The Man of the Liberal Consensus

Very short summary: This essay reflects, based on a recent biography, on the intellectual life of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann exemplified the post-WWII liberal consensus in all its diversity and contradictions. Lippmann twice confronted a crisis of liberal society in his career. His writings and career bear instructive lessons regarding how to address the current one.

Since the end of WWII, the Western world has broadly lived under what can be called a liberal consensus. At the global level, the liberal consensus takes the shape of a rule-based order where relations between countries are mediated through international institutions such as the UN, the WTO, or the IMF. This rule-based order consists of trade agreements, international treaties, and collective decision mechanisms aimed at fostering cooperation and containing the risk of conflict. At the national level, it translates into the principles and institutions of liberal democracy, as well as a range of acceptable public policies in the context of a market economy. Public officials’ decisions are supposed to reflect the majoritarian views of citizens, but this relationship is constrained by and channeled through constitutional safeguards that limit the risk of tyranny from the few as well as from the majority. Economic freedom is granted equal importance to civic and political freedom, which implies that the state’s economic role is necessarily limited.

It is no exaggeration to say that the liberal consensus is now under stress. At the global level, cooperation is increasingly difficult as some major countries now reject the principles of the rule-based order. In many countries, the idea that constitutional safeguards should limit the popular will is increasingly contested, and public policies that deliberately discriminate between people are being enacted. The contestation comes simultaneously from parts of the population who consider that liberal society has deprived them of their ability to control their own destiny and made their lives worse, and from political and economic elites who claim the people have been betrayed by those they call the “elite.”

This current crisis of the liberal consensus has some unique characteristics and origins that make it historically singular. But it’s not the first time in contemporary history that something similar has happened, as you will realize by examining at the life of the celebrated American writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). The new intellectual biography of Lippmann recently published by historian Tom Arnold-Forster offers the opportunity to (re)discover Lippmann’s career and ...