ABSTRACT
The 1920s were frenetic and confusing years for most Americans, but for Walter Lippmann a time of consolidation and achievement. He had put his iconoclasm, along with his brief experiment in political radicalism, behind him. He had become an influential person. A conservative, by contrast, was wedded to the structures of his life: family, church, nation. Lippmann was not suggesting a return to the church, nor a submersion into the authority of the secular state. Both had lost their authority. Since modern man could not find security in institutions, he would have to look to himself — to adapt to the world as it was, and find in his own resources the means for dealing with it. He would have to stand back emotionally from it, become "disinterested". Lippmann had been impressed by Woodrow Wilson's observation that speculations on political philosophy were colored by whatever happened to be the prevailing view of the physical universe.
