From Revolt to Order: The Career of Walter Lippmanns Progressivism, 1913-1914

Abstract

This article is an attempt to reinterpret Lippmanns progressive thought. By comparing his early major work Drift and Mastery (1914) with his debut book A Preface to Politics (1913), this article argues that his intellectual journey can be divided into two closely related but yet distinctive phases. Whereas Lippmann believed in 1913 that the search for a new order should be waited until liberation from the old order was fully accomplished, in 1914 he clearly revealed the belief that the old order was already demised. In this regard, this article delineates the career of Lippmanns progressivism as the journey from a revolt against an old order to a search for a new order. By tracing his intellectual trajectory of the same era, it also maintains that Lippmanns main object was to resolve a series of tensions between desire for liberation and for order, between liberalism and collectivism, and between the ideal of self-government and the human epistemological limitations. Lippmann, employing the concept of hypothesis, consistently struggled with those tensions. By giving a more complex picture on the similarities and differences between A Preface to Politics and Drift and Mastery, and situating those books within its intellectual lineage, this article demonstrates both the protean and coherent nature of Lippmanns progressivism.