From Pragmatism to Natural Law

Abstract

When Walter Lippmann's Essays in The Public Philosophy appeared in 1955, it arrived on the American intellectual scene at a time when authors of various philosophical and ideological persuasion were making claims on the political soul of Western civilization. Two years earlier, at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss wrote Natural Right and History to insist that the classical values of his beloved ancient world offered the best hope of saving the modern world from relativism. At the same time, and at exactly the same institution, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote The Genius of American Politics to make the opposite case. America, Boorstin held, needs neither abstract philosophy nor absolute values or any kind of theory that would give priority to thought over action. What Americans do in their daily life requires no mediation of concepts, principles, doctrines, and, above all, ideology, the curse of the Old World. Lippmann's move to natural law was closer to Strauss's idea of natural right than to Boorstin's claim that American experience triumphs over all dogma. With the classical scholar Lippmann saw the contemporary world suffering from too much experimentation and mindless process and not enough direction and conscious purpose. Reflecting, as did Strauss's work, the threat of mass politics, Lippmann's book represented the conservative culmination of years of searching for radical and liberal solutions to the dilemmas of modernity.