Overview

"Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His ""Today and Tomorrow"" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Lippmann coined or popularized several keywords of the twentieth century, including ""stereotype,"" the ""Cold War,"" and the ""Great Society."" Sought out by U.S. Presidents and by America's allies and rivals around the world, Lippmann remained one of liberalism's most faithful proponents and harshest critics. Yet few people then or since encountered the ""real"" Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a ""post-Christian"" era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage. Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor considers the role of religions in Lippmann's life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism's blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also necessity of a civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century."

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9780192895165

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Reviews

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 *

"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 *"

Author Information

Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. He has published articles in Religion and American Culture, Diplomatic History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Religions, and the Journal of Religious History. He is the author of The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism (2012) and Faith and Foreign Affairs in the American Century (2019). In the Spring of 2018, he served as Fulbright Senior Scholar to Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea, where he taught American diplomatic history.

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