Walter Lippman 1889-1974

Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch

This article shows how in The Good Society Walter Lippmann argues that the very idea of a liberalism worth having is a spiritual project: it involves a spiritual transformation over extended historical time even if the true destination is unknown or uncertain. Along the way, I argue that Lippmann is also acutely aware of the dangers of theorizing that merely affirms an imperfect (or worse) status quo. He is, thus, attractive for those who wish to revive liberalism. In addition, Lippmann’s sensitivity to the role of power and technological change generates a potentially important philosophy of law. This article sketches his understanding of a liberalism that embraces a “spirit of adaptation” without too much deference to a status quo. The second part shows that despite his sensitivity to the risks of demagogues in politics, Lippmann did not turn away from democratic politics. In particular, he has an attractive conception of the vital nature of a pluralist politics inherent to libera...

Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, 2019

While the re-foundation of liberalism is generally attributed to the Colloque Walter Lippmann, it should be recalled that the supporters of this renewed liberalism intended to stand together in the face of the advance of planism, the problem of industrial concentration, and the rise of the limited liability company. This paper focuses on the groups known today under the captions of French neoliberalism and German ordoliberalism who, at the Colloque and in the following decades, sought to bring together ideas and people with the objective of defining the foundations of a liberal society and state interventions compatible with the market.

Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, 2019

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2017

Over twenty biographies and collections of commentaries have been written about Walter Lippmann, and more than a hundred essays in periodicals. Anthologies of his work have never gone out of print. It is no hyperbole to claim that Lippmann has a unique standing in the annals of American culture. He was a Pulitzer-winning journalistphilosopher of unrivaled clarity, depth, and infl uence, who held the reading affection of millions, and consorted with heads of state and the grandees of the arts and sciences. Despite such eminence and deserved attention, Craufurd Goodwin has authored the fi rst study of the economic ideas of Lippmann. Between 1931 and 1946, Lippmann wrote an average of 100 columns a year on economic subjects. Goodwin establishes by analysis, and by frequent and long quotations from the original text, that these writings were as sophisticated as they were numerous. Scholarship about Lippmann has traveled along two mainstreams. Goodwin rejects both. My review addresses this book's original contributions by showing how Goodwin's objections spell out a rich account of Lippmann's vision for public economic knowledge. In 1978 Michel Foucault observed that Lippmann's 1937 book, The Good Society , had been a prompt for a re-evaluation of liberal democracy. Since then Lippmann has been written into histories of neoliberalism. In chapter eight of his book, Goodwin records Lippmann's mid-1930s anxiety over an existential struggle between West and East that impelled him to write The Good Society and to argue for a twentieth-century reinvention of liberalism. And yet, as early as twenty years ago, Goodwin had a counter plot to offer (Goodwin 1995 ). According to him, Lippmann was fi rst and foremost a Keynesian. Lippmann and John Maynard Keynes were close friends, who often visited each other and took every opportunity to praise their companion's intellect and judgment. The two men shared the conviction that the Peace of Versailles was at the root of much of the tragedies of the interwar period. By studying Lippmann's "Today and Tomorrow" columns at the Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, Goodwin uncovers Keynes's conceptions of the business cycle and of fi scal and monetary policy. The survey of the columns is the main contribution of Goodwin's book. The survey is innocent of methodology and is driven by the author's determination in reading and reporting Lippmann's words. While most scholarship on Lippmann is focused on his bibliography, Goodwin skims the books but pauses to read the journalism carefully. Chapter four reviews Lippmann's columns on the Great Depression from 1931 to 1933. Lippmann is seen to favor gradual defl ation, fi scal conservatism, and the preservation of the gold standard. The following chapter describes his Keynesian conversion. Lippmann traveled in 1933 to London for the World Economic Conference and became

ORDO, 2019

This book fills a gap. Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier provide a fine translation of the transcript of the discussions that took place in the summer of 1938 at the famous "Colloque Walter Lippmann" (CWL) in Paris. The French original of this "essential document in the history of neoliberalism" (Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 4), as the authors quite appropriately advertise, has been around for a long while. But access to this new and timely English language version, together with the authors' excellent exhaustive introduction and rich, well-researched and fair background information, is likely to give scholarship on the origins of neoliberalism a fresh impulse, both in the history of economic thought and in political history. Such a boost is much needed and more than welcome at a time when the term "neoliberalism" is commonly being used as a derogatory word not only in much of the public debate, but also in the academic sphere. Neglecting almost everything about its historical roots and its proponents' major concern with establishing a strong state standing above rent-seeking private interest groups, critics falsely associate neoliberalism with mere policies of deregulation, privatization and the withdrawal of the state. Scholarly objectivity thus seems wont in much of the new SAGE Handbook on Neoliberalism (2018), for example, where the editors Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings and David Primrose explain that since neoliberalism's "persistent contradictions and crises have, at least, reopened an opportunity for diverse movements to work collectively to delegitimize neoliberalism", they hope that their volume of almost 700 pages "will productively contribute to such struggles" (Cahill et al. 2018, p. xxxii). Unlike them, Reinhoudt (Hoover Institution, Stanford University) and Audier (University of Paris-Sorbonne) nowhere give the impression that they aim to wield a new weapon in their hands for a crusade against neoliberalism. One may perhaps guess their political leanings, but these never seem to bias their account. Their aim is to "furnish elements for research and discussion" (Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 36), not to "settle which interpretation is the best" (Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 35). Everybody is invited to form their own opinions. And the authors very pertinently state that, "as historians, political theorists, and philosophers continue to debate the history of the term 'neo-liberalism' and the term's meaning, it is useful to devote attention to the 1938 colloquium where the movement was formally born." (Reinhoudt

1994

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2017

voracious reader and amply enjoyed the library privileges of his association with Harvard University. Lippmann's bookishness and elitism have earned him the title of 'public philosopher,' and that moniker is apt also because he spoke of his work as the work of "public reason," a phrase that was dear to Enlightenment philosophers. Following this ideal, Lippmann understood the journalist's role to be like that of the scholar in search of truth emancipated from authority, prejudice, and interest. The public space was not a marketplace of ideas and not an arena for the contest of passions; it was a space in which to inscribe the work of informed argument. Goodwin anoints Lippmann as a "public economist" and rightly notes that there has been none like him. It may be that Goodwin intends us to treat Lippmann as an economist. If that is so, the record of his originality is not compelling. I would endorse the alternative that Lippmann is a public economist in the sense of pursuing "public reason" on matters of economic policy. Lippmann did not believe that the public, on its own and even with his aid, could have the knowledge and discipline to govern. Lippmann was not a "persuader" in the style of his friend Keynes, or Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman, seeking to mobilize a popular outcry. Lippmann was not an "explainer" in the style of Leonard Silk or David Warsh, soliciting deference to the work of experts. Matters of economic policy required, for Lippmann, a higher court than the testimony of credentialed experts or an assembly of newspaper readers. Only the use of reason-vivid, synthetic, and conclusive-was fi t to sit in judgment of civic matters. There never will be another Lippmann, because this plausible and old-fashioned ideal is ill fi tted to a public culture that is bitterly polarized and cynical. Public intellectuals are not dead, but they are no longer men of reason.

Utilitas, 1991

Handbook on Global Constitutionalism: Second Edition, 2023

This chapter examines the International Relations theory of liberalism in relation to global constitutionalism. It uses the work of G. John Ikenberry, an American professor of International Relations as representative of liberalism. While Ikenberry's name is synonymous with this theory, as other commentators have suggested, he is far from its only representative in the United States. Ikenberry's thinking is in line with a 'worldview' of American liberal thought. This worldview reaches beyond an Ivy League perspective on the theory of International Relations (IR) and connects directly-as Ikenberry himself has throughout his career with the world of international practice and what has been described, in a related context, as the guidance that political theory can and should provide to decision-makers.