they do understand its tangible results. and
those results bring the discipline of science into direct
contact with the everyday concerns of human beings.“1 The
machine technology. he asserted. “requires“ a population that

“2 The continuing human

understands the scientific spirit.
need for a religious orientation. meanwhile. will also press
the population to adopt the disinterestedness that for Lippmann
is the common insight both of science and of high religion.

The real effect of modernity upon religion is to

make the religion which was once the possession of

an aristocracy of the spirit the only possible kind

of religion for all modern men.

Finally. it is true. as Hollinger observed. that Lipp-
mann tended to associate his efforts in the later book more
with philosophy than with science. In A Preface pp_Morals.
citations of research are few. Only in offering scientific
support for his belief that maturity is the end-point of
normal human development does Lippmann cite specific scienti-
fic work -- that of psychologist Ferenczi. In gppAAp Opinion.

he had cited scientific research numerous times.

 

“11bid.. pp. 121. 239.

“21bid.. p. 240.
“31bid.. p. 197.

75

On the other hand. Lippmann does attempt to associate
‘A Preface pp_Morals closely with science when he puts forth
the concept of disinterestedness as a concept capable of
articulation through research. He suggested that it might
have the same relation to psychological and educational
practice that scientific theory has to practical applications
in other disciplines. The realization of the ideal of dis-
interestedness is a matter of education. he wrote: Yet merely
telling mothers and teachers to lead children away from
childishness will do no good. Mothers and teachers will want
concrete advice about what they should do differently. But
the advice they should be given is “no more to be had from the
original concept than are rules for breeding fine cattle to
be had from the theory of evolution or Mendel's law.“ If the
concept of disinterestedness is “correct.“ however. psycholo-
gists and educators will be able to “thread their way by
dialectic and by experiment to practical knowledge.“uu

In putting his concept of disinterestedness on the same
footing with evolution and Mendel's law. however. Lippmann did
violence to a basic distinction: Both Mendel's law and
Darwin's theory of natural selection were proposed after con-
siderable empirical observation. while there is very little of
an inductive element in disinterestedness. Basically a moral
concept. it seems to have fallen victim to the same “pathetic

fallacy“ against which Lippmann warned earlier in the book --

 

qubid.. PP. 230-231.

76

the belief that good and evil are objective qualities of the
natural world.“5 To say that disinterestedness is the right
attitude for a mature person to have is one thing. To assert
that it is to psychology and education what Mendel's law is to
cattle breeding is to make an unsupportable claim for its
standing as science.

In several other respects. Lippmann's uses of science
in A Preface pprorals continue patterns from previous books.
Science remains the most reliable epistemological link to

#6 The social sciences continue to lag behind the

reality.
physical sciences in certainty and reliability. but will pro-
gress.u7 Science's strength continues to be its self-correct-

48 Moreover. science is brought to

ing and contingent nature.
bear against political and economic theories with which Lipp-
mann disagreed. The naive capitalists of the 19th century
were anti-scientific in spirit. he wrote. because the self-
interest that is at the heart of laissez faire capitalism is
at odds with scientific disinterestedness.u9
A Preface pp Morals had asked the same basic question
posed by Drift and Mastery: In a world in which the old

certainties had been swept away. how were people to orient

 

“51bid.. p. 168.

“61bid.. pp. 103. 133.
“71bia.. pp. 157. 173-174.
“81bid.. p. 239.

“91bid.. pp. 241-244.

77
themselves to the world. to others and to themselves? In both

books. the central answer is science. the “discipline of demo-
cracy.“ the “high religion incarnate.“ Yet. like one who
draws a line on a Mobius strip. Lippmann had arrived at an
opposite view without lifting his pencil. without appearing

to jump to the other side. In Drift and Mastery he had warned
against trying “to ignore the desire that moves our thought

. . . .“50 He had urged a science centered on human needs

and directed by human needs. In A Preface pp Morals. he again
confronts the conflict between science and the "desire that
moves our thought.“ Science doesn't fill the human needs to
which popular religion responded. But now it is the human
need that must give way. Human beings must learn not to desire
what they cannot have. and instead must discipline their wills
in a disinterested maturity.

American Inquisitors

At about the time Lippmann was working on A Preface pp
Morals. he was asked to give the Barbour-Page lectures at the
University of Virginia. These lectures. reprinted as American
Inquisitors. focus on the Scopes trial in Tennessee and on
efforts in Chicago to legislate the content of school texts
in American history. In the main. American Inguisitors sets
forth the same themes in regard to science as does A Preface
pp Morals. Specifically. it interprets modern times as a
period of transition between fundamentalist religious belief

 

5°Ibid.. p. 170.

78

based on revelation and authority and. on the other hand. “the
scientific method of thought.“51 It leaves no doubt that. in
Lippmann's view at least. the transition was taking place in
the direction of a desirable ideal. “Have you ever stopped
to think.“ he has Socrates ask in a dialogue on Olympus.

what it means when a man acquires the scientific

spirit? It means that he is ready to let things

be what they may be. whether or not he wants them

to be that way. It means that he has conquered

his desire to have the world justify his prejudices.

It means that he has learned how to live without the

support of any creed. that he can be happy. or at

least humane. no matter what conclusion men may

come to as to the origin of the world. or its plan.

or its destiny. There are not many men of this

sort in any age.

Although its general treatment of science is the same
as A Preface pp Morals. which was published the next year.
American Inquisitors is of interest because of the self-
criticism it shows Lippmann willing to direct at his own ideas.
The book is Lippmann's effort to play the devil's advocate.
to make “the strongest case which I know for the fundamentalist
in religion and in politics who is at war with the new scien-
tific spirit in education.“53
Lippmann puts the devil's case into the mouth of a

Fundamentalist who is neither illiterate nor unsophisticated.
In his argument with the Modernist over the Scopes trial. the

Fundamentalist quickly focuses not on the Biblical creation

 

51Lippmann. American Inquisitors (New York: The
Macmillan Co.. 1928). p. 90.

521bid.. p. 46.
53Ibid.. p. 80.

79

account but on the question whether there is an absolute
point of reference for morality. If the creation story can
be disbelieved. the moral teachings of the Bible can be
doubted as divinely imparted truth. This uncertainty. the
Fundamentalist points out. is the price not of established
truth but only of the uncertain and contingent knowledge
of science. Modernism. says the Fundamentalist.
undermines the respect of my children for the truth.
They learn a lot of half-baked theories about evolu-
tion in school. and then they come home disbelieving
the whole religion and morality of their fathers.
and recognizing no standard of conduct except their
own wilfulness.5“

The Modernist argues that. given an enlarged experience
and trained judgment. children can learn to make their own
moral decisions. guided by the “accumulated wisdom of the
race.“ This strikes the Fundamentalist as naive. because it
leaves too much up to an innate goodness that is at variance
with experience. Neatly turning the Modernist's scientific
tables on him. the Fundamentalist observes:

Your natural man is a natural barbarian. grasping.

selfish. lustful. murderous. Your psychoanalysts

will tell you that. The religious teachers knew

it long before the psychoanalysts rediscovered it.55
Morality is not the result of acceptance of a moral code but
of the transformation of the will. and the will can only be

transformed through the knowledge that one is part of a

 

5“Ibid.. p. 52.

SSIbidoe po 55.

 

80

“universe governed by a divine plan to which. if I wish to be
everlastingly happy. I must make my will conform.“ says the
Fundamentalist.56 This transformation of the will is simi-
lar to the disinterestedness of which Lippmann wrote as both
the fruit of the scientific habit of mind and of the high
religion. The Modernist and the Fundamentalist do not dispute
that both the religious and the scientific elite can attain
to some similar kind of transformation. Where they differ is
in the extent to which the mass of the people can participate
in that experience without the guarantee of some supernatural
sanction for their belief. All that scientific education
amounts'to. says the Fundamentalist. is that a slowly growing
minority learns to live the disinterested life. The rest
merely pick up “odds and ends of more or less obsolete infor-
mation“ which erodes religion while offering nothing of moral
value in its place.57 Meanwhile. the demands of modernism
for tolerance and open-mindedness further undermine the auth-
ority of the “ancient and established order of mankind.“
because religious authority is by its nature not subject to
the test of reason. It is all very well for a modernist to
call for a discussion of the issues without heat and without
rancor. But for the Fundamentalist.

an eternal plan of salvation is at stake. For you

there is nothing at stake but a few tentative opin-

ions none of which means anything to your happiness.
Your request that I should be tolerant and amiable

 

56Ibid.
57Ibid.. p. 62.

81
is. therefore. a suggestion that I submit the
foundation of my life to the destructive effects
of your skepticism. your indifference. and your
good nature. You ask me to smile and to commit
suicide . . . .53

As persuasively as he was able to state them. Lippmann
rejected the Fundamentalist's views in American Inqpisitors.
It is Socrates. with his eloquence about “what it means when
a man acquires the scientific spirit.“ who speaks for the
author. Nevertheless. it is remarkable that Lippmann was
able to confront some of the difficulties of his position
so squarely. Years later. in his last two books. Lippmann
would re-examine the questions of tradition and of moral
relativism and. while not forsaking science. would find him-
self more in sympathy with the Fundamentalist's point of
view.

Before that change began to take place. however. Lipp-
mann published two short books on domestic economics. ppp
Method pp Freedom and ppp ppy Imperative. The first is an
argument for Keynesian regulation of the economy. the second
an argument that the maintenance of a decent standard of
living for the public had become as fundamental a task of
government as the national defense. Neither book deals with
the impact of science on society. and science is mentioned
only briefly in each.

In 152 Method pp Freedom. Lippmann claims that the

“compensated economy“ -- his version of Keynesianism -- is

 

581bid.. pp. 65-66.

82

“a conception which is not spun out of abstract theory. It is
rather an induction from many experiments actually under-
taken.“59 And in ppp A ! Impprative. he rests his argument
that maintaining the living standard is a basic governmental
function.on the contention that both Herbert Hoover and
Franklin Roosevelt by their actions demonstrated that they
accepted it as such. The two administrations. thought to be
so different in their approaches to the Depression. actually
brought to it the same assumption. that it was the government's
job to restore prosperity. The comparison between the two
administrations “has been something like a controlled scien-

60 The two books illustrate once again

tific demonstration.“
Lippmann's characteristic impulse to appeal to the authority

of science to bolster his social views.

 

59Lippmann. The Method pp Freedom (New York: The
Macmillan Co.. 19337? p. 51.

60Lippmann. The New Imperative (New York: The
Macmillan Co.. 1935?. p. 10.

83
Chapter X

Toward Natural pp!

gpp,§ppp Society. first published in 1937. takes Lipp-
mann in a new direction. It is the first of his major books
of political theory that does not hold out science as the key
to the perplexities of the ago. To be sure, science still is
highly valued. both for what it can do and for what it can
offer as an intellectual and social ideal. The impulse that
drove Galileo to examine the heavens. Lippmann wrote. is the

1 Still. when

“movement which drives human life forward.“
Lippmann summarizes the solutions to the problems discussed
in the book. he writes not of science as the “discipline of
democracy“ or as “high religion incarnate.“ but instead of
the inviolability of the individual as perceived in natural.
self-evident law.

ppp Qppp Society begins by asking what sort of political
relationships are appropriate in an age of machine technology.
Spokesmen for the collectivist point of view say the new
technology required centralized. authoritarian control. either
to protect the workers from the dislocations of a technology-
driven economy or to fully realize the promise of such an

economy.2 Lippmann's characterization of the collectivist

vision is strikingly similar to one he himself could have

 

1Li pmann. The Good Society (Boston: Little. Brown 2
Co.. 1937 . p. 354.

2Ibid.. pp. 7-8.

84

urged in all seriousness 15 years earlier. when he was pro-
posing government by the “experts“ and the “insiders.“ The
collectivists' “ardent wish.“ he wrote in The Good Society.

makes plausible one of the most enchanting myths

which ever captured the human imagination. From

the marriage of knowledge with force a new god is

to be born. Out of the union of science with

government there is to issue a providential state.

possessed of all knowledge and of the power to

enforce it . . . . The prime ministers and their

parliaments. the dictators and their commissars.

are to follow the engineers. biologists. and

economists who will arrange the scheme of things.

The men who know are to direct human affairs and

the directors are to listen to those who know.3
But far from embracing such a vision. as he once did. Lipp-
mann had come to believe that the concentration of central-
ized power was the wrong arrangement for the modern world.
It was inappropriate to the machine technology. because it
was impractical and because it was at odds with the scientific
spirit.

He illustrated its impracticability on several counts.

The overall direction of an economy must be general and rela-
tively stable. But in a society of constant. rapid technical
change. the bureaucracy will not be able to keep up. The
official will not be able to issue orders as fast as the
inventors can invent.“ It does not matter to Lippmann
whether the bureaucracy is public or private. Corporate
capitalism. far from being a natural outgrowth of the machine

technology. actually may retard technological progress by

 

3Ibid.. p. 22.

”Ibid.. pp. 11-12.

85
creating cumbersome business organizations in which “the
objective criteria of the competitive market“ are destroyed
and in which technical change is “ruinously expensive.“5
In addition. collectivism is impractical because there
are limits on humans' abilities to govern. True. the modern
technology of communications makes it possible to cover more
ground. but there is just that much more ground to cover.
Those who govern remain human beings with limited faculties
of insight and foresight. Moreover. they still must deal in
partial and simplified views of existence. stereotypes that
Lippmann described as having “to reality some such relation
as a silhouette to a man.“6
Finally. collectivism is impractical because the social

sciences -- whose progress Lippmann had been enthusiastically
predicting since 1914 -- still had not progressed far enough.
The tools of social analysis necessary to plan a society
might be imagined by a mathematical logician. But in their
present state they are inadequate.

The time may come when the higher logic will have

been significantly developed to enable thinkers to

analyze the whole relevant social order. and from

this analysis to predict successfully the real and

not merely the apparent and immediate. effect of a

political intervention.

Not until then will it be possible to contem-
plate a planned society consciously directed.7

 

51bid.. p. 15.
6Ibid.. pp. 27. 31-32.
7Ibid.. p. 33.

86

The theme that the social sciences lagged the physical
sciences was a continuing one in Lippmann's thought. But in
previous books. progress in the social sciences was considered
a matter of course. In 1pp}§ppp Society. for the first time.
the relatively primitive state of the social sciences is
advanced as a reason app to attempt the conscious control
and direction of society.

This less hopeful view of social science did not mean.
however. that Lippmann had stopped considering science to be
a strong social force or a worthy intellectual ideal. Indeed.
collectivism is wrong not just because it is impractical. but
because it is antithetical to the spirit of science.

Taking issue with what he said was the collectivist
view that concentration of control is a natural outgrowth of
the machine technology. Lippmann argued instead that the
growth of corporate capitalism stems from those laws which
allow limited liability corporations to be formed. Without
the corporate form of economic organization. the modern
industrial system could not exist. Thus big business has no
organic link with science and technology. and its attendant
evils instead result “from the mistakes of the lawmakers.“8

The socialist and communist versions of centralized
control are no more scientifically based than their capitalist
alter ego. The hypothesis of doctrinaire communism was that

a new technology caused capitalism to evolve out of feudalism.

 

81b16.. PD. 13, 15.

87

and a new technology would bring about the evolution of
socialism as well. But technological change will not halt
with the coming of socialism. despite the Marxian assumption
that “after socialism the new technologies will not call into
being a new class whose interests conflict with the interests
of those who still live by the more antiquated technology.“9

There is a more basic sense as well in which collecti-
vism is anti-scientific. Because it depends on authoritarian
control. it chokes off scientific inquiry. The intensifi-
cation of government Lippmann saw around him in the 1930s
“is arresting the very advance in science which is the reason
given for the magnified officialdom.“ Thus those collecti-
vists who argue for an increase in authority to realize the
promise of science “find themselves facing the awkward fact
that science is being crushed in order to increase the autho-

”10

rity of the state. The 20th century's threats to science

are of the same kind faced in the 16th century by Galileo.

When the Inquisitors summoned Galileo before them.
they told him he must not find that the earth
revolves around the sun. Galileo had been observing
the heavens through a telescope: He had become
convinced that the evidence warranted his conclusion.
But the Inquisitors did not look through the tele-
scope. They knew all about astronomy from reading
the Bible. So against Galileo's telescope the
Inquisitors employed another instrument: the rack . . . .

.TBut the rack is not an instrument for exploring
the heavens. A concentration camp is not a political
seminar.11

 

91bid.. p. 69.
°Ibid.. p. 19.
1Ibid.. p. 353.

1
1

 

88

The political ideal that Lippmann apposed to collecti-
vism is one he calls liberalism. He identified it with Adam
Smith. The basic economic fact of modern times is the divi-
sion of labor in widening markets. and the differences between
liberalism and collectivism lie in the answers they provide to
the human and technical questions raised by that fact. Ab-
stractly. the question is how to determine the allocation of
capital and labor. but in human terms. it is where savings
shall be invested. at what jobs people shall work and what
goods they shall consume. The collectivists say those ques-
tions must be answered by central planners backed by the
coercive power of the state. The first principle of liberal-
ism. however. is that the market is the essence of an economy
based on the division of labor: therefore the market “must be

12 Adam Smith's discovery of that principle. Lipp-

preserved.“
mann asserted. was a “genuine and a momentous scientific
generalization which cannot be obsolete until some radically
new mode of production comes into being.“ The fundamental
difference between Marx and Smith. between collectivism and
liberalism. “is not in their social sympathies. nor in their
attachment to or rebellion against the existing social order.
but in their science.“13

But if Adam Smith had correctly understood the modern

economy. why. a hundred years after The Wealth pp Nations.

 

12Ibid.. p. 174.

13Ibid.. p. 180.

89
was liberalism in decay? Why had it ceased to guide progres-
sives who wanted to improve the social order? Why had it
become “a collection of querulous shibboleths invoked by
property owners when they resisted encroachments On their

14 Because. Lippmann believed. it had be-

vested interests“?
come sidetracked by a false notion. the laissez faire concep-
tion that there was a realm in which the exchange economy
operated totally autonomously from the legal jurisdiction
of the state. Consistently with his view that the market
was a “scientific generalization.“ Lippmann compared the pre-
occupation of liberals with laissez faire to “the persistent
effort of astronomers to explain the motions of the solar
system by treating the earth as the fixed centre of it.“ The
progress of astronomical science was arrested until helio-
centricity cleared the way.15
Similarly sidetracked by laissez faire. liberalism
became an apologist for unrectified social abuses. It lost
standing among scholars. who abandoned it to the vested
interests and attacked the interests with learning based on
socialist premises. Liberalism simply had ceased to command
intellectual or moral respect.16 Meanwhile. liberals had

fallen into another error. that of assuming that their econo-

mic science was a full expression of the natural laws under

 

1”Ibid.. p. 183.

15Ibid.. p. 191.

16Ibid.. p. 184.

90
which the economy of divided labor operates. They were drawing
“tremendous practical conclusions from the first phase of an
incompleted scientific inquiry.“17
Lippmann rescued liberalism from this strait with a

remarkable argument. The subtler classical economists were
aware that there were “disturbances“ in the real world which
they had left out of their economic models. They assumed. for
example. that all labor and capital were mobile and that labor
and capital knew where to move. They assumed. in short. that
there was “only perfect and fair competition among equally
intelligent. equally informed. equally placed and universally

18

adaptable men.“ In fact. the world worked otherwise. But

these failures of correspondence between theory and reality
were not an indication of weak theory so much as of unrecon-
structed reality. Economists had presented not a picture of

the world as it is but of “the world as it needs to be remade.“

Had the economists

realized this implication of their own hypothesis.
they would have embarked at once upon the task of
exploring the legal. psychological. and social
circumstances which obstructed and perverted the
actual society.

They did not do this. The liberal economists
from Ricardo until recent times were obsessed by
the deadly confusion that their imaginary world
was not a critical introduction to research and
reform but the delineation of an order to which the
real world conformed approximately and sufficiently.
This error sterilized the scientific advance of

 

171bid.. p. 195.

181bid.. pp. 198-199.

 

91
liberal thought. paralyzed the practical energies
of liberal statesmen. and destroyed the prestige
of liberalism.19
Properly understood. in other words. classical econo-
mics was not a descriptive science but a normative science
like ethics. whose lack of correspondence with reality

20 The question

located the points where reform was needed.
Lippmann did not address is why socialism. which also has its
disjunctures with reality. shouldn't be considered just as
much a “normative science“ as classical liberalism.

Lippmann believed that. now that its preoccupation
with laissez faire was removed. classical economics could be
articulated and confirmed by research. In its relation to
the industrial revolution. Lippmann compared it to the early
chemical theories of Davy and Faraday and to the early in-
sights into experimental science of Roger Bacon and William
Ockham.21 Like his own concept of disinterestedness in
relation to psychology and education. he believed classical
economics to be one of those great insights waiting to be
established more firmly as a science.

The areas of reform to which the normative science of
classical economics points are the maladjustments of people

to the way they earn a living. These maladjustments include

handicaps. “the deterioration of the stock from which they

 

19Ibid.. pp. 201-202.

2°Ibid.. p. 208.

21Ibid.. pp. 239. 343.

 

92

spring.“ disease. malnutrition. neglect. a vicious family
life. poverty. squalor and inadequate education. “The econo-
my of the division of labor requires. and the classical eco-
nomics assumes. a population in which these eugenic and edu-
cational problems are effectively dealt with.“22 And the
money to deal with them is to come out of the increase in
overall wealth brought about by technical improvement. Quit
of the mistaken idea that trade operates in a realm free of
the legal jurisdiction of the state. society can divert part
of its wealth “to insure and indemnify against its own pro-
gressive development.“23

If technological improvement increases wealth --

and of course it does -- then some part of the

increased wea th can be used to relieve the victims

of progress.2
Such social insurance not only relieves human suffering. how-
ever. it also facilitates further technological change by
reducing the resistance from those who might otherwise see
themselves as the victims of progress.25 And in a more basic
sense. it can bring about the general improvement in the intel-
ligence of the populace that Lippmann believed was necessary
in the modern economy. To live in a world in which jobs are

both increasingly specialized and increasingly interdependent.

he wrote. “requires a continual increase of adaptability.

 

22Ibid.. pp. 212-213.

23Ibid.. p. 224.

24 .
Ib1d.. pp. 223-224.

251bid.. p. 224.

93
intelligence. and of enlightened understanding of the recipro-
cal rights and duties. benefits and opportunities of such a

26 It is an argument similar to that of A Preface

way of life.“
pp Morals. where Lippmann held that the machine technology
“requires a population which in some measure partakes of the
spirit which created it.“27
The governmental obligations of liberalism will be to
bring about the “eugenic and educational“ improvement of the
people: to guarantee the “technological honesty“ of products
-- the modern equivalent of guaranteeing the honesty of weights
and measures -- and to protect the public from being victim-
ized by the rapid changes of a technologically driven .
economy.28 Its political principles are that there is a
fundamental distinction between people and the state: that the
“gross and formless power of the people“ must be refined through
political institutions: and that the function of the state is
not to administer affairs but to administer justice between
people who conduct their own affairs.29 This definition.
Lippmann wrote in a phrase reminiscent of ppp Method pp Freedom.
was not an abstraction he invented because it pleased him. but
rather “a deduction from historic experience.“ Characteristi-

cally. he had tried to attribute to it something of scientific
standing. although in doing so he had confused deductive with

 

26Ibid.. p. 212.

27Lippmann. A Preface pp Morals. p. 240.
28Lippmann. The Good Society. pp. 212. 221. 224.
29Ibid.. pp. 250. 267.

94
inductive processes.

Like the collectivist vision he attacks. Lippmann
proposes a government that works on the basis of information
supplied by experts. whose role remains crucial. Such tasks
as managing the currency and regulating public markets are
not simple. They require experts using specialized techni-
cal procedures. But in Lippmann's scheme. the more power is
delegated to the experts. the more it is necessary for the
courts and the legislature to perform a watchdog function
over the experts.30 What is needed to settle disputes
arising out of the activities of the experts. however. is more
like legal than scientific or technical knowledge.

For in an administered order the officials must have
all the wisdom of all the technicians and entrepre-
neurs and the greater wisdom needed to select and
forecast the consequences of adopting a particular
plan. A state which leaves these decisions to the
citizenry and judges rights and duties according to
general rules. improving the rules as equity requires.
needs officials whose chief intellectual equipment

is a sense of the value of evidence.31

Thus in Lippmann's liberal government. technical exper-
tise is to be held accountable to the law. not for its facts
but for the proper performance of its fact-finding mission.
This new relationship in the structure of Lippmann's ideal
of government mirrors a new relationship in his overall poli-

tical thought: Law has become the central concept. The ideal

of equal. certain law as opposed to arbitrary authority is a

 

3°Ib18.. pp. 301-302.
311bid.. p. 297.

95

necessary outgrowth of the industrial revolution and is the
“political corollary of the division of labor.“ People who
live by exchanging specialized products and services in ever
widening markets need a society in which the ideal of law
holds sway. Only in such a society is there a counterbalance
against coercive overhead planning. arbitrary exercise of
authority by government. and arbitrary behavior by distant f
trading partners. It is no accident. he wrote. that the '

division of labor. common laws. the ideal of justice. the

 

restraint of privilege. the idea of international law and

peace should all have grown up together in the West. They I i

are all different facets of the "same momentous change in

which men have been passing out of their primitive self-

sufficiency into the intricate interdependence of the Great

Society.“32
At the heart of that momentous change. Lippmann had

come to believe. was a natural. self-evident. higher law to

which material force and authority could be held accountable. ’

Not merely as ideal. the higher law actually existed in “the

nature of things.“ as principles to which arbitrary human

authority could be held accountable.33 The highest of those

principles is the inviolability of the individual. “the recog-

nition that all men are persons. and are not to be treated as

things.“3u That principle is Lippmann's answer to the moral

 

32Ibid.. p. 325.

331bid.. p. 334.

3"Ibid.. p. 376.

96

relativity of a scientific and technical age. Comparing
modern humans to travelers lost in a forest at night. he
wrote:

To explore minutely. however conscientiously and

scientifically. the thicket in which some of the

travelers are lost will not show them the high-

road once more. They must find again the polestar

which men have followed in their ascent from

barbarism towards the Good Society. Where shall

they find it but in a profound and universal

intuition of the human destiny which. to all who

have it. is invincible because it is self evident?35
The Public Philosophy

The Good Society is the book of a man whose mind was
changing even as he wrote. Science and expertise have been
subordinated to the law. but science still provides much of
the imagery and emotional authority for the argument. Soc-
ialism was attacked. for example. not only because it was
impractical but because it was unscientific. Throughout.
Lippmann's effort is to find a political theory that would
conform to the requirements of a scientific and technological
society. The hero of The Good Society is Galileo. In The
Public Philosophy all that was changed.
The theme of the book is that the West is in decline

because political power has passed from the executive to the
public. Unable to wield it effectively. the public has in

turn ceded power to the pressure groups. the political bosses

and the media magnates. The result is an enfeeblement of the

 

351bid.. pp. 371-372.

97
power to govern.36
In matters of war and peace. the public is usually
wrong because it usually vetoes change precisely at the time
change is needed. It does this because public opinion. which
is inadequately informed. is slow to catch up to reality. At

the same time. political leaders in modern democracies are
unable to lead because they are in electoral servitude to
public opinion.37

In short. the powers of government in modern democra-
cies are deranged. and the only thing that can save them is
a return to the principle that elected executives owe their
allegiance not to the voters but to the office.38 Democra-
cies must either restore the ability of the government to
govern or they will fail and be replaced by some form of
totalitarianism.39

Modern democracy is in such dire straits because it
followed the worse of two roads. In healthy liberalism.
change is evolutionary and comes about by assimilation of
dissenting elements into the power structure. In unhealthy
liberalism. which Lippmann called Jacobinism. change takes
place by the overthrow of the inflexible and caste-bound

governing class. “Of the two rival philosophies. the Jacobin

 

36Lippmann. Essa s pp_the Public Philosophy (New York:
Mentor Books. 1955 , pp. 13-20.

371bid.. pp. 21-29.
38Ibid.. pp. 45-46.
391bid.. pp. 52-53.

 

98

is almost everywhere in the ascendant.“ Lippmann believed.“o
Seeing revolution itself as the definitive creative act.
Jacobinism offers no plan for governing society after the
revolution. undermined by Jacobinism. the educational systems
in modern democracies no longer transmit the traditional
moral values of a civilized society.“1

To Jacobinism. Lippmann opposed the idea of natural
law. which he identified as the public philosophy of the 17th
and 18th centuries. In essence. it was the doctrine that
there is a transcendant natural law over all of society. in-

42

eluding sovereign and people. The doctrine fell out of

fashion. and the most important question facing the West is
whether it can be revived.“3 The answer is important because
the loss of a common belief in natural law leaves men anxiety-
ridden. alienated and vulnerable to the authoritarian security
of totalitarian governments.

With Gide they are finding that the burden of freedom
is too great an anxiety. The older structures of
society are dissolving and they must make their way
through a time of troubles. They have been taught

to expect a steady progress toward a higher standard
of life. and they have not been prepared to withstand
the frustrations of a prolonged crisis in the outer
world and the loneliness of their self-centered
isolation.

 

uoIbid.. pp. 54-58.

“11bid.. pp. 58-65.
“21bid.. pp. 76-78.
“31bid.. pp. 78-81.

 

99
They are the men who rise up against freedom.
unable to cope with its insoluble difficulties and
unable to endure the denial of communion in public
2221§°22§3 fiifitfli'reii‘fij$31°J§¥2°$§£2§Y35 t°
Lippmann's answer is that the public philosophy can
indeed be revived. but only if there is a return to respect
for its basic principles: that there are laws above all:
that these laws can be developed and refined by rational
discussion: and that “the highest laws are those upon which
all rational men of good will. when fully informed. will tend
to agree.“u5
In American Inpuisitors. the Fundamentalist distrusted
the nature of man -- that is to say. distrusted the ability
of most people to find their way in a world of relative moral
value. In ppp Public Philosophy. Lippmann came to agree with
his Fundamentalist. The life of the spirit. in which desire
is disciplined to what is possible. is finally conceded to be
only for the elite. For the rest. detailed rules of conduct
based on the principles of natural law are required.“6 More-
over. the elitist role model of the book is not the scientist
Galileo but the philosopher Socrates. who denies his natural.
human instinct of self-preservation to affirm a higher value.
The point of the story is that Socrates would not
save himself because an Athenian citizen could not

cheat the law. least of all for his own personal
advantage. If Athens was to be governed. it must

 

““Ibid.. p. 86.

“51bid.. p. 123.

“51bid.. pp. 110-115.

100

be by citizens who by their second natures pre-

ferred the laws to the satisfaction of their own

impulses. even to their own will to live. Unless

the citizens would govern themselves with such

authority. the Athenian city would be ungovernable.

If they followed their first natufies. Athens would

be trampled down in the stampede. 7

In its treatment of science. The Public Philosophy

abandoned or reversed practices that Lippmann had followed
for years -- in some‘cases throughout his career. It is
his first book. for example. in which the general attitude
toward science is not positive. Science is mentioned as one
of the aspects of the West to which “less advanced“ people
looked up. but it is mentioned in the context of the West's

“8 Whatever science did for Western

decline since 1917.
society. it was not able to prevent or repair the derangement
of the powers of government that threatened the survival of
democracies. In fact. far from being able to prevent the
decline. science contributed to it. The positivism of the
democratic public -- “the growing incapacity of a large
majority of the democratic peoples to believe in intangible
realities“ -- stripped government of its imponderable autho-
rity and helped weaken the power of the executive.“9 And
since the natural law itself is not a scientific but a legal.

moral and philosophical law. that same positivism continues

to stand in the way of its renewal.

 

"71bid.. p. 107.

uaIbid.. p. 13.

“91bid.. p. 49.

 

101
We cannot start again as if there had been no advance
of science. no spread of rationalism and secularism.
no industrial revalution. no dissolution of the old
habitual order of things. no sudden increase in popu-
lation. . . . Since the public philosophy preceded
the advance of modern science and the industrial
revolution. how can it be expected to provide a posi-
tive doctrine which is directly and practically rele-
vant to the age we live in?50

In earlier books. Lippmann might have replied that if
the doctrine were not suited to the age. the age could do
without the doctrine. In The Public Philospphy. for the first
time. the burden of proof is on science and modernism. not on
the traditional wisdom.

Along with a generally positive attitude toward science.
more specific aspects of Lippmann's relationship with science
also were abandoned.

There is only the slightest use of scientific imagery
and vocabulary. The decline of governmental power in the
West toward factionalism and loss of liberty is “a tendency to,
be drawn downward as by the force of gravity.“51 But the
allusion is literary rather than an attempt to invoke the
emotional authority of science in behalf of the statement.
Lippmann comes closest to doing that sort of thing when he
compares the proper relationship between the governor and the
governed to the relationship between the sexes. The execu-

tive's power to act and the representative's power to consent

or refuse are “rooted in the nature of things.“ Lippmann

 

5°Ibid.. p. 80.
51Ibid.. p. 42.

102

wrote. like the duality of function of the two sexes. If the
function of one is “devitalized or is confused with the func-
tion of the other sex. the result is sterility and disorder.“
But even in this mild example. Lippmann warned the reader that
he was risking “reasoning by analogy.“52

Likewise there are no citations of research to buttress
his arguments and no suggestion that his ideas might be fruit-
ful for scientific research. Indeed. Lippmann offers his main
contention -- the possibility of renewing natural law as an
overarching social ideal -- not out of “theoretical education.
but rather from the practical experience of seeing how hard
it is for our generation to make democracy work.“53 Lippmann
was no longer striving to associate his ideas with science.

Also relinquished was the idea that science will trans-
form the general public so that its members will attain the
disinterestedness that will enable them to live morally in a
relativistic world. Those who live by the spirit alone “have
always been a mere handful.“ Lippmann wrote. but this time
he did not speculate that the situation might change.5u

For all of that. Lippmann's position hardly could be

characterized as anti-science. He still recognized science as

worthy of protection from tampering or influence by the voters

 

521bid.. p. 31.

53Ibid.. p. 79.

5“Ibid.. p. 115.

103

or the governments5 But he had come to believe that the
objective world included more than the facts and relationships
science could reach. Those facts and relationships that were
accessible to science had no moral component. so human beings
for whom science was the only sure way of knowing reality
would be adrift in a morally relativistic world. The objec-
tive world. however. also includes the self-evident and
therefore commonly accessible concept of the natural law.

It was not someone's fancy. someone's prejudice.

someone's wish or rationalization. a psychological

experience and no more. It is there objectively,
not subjectively. It can be discovered. It has

to be obeyed.56

 

551bid.. pp. 46. 76.
56Ibid.. p. 133.

104

Chapter 1;

Conclusion

Science was an enormously influential element in Walter
Lippmann's social thought over four decades. Throughout most
of his career as a writer of books. science was a touchstone.
an absolute in reference against which he justified his other
ideas. It furnished him with vocabulary and imagery for the
analysis of society. and with intellectual and personal ideals
toward which he strove and urged others to strive. In addi-
tion. it was a key element in terms of which he analyzed the
society in which he lived. He found in it both the solvent
of the old formalism and the hope for a new order. Yet late
in his career he turned from these patterns of thought. After
a lifetime of attempting to construct a social philosophy that
would itself be “scientific“ and in which science would re-
solve the difficulties science had helped to create. Lippmann
turned aside from science and toward tradition and law. An
overview of the meaning and role of science in Lippmann's
thought may suggest why.

Science's importance as a strong. emotional absolute is
evident in all of Lippmann's books except the last. In A
Preface pp Politics. it was the standard against which he
found Bryan wanting and Wilson adequate. In Qpppp ppp ppp-
pppy. it was Roosevelt who measured up to the scientific
standard while Wilson's party did not. In Public Opinion. A
Preface pp Morals and The Good Society. socialism was attacked

as anti-scientific. as was 19th century laissez faire

 

105
capitalism in A Preface pp Morals. In pppDQppp Society. the
classical economics of Adam Smith was justified. at least in
part. because it was better science than Marxism. Only in
‘ppp Public Philosophy did science lose its absolute value for
Lippmann as a touchstone against which ideas were to be
measured.

The emotional appeal of science for Lippmann is also
evidenced in his efforts to associate himself with it. In
the early books. this effort takes the form of his borrowing
of scientific imagery and vocabulary to explain and justify
his own social ideals: For example. his use in A Preface pp
Politics of Freudian ideas of taboo and repression to justify
a concept of the state as provider of services rather than as
policeman.

But in Public Opinion the pattern changed. and Lippmann
cited specific scientific research to buttress portions of his
analysis of the process of communication. In this instance.)
he was not borrowing general concepts to apply to social prob-
lems. as before: instead. he was using specific research
findings to help support a theoretical structure that he him-
self had developed. The research citations lend little to
the credibility of the work. which continues to be discussed
not because of its scientific underpinnings but because of its
usefulness as insight. Nevertheless. pppAAp Opinion was Lipp-
mann's most concentrated effort to associate his work with

science by building on a foundation of scientific research.

106

After Public Opinion. the pattern changed again. Lipp-
mann began in ppp Phantom Public to suggest that his ideas --
the tests for public involvement in public issues. disinterest-
edness. liberalism -- might be fertile ground for scientific
research. It was his hope for a time that political science.
psychology and economics could show the same sort of progress
that the physical sciences had demonstrated. and he wanted his
own ideas on the role of the public. on morality and on econo-
mics to be taken up as insights and placed on a scientific
footing through research. But in ppp Public Philosophy he
gave up that hope as well.

Science offered Lippmann professional values with which
he tried to associate himself: he also urged those values on
others. including businessmen in A Preface pp Pplitics and
journalists in Liberty ppp ppp Egyp. The question for Lipp-
mann was not whether the professional values of scientists
were appropriate ideals for others. but the extent to which
others were able to adopt those ideals. That question was a
crucial one in Lippmann's analysis of society.

Throughout most of his career. Lippmann saw science in
a dual role. It was both the solvent of the old order and
the hope for a new order: it offered both freedom from the old
restraints and discipline that would prevent that freedom from
decaying into chaos. But can a solvent also be the basis for
a new social order? In Lippmann's books that question resolved
itself into two component questions: 1) Can the mental habits

of science be diffused throughout a democratic society so as

107

to inform the political decisions of the people? and 2) can
science offer moral guidance?

The ability of the public to acquire the mental habits
of science was a constant and troubling question for Lippmann.
Even in his early books. in which science was defined as not
much more than trial and error or cultivated reflection. he
was concerned that its dry. technical surface would obscure
from the general public the “luminous passions“ beneath.
Beginning with Public Opinion. however. Lippmann wrote with
more awareness that science was a highly specialized. techni-
cal endeavor. He began to make references to his own lack of
specialized scientific training at about the same time that
his political thought began to posit a wide gulf between
science and the public. He attempted to maintain in A Preface
pp Morals that the scientific spirit of the times would build
a bridge across that gulf. But by the time of ppp Qppp
Society. he had decided that it was more necessary to spread
an understanding of mutual rights and obligations throughout
the body politic. In ppp Public Philosophy. Lippmann speci-
fically abandoned hope that the public at large would become
“disinterested.“ his term for both the scientific habit of
mind and the height of religious insight. Instead. he wrote.
the mass of people will continue to need the detailed regula-
tion that only a society of law and tradition can provide.

The second crucial question for Lippmann was whether
modern society could find a basis for morality in science. It

was a question that occupied him relatively late. In The

108.
Phantom Public. he argued that moral values were not useful --
that the questions confronting society needed facts to resolve
them. not values. In American Inquisitors. the difficulties
of moral relativism are stated forcefully -- but by the
“devil's advocate.“ the Fundamentalist. In A Preface pp
Morals. as in Qpppp.ppp Mastery. Science is characterized as
having undermined the old moral order. but the sense of loss
is far greater in the later book than in the earlier. And
in the scientific and religious ideal of disinterestedness.
Lippmann also creates a moral ideal. and even suggests that
advances in psychology may eventually create a morality based
on tested truths. But in ppp_gppp Society. the faith in
progress of the social sciences fades. and in ppp Public
Philosophy. Lippmann turned to the moral absolutes of the
natural law. which are accessible not through science but
because they are self-evident to reasonable people.

Lippmann's lifelong effort to construct a social philo-
sophy with science at the center failed. then because of his
inability to resolve two related problems.

One was the problem of the gulf between science and the
lay public. At one extreme in his effort to find a way out
of the dilemma. he restricted the role of the public in a
democracy to little more than that of a referee. At the other
extreme. he argued that the spirit of the age would force the
public to adopt the scientific frame of mind. Part of his
difficulty in resolving this problem may have been in the
ambiguity of his own position. Despite his efforts to

109
associate his work with science. he was not a scientist and
knew he was not. At the same time. he was unwilling to
restrict himself to the limited role of an outsider unable
to deal with the merits of the issues. about which he wrote
virtually daily as editorialist and columnist.

The second problem was that of moral relativity in a
scientific age. Could moral behavior find a basis in science?
Again Lippmann moved between extremes. At one. he argued that
moral education was useless. and that given the facts. people
would make the right choices. As something of the Fundamen-
talist's realism about human nature took hold. Lippmann tried
to argue that science itself created the conditions in which
the mass of people would attain to the moral stance of
disinterestedness.

In the end. he skirted both problems by asserting that
all reasonable people could reach the objective and moral
truth that was self-evident “in the nature of things.“ He
never turned against science in the sense of opposing it.

Its values of disinterestedness in observation of an objective
reality and of humility in stating conclusions were just as
important to ppp Public Philosophy as they were to A Preface
pp Politics. That is perhaps why he could recommend science
as the model for journalists in his 70th year as in his 30th..
But over the years he had given up the belief that ppAy
science was the custodian of those values. and that science

alone could solve the dilemmas of modern times.

110
Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources
Walter Lippmann's Books of Political Theory:
A Preface pp Politics. New York: Mitchell Kennerly. 1913:
new ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1962.
Drift and Mastery: Ap Attempt pp Diagpose ppp Current

 

Unrest. New York: Mitchell Kennerly. 1914: new ed.
with an introduction by William E. Leuchtenberg.
Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Liberty App ppp Appp. New York: Harcourt. Brace and Howe.
1920.
Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt. Brace & Co.. 1922.
ppp Phantom Public. New York: Harcourt. Brace & Co.. 1925.
Ameppcan Inquisitors: A Commentary pp Dayton ppp Chicago.
New York: The Macmillan Co.. 1928.
A Preface pp Morals. New York: The Macmillan Co.. 1929.
ppp Method pp Freedom. New York: The Macmillan Co.. 1934.
ppp New Ipperative. New York: The Macmillan Co.. 1935.
ppp Qppp Society. Boston: Little. Brown & Co.. 1943.
Essays pp ppp Public Philosophy. New York: Mentor Books.

1955.

Secondary Sources
Daniels. George H. American Science Ap_ppp_Agp pp Jackson.
New York: Columbia University Press. 1968.
Daniels. George H. “The Pure-Science Ideal and Democratic

Culture.“ Science 156. June 30. 1967. pp. 1699-1705.

111

Boorstin. Daniel J. ppp Americans: The Democratic Experience.
New York. Random House. 1973.

Bourke. Paul F. “The Social Critics and the End of American
Innocence: 1907-1921.“ Journal pp American Studies.
vol. 3 no. 1. 1969. PP. 57-72.

Childs. Marquis. and Reston. James. eds. pppppp Lippmann and
flip 2122p. New York: Harcourt. Brace & Co.. 1959.

Faulkner. Harold U. ppprgpppp ppp Social Justice. 1898-1914.
New York: The Macmillan Co.. 1931.

Forcey. Charles. ppp Crossroads pp Liberalism: Qpppy.pppyp.
Lippmann. App ppp Progressive Erpyp900-1925. New
York: Oxford University Press. 1961.

Hofstadter. Richard C. ppp American Political Tradition
ppp ppp Mpg flpp,Mpgp pp. New York: Alfred A Knopf.

Hollinger. David A. “Science and Anarchy: Walter Lippmann's
Drift and Mastery,“ American Quarterly 29. no. 5 (1977).
pp. 463-475.

Kaplan. Sidney. “Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of

 

World War I on Some American Liberals.“ Journal pp ppp
History pp ppppp 17 (June 1956). pp. 347-369.
Kinseley. Michael. “Walter Lippmann and the American
Sycophancy.“ Washingpon Monthly 13. no. 1 (1981).
pp. 42-46.
Kuhn. Thomas S. The Structure pp Scientific Revolutions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1962.
Link. Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era.

1910-1917. New York: Harper & Row. 1954.

112

Lippmann. Walter. "The Job of the Washington Correspondent.”
Atlantic. January 1960. pp. 46-49.

Lippmann. Walter. “Two Revolutions in the American Press.“
pppp Review 20. March 1931. pp. 433-441.

Luskin. John. Lippmann. Liberty. and the Press. University.
Ala.: University of Alabama Press. 1972.

May. Henry F. ppp Egg pp American Innocence. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. 1959.

May. Henry F. “The Rebellion of the Intellectuals. 1912-
1917.“ American Quarterly 8. no. 2 (1956). pp. 114-126.

Mott. Frank L. American Journalism: A History: 1690-1960.
New York: The Macmillan Co.. 3d ed.. 1962. '

Noble. David W. “The New Republic and the Ideal of Progress.
1914-1920.“ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 38
(1951). pp. 387-402.

Pastore. Nicholas. “The Army Intelligence Tests and Walter

’Lippmann.“ Journal pp the Histopy pp ppp Behavioral
Sciences 14 (1978). pp. 316-327.

Rosenberg. Charles E. pp Qpppp Qppp: 9p Science App
American Social Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
university Press. 1976.

Rubenstein. Annette T. “Disinterestedness as Ideal and
Technique.“ Journal pp Philosophy 28 (1931). pp. 461-
466.

Safianow. Allen Irving. “Walter Lippmann: The Quest for
Disinterestedness.” Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell

University. 1973.

113

Schapsmeier. Edward L. and Frederick H. Walter Lippmann:
Philosopher-Journalist. Washington: Public Affairs
Press. 1969.

Schiller. Daniel T. “An Exploration of the Origins of
Objectivity in American News Reporting.“ Ph.D.
dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. 1978.

Schiller. Daniel T. ijpctivity and ppp Appp: ppp Public
and the Rise of Commercial Journalism. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press. 1981.

Schudson. Michael S. Discovering the News: A Social History
pp American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. 1978.

Schudson. Micheal S. ”Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity
in the Professions: Studies in the History of Ameri-
can Journalism and American Law. 1830-1940.“ Ph.D.
dissertation. Harvard University. 1976.

Shapiro. Herbert. "Steffens. Lippmann. and Reed: The
Muckraker and His Proteges.“ Pacific Northwest Quar-
pppAy_62. no. 4 (1971). pp. 142-150.

Spitz, David. Patterns pp Anti-Democratic Thought. New
York: The Macmillan Co.. 1949.

Steel. Ronald. Walter Lippmann and ppp American Century.
Boston: Little. Brown & Co.. 1980.

Steffens. Lincoln. Autobiography. New York: Harcourt.
Brace & World. 1931.

Weingast. David E. Walter Lippmann: A §pppy pp Personal
Journalism. With an introduction by Harold L. Ickes.
Rutgers. N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1949: new

ed. Westport. Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1970.

114

Wellborn. Charles. Twentieth Centupy Pilgrimage: Walter
Lippmann and the Public Philosgphy. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press. 1969.

White. Morton G. Science and Sentiment pp America: gpppp-
sophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards pp John Dewey.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1972.

White. Morton G. Social Thought pp America: ppp Revolt
Against Formalism. Boston: Beacon Press. 1957.

Wiebe. Robert H. ppp Search ppp Order. 1871-1920. New
York: Hill & Wang. 1967.

Wright. Benjamin F. [Epyp Public Philosoppies pp Walter
Lippman . Austin. Tex.: university of Texas Press.
1973.

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