Walter Lippmann

Reviews / Votes

Edwards shows us that Walter Lippmann was a paradox: in his personal life, he projected a "nothing to see here" attitude toward religion, but he made a career of his public writing about morals. He decried religious institutions and insisted on their value. Edwards sees Lippmann's story as about secularism, liberalism, Christianity, post Christianity, and Judaism; he shows the tensions between political power and historical perspective. Edwards gives us not only a religious biography of Lippmann, but also a brilliant new angle on the religious biography of the US across the decades of the American century. * Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University, Bloomington * Mark Edwards' exhaustively documented, analytically ambitious study of Walter Lippmann's career argues that the notorious contradictions, conceits, and blind spots in Lippmann's writings are largely explained by a quasi religious quest for a national community that is at once post Judaic, post Catholic, and post Protestant. By ascribing to Lippmann's secularism a sense of religious mission grounded in a decidedly Judeo-Christian matrix, Edwards brings a fresh perspective to one of the most studied of American intellectuals. Against the many observers who have emphasized the "integrity" and "wisdom" of Lippmann's performance as a public moralist, Edwards insists that Lippmann was a "chameleon," whose brilliance functioned as a vehicle for a virtual infinity of American virtues and vices. * David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley * Mark Edwards smartly situates Walter Lippmann smack dab in the thicket of American exceptionalism and its religious facets. As such, Edwards' book is a welcome reminder of a public intellectual whose insights were arguably wiser than Reinhold Niebuhr's. Edwards' Lippmann could well turn out to be the better guide to the spiritual dilemmas of the United States' global dominance in the twentieth century than any voice the nationas churches produced. * D. G. Hart, Hillsdale College, Michigan, Russian Review * This slim but fruitful volume is the rare book that reconceptualizes the thought of a well-researched thinker in a way that illuminates rather than distracts...Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty. * Choice * This stimulating and thought-provoking book appears in a series entitled "Spiritual Lives," which offers "biographies of prominent men and women whose eminence is not primarily based on a specifically religious contribution." Walter Lippmann was the great interpreter, analyst, and critic of twentieth century America's self-understanding. Verbally gifted, he either invented or popularized the key concepts that Americans used to understand the world they were shaping, including globalism, stereotypes, and the Cold War. Mark Thomas Edwards presents a fascinating interpretation of a man whose analyses were constantly changing, yet seemed founded on a moral certainty. * Harold James, H-Diplo * In our present context, Edwards provides an important study of Lippmann's criticism of easy consensus built upon ideological stasis. * Andrew Finstuen, Church History Journal *