The starting point of Lippmann’s thinking, Arnold-Forster explains, was the concept of the “great society” developed by the progressive British social theorist Graham Wallas, who was a visiting scholar at Harvard in 1910, when Lippmann was a 21-year old undergraduate there. In his 1914 book The Great Society, which he dedicated to his former student, Wallas began with the observation that the modern world was “a radically new environment.” He attempted to apply the new insights of social psychology to the reality of the mass societies forged by the industrial revolution, characterized by “unequal social relations, a vertiginous increase in social scale, and structural psychologies of anxiety and unhappiness.” From his early dialogues with Wallas, Lippmann derived the central question which preoccupied him for the rest of his career: how the American ideal of self-government could be sustained in an increasingly complex, abstract, and fragmented society, in which people’s images of the world were mediated by technologies of mass communication.
This concern became more acute for Lippmann during World War I. In this period, he worked for The New Republic, which ended up serving as the unofficial propaganda apparatus of the Woodrow Wilson administration, and also briefly for Wilson’s War Department. In his 1920 book Liberty and the News, he reflected back on the implications of his experiences inside the state information apparatus, asking whether “government by consent [could] survive … in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise.” The quandary prompted Lippmann to develop the key concepts for which he is remembered: not just “stereotypes,” but “pseudo-environments,” his term for the composite mental pictures of the world held by individuals on the basis of direct experience, hearsay, and cultural beliefs, but also, increasingly, exposure to the burgeoning output of mass media and the stereotypes it disseminated.
The notion of public opinion had been a staple of democratic theory going back centuries, with Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, calling it “the dominant power” in a democracy. But Lippmann believed political theorists had remained trapped in a naive account of it rooted in the realities of a pre-industrial world that no longer existed. Under the conditions of Wallas’s “great society,” public opinion was no longer, so to speak, an organic product of the soil, but a mass-produced commodity, with state and private manufacturers vying for market share. At the same time, new questions had emerged about the value of public opinion amid the asymmetries of knowledge between the growing number of specialized experts on one hand and the broad citizenry on the other. This gap was the inevitable outcome of a basic feature of the industrialized world: the division of labor, which in separating people from each other for the sake of improved efficiency made it ever more difficult for them to speak to each other as fellow citizens.