Walter Lippmann: Free Collectivism!

Frumkina R.

Lippman Walter. Obshchestvennoe mnenie. Translated by T.B. Barchunova. Translation editors K.A. Levinson, K.V. Petrenko. Moscow: Institute of the Public Opinion Foundation, 2004. 384 pages.

I will begin my discussion of this book from the end. It is usually at the end that the reviewer describes a work's qualities: its style, the translation and its (and the translator's) relation to the original, to comments, references or lack thereof, etc. Walter Lippmann, a brilliant journalist, political philosopher and analyst, wrote this book in 1922, having retired to his Long Island house after exhausting and, in his view, ineffective work in Paris on a post-WWI political settlement.

The main theme of the book is the effectiveness and objectivity of information in a democratic society possessing freedom of the press and freedom of expression. The book was conceived as a reaction to the post-war situation and was intended for a wide audience of educated readers.

Imagine that you are translating from Russian into English (or any other language) texts that were topical in Russia in the late 1980s reflecting the accelerated march of time characteristic of that decade. Such texts might come, for example, from a Moscow Times article from the first years of Perestroika. If you were to translate such an article today, you would have to comment on almost every paragraph. Here's what we read in the paper: «So-and-so, the head of the commission for...» (what commission?); «this expression, to paraphrase Gorbachev's recent statement...» (what statement?); «Ilya Zaslavskiy (who's that?) disagrees with Gavriil Popov's speech at yesterday's rally» (where do I get the transcript of that speech?), and so on.

T.V. Barchunova, who translated Lippmann's book, not only produced an excellent translation, but made the extensive effort necessary to annotate the text, providing information on people and circumstances that Russian readers may not be familiar with (some notes were written by the editors). The book begins with the translator's preface, very informative and, in this case, quite indispensable, because (among other reasons) the very vocabulary of the American and European culture and politics of the 1920s (the attempted postwar settlement) is often unclear to us.

I remind you that, to my generation, which has witnessed the Second World War and the Cold War, Lippmann is a well-known American journalist who was continuously cursed and anathematized for decades on end. Yet his works were virtually inaccessible since they were kept in the spetskhran¹. This is in no way surprising: Lippmann's mindset was liberal, democratic and anti-statist, and totalitarian society was his archenemy.

Therefore it is no surprise that V.O. Pechatnov's doctoral thesis on Lippmann (published as a monograph: Pechatnov V.O. Walter Lippman i puti Ameriki. M.: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1994) saw the light before the translation of Public Opinion, Lippmann's first book. When writing the book, Lippmann was far from being a disinterested, observing academic; he was a practicing political expert prepared to fight for the sake of what he believed to be good for America and the world, which had still not recovered from World War.

Naturally, it is complicated to place Public Opinion in such a conceptual context, which would help understand why it is that today we read this book as a classic. Note that by referring to a text as a classic we fail to discuss the text itself, rather denoting its place in the structure of knowledge, or more specifically, the structure of a specific discipline. (In Lippmann's case, we should talk about several disciplines, see below.) When we say that a text is a classic, we don't mean the text as such, we refer to its functioning in the system of culture. As long as Public Opinion was only accessible to the Staraya Square bureaucrats (today's students ask what or who is meant by the latter) or the elite granted access to the spetskhran, this book could not become a classic as it was excluded from the cultural process.

Now we can but marvel at the fact that the first publication of Gabriel Tarde's book L'opinion et la Foule (Public Opinion and the Crowd, 1901) is separated from its Russian translation (1905) only by four years, while Lippmann's Public Opinion was awaited by Russian readers for 82 years.

Those reading Lippmann's book for the first time (apart from those who study America or the history of journalism) probably have no idea how significant and long-standing Lippmann's influence on the formation of public opinion was, both in the USA and elsewhere. Lippmann himself was highly critical of how well the manifestations of public opinion recorded by various methods reflected the real state of public conceptions and attitudes.

At the same time, he remained high-minded and clear-headed, which can be clearly seen in the book's section on stereotypes. Today, it can certainly seem to us that the author is too verbose, that his examples are too obvious, etc. But let us recall that forty years remained until mass polling came into use (it was considered to have begun in the 1960s) and that there was no television.

Lippmann's mindset has always been aimed at the possibility of harmoniously combining the interests of a free individual with those of the state. Lippmann thought that the government's inevitable intrusion into America's social and economic life during the First World War was an entirely temporary measure. From his point of view, even Roosevelt's New Deal was to be treated as an excessive state presence in the country's economy. Lippmann, as a true liberal, deemed it necessary to avoid as being extreme both a laissez faire policy and the centralization of power, while involving the government in the economic and social life. He referred to this direction as «free collectivism.»

These topics are the main object of analysis and discussion in Public Opinion. Yet, we need to understand Lippmann's belief system to appreciate his skepticism towards public opinion which, to a high degree, reduced itself to the reproduction of stereotypes dominant in society.

Here Lippmann proved to be an excellent social psychologist. In a certain sense, it can be stated that the subsequent research only confirmed his intuition regarding the human ability to perceive similarities and differences, form opinions and predilections, resist what at first glance seems self-evident, and so on.

Lippman's trust in man's primordial ability to make conscious choices looks extremely attractive. It combines with his sober evaluations regarding people's susceptibility to propaganda and the opinions of others, situational fears and apprehensions.

Most of us are not too familiar with the names of Lippmann's contemporaries, politicians and other public figures, and we would hardly understand examples from the First World War adduced by him to support one of his theses. However, let's not forget that those people were no less familiar to them than Margaret Thatcher and Saddam Hussein are to us, and that Lippmann's peers had fought on the Marne, survived gas attacks and dreamed of guarantees of peace. By the time he wrote this book, he had coauthored the famous «Fourteen Points», the American program of development in the post-war world.

There is a recent tendency in the history of science to consider not only the «ready-made» knowledge at a certain moment, but also the context behind the activity that led to its «creation». Reading Lippmann's book today, we should think about the world-wide scientific context in which this text was written. In Lippmann's youth, there was no such word as «interdisciplinary». But Public Opinion, as his other fairly well-known works on the history of sociology, is just that – an interdisciplinary work. It is for that very reason that his name is not found in Russian works on the history of sociology (which T.V. Barchunova mentions in the preface). In fact, what Lippmann was most concerned with, the conscious existence of informed people in a free democratic country, is an issue which cannot be formulated as within any strict boundaries of formerly established and currently collaborating disciplines.

Given the development of today's mass conscience and the growing danger that modern mass media will promote the influence of stereotypes, Lippman's book can doubtless be considered a very topical work.

¹ A secure room or section with restricted access, in which designated persons could read foreign material on issues deemed «sensitive» by Soviet authorities (translator's note).

To discuss »

Printer-friendly version