Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory by Sue Curry Jansen (review)

Walter Lippmann was a towering figure who has received too little attention in rhetorical studies. To the extent that Lippmann has been on our collective radar screens, it has typically been as John Dewey’s purported adversary in the so-called “Lippmann-Dewey” debate—where Lippmann, the elitist critic of public opinion and champion of expertise, draws the short straw against Dewey, the participatory democrat and hero of American pragmatism. Sue Curry Jansen’s excellent short study makes a new Lippmann available. She demolishes two-dimensional portraits, shows the “debate” with Dewey was a phantom invented in the 1980s, and offers a nuanced reconstruction that shows how Lippmann’s ideas about public communication still matter today.

As Jansen points out, Lippmann (1889–1974) led three kinds of public lives. He was a scholar working outside the academy who wrote sophisticated books on democratic political theory, public opinion, and the press. He was a syndicated columnist who during his lifetime was the country’s most influential journalist. And he was a shadow statesman who helped shape the public events he also commented on. Lippmann the scholar is Jansen’s main focus, more specifically his writings on public communication and democracy published between 1919 and 1925. She situates this small but important body of work within the contexts of his biography and intellectual influences, of World War I and its aftermath, and of receptions and misinterpretations of his work in communication studies since the 1950s. In the process, Jansen both situates Lippmann in his own times and draws out his relevance for contemporary discussions of democracy, publics, and media.

Jansen is an erudite and versatile scholar who came to Lippmann reluctantly. Cast as a cynical realist too close to power and “an unofficial embodiment of the national purpose,” as the historian Christopher Lasch once wrote, Jansen confesses that “Lippmann seemed to embody everything my generation once rejected” (ix). A feminist critical theorist who has scrutinized the politics and sociology of knowledge for nearly four decades, Jansen was spurred by an incisive undergraduate query that led her to recognize that she and the field had gotten Lippmann wrong. Several excellent articles and this book followed.

Chapter 1 (re)introduces us to Lippmann as a cosmopolitan intellectual whose openness and public-spirited independence of mind was anchored by “relentless Socratic interrogations, including reflexive self-questioning” (4). In the aftermath of World War I, he confronted a crisis of Western democracy partly occasioned by propagandistic manufacture of consent through mass media and recognition of the limitations of reason in human affairs. Jansen draws parallels to crises of democracy and media in our own age and Lippmann’s continued relevance as “‘truthiness’ now trumps truth” (9).

Chapter 2 delves into the historical sociology of knowledge in tracing receptions of Lippmann in communication studies. His writings on media are some of the most important of the twentieth century, but they have been marginalized and misinterpreted in the field. First, this was because as a public intellectual with pragmatist philosophical sensibilities he did not fit the paradigm for a professionalized, academic behavioral science that Wilbur Schramm and other communication researchers aspired to build in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, as James W. Carey rejected behaviorism in favor of a cultural approach to communication, he took Deweyan pragmatism as a touchstone and invented the Lippmann-Dewey debate as a proxy for the paradigm battles he was fighting. Carey was instrumental in propagating the image of Lippmann the antidemocrat who evacuated the public from politics, a reading that Jansen shows to be superficial and one-sided.

The interpretive ground thus cleared, over the next four chapters Jansen reconstructs those elements of Lippmann’s life and writings most relevant to the study of public communication. Chapter 3 sketches the making of a public intellectual. It focuses especially on his undergraduate career at Harvard and the influence of...