Walter Lippmann and George Santayana: A Shared Vision of Society and Public Opinion

Abstract

The philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann and his Harvard professor George Santayana hold a privileged position among twentieth century American thinkers, particularly within the tradition of questioning the role of the majority in democracy. While Lippmann is considered one of the fathers of the modern study of public opinion, the influence Santayana had in the shaping of Lippmann's ideas is often overlooked. The distinct and at times even antagonistic public personalities of the two men have worked to obscure the many convictions they in fact shared. This article investigates the influence Santayana had over Lippmann at Harvard between 1906 and 1910 and, more specifically, how Santayana's writing and thinking helped mold Lippmann's own notions of public opinion and society, ideas as pertinent today as they were almost a century ago. At first glance, the very different life choices of the two men could appear to contradict this thesis. The New York-born Lippmann (1889-1974) preferred a much more worldly lifestyle, pursuing social prominence through close relationships with politicians and the mass media. For decades he published a closely followed newspaper column called Today and Tomorrow in the Herald Tribune. The Spanish-American Santayana (1863-1952), in turn, lived an almost marginal existence at Harvard, embarking on few real friendships during his life and retiring early to travel and eventually settle in a Roman convent. Santayana's works are as difficult to classify as the man himself. A philosopher first and foremost, he also wrote poetry and novels, although he was not considered a master of either genre. His greatest talents lay precisely in those hard-to-categorize arts of the short essay, the critical review, and the purely theoretical digressions which pepper his writing (Savater 70). Nonetheless, the two men were both characterized by a deep-felt detachment from the world, an attitude seen in their self-defensive intellectualism, a tendency to distance themselves from those they disliked, and a manner of looking at the world without taking into account individual circumstances. This detachment was rooted in the inverted values of the historical times in which the two men lived, an era when productivity and quantity had replaced the once dominant cultural authority and values of the learned elite. In economics, commercialism had evolved into industrialism; in politics, direct democracy had been replaced by representative democracy; and in society, a mass culture had emerged. The irruption of the mass media at the end of the nineteenth century established new channels for the formation of public opinion beyond direct interaction. This led some thinkers, particularly in the burgeoning schools of social psychology and sociology, to begin conceiving the voice of the not as a morally rigid, rationally matured collective opinion but rather as a more random and individual phenomenon worthy of study via the newly crafted tool of polls. Lippmann was at the fore of this thinking as the first to question the Enlightenment belief that public opinion is based on a rational evaluation of public matters. Famously, in his 1922 tome Public Opinion, Lippmann coined the term stereotype to refer to the preconceptions, based on unexamined and a priori opinions, on which people base their judgments. Santayana's writing on the concept of public opinion is considerably less abundant and wellknown than that of Lippmann, yet here we will draw direct comparisons between Santayana's ideas on the subject and those of Lippmann. More generally speaking, the influence Santayana had on Lippmann was evident from their very first meeting in 1907, when the latter enrolled in an introductory Greek philosophy course taught by the Madrid-born professor. That same year Lippmann read Santayana's five-volume Life of Reason. Volume two of the series lays out Santayana's elitist ideas on good government, notions that coincide with the later thinking of the mature Lippmann. …