See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/305339790

Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory

Article  in  Rhetoric and Public Affairs · July 2016

DOI: 10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0346

CITATIONS READS
5 7,249

1 author:

Peter Simonson
University of Colorado Boulder
46 PUBLICATIONS   407 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Rhetoric and democratic theory, rhetorical field methods, rhetorical criticism View project

International history of communication studies View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Peter Simonson on 14 October 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

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

Peter Simonson

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 19, Number 2, Summer 2016, pp. 346-349
(Review)

Published by Michigan State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/621622

Access provided by University Of Colorado @ Boulder (6 Feb 2017 00:39 GMT)

346 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

moved well beyond visibility for many, I am moved by how consistent

Harvey’s vision of hope remained throughout his political life.
An Archive of Hope is an exciting document connecting one generation
to the next. Those interested in rhetorics of populism, rhetorical style,
coalitional politics, discourse of gay rights, queer futurity, GLBTQ history/
world making, or a long list of other academic interests would do well to
include this on their offıce shelves and in their classrooms.

TIMOTHY OLEKSIAK, Bloomsburg University

Walter Lippmann: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication

Theory. By Sue Curry Jansen. New York: Peter Lang, 2012; pp. xiv ⫹ 169.
$38.95 paper.

W
alter Lippmann was a towering fıgure who has received too
little attention in rhetorical studies. To the extent that Lip-
pmann 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 participa-
tory 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 sophisti-
cated 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 specifıcally his writings on public communica-
tion and democracy published between 1919 and 1925. She situates this
BOOK REVIEWS 347

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, pub-
lics, and media.
Jansen is an erudite and versatile scholar who came to Lippmann reluc-
tantly. Cast as a cynical realist too close to power and “an unoffıcial embodi-
ment 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 scruti-
nized 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 fıeld 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 fıeld. First, this was because as a
public intellectual with pragmatist philosophical sensibilities he did not fıt
the paradigm for a professionalized, academic behavioral science that Wil-
bur 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 fıghting. Carey was
instrumental in propagating the image of Lippmann the antidemocrat who
348 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

evacuated the public from politics, a reading that Jansen shows to be

superfıcial 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 the philosophers William James and George
Santayana and the visiting British political theorist Graham Wallas. (The
French philosopher Henri Bergson, the socialist settlement worker Florence
Kelley, and the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens were also important
to him.) Jansen shows how James’s pragmatism, Santayana’s skepticism and
critical realism, and Wallas’s focus on democratic communication in a
complex and rapidly changing “Great Society” all left their marks. She also
makes passing but suggestive reference to Lippmann’s composition instruc-
tor, Charles Townsend Copeland, later Boylston Chair of Rhetoric, who
helped make Lippmann the superb writer that he was. That misleadingly
clear style, Jansen argues, has contributed to undervaluing the profundity of
Lippmann’s thought.
Chapter 4 then takes us through Lippmann’s involvements and disillu-
sionments with World War I. As a journalist and intellectual (he had
already published two books before he was 25), Lippmann agitated for
U.S. entry into the war, developed a plan for a government information
bureau, created propaganda leaflets, and strongly supported the Wilson
administration—only to become critical of all of them by war’s end. By 1919
he was writing in the New Republic that one of “the great calamites” of U.S.
involvement in the war “was the character of American propaganda in
Europe” (82). His work on public communication began there, guided by a
skeptical but reform-minded sensibility philosophically guided by pragma-
tism, humanism, and recognition of the inescapable limits of human
knowing.
Across chapters 4–6, Jansen displays great hermeneutical care in
explicating three key works—Liberty and the News (1920), Public Opin-
ion (1922), and The Phantom Public (1925). She blends theory, criticism,
and sociologically hued analysis of the practices and institutions of
public communication and democratic engagement. Public Opinion is
the masterpiece, which Jansen places “in the grand tradition of the
classic social theories of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Veblen” (19).
 BOOK REVIEWS 349

There and in The Phantom Public Lippmann exposes unpleasant truths

about how we think, how democracy works, and how news functions.
Advancing a sophisticated constructivism, he argues that we perceive
the world through stereotypes that reflect our social sets and their
language games. Our understanding of the world is always mediated,
partial, and what a later generation would call socially constructed.
Democracy is built upon faith in public opinion and the people, but as
society has become more complex and far-flung, citizens are only able to
follow a small proportion of issues and be knowledgeable about fewer
still. All of us are outsiders or “bystanders” to most issues, hence the
need for specialists and expertise to represent distant and unfamiliar
matters. The press will never be able to bear that burden. Instead, news
“signalizes” key events and helps organize publics around issues of
shared concern to them. While we are bystanders to most issues, we can
be active participants in a few, mobilizing to support causes, elected
offıcials, and policymakers. Liberal democracy, for Lippmann and
Dewey alike, is a fundamentally pluralistic endeavor. As Jansen shows,
Dewey followed and sought to advance Lippmann’s views on public
opinion, which were both far more developed (and far better written)
than Dewey’s (135–37).
Jansen’s book will be valuable to rhetorical theorists, critics, historians,
and public address scholars. Beyond prodding us to carefully reread and
teach Lippmann’s writings, it spurs us to greater critical reflexivity about
our understandings of democracy, citizenship, public engagement, and
social knowledge. Implicitly, it also provides occasion to reflect upon how
the fıeld of speech institutionalized itself in the 1920s and 1930s and what
prevented it from incorporating major social theoretical works like Lip-
pmann’s. The Cornell rhetorician Everett Lee Hunt reviewed Lippmann’s
books in the 1920s, voicing a generally favorable if simplifıed view of them,
but to little apparent effect. Very recently, in essays by Dave Tell and Nathan
Crick, rhetoricians have begun to revisit Lippmann, joining Michael Schud-
son and Bruno Latour among others reevaluating his worth. Jansen’s book
is the most sustained of these efforts and an excellent (re)introduction for
students and scholars alike.

PETER SIMONSON, University of Colorado Boulder

View publication stats