Introduction
Few subjects in the discipline of International Relations (IR) have garnered the recent intensity of interest as the politics of emotion. From scholars making sense of populist rhetoric,Footnote 1 to appreciating the political power of Twitter,Footnote 2 the study of emotion appears as a promising fit with the political present. Less examined, however, is how this growing interest is often anchored to a distinct historical narrative: in the beginning – the precise start of which is often unclear – the discipline largely ignored emotions. The reasons for this neglect are varied. Emotions were either obscured by a disciplinary focus on rationality,Footnote 3 exiled to the supposed irrelevance of ‘first image’ analysis,Footnote 4 or simply avoided because of methodological barriers.Footnote 5 The result is a relative absence of emotion in the history of the field. Thus, emotions are presented as having received ‘surprisingly little attention’,Footnote 6 appear as ‘relatively unexplored terrain’,Footnote 7 are often ‘not deemed worthy of scientific attention’,Footnote 8 and are a topic which ‘until recently, International Relations scholars have turned a stubborn blind eye to’.Footnote 9 One colourful account likens emotions to a ‘strange uncle’ who is often present at academic gatherings but awkwardly ignored and avoided.Footnote 10
Of course all historical narratives have qualifications. Pockets of interest have existed in political psychology and foreign policy analysis.Footnote 11 Others have found surprising accounts of love and affect in the classical realism of Morgenthau and Niebuhr.Footnote 12 Yet, these examples are exceptions to the broader narrative that emotions have been absent from IR. Indeed, the very framing of an ‘emotional turn’ speaks to the belief that studying the visceral and embodied takes IR in fundamentally new directions,Footnote 13 or what some describe as one of the field's next ‘great frontiers’.Footnote 14
This narrative is compelling and parsimonious, but it is almost certainly misleading. Challenging this selective reading of history, I argue that a return to the early 20th century work of Walter Lippmann shows how emotions were a central and visible feature of international theory far earlier than normally believed. Deeply troubled by his experiences with American propaganda during the First World War, Lippmann spent the next several years reflecting on the relationship between emotion, mass politics, and democratic foreign policy. First developed in his 1922 book Public Opinion, he outlined a sophisticated theory of the democratic public's collectively shared but partial picture of the world structured by emotional stereotypes. Not only did these stereotypes often escape our conscious awareness, they often became condensed into powerful emotional symbols which would become crucial to mobilizing a population fragmented by the anomie of modernity. Although he had hoped that these symbols could be used to move the public to progressive ends, he became deeply troubled by how they became employed in mobilizing propaganda for war. In what later became characterized as ‘democratic realism’,Footnote 15 Lippmann recast the democratic public as an actor whose enlightenment was all too often frustrated by stereotypes and prejudice. In the present era where concerns over disinformation and demagogues abound, Lippmann's ideas offer striking purchase on the complicated relationship between emotion and the mass politics of modern democracy.
In returning to this legacy the broad aim of this essay is to correct one of the more ‘misleading vignettes’ of IR history.Footnote 16 The narrower aim is a recovery and reconstruction of ‘the history of conversation’ in and around Lippmann's work – and of Public Opinion in particular – to show how that conversation exercised a significant influence on the discipline.Footnote 17 My wager is that recovering this legacy has value for two reasons. First, although there are a number of recent reappraisals of historical figures in the discipline, comparatively little has been written about the distinctive contributions of Lippmann.Footnote 18 By serving as friend and foil to figures like Norman Angell, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Kenneth Waltz, Lippmann's intellectual footprint challenges prevailing assumptions about the history of international theory and suggests that the ‘emotion turn’ is in fact a ‘return’ to a much richer tradition of thinking about political subjectivity.
Second, Lippmann's legacy draws attention to a crucial relationship which has seen relatively little attention in international theory: the relationship between democracy and emotion. Thus, like many other scholars Lippmann is interested with the political implications of collective or group emotion and affect.Footnote 19 But where he differs is in fusing this interest to a distinctive view of democracy rooted in the growth of mass politics, increasing innovation in symbolic practices, and the broader uncertainty of modernity. This view matters because it brings into focus a series of problems – the challenge of disinformation, the unintended consequences of symbols, and the difficulty in establishing responsibility for the emotional excesses of a democratic public – which IR scholars have yet to fully appreciate.
‘The world outside and the picture in our heads'
For Lippmann emotions were never a discrete object of study but instead formed a central component of a broader theory of mass politics in the modern age. Democracy in America was being transformed in the 20th century by a widening suffrage and rapid technological change. At the centre of this transformation was a paradox: more people than ever before were becoming publicly engaged but few enjoyed direct knowledge on matters of public policy. The result was that the public could only ever have a partial image of the world – what Lippmann called a ‘pseudo-environment’.Footnote 20 This partial image was the result of numerous barriers to public knowledge: government censorship and secrecy, limited travel and education, narrow class sensibilities, and generalized apathy. Yet, even in the absence of these barriers the growing complexity of the world meant that we could only appreciate it in partial terms for ‘the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance… And although we need to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it’.Footnote 21 When these ‘pictures in our heads’ are shared and served as the basis of collective action, they constituted ‘Public Opinion’.Footnote 22
No other idea better captures the inherent limitations of public opinion in this view than stereotypes. Drawing on the pragmatist ideas of William James and John Dewey, Lippmann believed that a constant stream of experience frustrates our ability to make sense of the world. In every waking moment we are exposed to an evolving composite of sensations – perceptions of images, objects, shapes, smells, and sounds – which blur together. Managing this confusion requires drawing on past experiences and cultural knowledge. ‘For the most part we do not see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us’.Footnote 23 Stereotypes involved taking recognizable markers of situations – from the colour of someone's skin to the accent in their speech – and indexing them to broader conceptual categories. When these markers are encountered later in life, the details of the situation are automatically filled in. The results could produce judgements with a germ of truth but it could also create egregious errors. Yet, despite their inaccuracy, the use of stereotypes is unavoidable because looking at the world ‘freshly and in detail… is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question’.Footnote 24 Presaging future discussions on our limited cognitive economy,Footnote 25 he saw stereotypes as a by-product of human limitations.
Stereotypes may be a practical necessity but Lippmann vigorously resisted the idea that they were somehow natural. They were the effect of local ‘political habits’ which need to be understood as an inherited ‘tradition… handed on from parents, teachers, priests, and uncles’, not the ‘germ plasm’ of biology.Footnote 26 This left him deeply suspicious of deterministic readings of human nature, an idea which itself appeared deeply vulnerable to stereotyping. At the same time, these filtering effects had limits. Sceptical and reflective modes of thought, especially those in science and education, could promote greater self-awareness of stereotypes and their veracity.Footnote 27 In sum, ‘[w]hat matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them’.Footnote 28
In Lippmann's view these images are often more than cold cognitions. They could be deeply emotional. Stereotypes ‘are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope. Whatever invokes the stereotype is judged with the appropriate sentiment’.Footnote 29 It is this affective quality which pushes stereotypes from being a merely descriptive heuristic into being crucial tools of moral and political judgement. Nowhere is this connection between emotion and judgement become more visible than in Lippmann's recurring focus on – and critique of – national and racial prejudice. Such stereotypes were not only descriptive, they produced particular affective orientations which allowed for the unreflective moral judgement of different groups:
Except where we deliberately keep prejudice in suspense, we do not study a man and judge him to be bad. We see a bad man… a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100% American. In the workaday world that is often the real judgment, long in advance of the evidence… Neither justice, nor mercy, nor truth, enter into such a judgment, for the judgment has preceded the evidence.Footnote 30
The final clause of the passage is crucial because it captures how Lippmann believed emotional stereotypes were, in fact, a form of prejudgement.
The connection between emotion and prejudgement here is significant because it bears the markings of an important intellectual engagement with William James.Footnote 31 During his time at Harvard Lippmann was a student of James and the philosopher was so impressed with Lippmann that the two met regularly to discuss politics, philosophy, and social issues.Footnote 32 James's Principles of Psychology is an oft cited source in Public Opinion and it is highly unlikely that Lippmann – a close student and interlocutor of James – would be unfamiliar with its central ideas. One of those ideas was James's distinctive theory of emotion. In what became known as James-Lange view, James criticized the then-conventional view of emotion as the mental perception of a stimulus followed by bodily changes. In a radical reversal, he argued that an emotion entailed bodily changes emerging directly from the perception of a stimulus with no intervening mental state.Footnote 33 This sequencing was critical for James because ‘[w]ithout bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, and destitute of emotional warmth’.Footnote 34
The significance of James' view is that if an emotion emerges directly as a bodily response to stimulus, then emotions can occur outside the register of conscious agency. At this point emotions are akin to conditioned reflexes which can escape our awareness.Footnote 35 This argument is critical for Lippmann because it helps explain why we are so often unaware of the stereotypes we rely upon despite their affective intensity. Our stereotypes could become ‘highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them’ and yet only rarely would we reflect on these ‘unconscious constellations of feeling’.Footnote 36 The problem then is not simply that the picture in our heads often relies on emotional stereotypes, it was that we are often unaware of how they can powerfully colour our judgement.
Thus, Lippmann's view of ‘Public Opinion’ encapsulates something very different than today's sophisticated polling and horse race journalism. It invokes an image of an intersubjectively shared but inevitably partial picture of the world structured by emotional stereotypes. These stereotypes are rooted in the collective limits of the human ability to know the world, limits which force us to draw on the experiences of our cultural heritage to make sense of the world. Yet, as Lippmann laments, we often lack the self-awareness to recognize how these emotional images shape our judgement. The consequences for democratic politics are stark: far from being omnicompetent citizens, the public only see a partial picture of the world and mistakes it for a fulsome image. The crucial question then becomes who creates the picture in our heads – and how is it used?
Propaganda and the politics of public opinion
Lippmann's personal experiences with propaganda during First World War form a powerful backdrop for his thinking about the political content of Public Opinion. Writing to Atlantic magazine in 1920 he proposed an article focused on the problem of freedom of thought in ‘light of the discovery that opinion can be manufactured’. The idea had come to him ‘as a result of certain experiences with the official propaganda machine’ and a need to revisit the problem of freedom of thought ‘under modern conditions of government’.Footnote 37
Lippmann's initial experience with propaganda was limited. He joined the war effort as an assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker but was soon tasked to the ‘Inquiry’ – a secret initiative created by President Wilson for devising a postwar peace plan. The Inquiry was responsible for drafting the postwar recommendations which would eventually become Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. By the Summer of 1918 Lippmann believed the peace plan was finalized and turned his efforts to communicating Wilson's vision.Footnote 38 Accepting a commission as a US Army captain in 1918, he took on a new role in coordinating propaganda in Europe with the Allied Powers. In taking the position however, he stressed that propaganda need not be deceptive or menacing. What was required was ‘a frank campaign of education addressed to German and Austrian troops’, one which ‘avoid[ed] all tricky and sinister aspects of what is usually called propaganda’.Footnote 39 Education could bolster support for the war at home, hasten the surrender of the Central Powers, and save lives in the final days of the conflict.
At the same time, Lippmann had good reason to believe propaganda could be deceptive and menacing. Under the leadership of George Creel the American wartime propaganda agency Committee on Public Information became notorious for disinformation about the war. Lippmann had criticized Creel's earlier journalism, describing him as a ‘reckless and incompetent person who… has shown himself incapable of judging evidence and determined to make a noise no matter what canons of truthfulness he violates’.Footnote 40 In one of the Committee's more notorious episodes, its news arm published a dramatic story of American troop ships crossing the Atlantic while their escorts fought off and destroyed several German U-boats. When reporters in England interviewed the American sailors they discovered that the story was fabricated leading to public outrage. The New York Times denounced Creel's office as the ‘Committee on Public Misinformation’.Footnote 41 Episodes like these led Lippmann to believe that the Committee threatened the public's confidence in the American government's handling of the war.
Yet, despite these episodes Lippmann saw Creel's Committee as having a profound impact on wartime opinion. Part of this influence lay in how it fused modern communications with a wartime bureaucracy to create a message with unprecedented reach: ‘Mr. Creel had to assemble machinery which included a Division of News that issued… more than six thousand releases, had to enlist seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men who delivered at least seven hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and ninety speeches to an aggregate of over three hundred million people’.Footnote 42 Although impressed with the scale of the project, Lippmann was also sensitive to how new mediums like film changed the character and authority of propaganda. There was simply ‘no aid to visualization comparable to the cinema’, he argued, because ‘on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you’.Footnote 43
At the same time, the striking influence of wartime propaganda could not be explained by novel mediums like film. It was the content of propaganda that mattered, and it is this content which led Lippmann to think seriously about the powerful effects of symbols in political communication. For Lippmann symbols like the American flag or slogans like ‘Progress’ represented an important evolution of the emotional stereotypes outlined in the first half of Public Opinion. To understand this evolution one has to recognize that the images we use to derive our stereotypes begin to fade over time:
The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger [for a stereotype] may have been a series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words. These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady… Gradually the process sets in of knowing what you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the substituted images and names.Footnote 44
Yet, what intrigued Lippmann about this process was that even though the picture in our mind fades over time, the emotional response it originally generated can continue. The result was an innovative and politically potent observation: the condensing of stereotypes allowed emotional responses to be pried free of their original context and attached to more nimble symbols. In turn, these symbols could be creatively re-arranged to compose new and emotionally evocative images.
Although not directly addressed by Lippmann, H.R. Hopps' now infamous ‘Destroy this Mad Brute’ propaganda poster offers a useful illustration of this kind of creative composition. The poster features a savage-looking gorilla wearing the distinctive German helmet (the ‘Pickelhaube’) while carrying a club in one arm and a half-naked, unconscious women in the other. In part, the poster was effective because it plays on much broader anxieties of a reversion to a primordial barbarism but fused to the destructive potential of the 20th century warfare.Footnote 45 But, for Lippmann each of the symbols needed to be read as indexed to deeper, evocative stereotypes: the pickelhaube helmet a symbol of German militarism, the Gorilla a symbol of German savagery, the unconscious women as a symbol of the rape of Lady Liberty, and the sharp contrast of the darkened Gorilla and white Lady Liberty as a symbol of America's anxieties over miscegenation.Footnote 46 Normally, these themes would be too complex and nuanced to be contained in a single, terse image. Yet, the condensing effects of symbols allowed the propagandist to exceed these limits and produce images which could be rich and diverse in emotional significance yet impoverished of nuance and detail. Wartime visuals like this underscored just how much symbolic practices were sites of experimentation and innovation.
This reading of propaganda left Lippmann deeply ambivalent about the role of symbols in modern democracy. On the one hand, it was ‘impossible to conclude that symbols are altogether instruments of the devil’.Footnote 47 They could function as a powerful force of social solidarity as conflicting factions could rally around a single ambiguous symbol like the American flag.Footnote 48 In a reading of modernity which stresses growing complexity and the risks of disenchantment, symbols have an unmistakable value in generating unity. It was also difficult to view symbols as intrinsically harmful ‘since there is no power in the symbol, except that which it acquires by association in the human mind’.Footnote 49 In sum, we may not like how symbols distort and deceive, ‘[b]ut in the world of action they may be beneficent, and are sometimes a necessity… [for the] manipulation of masses through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing done’.Footnote 50
At the same time, symbols were a cause for serious alarm. Lippmann's experience with war propaganda impressed upon him how symbols could be manipulated for self-serving ends. In his starkest formulation, the person or group ‘who captures the symbols by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy’.Footnote 51 They are effectively the true levers of power in the democratic mass age because it is ‘only when symbols have done their work is there a handle [leaders] can use to move a crowd’.Footnote 52 Adding to concerns over manipulation, symbols could also be a source internecine strife. As different factions struggled to appropriate different symbolic legacies for their own political purposes, venerated figures like Washington risked abuse as their legacy became an object of contention.
Ultimately, the symbol for Lippmann is ‘an instrument by which a few can fatten on many, deflect criticism, and seduce men into facing agony for objects they do not understand’.Footnote 53 The imagery of agony here is not incidental. The most prominent example of the dangers of symbolic politics for Lippmann is the devastation of the First World War. By censoring casualties and hiding the incompetence of its generals, the Allied powers manufactured a symbolic unity and aura of competence which obscured a litany of failures. Members of the public, who are always at a distance from the front, had to rely on the picture in their heads pieced together by journalism and official statements. Yet, with Allied leaders engaged in a ‘conspiracy of silence’ the image in the public mind could only be an illusion.Footnote 54 Lippmann begrudgingly accepted this illusion on the basis that it expedited an end to a war which had already proved costly. But, it signalled for him the dangers of increasingly sophisticated forms of propaganda and how – when combined with the technology of modern warfare – it could pose an acute challenge for American democracy.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that Lippmann is commonly regarded as one of the most vociferous critics of democratic politics in the 20th century. Frustrated by a ‘mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded… and frustrated individuals’, it was often difficult for Lippmann to see any hope for an informed public in the mass age.Footnote 55 And although John Dewey called Public Opinion ‘perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy ever penned’,Footnote 56 other critics were less kind. The result is that Lippmann is routinely depicted as, at best, an elitist, and at worst, an anti-democratic figure.Footnote 57 Worse yet, he is occasionally placed in the company of far more radical anti-democratic theorists such as Carl Schmitt.Footnote 58
Amid closer scrutiny however, this anti-democratic image does not hold. In recent years, a growing wave of revisionist work has emerged aimed at rehabilitating Lippmann's legacy.Footnote 59 Although diverse in their assessments, they are united in the view that his critique of democracy is by no means a repudiation, and that Lippmann was equally concerned with how to rehabilitate democracy for the mass age. This project takes different forms at different points in Lippmann's career. Earlier in his career it entailed calls for greater standards and rigour in how news is collected and reported,Footnote 60 as well as the creation of a network of disinterested experts to help educate citizens in navigating their complex environment.Footnote 61 Later, it entailed calls for chastening our expectations of the public's ability to become directly involved in public policy,Footnote 62 as well as resurrecting a ‘tradition of civility’ aimed at curbing democracy's worst excesses.Footnote 63 There are certainly reasons for criticizing these projects on their own merits (more on this below). But taken collectively, the fuller arc of Lippmann's intellectual development points less to a committed anti-democrat and more to a figure concerned with alerting us to the ‘casual cruelty of our prejudices’.Footnote 64
Why Lippmann matters for IR
Given the approaching centenary of Public Opinion a return to Lippmann might be seen as luxury we can hardly afford given the pressing problems of the present. This would be a mistake. The value of disciplinary history matters for several reasons: forgotten thinkers can be gleaned for lost insights; historical myths risk distorting intellectual debates; appreciating the historical context of disciplinary ideas is important for understanding how they operate in the present; and, finally, a more fulsome history can allow for a more critical consideration of the present.Footnote 65 One can add to these justifications the argument that disciplinary myths often play an important ‘legitimating function’ within the discipline.Footnote 66 It is through myths that we define what counts as progress, what counts as a dead end, and where the future of the discipline ought to reside.
Informed by these arguments, I see two distinct reasons for returning to Lippmann. First, he played an important role in the early constitution of IR by exercising a palpable influence on key disciplinary figures. This history undercuts the view that emotions are a new frontier of IR scholarship, and leads to a more complicated and provocative history. Second, one of the core values of Lippmann's work is in how it elevates the relationship between democracy and emotion as a central concern for international theory. In framing this relationship as crucial for a democracy's capacity to engage internationally, he raises a series of important questions surrounding disinformation, the unintended consequences of symbols, and responsibility for the emotional vicissitudes of the democratic public.
Challenging disciplinary myths
Few texts have been as misrepresented and misunderstood as Norman Angell's 1911 The Great Illusion. Although the outbreak of the First World War initially appeared to challenge his argument that the economic benefits of war were illusory, a wave of revisionist history has shown he was far from the ‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’ he is often caricatured as.Footnote 67 What has received less attention, however, is how his ideas evolved in response to 1918 and how this evolution bears the marks of a subtle but important engagement with Lippmann's thinking. The two came into recurring contact as Angell joined the editorial board of The New Republic in 1915.Footnote 68 Hoping to leverage Angell's pacifist credentials, Lippmann would even persuade him to write an article to convince the magazine's readers of the need for America to enter the war. For Angell however, Lippmann's ideas on emotion and public opinion would offer important resources in constructing his own theory of the ‘public mind’.
Although psychological factors were never absent from Angell's work,Footnote 69 in the wake of 1918 they took on a far greater urgency as he turned to nationalism, the news media, and the public mind to explain the outbreak of war. For Angell, the public mind represented the ‘collective thinking that produced public opinion and commonly accepted belief systems’.Footnote 70 Writing in The Press and the Organisation of Society – a book which approvingly cites Lippmann's earlier criticisms of the media Footnote 71 – Angell frames the problem of the public mind in a familiar way: ‘In a civilization increasingly complex and difficult to manage… newspapers are compelled for the profits… to appeal to the most easily aroused interests of readers; to pander to the instincts and emotions that can be most rapidly excited and to “first” instead of the “second” thought’.Footnote 72 Like Lippmann, Angell believed the growing complexity of the modern world left the public with only a partial picture of events. And, like Lippmann, Angell argued that this created a reliance on media institutions leaving the public vulnerable to the emotional resonances of nationalist propaganda.
This argument reached its fullest expression in Angell's 1927 The Public Mind. In many ways this book parallels Lippmann's earlier Public Opinion and its focus on the relationship between democracy, emotion, and foreign policy. Like Lippmann, Angell was deeply disillusioned with the performance of democracies during the First World War and attempted to reconcile his democratic priors with ‘the fact that the voice of the people is usually the voice of Satan’.Footnote 73 And, like Lippmann, Angell believed that the source of this problem was a propaganda which worked ‘to make us hate the enemy’ and left the public ‘consumed with a blazing passion for retaliation’.Footnote 74 Angell's Public Mind even contains a similar call for public education and impartial expertise – a point on which he directly cites Lippmann's Public Opinion as an ‘admirable and authoritative’ book which ‘should be studied by all interested in the discussion’.Footnote 75 This similarity, however, was not lost on critics. Public Mind was criticized for lacking the ‘incisive and pioneering quality’ of Lippmann's original work.Footnote 76 It would be a mistake, however, to treat Angell as a pale imitator of Lippmann – for all its faults Public Mind was a sophisticated reckoning with the role of emotion in liberal international theory in the wake of the First World War. Yet, it is a reckoning which may have looked very different had it not been for the influence of Lippmann.
Although Lippmann's ideas were influential in the 1920s, their significance for IR scholars would not become fully apparent until the middle of the 20th century. This was a period of intense debate among IR scholars over the nature and purpose of the field and its relationship to science. A key reference point in this history is the events surrounding the 1954 Rockefeller conference on IR theory. In Guilhot's provocative telling the conference represented a meeting of intellectual dissidents – mostly realists – concerned with the creeping influence of behaviouralism, scientific rationalism, and the need to carve out a distinctive space for IR theory.Footnote 77 For these dissidents the problem with the scientific rationalism which dominated postwar social science was that it assumed politics was entirely rational and that ‘irrational elements such as psychological drives, charisma, or a deep seated libido dominandi’ could be excluded.Footnote 78 Hans Morgenthau, a key representative of this view, put the critique more pointedly: ‘the fallacy of the rationalistic conception of man…[is] its depreciation of, if not its complete disregard for, the spiritual and emotional aspects of human life’.Footnote 79 What was at stake for these dissidents was a narrowed view of political subjectivity which excluded the emotional dimensions of politics and risked repeating the utopianism of the interwar period.Footnote 80
The sources of this intellectual moment are complex, as were the aims of its participants.Footnote 81 Yet, not only was Lippmann present at the 1954 conference, he had a direct influence on key participants. Morgenthau maintained a longstanding intellectual friendship with Lippmann, writing to him in 1950 to praise his ‘public spirit, courage and insight, which will assure you a place in history as one of the great mentors of our time, regardless of whether your advice is heeded or not’.Footnote 82 When Lippmann wrote The Public Philosophy,Footnote 83 a book which deepened and expanded on the critique of democracy in Public Opinion, Morgenthau largely praised the book and agreed with its conclusion that democratic governments are often vulnerable to paralysis.Footnote 84
Perhaps, the strongest indication of Lippmann's influence appears directly in Morgenthau's work. In what he praises as a ‘brilliant analysis’, Morgenthau cites an extended passage of Public Opinion to explain how nationalism presented a barrier to the realization of Woodrow Wilson's peace plan:
It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on a program… The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a common emotion…As public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private meanings are given universal application.Footnote 85
Collective enthusiasm surrounding the Fourteen Points helped rally despondent allies in the final days of the war, but it also masked key differences in interpretation. Later, in the final pages of Politics Among Nations, Morgenthau returns to these themes in a way which unmistakably resonates with Lippmann:
the rational requirements of good foreign policy cannot from the outset count upon the support of a public opinion whose preferences are emotional rather than rational… The statesmen, then, is allowed neither to surrender to popular passions nor disregard them. He must strike a prudent balance between adapting himself to them and marshalling them to support his own policies.Footnote 86
To be clear, Morgenthau did not need Lippmann to convince him of the importance of emotion or the volatility of democratic regimes. His own thinking entailed a sophisticated account of psychological drives,Footnote 87 and his troubling experience with Weimar democracy left him sensitive to democratic volatility.Footnote 88 Yet, the language of ‘public opinion’ and ‘emotion’ gave him a familiar and distinctly American vocabulary to frame his concerns.
Beyond Morgenthau Lippmann's influence on other key disciplinary figures is palpable. In 1930 Reinhold Niebuhr reviewed Lippmann's A Preface to Morals,Footnote 89 a book in which he argued that the ‘acids of modernity’ had eroded traditional forms of authority and created moral uncertainty. Niebuhr was taken with the book's diagnosis: ‘No one has made a better analysis of the moral confusion of our day than does Mr. Lippmann’.Footnote 90 Yet, he ultimately remained unconvinced by the book's prescription to cultivate a disinterested rationalism as the basis of a new humanist morality. Niebuhr saw this as an ironically unrealistic effort to tame humanity's passions: ‘Mr. Lippmann thinks these powerful men can bring their expansive desires under rational control. Perhaps a few of them will. But most of them can't’.Footnote 91 The same qualified embrace is visible in Niebuhr's review of The Public Philosophy. On the one hand, Niebuhr praised the book for offering a ‘scorching indictment of the foreign policies of democracies [that] is too close to the facts of history to be refuted’.Footnote 92 On the other hand, he was deeply critical of the book's call for a more powerful executive and return to natural law. The first risked turning to a ‘cure… more dangerous than the disease’. The second ignored how democracies, ‘despite their great blunders in foreign policies’, have proven capable of generating stable social order by ‘gradually shifting the equilibrium of power’ in ways that blunted the threat of ‘revolutionary resentments’.Footnote 93
In 1959 Niebuhr would return to these tensions when he contributed to an edited volume on Lippmann's career.Footnote 94 In his essay, Niebuhr praised Lippmann as ‘one of the great educators’ who was preparing the United States to ‘assume responsibilities commensurate with its power and to exercise them without too much self-righteousness’.Footnote 95 He reiterated his objection to Lippmann's call for a stronger executive and turn to natural law – both crucial sticking points for Niebuhr. But, on the balance he saw Lippmann as giving ‘a vivid analysis of the weaknesses of democratic foreign policy’, one which recognized that ‘passions’ aroused in a democracy often led to ‘a vindictiveness, which makes a stable or decent peace impossible’.Footnote 96 When asked in personal correspondence why he had given Lippmann's The Public Philosophy such a favourable review, Niebuhr gave a revealing answer:
… if it had been anybody else but Walter Lippmann I would have reviewed it more severely… I didn't, at least consciously, go easy on Walter Lippmann because of his reputation. My inhibitions were due to the fact that I met him personally for the first time last year, that he was very kind to me, and that we found ourselves in agreement on many foreign policy questions. So I pulled my punches.Footnote 97
Niebuhr had enduring reservations about Lippmann's ideas, but that he tempered his criticism speaks to the value he saw in the latter's analysis of democracy and foreign policy.
For other IR scholars, Lippmann represents a key critic of democratic foreign policy who demands refutation. As Williams argues,Footnote 98 this is the role Lippmann plays in Kenneth Waltz's lesser known 1967 book Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics. In this book, Waltz takes issue with how ‘the foreign-policy capabilities of democratic states are unduly disparaged’,Footnote 99 a charge he sees as exemplified by figures like Lippmann:
Mr. Lippmann is a democratic skeptic who doubts the values and virtues of a general and active popular control, especially in foreign policy… His criticism of democratic foreign policy, in The Public Philosophy, joins hands with an enduring aristocratic distrust of mass electorates. One wonders, however whether he has correctly described the workings of democracy.Footnote 100
To be clear, Waltz never offers a wholesale refutation of Lippmann's critique. He understands, and even appears to accept that ‘[t]he public reaction to complicated international events is often unpredictable; feelings, whether of patriotism or fear, supplant reason and produce a response based on moods of the moment rather than on solid and sensible analyses’.Footnote 101 He even sounds sympathetic to how figures like Lippmann were ‘[h]aunted by the memory of the democracies’ failures in the 1930s.Footnote 102 Yet, for Waltz this depiction of democratic foreign policy-making is incomplete. It ignores how the habits and institutions of different political systems, and especially the American presidential system, combine with the pressures of bipolarity to create a more temperate and sensible foreign policy.Footnote 103 Contra critics like Lippmann, Waltz believed: ‘The judgement should be reversed. American institutions facilitate rather than discourage the quick identification of problems, the pragmatic quest for solutions, the ready confrontation of dangers, the willing expenditure of energies, and the open criticism of policies’.Footnote 104 This conclusion for Waltz is key because it shows that western democracies are ‘well able to compete with authoritarian states’ in foreign policy even if encumbered by the problems Lippmann identifies.Footnote 105
Apprehending this context is crucial, Williams argues,Footnote 106 because it helps us understand the evolution of Waltz's critique of first- and second-image theorizing, along with the development of a third-image systemic theory. Here, Waltz's attempt to develop a systemic theory of international politics is not simply a distinct theoretical project, but also as part of an explicitly political response aimed at blunting the challenges to a democratic foreign policy raised by Lippmann and his contemporaries.Footnote 107 Put simply, if human nature and regime type matters less than the shaping forces of anarchy and the distribution of power, then the problems raised by critics like Lippmann become far less significant.Footnote 108 Bessner and Guilhot support this view, arguing that Waltz fundamentally accepted the idea of ‘democratic publics’ irrationality’, but at the same time he hoped to escape the ‘anti-democratic implications of this critique’.Footnote 109 Waltz's Theory of International Politics helped to achieve this by showing how anarchy leads to systemic pressures which compel all states – including democracies – to act in a similar manner.
Lippmann's critique of democracy and foreign policy then had a far-reaching impact on 20th century international theory. Recovering this history matters because it punctures the myth that ‘until recently, International Relations scholars have turned a stubborn blind eye to the nature and role of emotions in world politics’.Footnote 110 The more interesting question then becomes what relevance do Lippmann's ideas hold for today?
Democracy, emotion, and international theory
International theory has been curiously silent on the relationship between democracy and emotion. Although studies have focused on the emotions of elite decision-makers,Footnote 111 groups,Footnote 112 as well as the entanglement of emotion and discourse,Footnote 113 and each of these intersects with democratic politics in different ways, only rarely is democracy taken as an explicit object of consideration. This silence is puzzling because democracies – and the United States in particular – overwhelmingly form the backdrop for the theoretical and empirical study of emotion in IR. In this sense, democracy often serves as the unacknowledged background against which the connections between ‘emotion’ and the ‘international’ are theorized. This silence is also puzzling given how long democracy has been a central interest of international theory, both in democratic peace theory and beyond. Thus, although the emotion turn has long promised added insight and innovation in international theory, it has said surprisingly little about one of its foremost concerns.
Here, the value of Lippmann is in his framing of the relationship between democracy and emotion as a vital concern for international theory. Contrary to popular caricature, his view is not that democratic publics are simply irrational. Instead, democracy appears as a form of mass politics challenged by the growing complexity of modernity. Collective or group emotions are central to this view, but they are shaped by the uniquely democratic context of increasingly large and heterogenous groups, relative openness to symbolic innovation, and the increasing uncertainty generated by the complexity of modernity and the erosion of traditional forms of authority.Footnote 114 In this context, the decisive collective action needed for a democracy to engage in the world – especially in matters of war and peace – hinges on collective mobilization through the careful management of emotional symbols and stereotypes. Yet, the misuse and abuse of these symbols can leave democratic publics ‘too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in times of war’.Footnote 115 Worse yet, internal struggles over these symbols risks incapacitating the country and leaving any international engagement impossible. When viewed from this lens three key problems come into sharper focus: disinformation, the unintended consequences of symbols, and the challenge of responsibility.
Although the problems of disinformation, propaganda, and post-truth politics have recently attracted growing attention among international theorists,Footnote 116 these issues reflect long-standing concerns in Lippmann's reading of democracy. Limited space prevents a full examination of his thinking on these issues, but it is possible to highlight three specific themes. First, Lippmann would object to characterizing disinformation as simply cognitively cold ‘data or knowledge’ designed to mislead the public.Footnote 117 Disinformation is often more than just misleading facts; it also reflects the savvy deployment of emotional imagery, stereotypes, and symbols with the potential to unify (or divide) the public in service of parochial interests. In an intriguing alignment with recent critical, feminist, and post-structural arguments,Footnote 118 Lippmann would see any attempt to frame disinformation as merely a problem of the existing ‘information order’ as fundamentally incomplete.Footnote 119 Not only does this elide disinformation's emotional and affective elements which are often central to its success, it risks understating the resistance of disinformation to simple fact-checking and education. For Lippmann, this resistance stems from how emotional stereotypes and symbols often become crucial parts of our subjectivity as they help us manage the confusion of our daily lives. As the ‘fortress[es] of our tradition’ where ‘we can continue to feel safe in’, any attack on them feels ‘like an attack on the foundations of the universe’.Footnote 120 Simply treating disinformation as misleading data to be corrected risks misapprehending the origins of this resistance.
Second, for Lippmann episodes of disinformation are the norm rather than the exception. Contra the prevailing liberal view where mature democracies enjoy a robust marketplace of ideas to weed out ‘unfounded, mendacious, or self-serving’ arguments,Footnote 121 Lippmann's democratic realism sees attempts to distort, deceive, and conceal in ways that appeal to popular prejudices as recurring features of democracy. More often than not opposing views are denied a fair hearing and subjected to vilification and conspiracy theories:
Out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies. If prices go up unmercifully the profiteers have conspired; if the newspapers misrepresent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too rich, they have been stealing; if a closely fought election is lost, the electorate was corrupted; if a statesman does something of which you disapprove, he has been bought or influenced by some discreditable person.Footnote 122
From this perspective, contemporary events like Russian disinformation campaigns, President Trump's allegations of fraud over the 2020 election, and transnational conspiracies theories like Qanon are not unique anomalies from an otherwise well-functioning marketplace of ideas. They represent predictable, albeit extreme manifestations of tendencies Lippmann saw as central to the democratic experience. Finally, Lippmann would likely object to the idea that disinformation is tied to the emergence of a new ‘post-truth age’. Although the technology and actors have certainly changed, many of the features commonly ascribed to post-truth politics – the egregious lies by political figures, the low value of truth, the favouring of emotion over reasonFootnote 123 – would be eminently recognizable to Lippmann when he was writing Public Opinion a century ago. In others words, the presence of emotional symbols in our politics is not the effect of some atavistic post-truth age eclipsing some bygone age of reason.Footnote 124 Rather, it comes as result of a people grasping for a common lodestone when confronted with the blooming, buzzing confusion of modernity.
Lippmann's concern, however, was not simply that disinformation and conspiracy theories were recurring features of democratic politics, but that their use of symbols could have unintended consequences that rippled into the field of foreign policy. Here, his thinking intersects with a growing body of research in international theory exploring the links between symbols, emotion, and collective mobilization.Footnote 125 Hall and Ross, for example, argue that 9/11 generated a high-intensity ‘affective wave’ – a range of fear, sadness, and anger – which created a unique ‘political window’ that allowed American officials to strategically mobilize the public in support of the war in Iraq.Footnote 126 Lippmann would not disagree with this reasoning, but he would add that such symbolic strategies inevitably create perverse and unintended consequences. This argument stems from his tragic view of the First World War. With the American public at first indifferent to the conflict in 1914, leaders relied on propaganda to mobilize popular support. Here, the ‘inertia’ of indifference could not be overcome until the public had been ‘frightened by the opening disasters, had been incited to passionate hatred, and had become intoxicated with unlimited hope’.Footnote 127 Yet by 1918 these same popular feelings severely circumscribed the government's freedom of action in the peace process: ‘As a result of this impassioned nonsense public opinion became so envenomed that the people could not countenance a workable peace; they were against any public man who showed “any tenderness to the Hun”’.Footnote 128 The lesson for Lippmann was that control over symbols was always only partial and fleeting, and that the symbolic relationships invoked today could have unanticipated consequences tomorrow.
It is not difficult to see how Lippmann's concern with the unintended consequences of symbols resonates with contemporary experience. Both the Bush and Obama administrations relied on the symbolism of ‘justice’ and ‘right’ to legitimize the war in Afghanistan,Footnote 129 while broader American institutions symbolized terrorists as unremittingly ‘evil’.Footnote 130 Now, after two decades of war, the result is an impossible impasse: the United States has no hope of winning but any attempt to withdraw is threatened by recriminations of surrender and betrayal. This not only raises the political costs of ending the war, it creates a series of anxieties over emotional experiences which were promised and never delivered. Using the Lacanian language, the symbols of ‘justice’ and ‘right’ served as sites of ‘affective investment’ which appealed to the American public precisely because they offered a sense of wholeness and completion, particularly after the experience of ‘injustice’ and ‘wickedness’ on 9/11.Footnote 131 Now, with victory more elusive than ever and mounting evidence of civilian casualties and war crimes,Footnote 132 it has become impossible to reconcile the war with its original animating symbols. The outcome of this cascading failure, as Subotic and Steele aptly describe, is an acute sense of ‘moral injury’.Footnote 133 Bereft of any clear sense of victory, the United States now faces a growing feelings of ethical anxiety and a loss of control, both of which have fuelled the rise of a ‘dominance politics’ where the United States lashes out at the international community in order to ‘avoid future humiliations’.Footnote 134
Nor is it difficult to see how Lippmann's concern with the unintended consequences of symbols resonates with the contemporary global pandemic. Throughout the pandemic a range of public figures have turned to the symbolism of ‘war’ and ‘sacrifice’ in managing the response. This makes sense as a strategy of collective mobilization in the face of an unprecedented pandemic, but it has also given rise to a series of perverse consequences. For one, a war metaphor demands the existence of an enemy and in many cases a virus is too abstract to qualify. In response the virus becomes personified by fusing it with a particular group, a process aided and abetted by existing stereotypes and prejudices. The result has been a surge of anti-Asian racism, violence, and xenophobia around the world.Footnote 135 Equally problematic is how this symbolism can create expectations of a clear and decisive victory just over the horizon. For countries like the United States where victory in war forms an integral part of national identity,Footnote 136 the high death toll and compounding political failures may point to a more humiliating and traumatizing Vietnam-style defeat. Finally, officials calling for both personal and collective sacrifice have become a ubiquitous feature of the global pandemic.Footnote 137 Yet, the invocation of sacrifice can generate intense resentment and charges of hypocrisy when public officials break travel restrictions for personal reasons or fail to abide by basic masking and social distancing protocols.Footnote 138 The result is an erosion of public trust at a time when it is most needed.
These recurring connections between the choice to invoke particular symbols and the sometimes catastrophic consequences that follow makes questions of responsibility a central theme in Lippmann's analysis of democracy. The issue of responsibility, however, has received comparatively little attention in the emotions literature in IR. One exception is Fierke's discussion of intentionality and emotion.Footnote 139 Emphasizing the relationality of emotion and intention, she argues that ‘the intention expressed through action shapes the emotional response of various audiences, rather than the intent of the agent per se’.Footnote 140 Although responsibility is not explicitly mentioned, the implication is that political agents can be responsible for eliciting specific emotional responses because of the intentions attributed to their actions in a distinct context – such as the intention attributed to President Trump by African leaders when he described their countries as ‘shitholes’. Another key exception is in Head's discussion of the ambivalence of emotions for political responsibility.Footnote 141 Head argues that emotional encounters with suffering – such as slavery – can dissolve traditional divides between the public and private and expose how we are implicated in broader patterns of structural injustice. Yet, the effects of this encounter are fundamentally ambivalent. In some cases it can engender a sentimental ‘pity’ characterized by ‘passive or short-term engagement,’ and the absence of political action.Footnote 142 In others it can lead to a ‘testimonial empathy’ characterized by a more ‘radical reflexivity’ and sustained political action.Footnote 143 Lippmann would likely agree that emotions play a role in stimulating responsible political action, especially as he saw democracies suffering from recurring bouts of indifference. Yet, his concern was focused on different question: which institutions and actors can be understood as responsible for the democratic public's emotional excesses?
On this question Lippmann's thinking is complicated and evolving. In the immediate wake of the First World War responsibility for the public's intemperance is placed with news media and journalists. Saturated with racial prejudice and jingoism, Lippmann saw journalism as facing little accountability:
If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor's cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers involving a matter of war and peace, I can lie my head off, and… be entirely irresponsible. Nobody will punish me if I lie about Japan, for example. I can announce that every Japanese valet is a reservist, and every Japanese art store a mobilization center. I am immune… If I asserted that the Japanese secretly drank the blood of children, that Japanese women were unchaste, that the Japanese were really not a branch of the human race after all, I guarantee that most of the newspapers would print it eagerly, and that I could get a hearing in churches all over the country.Footnote 144
Yet, by the time he wrote Public Opinion in 1922 his understanding of responsibility becomes much more diffuse. Stereotypes, prejudices, and symbols did not only come from news media, but also from local ‘political habits’ derived from family, education, church, and our contact with the broader ‘moral codes’ of society.Footnote 145 They increasingly come from film as well as official propaganda organs like George Creel's Committee on Public Information.Footnote 146 They come from political organizations, parties, and even militant groups like the Klu Klux Klan – whom Lippmann described as ‘[selling] hate on a country wide scale’.Footnote 147 Even the general public itself bears some responsibility as the appetite for distraction leaves them disinterested in examining their own prejudices.Footnote 148 Later, he explicitly includes democratic politicians: perennially uncertain of their position, they worked to ‘placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise managed to manipulate’ their constituencies.Footnote 149 Ultimately, Lippmann's answer to this problem of diffuse responsibility was a revitalization of a ‘tradition of civility’ anchored in natural law.Footnote 150 Severed from the experimentalism and pluralism of his earlier pragmatism, Lippmann hoped this inchoate set of principles – rational inquiry, consensus, toleration, and qualified dissent – would serve as a bulwark against democracy's worst excesses.
Lippmann's solution generated widespread scepticism, including Niebuhr's criticism of its questionable turn to natural law discussed above. But, what likely matters more for contemporary scholars is his attempt at diagnosis. The question of who or what could be held responsible for the emotional vicissitudes of the democratic public matters, and it matters regardless of whether one views collective emotions as the result of a particular social identity,Footnote 151 efforts at institutionalization,Footnote 152 practices of representation,Footnote 153 or exposure to affect-inducing stories and practices.Footnote 154 The vital importance of this question only increases when public feeling turns destructive and violent, as Lippmann often believed it could. In this sense, the question of whether President Trump can be held accountable for inciting the 6th January insurrection – an attack in which the majority of the United States' civilian leadership narrowly escaped being captured or killed – is not simply matter of criminal responsibility.Footnote 155 It speaks to the broader challenge of collective political responsibility in moderating the passions of the democratic public, especially when the sources of popular feeling are so diffuse. How can a political community have accountability for rumours of satanism and paedophilia in an opposition party? For conspiracy theories portraying elected officials as at war with a shadowy ‘deep state’? For fantasies that a political utopia lies just beyond one violent, apocalyptic struggle?Footnote 156 Here, Lippmann's greatest significance for contemporary IR may be in his call for an urgent and careful interrogation of the responsibility for the passions of the democratic public.
Conclusion
Disciplinary history has a powerful role in framing the purpose and purchase of scholarship. Although IR scholars often invoke the language of a ‘turn’ to frame emotions research as novel and innovative, the revisionist history offered here suggests that, in some ways, it is a return to a concern with emotions and mass politics that began in the interwar period. In this context, a return to Lippmann's legacy shows us two things. First, it shows how his thinking about emotions and mass politics formed an important backdrop for key figures like Angell, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Waltz, and thus influenced the early constitution of disciplinary IR. This does not mean we need to abandon the language of an ‘emotion turn’ which still serves as a useful shorthand for describing recent disciplinary developments. But, it does mean we should exercise greater caution in the kinds of historical vignettes we deploy in framing our research as novel and innovative. Second, it shows why the relationship between emotion and democracy should be understood as a vital concern for international theory. Radiating with scepticism, but also buoyed with hope for rehabilitation, Lippmann's unique view of democracy foregrounds a series of problems – the challenge disinformation, symbols and their unintended consequences, and how to engender responsibility for the passions of the democratic public – which have an eerily grim resonance with the present. Before setting themselves on these problems anew, scholars may find it useful to learn how they were understood in the past.
Any return to Lippmann, however, should also not overlook the problems with his thinking. Elements of his psychology, including his often simplistic dichotomy of reason and emotion, are significantly dated.Footnote 157 His analysis of public emotions often imposes stable and coherent emotion categories (e.g. fear and anger) in the place of what are often more messy and diverse affective experiences.Footnote 158 His writing is deeply gendered and his support for policies like Japanese internment during the Second World War suggest that he succumbed to some of the same racial prejudices he hoped to criticize.Footnote 159 More generally, there are deep tensions and contradictions within his thinking. The opening chapters of Public Opinion position emotional stereotypes as unavoidable and necessary features of social life, yet in subsequent passages he treats them as contagious pathologies to be corrected. For Lippmann ‘[t]he passions were not the basis of a rich human life but an ancient, animal substratum to be domesticated’.Footnote 160 This leads to deeply anti-humanist account where emotions are seen in almost exclusively negative terms.Footnote 161 Absent from this picture is a discussion of how to cultivate emotions conducive to social order at home and restraint abroad.
Finally, the recovery of Lippmann's legacy here raises important questions over which other historical figures have been passed over by the emotion turn. How have other scholars of propaganda – such as Theodor Adorno, Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, as well as Alexander and Juliette George – influenced early thinking about emotions in international theory? Similarly, Angell's connections to Lippmann show he was interested in collective emotions, especially as a way to understand the forces of nationalism in the wake of 1918. In this sense, there is an intriguing symmetry to be explored between the failure of Angell's interdependence theory to account for bellicose nationalism and the failure of contemporary interdependence theory to account for populist backlash against globalization. Similar connections exist between Lippmann and Niebuhr, even though they disagreed on key issues. Although recent studies have drawn attention to a range of emotive themes in Niebuhr's work including love, cruelty, and racism,Footnote 162 he remains an under-appreciated figure within the emotion turn.Footnote 163 Beyond these mainstream figures, however, which other historical voices – including critical, feminist, and non-western voices – have been passed over by the emotion turn, and how might their ideas speak to the present?
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Simon Koschut, Andrew A.G. Ross, audiences from ISA and ISA-Northeast Conferences, three anonymous reviewers, as well as the editors for their thoughtful comments and helpful feedback.
