Walter Lippmann poses unique challenges and opportunities for his interpreters. His long career, extraordinarily deep roster of friends and acquaintances, protean political sensibilities, and earnest philosophical engagements have led some to represent him, in Christopher Lasch's terms, as an “unofficial embodiment of the national purpose.”Footnote ¹ Perhaps no other American traversed such a broad swath of the country's intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century. But his relentlessly experimental views and absence of disciplinary or theoretical rigor often render his underlying commitments elusive. Ronald Steel's 1980 biography, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, frankly engaged the tension between the breadth of Lippmann's influence and the thinness of his social philosophy. In that landmark text he emerged as a figure with a relentless curiosity and a genius for accessible synthesis, but only an uncertain contributor to the history of ideas.

In contrast to Steel's wide-ranging treatment of Lippmann's life and thought, Crauford Goodwin approaches his subject through strategic constraint: the focus here is on the newspaper columns Lippmann wrote about economic policy, primarily during the Great Depression. (Barely thirty pages are devoted to Lippmann's remarkable education and early career, for example, and none to the fraught circumstances of his personal life in the late 1930s.) Even Lippmann's forays into social philosophy, from his sympathies with pragmatism in the 1910s to his defense of natural law four decades later, appear here only briefly as aids in understanding his role as a public expositor of economic ideas.

Lippmann's columns, which were published with Ogden Reid's New York Herald-Tribune and syndicated nationwide under the heading “Today and Tomorrow,” are a worthy subject of analysis. Prior treatments of Lippmann have devoted much closer attention to his major texts – Drift and Mastery, Public Opinion, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society – and the occasional long-format pieces he wrote for publications including the New Republic and Vanity Fair. But beginning with his daily editorials for the New York World in the 1920s, Lippmann devoted most of his time to short opinion pieces on the major events of the day. As the progenitor of the modern political columnist, his writings for the Herald-Tribune were distributed three or four days a week to over ten million readers, gaining him public notoriety and extraordinary access to (and deference from) the leading political figures of his era. The Lippmann that emerges in these columns – detached, fluid, always searching academic literature for novel schemes to address the felt problems of the moment – establishes a throughline between the seemingly disconsonant texts of his early and late careers. Goodwin's Lippmann was consistent in his experimentalism, and proved remarkably skilled at explaining emerging social-scientific doctrines to a dubious public.

Goodwin is most interested in Lippmann's role as a translator of economic discourse, and draws on that aspect of his identity to explore the unique professional dynamics of the era. With the incipient decline of literary economics, the leading economics journals of the 1930s were becoming ever less comprehensible to laypeople at precisely the moment when the profession was rising to new prominence. Despite their growing importance, few American economists in the 1930s proved willing or able to expound their ideas to a broad readership. Lippmann stepped into this vacuum, accruing extraordinary power among both policymakers (who relied on his elegant syntheses of recent research) and members of the profession (who jockeyed for references in his columns). In the years before World War II, Goodwin suggests, economic discourse was framed largely by those who could traverse the abstruse language of academic economists and the public sphere.

By engaging these contexts, Walter Lippmann: Public Economist provides more than a reinterpretation of the middle years of Lippmann's career: his story becomes a demonstration of the fluidity and indeterminacy of economic policy throughout the Great Depression, and a sign of the opportunities and costs associated with the changing conventions of the economics profession. Goodwin's incisive and engaging account of Lippmann's role in these crucial periods of transition will be of broad interest to intellectual historians, political historians, and historians of economic thought.

Although Goodwin frankly acknowledges the puzzling antinomies in Lippmann's thought during this period, he chooses not to resolve them or situate them within a broader critical framework. Readers of this book, like many of Lippmann's contemporaries, will derive at best an ambiguous sense of his economic philosophy. At various points we find Lippmann expressing allegiance to Veblen, to Mitchell, to Keynes, to Hayek, to Samuelson, to Galbraith. Was he little more than an itinerant traveler in the many competing ideologies of early twentieth-century economic thought, or did he manage to braid them together within a coherent social philosophy? Should we conclude, with Steel, that The Good Society was a sign of his “split personality” and “confusion,” or does its logic draw a novel bridge between the views of Keynes and Hayek? Were Lippmann's contemporaries shrewd to perceive a rightward drift in his politics after he arrived at the Herald-Tribune, or did the continuities between his early and late careers transcend this apparent conservative turn? Should we see Lippmann's prominence in the economic discourse of his era as a transient phase, or did it signify deepening problems in the relationship between economists and their audiences? Goodwin's analysis inspires and contextualizes these vital questions, but leaves them largely unresolved.

Lippmann therefore remains a tangle of contradictions: an ardent supporter of the New Deal who authored one of the most prominent critiques of it; an avowed Keynesian who endorsed and championed his leading detractors; a progressive and pragmatist who came to espouse the enduring virtues of cultural tradition and natural law. Walter Lippmann: Public Economist reveals the aspects of Lippmann's writing life that fostered this ideological flexibility, and is an admiring portrait of the unique capacities it engendered. In Goodman's reading, Lippmann was a curious, candid, and versatile synthesizer of the evolving ideas of others: a columnist, rather than a social philosopher, after all.