Volume 1, Number 3 · September 26, 1963
Parti Pris
By Richard H. Rovere
The Essential Lippmann
edited by Clinton Rossiter, edited by James Lare
Random House, 535 pp., $7.50
Walter Lippmann, the editors say, 'deserves to be ranked with such men as John Dewey, Thorsten Veblen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles A. Beard, H. L. Mencken, Eugene O'Neill, Robert Frost, Lewis Mumford, Roscoe Pound, and Reinhold Niebuhr as a major contributor to the American way of life and thought.' This may be one way of placing him, though it is not, I think, a very helpful one. For myself, I would bench some of these players and send in others—Mr. Justice Holmes, certainly, and Lippmann's old teacher Santayana, and, replacing Lewis Mumford at left tackle, Edmund Wilson. But this is playing the editors' game. They are determined to find chic companions for Lippmann. Locke and Hobbes and Mill are mentioned, along with Machiavelli and Rousseau, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Calhoun. Back among the quick, Lippmann is appointed chairman of a board of intellectual directors that includes David Riesman, Erich Fromm, Herbert Agar, Harold Lasswell, and a few others. A phantom board, thank God!
Review, 1230 words
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