ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the tradition by means of a sympathetic but critical examination of Walter Lippmann's Essays in the Public Philosophy, and a review of his other work as an outstanding twentieth-century democratic theorist. Walter Lippmann was born in 1889, in New York, where he grew up in a cultivated family of German-Jewish origin. His father was a prosperous clothing manufacturer who retired young; his mother was a university graduate. The public philosophy, which was the product and responsibility of participants in governmental and political life, on the one hand, and scholars, journalists and other intellectuals and concerned citizens on the other, mediated between political theory and political practice, and between the community and its political leaders. Lippmann combined flexibility on immediate issues with a consistency in his concerns and the principles he applied to them. A search for a mean also characterises Lippmanns writing on economic issues, especially those of capitalism versus socialism, and the market versus government control.
