Science and Anarchy

Of many young Americans still moved by Dover Beach in early twentieth century, none was more adamantly and publicly opposed to nostalgia and traditionalism of Matthew Arnold than was Walter Lippmann. In Drift and Mastery, Lippmann condescendingly declared inherited culture so moribund that additional attacks on it would be arcane. Yet even in this book of 1914 Lippmann soberly endorsed Arnold's vision of ignorant armies, and his lament for lost certitude. The tradition-affirming remedies proposed by Arnold and by his more fanatically neoclassical American followers, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, were altogether academic, Lippmann believed, but their diagnosis does locate spiritual problem: loss of authority (111, 119).1 Lippmann's answer, mastery he prescribed, was adherence to most thoroughly modern yet potentially authoritative thing he could think of: the discipline of science. To recognize that Lippmann meant by drift many of same things Arnold denounced as anarchy, and that he saw in science many of same capabilities Arnold assigned to culture, is to suspect immediately that Lippmann, like so many other progressives, partook of historians' favorite syndrome from period, conservative use of an allegedly liberal program in seeking social control and consolidation of American

Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · American Literature and Culture · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Philosophy

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