Contemporary critics saw Lippmann’s stark binary as reactionary heresy-hunting

Evidence

The book, John Dewey wrote in Common Sense, gives “encouragement and practical support to reactionaries,” in part by identifying “every form of socialism and collectivism with state or governmental socialism.” Lewis Mumford complained of Lippmann’s “strange collectivist heresy hunt,” in which he posited the only social options as a free economy and a militarized collectivism. And Charles Merriam expressed his consternation about “an attempt to state a theory and formulate a practice of neoliberalism” that demonstrated “illiberalism and intolerance toward those who differ from the new credo.” Lippmann’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of gradations of planning lent a potent sense of urgency to his rhetoric, which in turn troubled those who did not share his manifest belief in the contemporary dangers of nuance. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 157

Categorization

• XREF: The critics calling Lippmann ‘illiberal’ and reactionary is a striking inversion of today’s meaning of neo/liberal labels — connects to the reader’s adjacent history of MPS and its critics. — connects to: Critics saw Lippmann’s rightward turn as corruption by soft association rather than sale; Lippmann’s slope-to-dictatorship framing troubled even sympathetic contemporaries by its absolutism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 156
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the term ‘neoliberalism’ as used by Merriam in 1937 already carry the pejorative charge it later acquires?