The Walter Lippmann Reader

Collected in this massive 500+ page omnibus editions are Walter Lippman's four most important books. These four books are seminal texts in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology. The father of modern journalism, Walter Lippmann was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and visionary. A Preface to Politics is most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. In Liberty and the News Walter Lippmann offers us a stern warning about the importance of reliable news to the survival of a healthy democracy. He railed against bad journalism and drove home the point that the general public must be able to ascertain the truth or democracy is doomed. Public Opinion exposes how media can shape public perception and how that perception changes society. It is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion. The detailed descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their sociopolitical and cultural environments, leading them to apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion The Phantom Public was Lippman's most towering achievement influencing political thought for decades to come. In it Lippman posits that the public exists merely as an illusion, myth, and inevitably a phantom; that the common man cannot be expected to know enough about events entirely beyond their control to cast an informed and meaningful vote.

The book "Public Opinion" is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion. The detailed descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their socio-political and cultural environments leading them to apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion a seminal text in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology. Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books.

Written in the aftermath of World War I, this essay by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist remains relevant in its denunciation of media bias, particularly in terms of wartime propaganda.

The biography of an economist whose work as a journalist helped the American public understand the economics of the Great Depression.

A great editorial commentator of the twentieth century, Walter Lippmann, was a major contributor to the central periodicals and journals of the age, including the Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and Yale Review. Men of Destiny, a set of biographical essays on leading figures of Lippmann's day, is arguably the best single source for understanding the persons and the policies of the post-World War I period.In a series of vignettes, the reader is introduced into the lively world of Al Smith, Calvin Coolidge, William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Warren Harding, Andrew Mellon, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The collection offers a rare glimpse of the first truly modern generation of American politics and society, and also a type of serious, detached writing that presumes a literate audience, but also one not given over to bias and hostility.The magic of this volume, however, is not in its litany of figures great and small, but Lippmann's comprehensive understanding of the place of America in world affairs. His essay on American imperialism remains a classic: "All the world thinks of the United States today as an empire, except the people of the United States." His advice to Americans is not to continue being evasive and grandiose with the rhetoric of equality, but to recognize the changing conditions and get on with the task of rule in as honorable a state as is possible by a holder of power.In his perceptive essays on the League of Nations, the efforts to outlaw war through international law, debt and reparations policies, Lippmann appeals to "time and a sense of reality" in examining all matters political. This volume, graced with a new introduction by Paul Roazen, will enable readers now well into the first decade of a new millennium to do just that.

One of the most influential documents of the Progressive Era, Drift and Mastery remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. A new foreword (by a former advisor to Elizabeth Warren) argues that Lippman's analysis of societal problems, and political actions needed to solve them, is highly relevant today.

In an era disgusted with politicians and the various instruments of "direct democracy," Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public remains as relevant as ever. It reveals Lippmann at a time when he was most critical of the ills of American democracy. Antipopulist in sentiment, this volume defends elitism as a serious and distinctive intellectual option, one with considerable precursors in the American past. Lippmann's demythologized view of the American system of government resonates today. The Phantom Public discusses the "disenchanted man" who has become disillusioned not only with democracy, but also with reform. According to Lippmann, the average voter is incapable of governance; what is called the public is merely a "phantom." In terms of policy-making, the distinction should not be experts versus amateurs, but insiders versus outsiders. Lippmann challenges the core assumption of Progressive politics as well as any theory that pretends to leave political decision making in the hands of the people as a whole. In his biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel praised The Phantom Public as "one of Lippmann's most powerfully argued and revealing books. In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory." This volume is part of a continuing series on the major works of Walter Lippmann. As more and more Americans are inclined to become apathetic to the political system, this classic will be essential reading for students, teachers, and researchers of political science and history.