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Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)
Born to a prosperous family in New York City, Lippmann studied philosophy and languages at Harvard. He became a journalist and in 1913 founded The New Republic with Herbert Croly. He aided Woodrow Wilson in his writing his Fourteen Points speech that outlined the principles of the Versailles Treaty, but criticized the president for his extensive censorship of the press during World War I.
Lippmann is best known for his critique of the contemporary news media as being too willing to accept what its sources said without subjecting it to critical analysis. He was also critical of the American public, which he saw as unintelligent and uniformed, and thus of little help in solving the problems facing the country. Lippmann preferred that government decisions be guided by a technocratic elite, but he drew the line at centralized economic planning, which he saw as inimical to both freedom and democracy.
Planning in an Economy of Abundance (1937)
As the Roosevelt administration transformed the US economy through adoption of various forms of public assistance, some advocated adopting centralized economic planning as a way of attaining prosperity for all. Lippmann acknowledged that such planning made sense during wartime, but criticized it in peacetime due to the widespread discretion that government officials would have in setting planning targets. Lippmann’s work thus presents a critique of a planned economy in peacetime as well as a justification for permitting such planning as a wartime emergency measure.
Although all the known examples of the species have had their origin in war or hold as their objective the preparation for war, it is widely believed that a collectivist order could be organized for peace and for plenty. “It is nonsense,” says Mr. George Soule, in A Planned Society, “to say that there is any physical impossibility of doing for peace purposes the sort of thing we actually did for war purposes.” If the state can organize for war, why can it not organize for peace and plenty? If it can mobilize against a foreign enemy, why not against poverty, squalor, and the hideous social evils that attend them?
It is plain enough that a dictated collectivism is necessary if a nation is to exert its maximum military power: very evidently its capital and labor must not be wasted on the making of luxuries; it can tolerate no effective dissent or admit that men have any right to the pursuit of private happiness. No one can dispute that. The waging of war must be authoritarian and collectivist. The question we must now consider is whether a system which is essential to the conduct of war can be adapted to the civilian ideal of peace and plenty. Can this form of organization, historically associated with military purposes and necessities, be used for the general improvement of men’s condition? It is a critical question. For in answering it we shall be making up our minds whether the hopes invested in the promises of the collec