Shared Vision of Society and Public Opinion  Ce sar Garca

183

Walter Lippmann and George Santayana: A Shared Vision of Society and Public Opinion
Ce sar Garca
The philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann and his Harvard professor George Santayana hold a privileged position among twentieth century American thinkers, particularly within the tradition of questioning the role of the majority in democracy. While Lippmann is considered one of the fathers of the modern study of public opinion, the inuence Santayana had in the shaping of Lippmanns ideas is often overlooked. The distinct and at times even antagonistic public personalities of the two men have worked to obscure the many convictions they in fact shared. This article investigates the inuence Santayana had over Lippmann at Harvard between 1906 and 1910 and, more specifically, how Santayanas writing and thinking helped mold Lippmanns own notions of public opinion and society, ideas as pertinent today as they were almost a century ago. At rst glance, the very different life choices of the two men could appear to contradict this thesis. The New York-born Lippmann (18891974) preferred a much more worldly lifestyle, pursuing social prominence through close relationships with politicians and the mass media. For decades he published a closely followed newspaper column called Today and Tomorrow in the Herald Tribune. The Spanish-American Santayana (1863 1952), in turn, lived an almost marginal existence at Harvard, embarking on few real friendships during his life and retiring early to travel and eventually settle in a Roman convent. Santayanas works are as difcult to classify as the man himself. A philosopher rst and foremost, he also wrote poetry and novels, although he was not considered a master of either genre. His greatest talents lay precisely in those hard-to-categorize arts of the short essay, the critical review, and the purely theoretical digressions which pepper his writing (Savater 70). Nonetheless, the two men were both characterized by a deep-felt detachment from the world, an attitude seen in their self-defensive intellectualism, a tendency to distance themselves from those they disliked, and a manner of looking at the world without taking into account individual circumstances. This detachment was rooted in the inverted values of the historical times in which the two men lived, an era when productivity and quantity had replaced the once dominant cultural authority and values of the learned elite. In economics, commercialism had evolved into industrialism; in politics, direct democracy had been replaced by representative democracy; and in society, a mass culture had emerged. The irruption of the mass media at the end of the nineteenth century established new channels

Cesar Garca is assistant professor in the department of English and communication at Saint Louis University (Madrid Campus). This article is extracted from his dissertation, Public Opinion and Press in the United States: The View of Spanish Intellectuals from 1885 to 1936.
The Journal of American Culture, 29:2 r2006, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation r2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

184

The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006

for the formation of public opinion beyond direct interaction. This led some thinkers, particularly in the burgeoning schools of social psychology and sociology, to begin conceiving the voice of the people not as a morally rigid, rationally matured collective opinion but rather as a more random and individual phenomenon worthy of study via the newly crafted tool of polls. Lippmann was at the fore of this thinking as the rst to question the Enlightenment belief that public opinion is based on a rational evaluation of public matters. Famously, in his 1922 tome Public Opinion, Lippmann coined the term stereotype to refer to the preconceptions, based on unexamined and a priori opinions, on which people base their judgments. Santayanas writing on the concept of public opinion is considerably less abundant and wellknown than that of Lippmann, yet here we will draw direct comparisons between Santayanas ideas on the subject and those of Lippmann. More generally speaking, the inuence Santayana had on Lippmann was evident from their very rst meeting in 1907, when the latter enrolled in an introductory Greek philosophy course taught by the Madrid-born professor. That same year Lippmann read Santayanas ve-volume Life of Reason. Volume two of the series lays out Santayanas elitist ideas on good government, notions that coincide with the later thinking of the mature Lippmann. Santayanas inuence led Lippmann to study philosophy, abandoning the art history career which had originally brought him to Harvard. Over the course of Lippmanns remaining years at the university he took all of the philosophy courses offered by Santayanasome of them becoming almost private lessonsand received a masters degree in philosophy under Santayanas tutelage. It can be said that during these years there was a mutual fascination: the professor, too, was intrigued by the intellect of his young student. In 1910 Santayana nominated Lippmann as assistant professor in philosophy, a position Lippmann relinquished in 1911. However, Santayanas inuence over Lippmann was shared by that of another philosopher, William James, in many ways Santayanas intellectual

opposite. The father of pragmatism, James was one of the leading gures of American philosophy of his era and among the most respected and veteran professors at Harvard. He also maintained a marked intellectual rivalry with Santayana, who had once been his student, going so far as to describe Santayanas doctoral dissertation on Lotze as the perfection of rottenness (qtd. in Steel 20). Lippmann adopted the Jamesian ideals of social justice, egalitarianism, respect for all ideas, and contempt for cultural absolutism. It was everything that Santayana, whose values were founded on Neo-Platonism, idealism, eternal values, a search for the reality beyond experience, and the rejection of cultural relativism, opposed. Yet if we consider the whole of Lippmanns long career, it becomes clear that those Jamesian ideals began to fade as he grew older. After World War I, Lippmanns Jamesian optimism gave way to a feeling of skepticism about mankind, an attitude he maintained for the rest of his life. Indeed, one of Santayanas favorite topicsthe fear that an excessive democratization of society would culminate in a tyranny of the majorityproved much longer lasting in Lippmanns thinking. As Lippmann himself wrote to his friend Bernard Berenson in 1921, I love James more than any very great man I ever saw but increasingly I nd Santayana inescapable (qtd. in Steel 21). Santayana, Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce paved the way for what Robert Dawidoff has called the critical canon of American culture (160). In his classic work Democracy In America (1835), Tocqueville employed a similar concept of public opinion as a tool for social control. The French aristocrat was a pioneer in the critical consideration of public opinion, which, based on the premises of political philosophy and social psychology, he famously called the tyranny of the majority. Other authors, including John Stuart Mill, James Bryce, Gustave Le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde, would join in this school of thought, which reigned until the triumph in the early twentieth century of the positivism and empiricism of the social sciences. Santayana, too, harked back to Tocqueville when he wrote about true culture belonging to a

Shared Vision of Society and Public Opinion  Ce sar Garca

185

deserving few. In his writing, Santayana makes numerous references to his lack of faith in democracys potential as a social equalizer by extending aristocratic privileges to all citizens. For Santayana, the ideal form of government was timocracya government of men of merit, and a more liberal form than social democracy.
Such a timocracy (of which the Roman Church is a good example) would differ from the social aristocracy that now exists only by the removal of hereditary advantages. People would be born equal, but they would grow unequal, and the only equality subsisting would be equality of opportunity. (Reason In Society 102)

have had its origins in the critique that Santayana had already developed about the negative effects of democracy on culture, particularly in the United States. Both Santayana and Lippmann can be categorized as belonging to the most pessimistic sector of the Tocquevillian tradition in their acknowledgment of the challenges modern man faces to maintain a rich spiritual life while living in democracy. Instead, these writers proclaim the hierarchy of the world of the intellect, the spirit, and the aristocracy of talents, values that earned each a certain reputation for snobbishness.

An Unreciprocated Respect
In spite of the similarities in Santayanas and Lippmanns thinking, the inuence can be seen to have worked in only one direction. Throughout his more than 500 pages of memoirs, for example, Santayana does not once mention the American journalist, and in his extensive collection of lettersmore than 3,000 compiled by his literary executor, Daniel L. CorySantayana names Lippmann perhaps a half a dozen times and not always in the most attering light. Lippmann, on the other hand, often cites his ex-professor and repeatedly mentions the inuence that Santayana exerted on his thinking. It is difcult to convincingly explain why Santayana had such low personal regard for Lippmann. In the preface to the fourth volume of Santayanas letters, editor William G. Holzberger reasons the antipathy could stem from Santayanas opposition to Lippmanns conversion from socialism to conservative thinking. The claim that Santayana was never well disposed toward converts of any sort (Holzberger, Fourth Book xiv) seems plausible although difcult to demonstrate. It is also possible to interpret motivations of a more personal nature. For example, Santayana, who had become a sort of mentor to Lippmann during the four years that Lippmann spent at Harvard, was disappointed when his student abandoned his academic position in the philosophy

Lippmann admired the precise and elegant style of Santayana the poet, and the moderation and discretion of Santayana the humanist. But where the two thinkers most coincided was in their shared beliefs about what Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel refers to as the model of the ideal society. Lippmann and Santayana shared a skepticism regarding the power of public opinion and a belief in the need for educated elites to guide society. Both thinkers felt democracy was greatly limited by the tyrannical power of public opinion and the inability of the ordinary man to pass accurate judgments on the key matters of public life. These concerns led them to advocate for a government ruled by those possessing sufcient competence or knowledge of major issues. Contrary to popular belief, a disinclination toward democracy was already present in Walter Lippmann during his socialist period. In fact, in 1911 Lippmann had already encouraged liberals to accept once and for all the limitations of democracy (qtd. in Steel 214). Steel attributes Lippmanns early skepticism concerning the functioning of democracies almost exclusively to the inuence of two people: Graham Wallas, disappointed leader of English Fabian socialism who instructed Lippmann on the irrationality of politics, and H. G. Wells, who was also involved in Fabian socialism and later came under the spell of fascism. This interpretation may be a bit drastic. The same disinclination could also

186

The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006

department to go to work for a newspaper with socialist tendencies, the Boston Common. It is also likely that Santayana interpreted Lippmanns emerging fame in the world of journalism and politics as similar to that of a social climber, and someone willing to betray his own intellectual ideals of distancing (detachment), in order to bask in the glory of social notoriety. In 1929 John Middleton Mary, editor of the magazine New Adelphi, asked Santayana for a critique of Lippmanns A Preface to Morals, claiming that it would be of interest to read the masters opinion of his disciples work. In his reply, written on September 17, 1929, Santayana rejected the request: It is with difculty that I think of Lippmann as a disciple of mine (qtd. in Holzberger, Fourth Book 130). In addition, it has also been suggested by many authors that Santayana was anti-Semitic, a factor which might explain his lack of esteem for Lippmann. For example, Santayana references Lippmanns Jewishness as an explanation for his identication with socialist ideas until after World War I.
Is there any bitter socialism, or is it all Jewish and academia? In saying Jewish I was thinking of some successful Jews, like my pupil Walter Lippmann, who only want a chance to thrive themselves. (qtd. in Holzberger, Fourth Book 55)

However, afrmations of such a nature from Santayana can be attributed more to the general anti-Semitism of the time rather than to any specific racism on Santayanas part. Indeed, he was a confessed admirer of Jewish authors like Edman and especially Spinoza. The nal chapter of Lippmanns and Santayanas intellectual relationship comes with the chain of events following the formers publication of Preface to Morals in 1929. Santayana critiqued the book in The Saturday Review of Literature, and Lippmann published a retort in the same edition. The approach of the book could not have been more stoic: those who, like Lippmann, had lost their religious faith in modern societies had no alternative means of salvation but to adopt a secular humanism accessible only to superior

emotional responses. Although Lippmanns thesis was fundamentally based on the philosophy of Spinoza and Santayanas religion of disillusionment, including elements such as the distancing from others and the stoic acceptance of facts, Santayana nevertheless took issue with the writing. In his critique, he used words like admirable and well done to describe Lippmann and his book, respectively, yet Santayana considered Lippmanns proposed selfless contemplation of the world as lacking any sort of moral sense. In a piece titled Enduring the Truth, Santayana described Lippmanns proposal as an epilogue to all possible moralities and all possible religions as it was based on the fact that the pure intellect is divorced as far as possible from the service of the willdivorced, therefore, from affairs and from morality; and love is divorced as far as possible from human objects, and becomes an impersonal and universalized delight in being. Far from guiding human morality, these ultimate insights are in danger of subverting it (512). Lippmann replied to Santayanas claims by denying the argument that his book encouraged the dispassionate acceptance of the society created by capitalism. However he went on to argue in A Footnote to Santayana that in the event this were perpetuated, its evolution would have to be led by upright men with no interest in economic power. He wrote, All I say is that if the present type of civilization is to full itself it will have to recognize as its ideal pattern of conduct the disinterestedness of the mature and self-disciplined leader (513). After this intellectual tete-a-tete there is no evidence that the two men ever met again.

A Similar Conception of Society

One of Santayanas biggest concerns was the feeling of loss generated by societal changes during his lifetime, in particular the loss of liberal democracies rights because of the sudden emergence of the masses in the public sphere. In the case of Lippmann, this is also a central idea in his

Shared Vision of Society and Public Opinion  Ce sar Garca

187

political thinking and, in all likelihood, one of those that marked the transition from the young Lippmann to the mature Lippmann. As we have seen, this transition was already latent in his socialist period and in the early works of his youth, yet it is not clearly manifested until the publication of Public Opinion in 1922. The central thesis of this work is that the inability of the common citizen to formulate intelligent opinions on public matters represents the origin of and the reason for the limitations of democracy of the masses. Lippmann also tackles this topic in greater depth in one of his later works, The Phantom Public (1925). This book shares many of the same ideas previously expressed by Santayana in Life of Reason (1907), Character and Opinion in United States (1921), Soliloquies in England (1923), later essays such as Alternatives to Liberalism (1934) and other essays published in Dominations and Powers (1952). First and foremost, both thinkers offer an appraisal of the existence of something which can be called public and a denial of the theory of popular sovereignty which originated in the Enlightenment. By speaking of the public as sheer phantom or abstraction, Lippmann assumes that public opinion does not constitute a clear group of individuals and that this group varies depending on the individual interests of its members.
The public is not, as I see it, a xed body of individuals. It is merely those persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors. (Rossiter and Lare 89)

In the chapter entitled Public Opinion from his work Dominations and Powers, Santayana similarly contends that public opinion materializes through public acts arising from individual interests. Although these interests may differ from one another, they can still have a common cause. Santayana gives as an example the different motives citizens have for desiring peace in times of war. In The Phantom Public (1925), Lippmann advocates for the incompetent public, which he refers to as outsiders, to play the role of alienating themselves in favor of or against the elites, those he calls insiders, who possess ability or

knowledge. This idea is similar to one broached by Santayana in Reason in Society (1905), which Lippmann read as soon as he arrived at Harvard, when he speaks of timocracy, or government of the most able, as the perfect means to reconcile the ideal of aristocratic excellence and thereby remove its hereditary characteristics and at the same time offer equal opportunities for all citizens to accede to power based on merits and guaranteed by law. Also in The Phantom Public, Lippmann proposes another idea stemming from the premise of democracy as tyranny of the masses. He argues that democracy is the best possible answer to the urgent need for men to create a civilized society by means of a system whose hierarchy comes from its ability to peacefully resolve conicts rather than from its ethical superiority. Nevertheless, this conquest does not prevent him from describing democracy as gloried and tainted civil war (Rossiter and Lare 215). This Aristotelian vision of democracy as the lesser evil of all the possible systems is similar to the vision put forward by Santayana in 1923 when he praised the concept of English Liberty based on a pressure from the majority that was not tyrannical but docile, and which in spite of its inevitable obligations would guarantee consensus and social advancement. Despite the similarities in their thinking, a fundamental difference separates the two authors: while Santayana focuses mainly on identifying the evils of democracy, Lippmann makes an effort to nd its strengths and seeks ways to rectify its deciencies. The reason for this could be that although they coincide on the unpleasant repercussions of aristocracy on matters of culture, Lippmann was never an aesthete or a deep thinker like Santayana but rather more of a pragmatist like William James.

Public Opinion, Santayana, and Spinoza

Santayana and Lippmann begin with a similar preconceived idea when dealing with the meaning of public opinion. Both assume man has a creative

188

The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006

role in his perception of reality. As a result, individuals have an indirect access to reality formed by what this perception represents and the human contribution determined by the individual circumstances of each person. We can glean some theoretical insights from the professorstudent relationship of Santayana and Lippman, but this on its own is not enough to justify these important parallels. If we take one plausible step further, we can follow the transmission of knowledge from Santayanas teachers through Santayana and on to Lippmann. One of those teachers, Spinoza, was especially crucial to Lippmanns conception of public opinion and stereotype. His inuence on Lippmann can be seen most clearly in two key ideas: rst, the role passions play in confusing human judgments; and, second, the distinction that is achieved in the eld of knowledge between words, images, and ideas, since these represent the main sources of individual knowledge. Spinoza addresses the rst topic in his work Ethics, where he argues that mans ignorance stems from the fact that he confuses his personal sensations of reality with its real attributes and thinks he knows things when he really only imagines them. Man, prisoner of what Spinoza calls corporal passions, would establish ideas of what is good, beautiful, or moral according to his own point of view. Therefore, the opinions, sensations, or images of each person would lock each individual into a subjective world where direct knowledge is impossible.
Each person formulates opinions of things according to the disposition of their brain, or rather they think of the likings of their imagination as reality . . . . In fact, everyone talks about these sentences: there are as many opinions as there are heads, each person goes into great detail about their opinion; there is no lesser discrepancy between brains than between tastes. They adequately show that men judge things according to the disposition of their brain, and better yet they imagine they understand them. (Allendesalazar 36)

Concerning the second topic, also in Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes between words and images,

which belong to the eld of the body and sensibility, and ideas, which correspond to the eld of thought. Although he agrees that both words and images prevent knowledge, Spinoza tries to distinguish between their causes. In the case of words, their inherent lexical ambiguity distorts reality by the improper use men make of them and because we often accept them as proof of the existence of something for the mere fact of having a name. In turn, Spinoza considers the image to be the result of the relationship established between the object that affects the individual and his body, depending on the relationship of his own body in view of the outer object rather than on the intrinsic qualities of the object. Therefore, the image would be knowledge after all, but a limited one as it ignores the context and only considers the reaction between two bodies. For this reason, Spinoza suggests the opposition between image and idea is not absolute although the idea implies dening the genesis of the nature and deducing the properties of the object. Santayana similarly questions the usefulness that his opinions concerning the United States may have for readers as they are based on his own experience, which in the end is only the result of his own individual tastes and phobias. In this way, Santayana refutes the common assertion that seeing ourselves as others see us is the same as seeing ourselves as we really are and, on the contrary, refers to Spinoza when defending the view that an individuals perception of a person or an object reveals more about the nature of the beholder than of the person or object in question (Character and Opinion 5). Santayana also shares Spinozas beliefs concerning the relativity of ethical values. If, as Spinoza taught him, our approvals and disapprovals are nothing but personal equations; or, at most, indications of the needs and interests of the human race (qtd. in Cory The Idler 76), then the moral judgments we make will not have any universal validity and will only be an indication of each persons pursuit of satisfying his or her own personal needs. Santayana questions the credibility of the opinions of the individual, which would be expressions partial to

Shared Vision of Society and Public Opinion  Ce sar Garca

189

their nature but not in themselves sufcient or infallible. Lippmann uses the term image to explain the difculty that the individual has in separating reality from illusion. Although Lippmann refers to Freuds study of dreams as his inspiration on this topic, the way Lippmann uses the term image also can be seen to draw on Spinozas use of the term in Ethics. Lippmanns argument is based on the fact that the news coming from the media generates images in our heads about an outer world that is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind (Public Opinion 18). When using the word image, Lippmann refers to a level of immediate knowledge, perhaps corporal but in any case inferior to the rational knowledge that he suggests to overcome stereotypes. Lippmann, like Spinoza, establishes levels of knowledge, two in his case: one that is instinctive and equivalent to what Spinoza calls sensitive, based on the prejudices of people and manifested in the creation of stereotypes, images, or gments of imagination; the other, which Spinoza calls rational, based on information and knowledge, is characteristic of the elites and is useful in the creation of ideas. In the case of the word image, Lippmann is also inuenced by Spinozas writing on lexical ambiguity and symbolic components. However, far from criticizing written languages limitations for knowledge, Lippmann theorizes on the symbolic power of words which, when used wisely, can serve to unite people and facilitate decisionmaking by societies in critical moments. This point of view is more typical of an expert in persuasion than that of an ethics philosopher like Spinoza. On other concepts, such as the humans inability to understand the world in a rational way, Santayana and Lippmann follow divergent courses. Santayana uses this inability to discredit both individual opinion, based on pure subjectivity, and collective opinion, mere ction instigated by contagious rumor and expressiveness. Lippmann, in turn, professes a more positive view of individual opinion. Whereas in Public Opinion he blames the existence of stereotypes on the human inability to possess rational knowledge of the environment, he also admits that stereotypes offer

us a limited but also ordered and consistent image of the world necessary to give it value. Both thinkers believe it is impossible for man to formulate rational and analytical opinions about public matters because of the thinking limitations imposed on him by industrial capitalism. Therefore, both also agree on the need for quality intermediaries to act as guides to public opinion. While Santayana advocates bestowing the role of guide on worthy men, or timocrats, Lippmann defends the role of the press as opinion leader, although he recognizes that to date the press had done the opposite in adopting and amplifying opinions already existing in the public sphere. For both Santayana and Lippmann, modern man is condemned to succumb to the hands of the modern techniques of persuasion that would put into question the dogma of democracy and the spontaneous emergence of knowledge in people. Santayana refers to these modern techniques of persuasion as expressiveness, whereas Lippmann calls them propaganda. In spite of these differences in terminology, both are aware of the fact that advances in social psychology, along with the modern means of communication, transformed the idea of democracy. In the new society that emerged, those means of communication act as elements of social organization. Both men justify the idea that in particular situations, such as economic crises or wars, it can become necessary to use new communication techniques as a means of social control. In 1934, Santayana wrote: Perhaps without ofcial coercion it would be impossible to form a definite type of citizen in our vast amorphous populations, and to create an unquestioning respect for a definite set of virtues and satisfactions (qtd. in Cory Birth of Reason 76). More than a decade earlier, in 1922, Lippmann had written in favor of using symbols as propaganda in extreme situations due to his distrust of the defective organization of public opinion (Public Opinion 19). The reactionary motives behind these claims should not lead us to forget the historical period in which they were expressed: shortly after the World War I, and in the middle of a global economic depression. Santayana permanently left the United States in 1912 and, after living in England and traveling

190

The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006

throughout several Mediterranean countries between 1918 and 1920, he settled in Rome and lived there until the end of his life. At rst his lack of faith in liberal democracy made him sympathetic to other alternatives, such as the existence of certain elites who, resorting to the tools of propaganda, inculcated in the masses a series of values. However, at the end of his life, the tragic historical evolution of the 1930s led him to distance himself from this tendency and severely criticize the existence of propaganda. Lippmann dedicated significantly more time in his life to reecting on public opinion and phenomena such as propaganda. He successfully formed part of the rst American intelligence agency, The Inquiry, of which he was the secretary, chief of propaganda for Europe and, eventually, director. By his own admission, the negative consequences of World War I and then President Wilsons failure to follow through on agreements, fostered in him a growing skepticism regarding the purpose of politics and the role played by public opinion. Nevertheless, he never lost faith in the utility of inuencing collective thinking from the means of communication in which he worked for sixty years, as both editorialist in the most inuential newspaper published in New York at the time, the World, and for more than 36 years as the most important columnist at the Herald Tribune. In the end, unlike Santayana, Lippmann was always more a journalist than philosopher. Lippmanns belief that the media and press could act as quality intermediaries in the formation of public opinion today holds more significance than ever considering the overwhelming presence and power of the audiovisual media, especially television. In an era in which individualsarguably erroneouslyfeel more capacitated than ever to form opinions of their own simply by watching TV, Lippmanns groundbreaking work on public opinion nearly a century agoand the thinkers like Santayana who inuenced that workare worthy of continued study.

Works Cited
Abellan, Jose Luis. Santayana (18631956). Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1996. Allendesalazar, Mercedes. Spinoza, Filosofa, Pasiones y Poltica. Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1987. Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth, 2-volume set. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., (1995 [1888]). , ed. The Birth of Reason and Later Essays. New York: Co lumbia UP, 1968. Cory, Daniel. The Idler and His Works. New York: George Braziller Inc., 1957. Dawidoff, Robert. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1992. Garca Munoz, Cesar. Santayana on Public Opinion. Overheard in Sevilla: Bulletin of the Santayana Society. Indianapolis: Indiana University Purdue University (IUPUI), No 23, Fall 2005. . Public Opinion and Press in the United States: The View of Spanish Intellectuals from 1885 to 1936. Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 2005. Holzberger, William H., ed. The Letters of George Santayana (Third Book: 19211925). Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. , ed. The Letters of George Santayana (Fourth Book: 19281932). Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. Le Bon, Gustave Psicologa de las masas. Madrid: Ediciones Morata, (1986 [1895]). Lippmann, Walter. A Footnote to Santayana. The Saturday Review of Literature 7 Dec. 1929: 513. . Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks (1997 [1922]). Rossiter, Clinton, and James Lare, eds. The Essential Lippmann. New York: Random House, 1963. Santayana, George. Character and Opinion in the United States. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1921. . Soliloquies in England. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1923. . Enduring the Truth. The Saturday Review of Literature 7 Dec. 1929: 512. . Reason in Society. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Savater, Fernando. Santayana, huesped del mundo. Instrucciones para olvidar el Quijote. Madrid: Editorial Taurus, 1995. Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1980. de Spinoza, Baruch Etica. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987. Splichal, Slavko. Public Opinion. Developments and Controversies in the Twentieth Century. New York: Rowman & Littleeld Publishers Inc., 1999. Tarde, Gabriel. La opinio y la multitud. Madrid: Taurus n Comunicacion. (1986 [1904]). de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Signet Classics. (2000 [1835]).