Public Opinion

Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion begins with a startling premise: people do not live in direct contact with reality, but in the mental pictures they carry of it. From a story of islanders misreading the outbreak of World War I to historical examples of confident error, Lippmann shows how easily belief outruns fact and how ordinary life can continue inside a false world. He traces the same pattern through religion, exploration, war, and politics, arguing that people often mistake imagined versions of others for truth, and that even great figures are known less as themselves than as public constructions. In war, these images harden into myth, turning commanders like Joffre into heroes and enemies into demons, only to fade when the crisis passes. Lippmann calls these shifting mental models "fictions" or pseudo-realities: simplified maps that make social life possible but are always vulnerable to rumor, fear, and private fantasy. His political examples, from a Senate uproar over a false Adriatic rumor to Charles Evans Hughes's carefully coded campaign language, reveal a modern "Great Society" in which public opinion is formed at a distance, united by vague symbols, and often divided by the very words meant to reconcile it. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.