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All available selections by Walter Lippmann

  • Fact Finding and Steel   — Among the many big questions posed by the steel strike, perhaps the most important is what should be the role...
  • The Coronation of a Queen — Many men who live far beyond the Commonwealth and Empire have come to feel, as the coronation of the Queen...
  • On Self Reliance in This Age — While no one will grudge relief in the emergency, the question is bound to be raised in many minds as to how...
  • Reflections on Gandhi — In the life and death of Mahatma Gandhi we have seen reenacted in our time the supreme drama of humanity....
  • Amelia Earhart — I cannot quite remember whether Miss Earhart undertook her flight with some practical purpose in mind, say,...
  • Introduction — In the early months of 1914 widespread unemployment gave the anarchists in New York City an unusual...
  • The Themes of Muckraking — There is in America today a distinct prejudice in favor of those who make the accusations. Thus if you...
  • New Incentives — We say in conversation: 'Oh, no, he's not a business man, - he has a profession.’ That sounds like an...
  • The Magic of Property — The ordinary editorial writer is a strong believer in what he calls the sanctity of private property. But as...
  • Caveat Emptor — I am sure that few consumers feel any of that sense of power which economists say is theirs. No doubt when...
  • A Key to the Labor Movement — When employers talk about the freedom of labor, it may be that some of them are really worried over the...
  • The Funds of Progress — By this time, I imagine, the reader will be wondering how these modern ambitions are to be financed. For at...
  • A Nation of Villagers — It has been said that no trust could have been created without breaking the law. Neither could astronomy in...
  • A Big World and Little Men — Those who take city children out into the country for a day's airing can tell you one story after another...
  • Drift — It seems as if the most obvious way of reacting toward evil were to consider it a lapse from grace. The New...
  • A Big World and Little Men — Those who take city children out into the country for a day's airing can tell you one story after another...
  • The Rock of Ages — I happened to be in Dublin some time ago during what was undoubtedly a crisis in Irish history: Home Rule in...
  • A Note on the Woman's Movement — Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed...
  • Bogeys — There are people who are always waiting for the heavens to fall. In 1879, when Massachusetts granted school...
  • Poverty, Chastity, Obedience — Poverty, chastity, and obedience are not the ideals of a self-governing people. Occasionally, however, some...
  • Mastery — The Dyaks of Borneo, it is said, were not accustomed to chopping down a tree, as white men do, by notching...
  • Modern Communion — But, you will say, granted that the breakdown of authority in a complicated world has left men spiritually...
  • Fact and Fancy — Most people still feel that there is something inhuman about the scientific attitude. They think at once of a...
  • Law and Order — Our statute books are cluttered with legislation that represents somebody's good intention, rather than a...
  • The Paralysis of Governments — Perhaps, before going any further, I should say that I am a liberal democrat and have no wish to...
  • My Reason For Writing This Book — During the fateful summer of I938 I began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in my own mind and...
  • 1917: The Revolutionary Year — In December, 1941 I put the manuscript away, knowing that so much was going to happen to the world and to me...
  • Internal Revolution in the Democracies — A vigourous critic of democracy, Sir Henry Maine, writ­ing in 1884 just as England was about to adopt general...
  • Democratic Politicians — At the critical moments in this sad history, there have been men, worth listening to, who warned the people...
  • The Pattern of the Mistakes — In order to see in its true perspective what happened, we must remember that at the end of the First World...
  • The Compulsion to Make Mistakes — The errors of public opinion in these matters have a common characteristic. The movement of opinion is slower...
  • Public Opinion in War and Peace — Writing in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, and having in mind Queen Victoria and King Edward the...
  • The People and the Voters — A recent historian of the Tudor Revolution, Mr. G. R. Elton, says that 'our history is still much written by...
  • The Governors and the Governed — When I describe the malady of democratic states as a derangement in the relation between the mass of the...
  • The Recently Enfranchised Voters — The doctrine of popular sovereignty is ancient and venerable. But until about the second half of the...
  • The Equations of Reality — A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance...
  • What Is the Public Interest? — We are examining the question of how, and by whom, the interest of an invisible community over a long span of...
  • The Elected Executive — Our inquiry has shown, I believe, that we cannot take popular government for granted, as if its principles...
  • The Protection of the Executive — During the nineteenth century good democrats were primarily concerned with insuring representation in the...
  • The Overpassing of the Bound — This is the root of the matter, and it is here that the ultimate issue lies. Can men, acting like gods, be...
  • From Jacobinism to Leninism — Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels produced an explanation of why...
  • Democratic Education — We live long enough after the new gospel was proclaimed to have seen what came of it. The post-revolutionary...
  • The Paradigm of Revolution — Of the two rival philosophies, the Jacobin is almost everywhere in the ascendant. It is a ready philosophy...
  • Liberalism and Jacobinism — We are living in a time of massive popular counter­revolution against liberal democracy. It is a reaction to...
  • On the Efficacy of Ideas — There are those who would say, using the words of philosophers to prove it, that it is the characteristic...
  • The Capacity to Believe — The freedom which modern men are turned away from, not seldom with relief and often with enthusiasm, is the...
  • The Distribution of Power — On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise...
  • Disentangling Ideas — On many subjects of great public importance, and in varying degree among different people for more personal...
  • The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads — There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable...
  • The Lost Theme — A man was taken the other day to a soiree of artists and serious thinkers. He had never been to such a...
  • Science as Scapegoat — The Atlantic Monthly has just published an article by Mr. R. K. Hack called 'Drift' which sets itself the...
  • Poltroons and Pacifists — Of all sneers none is so carelessly thrown as the charge of cowardice. To call a man a coward is almost to...
  • Minimum Wage — The opposition to a minimum wage law for women is curiously compounded of interested employers, abstract...
  • Free Collectivism — It is often assumed in current discussion that all the nations must make an exclusive choice between the old...
  • Making the Perfect Citizen — I have tried to imagine how the perfect citizen could be produced. Some say he will have to be born of the...
  • Whirl is King — Among those who no longer believe in the religion of their fathers, some are proudly defiant, and many are...
  • False Prophecies — The modern age has been rich both in prophecies that men would at last inherit the kingdoms of this world,...
  • Sorties and Retreats — It might seem as if, in all this, men were merely going through once again what they have often gone through...
  • Deep Dissolution — This same tendency manifests itself in the midst of our modern uneasiness. We have had a profusion of new...
  • Imago Dei — By the dissolution of their ancestral ways men have been deprived of their sense of certainty as to why they...
  • An Indefinite God — It may be that dear and unambiguous statements are not now possible in our intellectual climate. But at...
  • God In More Senses Than One — But even if there was some uncertainty as to the existence of the God whom William James described, he was at...
  • The Protest of the Fundamentalists — Fundamentalism is a protest against all these definitions and attenuations which the modern man finds it...
  • In Man's Image — The long record of clerical opposition to certain kinds of scientific inquiry has a touch of dignity when it...
  • Ways of Reading the Bible — It is important to an understanding of this matter that we should not confuse the modern practice of...
  • Modernism: Immortality As An Example — This predicament forced modern churchmen to seek what Dr. Fosdick calls "a new solution." They could not...
  • What Modernism Leaves Out — Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church as much as they once did. Surely the...
  • The Kingly Pattern — What I have said thus far can be reduced to the statement that it is difficult for modern men to conceive a...
  • Landmarks — In a famous passage at the beginning of Heretics, Mr. Chesterton says that "nothing more strangely indicates...
  • Barren Ground — The American people, more than any other people, is composed of individuals who have lost association with...
  • Sophisticated Violence — Much effort goes into finding substitutes for this radical loss of association. There is the Americanization...
  • Rulers — He cannot look to his betters for guidance. The American social system is migratory, revolutionary, and...
  • God's Government — The dissolution of the ancestral order is still under way, and much of our current controversy is between...
  • The Doctrine of the Keys — The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties to human reason, as we can see even in...
  • The Logic of Toleration — As a result of the great religious wars the governing classes were forced to realize that unless they...
  • A Working Compromise — If the rival churches were not compelled to tolerate each other, they could not, consistently with their own...
  • The Effect of Patriotism — Modern governments are not merely neutral as between rival churches. They draw to themselves much of the...
  • The Dissolution of a Sovereignity — Thus there has gradually been dissolving the conception that the government of human affairs is a subordinate...
  • Business — n any scheme of things where the churches, as agents of God, assert the right to speak with authority about...
  • The Family — The family is the inner citadel of religious authority and there the churches hake taken their most...
  • Art (a) The Disappearance of Religious Painting — To walk through a museum of Western European art is to behold a peculiarly vivid record of how the great...
  • Art (b) The Loss of a Heritage — In setting the religious tradition aside as something with which they are not concerned when they are at work...
  • Art (c) The Artist Formerly — In 787 the Second Council of Nicaea laid down the rule which for nearly five hundred years was binding upon...
  • Art (d) The Artist as Prophet — Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad thing for the artist, there can be no...
  • Art (e) Art for Art's Sake — This brings us to the other theory, which is that art has nothing to do with prophecy, wisdom, and the...
  • Art (f) The Burden of Originality — As a matter of fact this doctrine is merely the esthetic version of the rather crude mechanistic materialism...
  • The Soul In the Modern World — The effect of modernity, then, is to specialize and thus to intensify our separated activities. Once all...
  • The Great Scenario — The modern world is like a stage on which a stupendous play has just been presented. Many who were in the...
  • Earmarks of Truth — Religious teachers who were close to the people have always understood that they must perform wonders if they...
  • On Reconciling Religion and Science — The conflicts between scientists and churchmen are sometimes ascribed to a misunderstanding on both sides....
  • Gospels of Science — Because its prestige is so great, science has been acclaimed as a new revelation. Cults have attached...
  • The Deeper Conflict — It follows from the very nature of scientific explanation, then, that it cannot give men such a clue to a...
  • Theocracy and Humanism — There is a revolution here in the realm of the spirit. We may describe it briefly by saying that whereas men...
  • Introduction — The upshot of the discussion to this point is that modernity destroys the disposition to believe that behind...
  • Golden Memories — It will be granted, I suppose, that there would be no need for certainty about the plan and government of the...
  • The Two Approaches to Life — The land of heart's desire is a place in which no man desires what he cannot have and each man can have what...
  • Freedom and Restraint — It is significant that fashions in human nature are continually changing. There are, as it were, two extreme...
  • The Ascetic Principle — The average man to-day, when he hears the word asceticism, is likely to think of St. Simeon Stylites who sat...
  • Oscillation Between Two Principles — These cycles of action and reaction are disastrous to the establishment of a stable humanism. A theocratic...
  • The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties — Aristotle faced this fundamental difficulty of humanism in the Ethics. He had expounded the theory that...
  • The Matrix of Humanism — The conception of human nature as developing behavior is, of course, accepted by all modern psychologists. If...
  • The Career of the Soul — If our scientific knowledge of human nature were adequate, we could achieve in the humanistic culture that...
  • The Passage Into Maturity — The critical phase of human experience, then, is the passage from childhood to maturity; the critical...
  • The Function of High Religion — In the light of this conception of maturity as the ultimate phase in the development of the human personality...
  • Popular Religion and the Great Teachers — In popular thought it is taken for granted that to be religious is to accept in some form or other the...
  • The Aristocratic Principle — To those who want salvation cheap, and most men do, there is very little comfort to be had out of the great...
  • The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation — But because the teaching of the sages was incomprehensible, the multitude, impressed but also bewildered,...
  • The Stone Which the Builders Rejected — The way of life which I have called high religion has in all ages seemed so unapproachably high that it has...
  • The Problem of Evil — The greatest of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with his...
  • Superstition and Self-Consciousness — This change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it may seem, merely a new way of talking...
  • Virtue — It can be shown, I think, that those qualities which civilized men, regardless of their theologies and their...
  • From Clue to Practice —
  • The Invention of Invention — One of the characteristics of the age we live in is that we are forever trying to explain it. We feel that if...
  • The Creative Principle In Modernity — Although the disposition to scientific thought may be said to have originated in remote antiquity, it was not...
  • Naive Capitalism — The application of science to the daily affairs of men was acclaimed at first with more enthusiasm than...
  • The Credo of Old-Style Business — It was frequently pointed out by moralists like Ruskin and William Morris, and by churchmen as well, that...
  • Old-Style Reform and Revolution — Naive capitalism--that is to say, the theory of each for himself according to such light as he might happen...
  • The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct — While both the bolshevists and the fascists look upon themselves as pathfinders of progress, it is fairly...
  • Ideals — It is my impression that when machine industry reaches a certain scale of complexity it exerts such pressure...
  • Loyalty — The difficulty of discovering an industrial philosophy which fits machine industry on a large scale has...
  • The Evolution of Loyalty — Broadly speaking, the evolution of political loyalty passes through three phases. In the earliest, the most...
  • Pluralism — The relationship between lord and vassals in which each man attaches himself for better or worse to some...
  • Live And Let Live — One of the inevitable effects of being attached to many different, somewhat conflicting, interdependent...
  • Government In the People — It has been the cause of considerable wonder to many persons that the most complex modern communities, where...
  • Politicians And Statesmen — The role of the leader would be easier to define if it were agreed to give separate meanings to two very...
  • Birth Control — The Biblical account of how Jehovah slew Onan for disobeying his father's commandment to go to his brother's...
  • The Logic Of Birth Control — With contraception established as a more or less legitimate idea in modern society, a vast discussion has...
  • The Use Of Convention — It is one thing, however, to recognize the full logic of birth control and quite another thing to say that...
  • The New Hedonism — Among those who hold that the separation of the primary and secondary functions of the sexual impulse is good...
  • Marriage and Affinity — It is not hard to see why those who are concerned in revising sexual conventions should have taken the logic...
  • The Schooling Of Desire — They need not deny, indeed it would be foolish as well as cruel for them to underestimate, the enormous...
  • The Declaration Of Ideals — Of all the bewilderments of the present age none is greater than that of the conscientious and candid...
  • The Choice of a Way — What modernity requires of the moralist is that he should see with an innocent eye how men must reform their...
  • The Religion of the Spirit — The choice is at last a personal one. The decision is rendered not by argument but by feeling. Those who...