The journalist, commentator, and public intellectual Walter Lippmann has received more intellectual-biographical attention than virtually any other member of the American newspaper press. This began even before his death in 1974 with Charles Wellborn’s Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (1969), Benjamin Fletcher Wright’s Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann (1973), and Charles Forcey’s collective biography Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (1961). In 1980, Ronald Steel published a major scholarly biography of Lippmann under the title Walter Lippmann and the American Century. And as recently as 2023, Mark Thomas Edwards published a kind of spiritual biography of Lippmann titled Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor.

One wonders then why another intellectual biography of Lippmann is called for. No new archive has been opened, no trove of papers discovered, no new revelations disclosed. Tom Arnold-Forster, author of the newest biography, Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, does not address this why? head-on, and he largely proceeds as though no one else has attempted a project like the one he sets before readers: “exploring his [Lippmann’s] ideas in their historical context” (2). Nevertheless, reading between the lines, three different reasons for Arnold-Forster’s recent contribution can be inferred. First, Arnold-Forster suggests that, given the intense pressures the twenty-first century so far has put on liberalism, readers will benefit from reviewing an intellectual career organized around the tensions, challenges, and even contradictions of liberalism like Lippmann’s. Second, Arnold-Forster suggests at numerous points in his biography that previous interpreters of Lippmann have gotten some things wrong; in a sense, he wants to correct the record. Lippmann, for example, was not a technocrat, but puzzled political observer. Third, Arnold-Forster’s book offers an intellectual history strictly speaking—one gets the sense reading the book that Arnold-Forster may think that the biographical work on Lippmann that has preceded him was not, strictly speaking, straight-up intellectual history.

Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann is very much an intellectual biography, and a very thorough one at that. In 12 packed chapters, he takes readers from Lippmann’s early years as a budding Progressive-era journalist to his predominant place among the American literati in the Cold War. Arnold-Forster hardly misses a beat in Lippmann’s long intellectual life. At the center of Lippmann’s preoccupations, he argues, was “the vicissitudes of politics”—specifically, politics in the modern liberal-democratic age (5). This is the big theme that runs throughout the book.

Yet Arnold-Forster builds this big theme out of the details of Lippmann’s thought, and this is the best reason to take up this new biography. Like a photograph blown up and magnified, it is packed with granular details. Out of these details Arnold-Forster reaches some new and helpful reinterpretations of Lippmann’s thought. For example, we see Lippmann move away from a constitutional approach to politics to a social-psychological one and then back to the constitutional one, and thus learn something about instability of liberal governance. Or we learn that Lippmann in the 1930s “became a kind of modernization theorist before modernization theory was formalized in the 1950s” (115). Or we come to see the linkages between Lippmann’s early devotion to Graham Wallas’s The Great Society (1914) and his support of LBJ’s “Great Society” (250). Such details are luminous for anyone intensely interested in Lippmann’s career.

For those, however, looking for a broader appraisal of Lippmann’s life and work, Steel’s biography remains the best. And Edwards’s recent work is better for those wanting to get a sense of Lippmann the man—his struggles, doubts, and desires. For Arnold-Forster tells us less about Lippmann than about his ideas, and Lippmann’s ideas are treated by Arnold-Forster as relatively disassociated from Lippmann’s relationships, his infamous mood swings, or his need to make money and stay relevant. Most of what happens in Arnold-Forster’s intellectual biography happens between Lippmann’s ears and among Lippmann’s many texts.

Arnold-Forster takes a problem-centered approach to intellectual history. Lippmann appears as something like an intellectual puzzle solver, a beautiful mind thrown into vicissitudes of politics. Ironically, while William James, who had great influence on Lippmann, is rightly featured in Arnold-Forster’s biography, Lippmann himself is not interpreted in a Jamesian frame as a man trying to do things with ideas in the world along with others. Such worldly details are pushed to the background by Arnold-Forster. When Lippmann’s rich (literally!) and dense network of correspondents and associates are mentioned in the book, they appear as occasions for Lippmann’s thought rather than as co-producers with Lippmann of a social and political world. Similarly, we get little sense of the intellectual traditions in which Lippmann works; instead, Arnold-Forster presents Lippmann as working with these traditions.

Biographically, we learn that Lippmann pushed his Jewishness aside, but we don’t get any arguments for how being Jewish might have profoundly, and not just incidentally, affected Lippmann’s thought. Similarly, we get a sense that Lippmann was closely connected to some of the most powerful men on the planet, but we get little sense of how his proximity to power might have led or misled him in certain intellectual directions. Is one to presume that Lippmann’s brain was so vigilantly guarded against unwarranted influence?

For all of this, there has not appeared an intellectual biography of Lippmann like Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann. For those who are seeking intellectual devils in the details of Walter Lippmann expansive corpus, Arnold-Forster’s is a great biography.