"There is widespread agreement that the concept of stereotype was introduced by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) in Public Opinion, published in the United States in 1922 (Lippmann 1922). However, as Leonard S. Newman (2009) reminds us, while Lippmann is one of the most-cited authors in the field, he is also one of the least read. Contrary to the received wisdom, he was not the one who introduced the term, though his book made it more famous than it would have been otherwise. As a further paradox, Public Opinion may have been cited a great deal, but it has very rarely been translated. There is still no French translation, and those into other languages are recent: the book only seems to have been translated into Russian (Lippmann 2004) and German (Lippmann 2018).
This lack of understanding, not of the concept itself but of the circumstances in which it appeared, invites us to trace back its origins, in order to better understand its whys and wherefores—at a time when our multipolar world is undergoing a growing rebabelization (Oustinoff 2011).
Public Opinion: The origins of the modern conception of stereotypes
People tend to think about stereotypes in isolation, while recognizing that Lippmann was the father of the notion. However, Lippmann placed stereotypes at the center of a deeper reflection on the foundations of public opinion, from which stereotypes are indissociable. The epigraph for the work is Plato’s allegory of the cave. We can only perceive reality through simplified forms of more complex processes, which we can therefore only grasp through a “stereotyped” vision (Lippmann 1922, 142):
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
“The great blooming, buzzing confusion”: this phrase is borrowed from a remark by William James, who had taught Lippmann at Harvard, about the child’s perception of the world. And Lippmann was not the first to use the term “stereotyped”: he quotes Bernard Berenson (ibid., 145), who writes about the “stereotyped shapes” of art. Nonetheless, the term clearly holds an important place: one of the seven chapters of Public Opinion is entirely devoted to stereotypes, and the term appears no less than 130 times throughout the book.
The publication date of Public Opinion is no coincidence, either. The book appeared only a few years after the end of the First World War. Lippmann had been appointed assistant to Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war in 1917 and was part of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Based on what he saw from this front-row seat, he continues his reflection (ibid., 142–3):
Of the great men who assembled at Paris to settle the affairs of mankind, how many were there who were able to see much of the Europe about them, rather than their commitments about Europe? Could anyone have penetrated the mind of M. Clemenceau, would he have found there images of the Europe of 1919, or a great sediment of stereotyped ideas accumulated and hardened in a long and pugnacious existence? Did he see the Germans of 1919, or the German type as he had learned to see it since 1871?
The introduction is titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads,” and begins with a description of an island where, in 1914, Englishmen rubbed shoulders with Frenchmen and Germans. News that war had been declared arrived six weeks late—six weeks during which all coexisted peacefully, until they learned that they were in fact enemies. Unlike clichés, the stereotypical representation of the Other is therefore a dynamic notion, as it can be reversed according to circumstances.
Stereotypes and visions of the world
“Stereotype” was originally a technical term, borrowed from the printing trade of the nineteenth century. Littré only has this sense in its entry: “Printing term. Applied to printed works with pages or plates whose characters are not movable, and which are kept for new impressions” (Littré). Since this procedure enables the mechanical reproduction of any number of identical copies, it took on a pejorative sense, as the CNRTL notes: “A ready-made idea or opinion which is accepted without reflection and repeated, without having been submitted to critical examination, by a person or a group, and which determines, to a greater or lesser extent, their ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Synon. cliché.” They illustrate this with an example: “Stereotypes spread by the media.” For Lippmann (1922, 171), stereotypes are not fixed processes, as the etymology would suggest (Greek stereos, solid, and typos, impression). Instead, they are processes inherent in the perception of the world around us: “This is the perfect stereotype. Its hallmark is that it precedes the use of reason; is a form of perception, imposes a certain character on the data of our senses before the data reach the intelligence.” This is the core of his argument.
A change in circumstances is enough for our understanding of reality to change too. This was true in the example of the island where, for six weeks, the Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans were unaware that they were at war. Such variability of stereotypes does not just occur in international relations, but also within a single nation. This is true in the United States, the quintessential land of immigration: “Americanization, for example, is superficially at least the substitution of American for European stereotypes.” But such a change ultimately leads to an even more profound one: “This constitutes a change of mind, which is, in effect, when the inoculation succeeds, a change of vision” (ibid., 149). We can see the distinction between stereotypes and clichés, and why Lippmann did not use the second term: “stereotype” refers to the process itself, whereas “cliché” refers only to the result—meaning that stereotypes have a dynamism that clichés typically lack. In any case, the stereotype cannot be separated from our vision of the world, thus it is a concept with potential consequences for our own age.
The massification of stereotypes in an age of globalization and social networks
Another of Lippmann’s central ideas is that stereotypes form a system (ibid., 172): “In some measure, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the same time.” This is where experience can contradict stereotypes. For Lippmann, there are two possibilities: either we reject the contradiction between our experiences and our preconceived vision of the world, preferring the latter; or we do the opposite, and challenge the stereotypes through which we understand reality. “Sometimes, if the incident is striking enough, and if he has felt a general discomfort with his established scheme, he may be shaken to such an extent as to distrust all accepted ways of looking at life, and to expect that normally a thing will not be what it is generally supposed to be” (ibid., 173). All of this requires, however, that we remain “curious and open-minded” (idem).
Public Opinion appeared in the 1920s. The subsequent decade saw the emergence of mass media. Lippmann seemed to anticipate this massification of information sources, which increased the importance of the stereotypes through which public opinion is formed—and deformed. He conceived of this on an international scale: the First World War made it impossible to consider the question in any other way. Still, Lippmann saw the world in terms of the United States and Europe—even within the “melting pot” (ibid., 147), which as we have seen involved “Americanizing” European stereotypes, as immigration to the United States came primarily from Europe at the time. He had nothing to say about Asia, Latin America, or any other continents.
Such a narrow perspective is impossible today. In spite of its shortcomings, however, the fundamental mechanism of stereotypes that Lippmann describes has remained in place. Its importance has increased as mass media has grown exponentially, spreading across a world that is now multipolar and interconnected as never before.
We have never been exposed to so many stereotypes, all organized into a system—in fake news, for instance, playing a key role in the election of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016 and of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, to give just two examples from the field of politics in the “post-truth” era. It is true that stereotypes, like clichés, have a positive side: without them, both communication (Amossy 1989) and a coherent grasp of the world would be impossible. Because they can be instrumentalized, however, we must also recognize their negative side—with its worrying and sometimes disastrous consequences. Faced with the massification of stereotypes caused by the unprecedented global expansion of new technologies, particularly through social networks, Lippmann’s book offers solutions that are more timely than ever.
Firstly, he invites us to look beyond the question of whether a particular stereotype is negative, and to situate ourselves at the level of the mechanism itself: without stereotypes, it is impossible to understand the world. Secondly, the very fact that stereotypes are simplifications is essentially a negative quality: they are reductive. This is why they must, sooner or later, come into conflict with reality. We can only approach stereotypes from a critical angle. Finally, the perception of this disparity puts the free will of receivers to the test; it is up to us to challenge the stereotypes that guide our perception of the world when they give us a deformed vision of it, instead of allowing us to better understand it. We must work from these three points: it is not a matter of getting rid of stereotypes altogether, since we cannot do without them, but of conceiving them not as fixed processes, but as dynamic ones, since they can be altered—radically, if need be. The example of war, given at the very start of the book, is the clearest demonstration of this.
Stereotypes during the rebabelization the world
For Lippmann and his contemporaries, the First World War was a turning point: he argued that the world had become too complex for the public to form a clear opinion of it by themselves. He thought it necessary to appeal to specialists who could establish the “manufacture of consent” (ibid., 413), enabling society as a whole to steer clear of what we would today call disinformation—or, inversely, overinformation. Lippmann has been attacked for an elitist vision of society—Public Opinion opens, after all, with a quotation from Plato’s Republic. Nonetheless, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky took up his argument from the opposite point of view in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (2002 [1988]). We will not go into this argument here, nevertheless, the question of the central role of stereotypes in public opinion—and, more generally, in all forms of communication—is made more complex when we think on a globalized scale. Talk about “stereotypes” must be recontextualized for the framework of particular cultural environments (Wolton 2003).
In this sense, the fact that the term has been adopted unchanged in so many languages may give the illusion that it has the same meaning everywhere—that it is copy-pasted, so to speak. We can begin with the Indo-European languages, to which modern Greek stereotypia (στερεοτυπία) of course belongs: Spanish estereotipo, Italian stereotipo, Portuguese estereótipo, Romanian stereotip (Romance languages); German Stereotyp, Dutch stereotype, Danish stereotyp, Norwegian stereotyp, Swedish stereotyp (Germanic languages); Russian stereotip, Polish stereotyp, Serbian stereotip, Ukrainian stereotip (Slavic languages); Albanian stereotip, etc. It has even been borrowed by non-Indo-European languages: Estonian stereotüüp, Finnish stereotypia, Hungarian sztereotípia, Turkish stereotip, Indonesian sterotip, Japanese ステレオタイプ (sutereotaipu), and so on. The term is an “untranslatable”
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