Editor’s Remarks Mixing past and Future

Scholarly reputations that for a time seem unimpeachable now shrink or evaporate so speedily that ‘‘intergenerational’’ perceptions of whom to read will soon be measured in months rather than decades. As some theorists have begun to explain (e.g., Hassan 2012; Rosa 2013), to remain hip in any single intellectual or artistic field becomes ever more taxing, more and more breathless, with returns that seem weaker and less predictable than one might wish. Where to invest one’s time and energy for the purpose of edification becomes as tricky and unsettling as trusting hedge fund managers to grow one’s retirement savings. Who are the blue chip writers and thinkers with whom one can confidently spend those few hours per day, week, or month that can be wrested from the everyday duties of emailing, meetings, and online surfing? Whose stock holds its value? An expert in marriage and the family recently said to me, ‘‘Ernest Burgess wrote an early book about the family, and it’s humbling to examine it now, because he was doing all the stuff we continue to do, the correlations and so on, even if his methods were less fancy’’ (see Burgess and Locke 1945; 4th edition, 1971). So, does one burrow into what’s left of the library stacks to find Burgess’s 800-page textbook, or even Willard Waller’s related monographs from the 1930s, in order to limn the ground floor of family-oriented sociology? Or does one allow oneself to believe that the latest monograph subsumes these antique works, consigning them permanently to the airless forgetfulness of closed stacks? No-one can say with any authority; things are moving too fast to judge. Today the most visible ‘‘sociological imagination’’ in journalistic form seems to revolve around columnists of The New York Times, sometimes Paul Krugman, other times Maureen Dowd or their colleagues, but mostly David Brooks. His right-center cultural conservatism notwithstanding, Brooks regularly invokes social science research in his essays, and because of the internet, his version of what ‘‘we’’ are saying is very widely discussed. Widely, yes; how deeply remains the unanswerable question. Yet long before the ascension of globalized discourse, before the tyrannical computerization of consciousness had reached deep into our minds, prior to the nattering of tiny screens demanding perpetual attention, there was a journalist whose presence was so overwhelming for so long that he became indistinguishable from ‘‘what right-thinking people ought to think about important matters.’’ His name, of course, was Walter Lippmann. In 1943 James Thurber created a cartoon for The New Yorker showing a couple reading their morning newspaper, the woman saying to the man ‘‘Lippmann scares me this morning’’ (Steel 1981: 432ff). She was ‘‘scared’’ because Lippmann was famously trusted to tell the unpleasant truth, as a sociologist without portfolio, political scientist, moral philosopher, and presidential advisor. For decades he was the voice of apparent reason in the popular press—his audience numbered ten million of the savviest citizens—and his books were taken as seriously as any scholar’s, and far more widely read: ‘‘Walter Lippmann had left his fingerprints on, and even helped mold, almost every major issue in American life over six decades’’ (Steele 1980: xvii, xii). Yet he, too, has now become for most readers merely a somewhat notable name without content or any compulsion to consult. The fact that his books—most notably Public Opinion (1922), The Phantom Public (1925), A Preface to Morals (1929), and The Good Society (1937)—were universally read and respected, going through many printings and editions long after their first appearance, no longer seems to carry much weight. Even The Essential Lippmann (1963; 1982) is out of print. Were it not for Transaction Publishers reprinting his works ‘‘on demand,’’ Lippmann’s books would be hard to find except in vanishing American Sociological Association 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0094306113499137 http://cs.sagepub.com