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How Propaganda Became Public Relations: Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public

November 2019

Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781000753271

Authors:

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

How Propaganda Became Public Relations pulls back the curtain on propaganda: how it was born, how it works, and how it has masked the bulk of its operations by rebranding itself as public relations. Cory Wimberly uses archival materials and wide variety of sources — Foucault’s work on governmentality, political economy, liberalism, mass psychology, and history — to mount a genealogical challenge to two commonplaces about propaganda. First, modern propaganda did not originate in the state and was never primarily located in the state; instead, it began and flourished as a for-profit service for businesses. Further, propaganda is not focused on public beliefs and does not operate mainly through lies and deceit; propaganda is an apparatus of government that aims to create the publics that will freely undertake the conduct its clients’ desire. Businesses have used propaganda since the early twentieth century to construct the laboring, consuming, and voting publics that they needed to secure and grow their operations. Over that time, corporations have become the most numerous and well-funded apparatuses of government in the West, operating privately and without democratic accountability. Wimberly explains why liberal strategies of resistance have failed and a new focus on creating mass subjectivity through democratic means is essential to countering propaganda. This book offers a sophisticated analysis that will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, Continental philosophy, political communication, the history of capitalism, and the history of public relations.

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How Propaganda Became Public Relations pulls back the curtain on

propaganda: how it was born, how it works, and how it has masked

the bulk of its operations by rebranding itself as public relations. Cory

Wimberly uses archival materials and wide variety of sources—Foucault’s

work on governmentality, political economy, liberalism, mass psychology,

and history—to mount a genealogical challenge to two commonplaces

about propaganda. First, modern propaganda did not originate in the

state and was never primarily located in the state; instead, it began and

ﬂourished as a for-proﬁt service for businesses. Further, propaganda is

not focused on public beliefs and does not operate mainly through lies

and deceit; propaganda is an apparatus of government that aims to create

the publics that will freely undertake the conduct its clients’ desire.

Businesses have used propaganda since the early twentieth century to

construct the laboring, consuming, and voting publics that they needed

to secure and grow their operations. Over that time, corporations have

become the most numerous and well-funded apparatuses of government

in the West, operating privately and without democratic accountability.

Wimberly explains why liberal strategies of resistance have failed and

a new focus on creating mass subjectivity through democratic means is

essential to countering propaganda.

This book offers a sophisticated analysis that will be of interest

to scholars and advanced students working in social and political

philosophy, Continental philosophy, political communication, the history

of capitalism, and the history of public relations.

Cory Wimberly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA.

How Propaganda Became

Public Relations

Freedom to Care

Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture

Asha Bhandary

Moved by Machines

Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology

Mark Coeckelbergh

Responses to Naturalism

Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism

Edited by Paul Giladi

Digital Hermeneutics

Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies

Alberto Romele

Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy

Owen Flanagan and Beyond

Edited by Bongrae Seok

Philosophy of Logical Systems

Jaroslav Peregrin

Consequences of Reference Failure

Michael McKinsey

How Propaganda Became Public Relations

Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public

Cory Wimberly

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

How Propaganda Became

Public Relations

Foucault and the Corporate

Government of the Public

Cory Wimberly

First published 2020

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

The right of Cory Wimberly to be identiﬁed as author of this

work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77

and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,

or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including

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ISBN: 978-0-367-26314-0 (hbk)

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To my parents, for teaching me the kind of skepticism

that always keeps one eyebrow cocked.

To Siena, for the joy that reminds me why I write.

And to the twins, whose birth allowed me to enjoy this

project for years longer than I might have otherwise.

Introduction: From Propaganda to Public

Relations 1

1 What Does Propaganda Do? 25

2 Propaganda Contra Liberalism 63

3 The Art and Science of Controlling Minds:

The Inﬂuence of Political Economy

and French Royalists on Public Relations 86

4 Governing Mr. and Mrs. Intelligent Quotient

Minus: Lineages of Crowd Psychology in

the Governmentality of Propaganda 105

5 Crossing the Atlantic, Propaganda’s New

Problematization for Corporate America 131

6 Edward Bernays and the Interacting Forces

That Govern Public Opinion 149

7 Grappling With Propaganda Today 170

Index 200

Contents

Everybody knows enough about propaganda to dislike it, but few know

enough to say what it is that propaganda actually does. Propaganda typi-

cally conjures visions of ﬂag-waving foreign nations where the govern-

ment has the people so discombobulated that they think that up is down

and down is up. Or, closer to home, people use the word ‘propaganda’ to

draw a tremendous circle that encompasses all fallacious attempts at per-

suasion and sometimes even uncharitably shades into meaning something

like ‘ideas I disagree with.’ Propaganda in popular usage is an almost use-

lessly broad term vaguely tied to mass deception and public manipulation.

Few know that propaganda is something much more speciﬁc than this—

with a well-deﬁned and erudite body of professional knowledge, charac-

teristic practices, and even conferences for reﬁning their techniques—and

it is one of the propagandists’ great successes that few care to know it.

Propagandists abandoned the name ‘propaganda’ in the early twenti-

eth century to shed its negative connotations, and even many working in

the ﬁeld today cannot connect the contemporary name of the ﬁeld with

its historical one. ‘Propaganda’ ﬁrst came into usage in 1622 from the

Catholic Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra

Congregation de Propaganda Fide), but by the twentieth century its

name was already popularly soiled. At the turn of the twentieth century,

propagandists entered into a long search for a new name and it took

decades for another name to reach consensus. Raymond Mayer lamented

the souring of the term in his 1933 How to Do Publicity: “Through the

years propaganda has been used to help win wars and to aid in struggles

for trade. It has fallen into ill repute, probably more so than it deserves.”1

Ivy L. Lee, perhaps the most inﬂuential of the modern propagandists,

wrote about his frustration in trying to replace the word ‘propaganda’

with something else in 1925: “[Propaganda] is a bad word; I wish I had

some substitute for it, but after all it means the effort to propagate ideas,

and I do not know any real derivative to substitute for the word.”2 One

can ﬁnd plenty of other examples of prominent propagandists (e.g., Qui-

ett and Casey, Arthur Page, John Price Jones, and Wilder and Buell)

lamenting the bad publicity propaganda had gotten and pondering the

Introduction

From Propaganda to Public Relations

2 Introduction

possibilities for a new name.3 ‘Publicity’ was the early favorite, but it was

‘public relations’ that eventually gained dominance during the 1920s.

Edward Bernays, perhaps the only other name in early twentieth- century

propaganda to equal the prominence of Ivy Lee, took sole credit for

renaming the ﬁeld in his 1923 Crystallizing Public Opinion, and while he

may have given himself too much credit (Bernays frequently did), he was

certainly instrumental in the renaming:

When I came back to the United States [from World War I], I decided

that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it

for peace. And “propaganda” got to be a bad word because of the

Germans using it, so what I did was to try and ﬁnd some other words

so we found the words “public relations.”4

The propagandists did their job well, and few people today know of

the connection between public relations and propaganda; many ‘pub-

lic relations counsels’ do not even know the history of their own ﬁeld.

Propaganda popularly remains deﬁned as any attempt at mass manipula-

tion, but the reality is that it is a multibillion-dollar industry with a well-

deﬁned set of practitioners, knowledges, and economic relationships.5

In this text I will switch between ‘public relations’ and ‘propaganda’

as interchangeable terms. Propaganda is not different from public rela-

tions except in its name: public relations and propaganda name the same

activities, the same rationalization of those activities, and even the same

personages. They are the same except that public relations is a kind of

doubling of propaganda, in that the term ‘public relations’ is propaganda

for propaganda. I use the terms interchangeably in order to highlight

their connection and to reconnect them more tightly in academic and

public discourse. I understand that this usage might be counterintuitive

to some, but it is precisely to the degree it is counterintuitive that it is nec-

essary to connect them. We are subject to a near constant barrage of cor-

porate public relations and we should know it for what it is: propaganda.

What is it exactly that propagandists do? How do they conceptualize

society, the public, their clients, and their relationships to them? Any

research into these questions inevitably runs into thorny empirical block-

ages. Namely, no public relations ﬁrm is willing to open the archives

of their current or even remotely recent clients to preserve trade secrets

and to forestall the tremendously bad publicity that would result from

their activities becoming public. As the current work is not available,

this text turns to the historical archives, a strategy that is unique among

the current philosophical scholarship on propaganda; earlier work did

not even have the opportunity to use the archives, as many have 70- to

100-year waiting periods before they can be accessed. It is only in the last

years that some of archives have become available. An overview of my

approach and its unique results in comparison to past work is offered

Introduction 3

toward the end of this introduction. Here, I would like to anticipate some

of my ﬁndings and show their relation to the core thesis of this book.

Earlier materials, from 1900 to 1934, have several advantages. First,

they are almost completely available to the public—a beneﬁt that cannot

be overstated. Just as importantly, the quality of the archives is excellent,

not just for their breadth but also because of the quality of the materials

themselves. The early twentieth century was a decisive time in the history

of propaganda and the West more generally: a break had occurred with

the previous propaganda methods of the nineteenth century, and a new

kind of propaganda was being born a tumultuous birth. The crisis and

rethinking of the ﬁeld that occurred during the early part of the twentieth

century produced an exceptionally articulate and philosophical discourse

as these individuals created their ﬁeld and created new prescriptions “for

American institutions and especially for business.”6

The present-day consensus is that the ﬁrst modern propaganda ﬁrm

was the Publicity Bureau of Boston, founded in 1900.7 Such claims of

origin must in the ﬁnal analysis be somewhat arbitrary, as the Publicity

Bureau was clearly inﬂuenced by developments before it and later prac-

titioners further enhanced, modiﬁed, and rejected the relations of power

and knowledge that trace from the Publicity Bureau. Across this zone of

temporal and conceptual ﬂux, this work primarily casts its net from 1900

and the founding of the Publicity Bureau to 1934, which not only marks

the death of Ivy L. Lee—the foremost early counsel in public relations—

but also the point at which the Great Depression was understood to be

an enduring phenomenon and thinking began to be concentrated around

issues arising speciﬁcally from the Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Within this early period, 1900–1934, there was a decentralized but none-

theless highly interconnected construction of modern propaganda. The

eventuation of public relations was tied to the similarly dispersed and

contested birth of the corporation and the modern urban consumptive

public at sites across the United States. Propaganda stood between its cli-

ents (usually corporations) and their publics and sought to reﬁgure their

relationships to each other so that corporations could succeed: “Business

publicity comprehends the entirety of the relations between any enter-

prise, corporation or individual, engaged in a commercial undertaking,

and their or his public.”8 This is in part what makes this topic so inter-

esting: public relations explicitly and relentlessly sought to theorize and

modify the relationships forming between the corporation and its pub-

lics, and there are few areas of greater importance to the present than the

corporations or the public.

The ﬁrst law to make incorporation easy in the United States was

established in 1896 in New Jersey, and other states soon followed. From

1896 forward, the corporate apparatus played an important role in pro-

ducing, shaping, and intensifying changes underway in the United States.

The new urban populations, called to the cities by rapid changes in

4 Introduction

American life, were characterized as a corporation’s ‘publics’ by propa-

gandists. These publics had many competing forms of description and

many possible futures outside of their construction as corporate publics:

these urban massiﬁcations were the proletariat to Marxists and Social-

ists, a series of rational autonomous individuals to laissez-faire liberals,

laborers to factory owners, voters to politicians, dangerous classes to the

middle and upper classes, and consumers to merchants. Alongside these

competing and in some ways overlapping characterizations of the urban

mass, propaganda developed a conception of the mass that would make

it governable and that would render its conduct able to be conducted by

its mostly corporate clientele.

The central chapters of this book conduct a deep investigation of

the publics as a peculiar invention of a time and place and position the

invention of the publics as part of the creation of the larger networks of

power and knowledge that would deﬁne corporations in the twentieth

and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. It was not only corporations that were try-

ing to theorize and govern the urban masses; many other actors were

engaged in similar projects, albeit guided by different values. Evidently,

it was hard to avoid thinking about the urban masses at the turn of the

century when it had manifested its new size and importance through the

largest mass events that had yet taken place in human history. The May

Day rallies that took place across the United States and Europe beginning

in 1890 were both the largest collective demonstrations (totaling all the

demonstrators across all locations) and the largest single demonstrations

(the most people in a single location) that had ever taken place.9 These

tremendous gatherings of individuals, by their own size and power, called

out their unprecedented character, which public relations (PR) alongside

others sought to shape, harness, and tame. These new urban masses were

not just visible on May 4th, but in tenements, on factory ﬂoors, on strike,

at the ballot box, at sporting events, consuming at the new department

stores, and as the audience for the exploding mass media outlets. The

urban mass in many ways culminated in the mass readership of newspa-

pers, a daily ritual shared by 15 million people in the United States at the

turn of the century.

Propagandists intentionally placed themselves at the nexus of the cor-

poration, the mass media, the state, and the urban masses. This makes

propaganda a sensitive, multifaceted, and well-situated barometer for the

tensions that marked turn-of-the-century life, much like a seismograph

placed between colliding tectonic plates. William Baldwin, one of the

ﬁrst and most respected early public relations counsels, wrote: “Rub-

bing takes place at all levels—person-to-person, group-to-group, nation-

to-nation, alliance-to-alliance. It can become highly abrasive where

imbalances develop in management-labor, producer-consumer, landlord-

tenant, majority-minority relationships and the like.”10 It was the task of

public relations not just to observe the rubbing of those plates but also to

Introduction 5

adjust those plates, making sure that corporations and their publics took

the forms that would best ease corporate growth and dominance.

It is no wonder then that propaganda was a site of great innovation

and action: its constitution depended not just on its relationships to its

publics and corporations, both of which were themselves intense poles

of activity and change, but also to the contesting efforts of others within

the United States to deﬁne them differently. Propagandists inserted their

work into the relationship of businesses and the masses in order to shape

corporations and the publics on terms favorable to its business clients,

while simultaneously justifying and naturalizing the domination of busi-

ness in shaping American life:

Business is in the saddle. It is the power behind the throne. The world

will be what business makes it, and advertising, if it sees its opportu-

nity in the largest light, can help business to formulate its ideals, put

them into effective language, and write them not merely on the pages

of newspapers and magazines or on the waves of the ether, but in the

more enduring stuff of minds and hearts.11

Into the deeply and rapidly changing waters of the turn of the early twen-

tieth century public relations began to lay down piers, attempting to

build and hold in place constructions of the public and corporations that

were favorable to its clientele and to itself: “Publicity in its ultimate sense

means the actual relationship of a company to the people, and that rela-

tionship involves far more than saying—it involves doing.”12 Propaganda

sought to build the publics and corporations that would best achieve

its corporate client’s directives, which sometimes placed propagandists

in the odd position of working for the client against the client’s wishes

when they judged that the client was doing something damaging to its

own aims.

What sets this work apart in considering propaganda is how it exam-

ines the changes propaganda created in constructing its publics, corpora-

tions, and itself. Typically, as I will explore in greater detail and speciﬁcity

in Chapter 5, previous studies of propaganda have assumed that propa-

ganda has neither signiﬁcantly altered the nature of the publics nor busi-

ness (i.e., capitalism). Rather, previous critics have seen propaganda as a

means to spread fallacious reasoning or provide an ideological cover—a

kind of masking that hides the nature of things without fundamentally

altering them. Previous efforts, popular and scholarly, have taken propa-

ganda to focus on beliefs. This work, instead of looking at propaganda

as papering over reality with false belief, looks at propaganda as having

an important role in creating it. Instead of taking propaganda, corpora-

tions, and the public as objects of study whose form is pre-given but

hidden by propaganda, this study looks at propaganda as occupying a

privileged place in the invention of corporations, their publics, and the

6 Introduction

relations of government between the two. This work starts from a dif-

ferent set of methodological presuppositions than those that guide most

work on propaganda. I will not shelter the hope most critics have that

the world they want lives just below the surface, waiting to spring forth

once the right critical philosophical incantation is uttered to clear away

the lies and ideological distortions. This work begins from the position,

well supported by the archives, that propaganda was an apparatus for

transforming all the relationships its clients had with the world and in

turn transforming those clients and the publics they governed. Edward

Bernays was clear that his primary strategy was not lying or ideological

masking of subjects’ true nature; he counseled his clients that “to make

customers is the new problem.”13 Make, not deceive, were his words and

conduct, not beliefs, was his target.

At the turn of the twentieth century, massive numbers of consumers,

laborers, urban dwellers, and voting blocs that hardly existed 50 years

before needed to be created on a gigantic scale. Relations and subjec-

tivities that may today seem common and even natural hardly existed as

modern propaganda ﬁrst went to work. Theodore Vail, head of AT&T

and an early proponent for the wide-scale and continuous use of propa-

ganda by businesses, wrote in November, 1917:

Contrast the conditions which I saw as a boy and the conditions of

today. When I ﬁrst entered business, man was self-dependent; with

the exception of the luxuries—and there were few enough of those—

the individual and his family produced every necessity of life. Most

production and manufacture was by individual, manual labor. . . .

Now none of us is self-contained; we depend upon others for not

only the luxuries but also for the comforts and the very necessities

of life.14

As corporations made steel I-beams, party dresses, and bar soap, they

also needed to mass-produce the workers, voters, shoppers, and labor

to fuel a stable and thriving environment for business in the twenty-ﬁrst

century. Propaganda did this by transforming corporations into appara-

tuses of government and subjectiﬁcation.

One of the most powerful and provocative ways propaganda devel-

oped for thinking of itself was as an apparatus of government that

worked in the last analysis through subjectiﬁcation. Although the exact

term ‘subjectiﬁcation’ was not used as part of the early discourse of prop-

aganda, the idea of mass-producing publics to ﬁll the human needs in a

rising industrial and corporate order—as laborers, consumers, managers,

voters—was an exciting and innovative concept. Bernays wrote in 1928:

Mass production is only proﬁtable if its rhythm can be maintained—

that is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing

Introduction 7

quantity. The result is that while, under the handicraft or small-unit

system of production that was typical a century ago, demand cre-

ated the supply, today supply must actively seek to create its corre-

sponding demand. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying

a whole continent with its particular product cannot afford to wait

until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch,

through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order

to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its

costly plant proﬁtable. This entails a vastly more complex system of

distribution than formerly. To make customers is the new problem.15

For most public relations counsels, subjectiﬁcation was an activity that

could only be carried so far. Propagandists worked with a view of the

subject as composed of certain innate natural drives. These drives could

be satisﬁed in a variety of ways, so the work of propagandists was to

transform how drives were translated into speciﬁc desires and how sub-

jects went about satisfying those desires. For instance, Brewster and

Palmer argued that all people have a drive for sociality and companion-

ship. This drive, while an inalterable fact, still could be satisﬁed in an

almost inﬁnite number of ways, and it was the job of the propagandist

to train the customer to satisfy the drive in a way useful to their clients

through “repetition, impressive size, illustration and short phrases”:

We do not know just what electricity is, but we do know something

about how it acts and, within certain limitations, how it can be con-

trolled. Neither do we know just what the mind is, but through the

researches of psychologists and through practical experience we

have learned something of how the mind behaves and how, to some

extent, its action can be inﬂuenced by advertising.16

Thus, by way of anticipation, we can glimpse here the notion that the

government of the subject occurred largely through subjectiﬁcation but

that this subjectiﬁcation was bounded: PR counsels assumed that the

object of desire and the satisfaction of desire could be transformed but

not the basic drives humans possess.

I differ from public relations in that I am not going to take the presup-

position that the basal psychology of the subject is essentially ﬁxed in

the way that public relations agents take it to be. I follow Foucault in

thinking that it is an error to regard the subject “as a sort of elementary

nucleus, a primitive atom or some multiple inert matter to which power

is applied, or which is struck by a power that subordinates or destroys

individuals.”17 Rather than accepting propagandists’ metaphysical claims

to have discovered the essence of the subject, I treat that metaphysics as

a cover and legitimation for the deeper creation of the subject who bore

those supposedly innate drives.

8 Introduction

Nietzsche, Foucault, and many others have worked historically and

especially through the twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries to pro-

vide interesting genealogies of the emergence and eventual disappearance

of subjectivities; the thrust of these works is to show that what we assume

to be common to people across time and culture is not. For instance,

feminists like Judith Butler, Diana Taylor, and Jana Sawicki disrupt an

enduring understanding of gender roles; queer theorists like Mark Hal-

perin do the same with sexuality; Ladelle McWhorter and Cornel West

do the same with race, Nietzsche with morality; and Foucault with mad-

ness, illness, health, and normality. These works empower and provide

positive support for the analytical position I am taking here because they

provide strong reason to be skeptical about claims to have discovered

the nature of the subject. This work will take the more skeptical position

that propagandists did not discover the nature of the subject but created

a knowledge of the subject based on their own local needs. In this genea-

logical frame, I take it not only that the propagandists work through

subjectiﬁcation at a ‘surface’ level, altering the objects of desire and their

manner of pursuit in the publics, but also that their understanding of the

underlying nature of public subjectivity was also their creation and part

of what they produced in their action.

This work takes its primary analytical point of departure on the sub-

ject from Foucault’s “The Subject and Power,” although it draws on com-

plementary materials from The History of Sexuality and several of his

lecture courses from the late 1970s. In Foucault’s work from The History

of Sexuality Volume I (1976) to “The Subject and Power” (1982), gene-

alogy does not posit a “theory of the subject,” so most accurately one

would have to say that there is no such thing as ‘the genealogical subject’;

this makes sense in my own aim to work outside of the priority of a sub-

ject that is marked by an enduring human essence. Instead of a theory

of the subject that elaborates a human nature, Foucault’s genealogy per-

forms an “analysis” of subjectivity in order to write its “history.”18 An

analysis differs from a theory in that a theory seeks to give a totalizing

account—it seeks to capture the quiddity of the thing, in this case the

subject. In contradistinction, an analysis of the subject aims to record

the conditions under which it is emergent: “My objective, instead, has

been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture,

human beings are made subjects.”19 Instead of looking for the subject

as an autonomous, independently existing object with its own essential

deﬁnition and functions, this work approaches the subject as a part of a

particular situation that only materializes through the differential elabo-

ration of relations of power in a localized context.

The subject, for Foucault and in this work, is something that only

appears within a certain strategic situation; it has no being or meaning

outside of it. For instance, there is no familial subject outside of famil-

ial relations (sons, daughters, mothers, fathers); there are only fathers

Introduction 9

if there are mothers, and mothers if there are sons and daughters, and

so forth. All subjects are found embedded in some particular situation

and they gain their meaning (e.g., ‘corporate executive’) only within that

speciﬁc arrangement of forces, in this case the arrangement known as the

‘corporation.’ The subject here is not a generic element of theory that can

be anonymously transposed between contexts but a localized phenom-

enon that is only revealed through a situated analysis of power relations.

Power is thus an important term in understanding the subjectivities

produced in propaganda. In rehashing the subject of power in Foucault,

I am mindful of the possibility of needless repetition. If sometimes people

write that gallons of ink have been spilled on a topic, we would have to

say that the amount of ink that has been spilled on Foucault’s theory of

power is closer to what spilled from the Exxon Valdez. Resultantly, in

establishing the analytical framework of this text, I will move quickly to

narrow the discussion of power in Foucault to conduct, which is the most

relevant aspect to understanding to the approach of this text.

Foucault explored several ways of understanding power throughout

his career. During the 1970s, until Security, Territory, Population (1977),

Foucault studied power through the lens of war. Especially in Society

Must Be Defended, he looked at power as an expression of war; power

was the assertion of one agent’s prerogative over another: “Power is

war, the continuation of war by other means.”20 For reasons that are not

directly germane to this text, Foucault found this notion of power prob-

lematic and began to explore power as conduct.

In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault asserts that the “equivocal

nature of the term ‘conduct’ is one of the best aids for coming to terms

with the speciﬁcity of power relations.”21 What is this equivocal nature,

and why did Foucault feel that it would give great insight into power

relations, and hence the creation of subjects? Conduct has two senses

here for Foucault, senses that will also be important in this text. Conduct

ﬁrst refers to an individual’s own behavior in “an open ﬁeld of possi-

bilities”; conduct indicates the free constitution of comportment among

many available lines of comportment. Conduct in this ﬁrst sense refers

to the way that a subject directs its actions in a situation in which it has

several possibilities.

Conduct also has the second sense of guiding or leading others, in the

sense that a train conductor conducts a train or a symphony is conducted

by a conductor. Foucault states that he is thinking of conduct in this sec-

ond sense less as “a confrontation between two adversaries” and more

as the direction of the “possibilities or action of other people.”22 If previ-

ously Foucault had thought of power as war, as a struggle between con-

ﬂicting partners, then with the notion of conduct he opened the door to

the idea that power could be mutually acceptable and cooperative, if not

always egalitarian. We should not make the mistake, however, of think-

ing that conducting others is necessarily cooperative or beneﬁcent, just

10 Introduction

that it is potentially so; conduct frees us from thinking that power must

be conﬂict, struggle, and war, not that it will never be so. It is also pos-

sible to conduct others surreptitiously, against their interests, or aggres-

sively against their will—in the way a prison warden conducts the lives

of prisoners.

Conduct in this second sense of the conduct of others is deeply tied to

the idea of government in Foucault. For Foucault, the sense of govern-

ment that emerges in the renaissance is an attempt to direct the conduct—

or to conduct the conduct—of subjects into speciﬁc paths:

Before it acquires its speciﬁcally political meaning in the sixteenth

century, we can see that “to govern,” covers a very wide semantic

domain in which it refers to movement in space, material substance,

diet, the care given to an individual and the health one can assure

him, and also to the exercise of command, of a constant, zealous,

active, and always benevolent prescriptive activity. It refers to the

control one may exercise over oneself and others, over someone’s

body, soul, and behavior.23

Foucault studies government as a historically speciﬁc set of power,

knowledge, and subject relations that develop in the West as a means to

conduct the conduct of others. As we will see later in the text, propagan-

dists offer a critique of the dominant modes of government in the West,

especially liberalism, and holds propaganda to be a necessary corrective.

Freedom plays an important role in this thought on government, con-

duct, and subjectivity. The conduct of conduct makes sense as a descrip-

tion only if the subject being conducted is free. Stating that a subject

is conducted implies that the subject could have conducted herself oth-

erwise but was directed through those possibilities by another. Like

the train conductor moves the train between its many possible routes,

and the symphony conductor conducts the symphony through just one

arrangement of instruments, pitches, and rhythms among many, so too

does subject’s conduct get guided among many possibilities. This does

not mean that all the possibilities are equally weighted in terms of their

costs and rewards (some may be more greatly rewarded than others,

some are heavily penalized, etc.), but nonetheless conduct implies that

the subject is working in a relational context in which multiple differ-

ent ways to constitute itself exist and that government is deployed to

move the subject towards one of those possible lines. Conduct—whether

self-conduct or the conduct of conduct by others—always occurs in a

context of freedom, where freedom is the open possibility of constituting

many possible lines of comportment. Propaganda, like other means of

conducting the conduct of others (coaching, pastoring, parenting, etc.) is

the reaction to the “intransigence of freedom” of the subject; government

seeks to guide the subject’s conduct, knowing that the conduct could be

Introduction 11

constituted in many possible ways, at least some of which the governor

prefers to others.24 It is the threat of the subject acting outside of the

interests of the governor that makes government necessary. Without the

freedom to constitute comportment in many possible ways, it is unnec-

essary to govern them; likewise, it is the freedom of the subject and the

possibility of unwanted conduct that prompts the growth of PR.

Precisely the problem that public relations and their corporate clients

were faced with was the freedom of subjects to conduct themselves in

ways contrary to the desires of corporations. The goal of corporate prop-

aganda was to alter the behavior of subjects and channel them into com-

posing their behavior in ways favorable to the new corporate order. It

should not be forgotten that propaganda began in a time of great change

for subjects in the United States as the myth and reality of the Jeffersonian

citizen farmer was being displaced by the many faces of the urban wage

earner. In the time of this explosion of new economic, social, and politi-

cal conduct at the turn of the twentieth century, corporations sought to

govern the publics towards the conduct that would enhance their wealth,

control, preeminence, and security. Propaganda is a response to free con-

duct and an attempt, not to dominate it via violence or physical con-

straint, but to conduct it in its freedom towards the desired outcomes. Do

not mistake my point: it is not that violence and physical constraint were

not used alongside propaganda—they were—but that propaganda is dis-

tinct from physical violence as a rationalization and practice of power.

This Foucauldian analytics of the subject not only provides a way to take

the subjectiﬁcation of public relations seriously, but it also provides a lens

through which the relations of power built through public relations can

be understood; namely, as a particular manifestation of the conduct of

conduct, government through mass subjectiﬁcation.

That this genealogical framework of analysis is so different from the

extant literature is outstanding on its face because many propagandists

explicitly deﬁne their service as government through the transformation

of the governed, “the signiﬁcant revolution of modern times is not indus-

trial or economic or political but the revolution which is taking place

in the art of creating consent among the governed.” And propagandists

are not shy to say that they govern through transforming businesses

and publics: “[The public relations counsel] helps to mold the action of

his client as well as to mold public opinion.”25 To fail to consider how

public relations changes its publics or its clients, either at the level of

desire or in deeper ways, has left much of the literature blinkered to the

effects of propaganda. To better spell this out, I would like to consider

how this blinkering operates in three broad types of writing on pub-

lic relations: (1) analyses in the social sciences that seek to determine

how public relations and propaganda work to inﬂuence and shape minds

(diagnostic analyses); (2) archival work that seeks to explain the context

into and from which public relations was born (historical analyses); and

12 Introduction

(3) critical leftist work that that argues for the injustice and immorality

of public relations (critical theory and social epistemology).

One can cluster together a whole series of works, generally from the

social sciences, that aim to explain why propaganda works and when

it works best. These articles and books often do not always explicitly

state their own operating assumptions about the subject but presuppose

it in their discussions of propaganda. Many of these studies make claims,

again some only implicitly, that follow the formula, ‘Human nature is X,

therefore effective propaganda can only take forms Y and Z,’ or its vari-

ant, ‘Human nature is X, therefore propaganda cannot effectively take

forms A and B.’ For example, in Ellul’s canonical study of propaganda

he repeatedly makes claims of the following form: “Besides, the public is

only sensitive to contemporary events,” or:

One trait of vertical propaganda is that the propagandee remains

alone even when he is part of a crowd. His shouts of enthusiasm or

hatred, though part of the shouts of the crowd, do not put him in com-

munication with others; his shouts are only a response to the leader.26

Ellul assumes a stable and apparently universal form of subjectivity in

order to make these types of claims in Propaganda: The Formation of

Men’s Attitudes. He makes these kind of claims because he is interested

in producing scientiﬁc knowledge of the human being and its relationship

to propaganda, at least in the sense that he wants to produce knowl-

edge that does not vary with different populations, at different times, or

in different circumstances. By assuming a like nature across all human

beings, Ellul can proclaim the efﬁcacy or inefﬁcacy of different methods

of propaganda across different national and historical contexts to pro-

duce universal psychological claims about how propaganda works.

Jowett, who is another important writer on propaganda and public

relations, also makes similar claims. In his article, The Korean POW

Controversy and the Origins of a Myth, he claims that brainwashing is

impossible because the nature of the human psyche does not permit it:

“Despite the assurances of psychologists, psychiatrists, and those who

study the human brain, the notion of ‘brainwashing’ as a distinct pos-

sibility remains as ﬁrmly entrenched as ever.”27 Here, Jowett hoped to

show why the subject of contemporary psychology could not be deeply

affected by ‘brainwashing.’ He argues that the notion of brainwashing

should be dropped as a serious matter of study and research because the

psychological notion of the subject he adopts precludes it. Again, the

implication is that the subject is something given, natural, and funda-

mentally inalterable, which allows for knowledge about propaganda to

be produced that does not vary with changes in time, place, and culture.

Lasswell’s studies are older but are nonetheless still highly inﬂuential

in the study of public relations and propaganda. Like Ellul and Jowett,

Introduction 13

he makes universalizing assumptions about human nature in order to

explain the efﬁcacy of public relations and propaganda. Unlike Ellul and

Jowett, he states explicitly that his assumptions about the nature of the

subject derive from ‘common sense’ rather than dressing them up in the

white lab coat of the sciences:

The procedure in this investigation has been to stick close to common-

sense analysis. . . . The present student goes no further than to

develop a simple classiﬁcation of the various psychological materi-

als, which have been used to produce certain speciﬁed results, and to

propose a general theory of strategy and tactics, for the manipulation

of these materials.28

In order to produce a theory of the efﬁcacy of propaganda across coun-

tries, Lasswell makes assumptions about the similarity of all publics in

order to show how they must be affected by propaganda. Regardless of

whether he works from the framework of psychology as Jowett does or

from “common-sense” assumptions, he still needs to produce the subject

as an enduring and universal substrate if his knowledge of propaganda

is not to be a history but a science. If he wants to give an account about

“how international war propaganda may be conducted with success”

which applies broadly across times and cultures, then the subject and its

nature must remain ﬁxed so that conduct of propaganda in relation to

the subject can also remain ﬁxed.29

All these social scientiﬁc analyses essentially aim to create a scientiﬁc

knowledge of propaganda, essentially parallel to the knowledge produced

by propagandists themselves. In order to ﬁll in the ‘missing’ discourse on

human nature and unlock the true secrets of propaganda, these social

scientists have had to proceed as if the propagandists were missing such

an analysis so that they could produce it. Unfortunately for them, the

propagandists had no such lack; they have an incredibly well-elaborated

psychology of the human being. The cause of this problem is that many,

many social scientiﬁc studies are strongly lacking in a solid knowledge of

the propagandists’ own texts and archives and are too willing to share

their inferred assumptions.

This assumption of a stable subject of propaganda unknowingly con-

tributes to the legitimation of the propagandists’ understanding of public

subjectivity. In taking the nature of the subject to be ﬁxed, as do Lass-

well and Ellul, they can have a hard time explaining how propaganda

can be so effective without also having to support the propagandists’

claims to have discovered the nature of the subject. For instance, if prop-

aganda techniques work by assuming the public to be subrational and

they establish techniques that work through treating the public as subra-

tional, there is a tremendous risk of reifying public relations’ assumption

of the public as subrational in explaining the technique’s efﬁcacy if one

14 Introduction

takes the nature of the subject to be ﬁxed. Propagandists formulated their

relationships of government with the public based on a precisely articu-

lated theory of public subjectivity, which in turn shaped their practices of

propaganda. When social scientists set out to ‘discover’ the ﬁxed psychol-

ogy that makes propaganda work, they are vulnerable to restating and

legitimating the nature of the subject as it is framed in the discourse of

propaganda.

The textbook Effective Public Relations—perhaps the most widely

read and inﬂuential textbook on PR since its ﬁrst publication in 1952—

offers a clear example of this danger. On page 270 of the millennial

8th edition, the textbook states that individuals come to opinions

through ‘salience,’ deﬁned as “feelings about an object derived from an

individual’s experience,” and ‘pertinence,’ deﬁned as “the relative value

of an object on the basis of an object-by-object comparison.” In other

words, subjects develop feelings about objects and they compare those

feelings to other feelings to arrive at a related understanding of things.

Do subjects reason? Do subjects have a principled analysis of the larger

social situation on which to base their understanding of value? Do they

have an ability to put aside feelings for a commitment to an abstract

sense of virtue or morality in the formation of values? No, subjects have

none of these abilities. Instead what we get in this picture of the human

being is a mass of feelings whose weight is only determined only by com-

parison with other feelings. This is not a full-ﬂedged rational individual

but an emotionally driven being whose actions are determined solely

by the strength of their feelings. This is pretty much the deﬁnition of

someone who is stupid, according to Merriam-Webster: someone who

is “not sensible or logical.”30 In building a universal notion of the sub-

ject out of a set of power relations designed to disempower and govern

the publics, there is tremendous risk that the underlying assumptions of

these relationships—that the public is ﬁckle, subrational, unconsciously

driven, suggestible, and impulsive—also becomes the conclusion of the

scientiﬁc researcher.

Ellul’s study of propaganda demonstrates the dangers of unknowingly

replicating public relations’ presuppositions about the subject as scien-

tiﬁc fact. For instance, Ellul argues that the only real effect reason has

on the public is aesthetic; people do not understand reason but relate to

it as a kind of costume that inspires deference, like the medieval masses

reacted to hearing the Bible read in Latin (e.g., with deference and awe

but without understanding). Ellul writes that propaganda that tries to

use “facts to demonstrate, rationally, the superiority of its system and

to demand everybody’s support” only “eliminate[s] personal judgment

and the capacity to form one’s own opinion.” In other words, facts para-

lyze the judgment of the average individual by catapulting the individual

into a realm of thought that is beyond him: facts do “not enlighten the

reader or the listener; they drown him.” The average individual “cannot

Introduction 15

remember them all [facts], or coordinate them, or understand them.”31

As a result, Ellul’s study—even though he is a social scientist studying

propaganda and is not a propagandist—comes to the same conclusions

about public subjectivity that the public relations practitioners like Lee,

Bernays, Wilder and Buell come to: propaganda is an essential part of

modern life because it transcribes the demands of the technical and

rational basis of modern society into an irrational and emotional dis-

course that builds consent at the only level that the masses are able to

receive it—the subrational.32

As the social scientiﬁc literature writings claim to be working from an

objective view of human nature, they ultimately disavow their role in

producing and normalizing the relations of subjectivity and control pro-

duced by propagandists. Rather than seeing propaganda and its publics

as a development that occurred at a particular point in human history as

the result of a conﬂuence of historically unique forces, they produce a sci-

entiﬁc discourse that argues that propagandists discovered and exploited

a truth about human nature that was always already there, even if undis-

covered. They give the view, at least implicitly, that propaganda is not the

product and responsibility of any given society or set of relationships and

it cannot be changed or eliminated; instead, they produce propaganda as

something that we must live with because it preys upon weaknesses that

subjects will always have as long as they remain human. In sum, many

of the works in the social sciences that work diagnostically to produce a

scientiﬁc knowledge of how propaganda works end up reproducing and

giving legitimacy to the terrible knowledge of the subject and the govern-

mental relations of propagandists.

A second set of literature is not social scientiﬁc but historical. This lit-

erature documents the personages, institutions, and events in public rela-

tions more than it focuses on the mechanics of how propaganda works.

It is often hard to tell exactly what the issues are that these histories are

interested in because the texts frequently have no explicit methodology

or thesis. Miller’s The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Post-

war Public Relations never raises the topic of methodology. Capozzola’s

Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern

American Citizen is in many ways much more politically aware and artic-

ulate than Miller’s work but never raises the issue of its own method and

perspective. Scott Cutlip’s The Unseen Power: A History is in many ways

an unmatchable work. Cutlip was a friend to many of the top ﬁgures in

public relations and he had unparalleled access, not only to the public

relations counsels, but also to their family and friends. In his papers at

the Wisconsin Historical Society, the widow of Hamilton Wright carried

on a correspondence with him about her husband’s work even though it

caused her such grief that she had a serious lapse in health.33 The will-

ingness to endure a crisis of health as the result of interviews and then

persevere through future interviews serves as an example of the loyalty

16 Introduction

and trust Cutlip engendered. Even so, this work has little reﬂection on

its methodology beyond carefully documenting its sources and their use-

fulness. I can only assume that the topic of methodology or aims is not

raised in these texts because they conceive of themselves as transparent

conduits of the historical facts: there can be no room for methodology or

aims if the work is an exact transcription of the past.

Cutlip’s work, while in many ways irreplaceable, nonetheless demon-

strates the problem of going without an explicit methodology and exami-

nation of one’s assumptions. In the ﬁrst page of the Prologue of Unseen

Power, we get as close as this text comes to a thesis and an explicit meth-

odology when Cutlip states, “I held, and still hold, that only through the

expertise of public relations can causes, industries, individuals, and insti-

tutions make their voice heard in the public forum where thousands of

shrill competing voices daily re-create the Tower of Babel.”34 Here Cutlip

accepts tout court the public justiﬁcations of propagandists going back

to the father of public relations, Ivy L. Lee.35 Cutlip accepts uncritically

the propaganda about propaganda: namely that it is an aid to democracy

because it makes previously unheard voices available—it makes democ-

racy more representative and fair. The biblical reference to the Tower of

Babel in Cutlip shows what he thinks the state of things is—total chaos—

and astonishingly places PR in the role of God returning order.

My point here is that without an explicit thesis, methodology, and their

critical review, one’s assumptions are all too likely to fall back on some-

thing like a ‘commonsense’ perspective on propaganda. The problem with

relying on common sense in a study of propaganda is that propaganda

has been working for more than a century to transform the common

sense about itself. If public relations has been even partially successful in

transforming the perception of propaganda and public relations, we need

to be very careful and quite skeptical about ‘commonsense’ analyses of

public relations.

This situation is made more dangerous by the fact that many peo-

ple writing history about propaganda are themselves often public rela-

tions counsels, once were counsels, or were trained in related disciplines

like journalism, communications, or public relations (even if they never

worked in PR). Cutlip again comes to mind, as does Miller, but also Lass-

well, L’Etang, Olasky, Center, Broom, Ries, Gower, Mickey, and Hiebert.

Let me be clear: this does not mean that the foregoing authors have not

produced good work or that they have never been critical. However, it

does highlight that a large number of people working on the history of

public relations are working out of public relations and the related dan-

ger of writing from ‘common sense.’ Authors who have been trained in

public relations and have been taught to view it favorably are doubly at

risk of adopting a ‘commonsense’ view of public relations that is blink-

ered. When common sense is the guide, the same problems that befall the

social scientiﬁc literature arise. Insofar as propagandists’ views about the

Introduction 17

subject, its governance, or the roles of corporations have become com-

mon sense, then the literature runs the risk of naturalizing those views by

uncritically adopting them.

Of course, not all writing on public relations is sympathetic, uncrit-

ical, and unreﬂective about its methodology or its subject. There is a

strong left-leaning tradition of criticism, which builds on the early work

of progressives like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. More recently, Noam

Chomsky has brought volumes of criticism from an anarchist perspec-

tive, and Marxian thinkers like Bourdieu, Habermas, Hall, Marcuse,

Horkheimer, and Adorno have worked on propaganda and related

issues. Stuart Ewen’s recent work PR!: A Social History of Spin is less

radical than the preceding authors but is nonetheless situated from a crit-

ical perspective. Of the aforementioned thinkers, Chomsky, Habermas,

Marcuse, and Ewen have most speciﬁcally written at length on the spe-

ciﬁc topic of public relations and propaganda. These authors also look at

subjects as having a ﬁxed and articulable nature but unlike many of the

social scientists and historians, they do not take on the propagandists’

assumptions about the subject its necessary government but formulate

their own counternarratives. This too is problematic for the way that it

masks the changes in subjectivity brought by propagandists by assuming

its nature is ultimately inviolable.

My aim here is not to address these thinkers’ body of thought as a

whole, which is a task that would require its own volume, but instead

just to deal with their methodology vis-à-vis propaganda. Chomsky,

Habermas, and Marcuse all share an assumption about the universality

of the subject with the social scientists discussed earlier, though to differ-

ent effect. In Chomsky’s famous debate with Foucault in 1971, he said:

That is, there are two intellectual tasks: one, and the one that I was

discussing, is to try to create the vision of a future just society; that

is to create, if you like, a humanistic social theory that is based, if

possible, on some ﬁrm and humane concept of the human essence or

human nature.36

At the time Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, he had developed a

notion of the human psyche based on a rewriting of Freud according to

Marxist sensibilities. According to Marcuse, this psychology could be

found in all human societies, though it was differently manifested accord-

ing to the speciﬁc repressions demanded by that society. As a consequence,

Marcuse’s primary critique of propaganda in One-Dimensional Man was

that the human psyche would be better suited to a different and lesser set of

oppressions than it currently encounters in contemporary Western society:

As the liberty to work or to starve, [free enterprise] spelled toil,

insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. [. . .] If

18 Introduction

the productive apparatus could be organized and directed towards

the satisfaction of vital needs, its control might well be centralized;

such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it

possible.37

Habermas’s most relevant work on public relations is his 1962 habili-

tation, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (“Structural Transformation of

the Public Sphere”). This early work of his is compelling and echoes some

of the themes of my own work: public opinion as a technology of domi-

nation, public relations as a tool to manufacture consent, and advertising

and public relations as technologies to manufacture the public sphere.

Even given this overlap, our primary emphases differ: Habermas reads

the rise of public relations and its ilk as a story about the rise and fall of

reason. For Habermas, the enlightenment drive to democratization meant

the growth of salons and coffeehouses in which rational-critical debate

could thrive and place a check on economic and political forces. In time,

structural and technological changes in society—importantly the rise of a

cheap and prevalent for-proﬁt mass media—undermined those spaces of

reason and replaced them with gibberish in support of an economic and

political elite. I would not deny that all of that is true in its outlines, but

I think the emphasis on the story of reason is misplaced in his account.

For Habermas, subjects have remained the same but their social context

has shifted for the worse, drawing out irrational and atomized behavior.

In the end, for all the help and inspiration that Chomsky, Marcuse, and

Habermas have given to my own work, my criticism of them is that they

are too conservative. They are conservative in the sense that they aim to

return to and enhance—thus conserve—what they see as essential human

qualities. They all wish to return to something that has been lost: Chom-

sky wants to end the alienation of production, Marcuse wants to satisfy

“true needs,” and Habermas wants to recover critical-rational subjectiv-

ity.38 These leftists seek to authorize the imposition and enforcement of

a set of social relations premised on the ﬂourishing of the subject’s own

true nature; in other words, these discourses portray the subject’s own

being as calling for the imposition of the particular social and politi-

cal circumstances that they favor and that only they adequately articu-

late. These authors attribute a voice to the nature of the subject that has

the convenient effect of allowing them to disregard the subject’s own

literal voice in favor of the phantasmal and essential one that appears in

their manuscripts. Here Marcuse traps the public in a kind of catch-22

when he states that the public must and can have the ﬁnal say over their

needs but can only have that say when they are “free” (in other words,

when they agree with his understanding of what a human should want

by nature): “In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false

needs must be answered by the individuals themselves but only in the last

analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer.”39

Introduction 19

The voice of human nature is created in these works through the guise

of social sciences and, although the works’ stated intention is to oppose

oppression, they too silence these abject populations through assuming

that only they, and not the subjects themselves, can speak their true wants

and needs.

In one important way, the leftists are much less democratic and egali-

tarian than even the propagandists and public relations counsels: it is

more common to see the public relations counsels question the ethics

of proceeding to impose their social-political vision on the public than

it is to see Chomsky, Marcuse, or Habermas engaging in such moments

of self-doubt and questioning. It can be hard for do-gooders to see their

image of the good as an alien imposition that is controlling, dominating,

and excising of the autonomy of those they claim to speak for. Foucault

criticizes Chomsky on similar grounds when he strives to get Chomsky to

see that his proposals for proletarian revolution will not achieve an ideal

justice but simply a different justice, a shift in power relations: “That is

the justiﬁcation, but one doesn’t speak in terms of justice but in terms

of power.”40 What is amazing about the debate is Chomsky’s seeming

inability to recognize the possibility of Foucault’s point. Chomsky never

openly grapples with the question of whether or not the ideals that he

constructs are really justiﬁed by an “essential nature” or are instead

just the imposition of his own ideals, no matter how well-meaning. His

assumptions about the justice and accuracy of his claims do not push him

to consider what might be the consequences of his ideas if in fact they are

not demanded by human nature but instead are his own invention.

I am concerned about the tyranny implicit in these works that results

from the way they deploy human nature as an authorization for a politi-

cal regime. But in respect to propaganda, I am also worried that they

fail to see some of the changes propaganda has wrought because they

assumed that such changes are impossible. In other words, their prob-

lematic position can be stated thusly: since the nature of the subject is

ﬁxed in the ways that they describe in their texts, then there can be no

worry of the nature of the subject being changed by propaganda; thus, it

is unnecessary, in theory and in practice, to grapple with propagandists

efforts to change the nature of the subject. This position is especially hard

to maintain in reference to propaganda, not just because of their frequent

discussions of transforming and shaping basic elements of human nature

but also because the historical record is rife with tremendous changes

in the public. It is astounding to see the transformation of small farm-

ers into laborers, consumers, and pro-corporate/pro-war voters in the

United States in a relatively short period following the Civil War and into

the new century. My own reaction verged on incredulity on ﬁnding out

that in 1850, 95% of the goods the average American used were self-

manufactured and 5% purchased, but by 1950 the equation was more

than reversed. It forces one not just to ask how human beings changed

20 Introduction

over that period of time but also how they might yet change. What else

might we have become other than consumers? More importantly, what

might we be yet? In place of a discourse that is blinkered to the past

changes wrought in human nature and how it might yet be changed,

this work takes the constitution of the subjectivity of the publics to be a

historical question that can only be answered in reference to the archives

rather than a theory of the subject and whose future contains a multitude

of possibilities and no single ideal answer. I write this work on the gene-

alogy of the publics to reveal its contingent formation and to open the

possibilities offered by the future. In other words, this text is performa-

tively democratic insofar as it seeks to cast doubt on the naturalization of

domination and make available different vectors of analysis and action

on the creation of subjects and the relations of power and knowledge in

which they are enmeshed today.

This democratic solution has to be differentiated from the one Stuart

Ewen offers in his book PR!: A Social History of Spin, in that my aim

is not to restore a situation that was once present but is now lost. In

PR! Ewen essentially wants to walk democracy backwards, rolling back

the inroads that corporate power and public relations have made into

democratic life and returning to an ideal of Jeffersonian democracy.41 His

book reads as the story of the erosion of the democracy that was, with

the exception that the New Deal slowed this tide and even temporarily

pressed democracy forward. Even though the New Deal made headway,

it was not so much by producing a new form of democracy but by extend-

ing Jeffersonian principles: ‘“To ensure this ﬂow [of communication]’ and

to further his commitment to ‘Jeffersonian’ principles, Roosevelt would

promote the federal government not merely as an instrument of ‘directive

intelligence,’” but as a “clearing house for the exchange of information

and ideas, of facts and ideals, affecting the general welfare.”42 For Ewen,

FDR was the return of what was in the process of being lost. In the

end, even the Jeffersonian New Deal was overwhelmed by the “Hamil-

tonians,” the corporate “engineers of consent.”43 In time, the New Deal

became just another healthy piece of democracy eroded by corporate/PR

inﬂuence that needs to be restored: “For this situation to change, the pub-

lic sphere—currently dominated by corporate interests and consciously

managed by public relations professions—must revert to the people.”44

The aim of this text is not to reclaim the truth of the human essence

so that an ideal political regime can be constructed or recovered. Its aim

is to write a genealogy of propaganda so that we may better see just

how contingent and fragile our present is. Propaganda has spent over

a century at the hands of elites, mostly corporations, aiming to recon-

stitute mass subjectivity and public conduct through a new kind of pri-

vate government; this has been done so effectively that it may be hard

to see at present just how much of public life is both pernicious and

contingent. Hopefully, by mapping these contingent lines of force we

Introduction 21

can better see their effects and also how they might be resisted. Previ-

ous literature on propaganda has many things to recommend it, and this

work is indebted to it. Nonetheless, that critical literature is not able

to see the depth, audacity, and import of the change propaganda was

proposing because it wanted to hold out the endurance of the past so

that it might be recovered in the present. In contrast, I aim to chart how

propaganda has framed and sought to govern public subjectivity without

making the assumption that the nature of the subject is ﬁxed and mak-

ing the claim that either the propagandists have gotten it right or gotten

it wrong. Instead, this text looks empirically and genealogically at how

propaganda emerged within a speciﬁc context and how its relations of

subjectivity, knowledge, and power were both produced and productive

of its context. This genealogical approach has the advantage of not hav-

ing to stand against the evidence of the archives; it makes sense of the

historically different articulations of power, knowledge, and subjectivity

that occurred before propaganda and the twentieth century, the break

that propaganda brought to those relations, and the eventual spread and

even hegemony of the relations of power, knowledge, and subjectivity of

propaganda.

In sum, this text is a genealogical analysis of the emergence of appa-

ratuses of propaganda through the archives. By ‘apparatus’ (dispositif ),

I follow Foucault’s usage, which is to use the term to frame an analysis

rather than to stipulate a deﬁnition. In other words, to look at something

as an apparatus is to approach it as a number of parts whose contingent

relationships with each other form the contingent being of the apparatus.

Foucault studies the relations between the different parts of an apparatus

as driven by an “urgent need” or problem that organizes his response:

What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, ﬁrstly, a thoroughly

heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, archi-

tectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative meas-

ures, scientiﬁc statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic

propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the

elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of rela-

tions that can be established between these elements. Secondly, what

I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of

the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements.

[. . .] Thirdly, I understand by the term “apparatus” a sort of—shall

we say—formation which has as its major function at a given histori-

cal moment that of responding to an urgent need.45

To study propaganda as an apparatus means to search for the parts that

compose it and to analyze their relationship as a response to an “urgent

need.” One of the most interesting parts of propaganda is how, in respond-

ing to the needs of business, especially the needs of the new corporations,

it sought to meet that need and transform it. The birth of propaganda

is also the story of the birth of the modern corporation and its publics.

Propaganda became a vector for the induction of government into the

corporation and the transformation of its relationship to its publics.

Generally, my work should only be construed to be making a claim

about the propagandists’ archives. Dealing with the wide variety of

archival texts (for publication, to clients, for internal training, in private

discussion with other PR counsels, etc.) offers more than enough for a

single volume. If I were to take on further domains of analysis, it would

almost certainly have to be in another volume besides this one. The kind

of statistics that many would want to see accompany this analysis of

propaganda—for instance, statistical analysis about changes in consump-

tion habits—are neither available now nor will they ever be in the future.

Why? The American Statistical Association was formed in 1839 in Bos-

ton, but zero professional statisticians were being trained in the United

States until the 1870s. Even in 1870, there were still no master’s degrees

and PhDs offered in the United States. It took a signiﬁcant amount of

time for enough advanced practitioners to be educated and then directed

to the study of business for any useful statistical information to be pro-

duced. In the United States, business statistics were not widely collected

until the Hoover administration of 1929–1933. After this move by the

Hoover administration, there was an additional lag until the private

sector began to make extensive use of the statistics and keep their own

detailed statistical information.46 In sum, the data with which one could

use to make ﬁne-grained statistical analyses about the effects of propa-

ganda do not exist in the time frame I am examining. What remains

outside of the possibility of these statistical analyses is exactly the kind of

archival analysis that I am doing here.

In terms of resisting propaganda, successful displacements of propa-

ganda will have to take seriously that propaganda is not primarily an

epistemological apparatus but one of government and subjectiﬁcation.

Resisting propaganda is not so much a task of liberation from various

kinds of falsehood, as if underneath all the lies remained an untouched,

happy, and ﬂourishing being, waiting to be set free by the truth. Propa-

ganda has created contemporary subjects—the publics—to be willing

and cooperative agents in producing corporate proﬁt and hegemony. If

we want the kind of subjects that will produce new and more demo-

cratic relations of power and knowledge, they will have to be created in

response to the disposition of contemporary relations.

Notes

1. Raymond C. Mayer, How to Do Publicity (New York: Harper, 1933), 8.

2. Ivy L. Lee, Publicity: Some of the Things It Is and Is Not (New York: Indus-

tries, 1925), 22–23.

3. R. H. Wilder and K. L. Buell, Publicity: A Manual for the Use of Business,

Civic, or Social Service Organizations (New York: Ronald Press, 1923), 4,

14; Glenn C. Quiett and Ralph D. Casey, Principles of Publicity (New York:

D. Appleton, 1926), V; Address to the New York Company of AT&T “Talk

on Public Relations” by Arthur Page, March 28, 1932, Volume 5, Pg. 2,

Arthur Page Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society; Self Published Promo-

tional Newsletter “The Publicist” volume 1 by John Price Jones, Decem-

ber 1929, Box 2, Pg. 3, John Price Jones Company Collection, Baker Library,

Harvard Business School. For further discussion of the term “propaganda”

as a name for their ﬁeld, please see Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 4, 10, 14;

Lee, Publicity, 22; H. A. Bruno and R. R. Blythe, The Modern Torchbearers

(New York: Bruno, Blythe and Associates, 1928), 2–3; Roger William Riis

and Charles W. Bonner, Publicity: A Study of the Development of Indus-

trial News (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), 143–144; John Price Jones, At the

Bar of Public Opinion: A Brief for Public Relations (New York: Inter-River

Press, 1939), xiii–xiv; H. S. McCauley, Getting Your Name in Print (New

York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1922), v–vi; Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public

Opinion (Brooklyn: Ig, 1923), 50; Talk before Annual Meeting of Ofﬁce

Equipment Manufacturers Institute “Industry’s Job in Public Relations,”

John W. Hill, Toronto, June 17, 1938, Box 39, Pg. 7, John W. Hill Papers,

Wisconsin Historical Society.

4. Edward Bernays, interview, in Century of the Self, directed by Adam Curtis

(London: BBC, 2002), DVD.

5. Paul Holmes et al. and the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations,

“The Holmes Report,” document, posted 2016, accessed September 9,

2018, www.holmesreport.com/ranking-and-data/global-communications-

report/2016-research.

6. Alan R. Raucher, Public Relations and Business, 1900–1929 (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), 115–116.

7. Scott Cutlip, “The Nation’s First Public Relations Firm,” Journalism and

Mass Communication Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1966): 269–280.

8. Riis and Bonner, Publicity, 6.

9. Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics: 1871–1899 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 163–164.

10. Draft of an unpublished autobiography, William H. Baldwin, 1/22/63, reel

10, Pg. 28, William H. Baldwin Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

11. Transcript of the ﬁfth radio talk titled “The Mainspring of Business Activ-

ity” from the “New Business World” series, conducted by Merle Thorpe

with Bruce Barton guest, November 30, 1929, Box 135, Pg. 18, Bruce Bar-

ton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

12. Lee, Publicity, 48.

13. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H. Liveright, 1928), 63.

14. Article “Truths from Business” appearing in The Forum by Theodore Vail,

November 1917, Box 1, Pgs. 619–620, Theodore Vail Papers, Wisconsin

Historical Society.

15. Bernays, Propaganda, 63. Emphasis mine.

16. Brewster and Palmer’s book is an early textbook that combines public rela-

tions and advertising into one text. Early university textbooks often com-

bined public relations with either advertising or journalism. Arthur Brewster

and Herbert Palmer, Introduction to Advertising (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1924), 78, 97.

17. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings

1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 98.

18. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777.

19. Ibid., 777.

20. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 15.

21. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 789.

22. Ibid., 789–790.

23. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchill (New York: Palgrave Macmil-

lan, 2007), 112.

24. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 790.

25. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 68, 82.

26. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 31, 80.

27. Garth S. Jowett, “Brainwashing: The Korean POW Controversy and the

Origins of a Myth,” in Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New Clas-

sic Essays, ed. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell (Thousand Oaks:

Sage, 2006), 210–211.

28. Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1971), 13.

29. Ibid., 12.

30. Merriam Webster, “Stupid,” accessed August 9, 2018, www.merriam-web

ster.com/dictionary/stupid.

31. Ellul, Propaganda, 84.

32. Lee, Publicity, 47; Bernays, Propaganda, 10–11, 20; Wilder and Buell, Pub-

licity, 5–6.

33. Letter from Frances Purdy Wright to Scott Cutlip, September 1, 1986,

Box 13, “Hamilton Wright” folder, Scott Cutlip Papers, Wisconsin Histori-

cal Society.

34. Scott Cutlip, The Unseen Power: Public Relations, a History (Hillsdale:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), ix.

35. Lee, Publicity, 19–22.

36. Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on

Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006), 41.

37. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of

Advanced Industrial Capital (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 2.

38. Ibid., 4–5.

39. Ibid., 6.

40. Chomsky and Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 54.

41. Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996),

80, 121, 125, 126–127, 145, 146–147, 150, 154, 172–173, 241–242, 397,

410, 411, 414.

42. Ibid., 242.

43. Ibid., 241, 414.

44. Ibid., 411. Emphasis mine.

45. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 194–195.

46. Matthew Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-

Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71.

1. George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amaz-

ing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel

of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York: Harper, 1920), 5.

2. Cutlip, “The Nation’s First Public Relations Firm,” 269–280.

3. Raucher, Public Relations and Business, 1900–1929, 65–74.

4. Creel, How We Advertised America, 4–5.

5. Ibid., 4.

6. Ibid., 17.

7. Ibid., 3–5.

8. Bruno and Blythe, The Modern Torchbearers, 2.

9. Edward Bernays, interview, in Century of the Self, directed by Adam Curtis

(London: BBC, 2002), DVD.

10. Bruno and Blythe, The Modern Torchbearers, 2–3; Bernays, Propaganda,

27–28; Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 11, 30; Riis and Bonner, Publicity,

106–109.

11. Ivy Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads (Philadelphia: E. S. Nash, 1915), 8.

12. John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progres-

sive Era, 1890–1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 25.

13. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New

American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 8.

14. Katherine H. Adams, Progressive Politics and the Training of America’s Per-

suaders (New York: Routledge, 2009), 25.

15. Chambers, Tyranny of Change, 55.

16. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in

the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 79–91.

17. Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 22.

18. Lee, Publicity, 44.

19. Special talk at the AT&T Commercial Conference by A. W. Page, June 1927,

Volume 5, Arthur Page Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

20. Raucher, Public Relations and Business, 67.

21. David Ames Wells, Recent Economic Changes and Their Effect on the Pro-

duction and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-Being of Society (New

York: Dr. Appleton, 1898), 25–26.

22. Bernays, Propaganda, 63. Emphasis mine.

23. McCauley, Getting Your Name in Print, v.

24. Riis and Bonner, Publicity, 6.

25. Ibid., 121.

26. Ibid., 143.

27. Tarde and crowd psychology will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Lee,

Human Nature and the Railroads, 22–23.

28. Bruce Baldwin, The Shopping Book (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1928), 1–2.

29. Ibid., 3.

30. Ibid., 2.

31. Matter sent out from Ivy L. Lee to Armour and Company, March 29,

1926, Ivy Ledbetter Lee Papers, Box 40, Folder 7–9, Public Policy Papers,

Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University

Library.

32. Hayes Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading (New York: General, 1927), 1–3.

33. Ibid., x.

34. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory, 85–93; Roland

Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and

Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1998), 44–47.

35. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, 140.

36. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 14; Leach, Land of Desire, 118–119.

37. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 116.

38. Another excellent example of the manipulation of the public/private distinc-

tion can be found in Ewen’s and Marchand’s account of American Telephone

and Telegraph’s PR campaigns. AT&T’s PR campaign would also work well

as an example here, but the account is involved enough that it would over-

take the chapter to recount. See Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul,

48–87; Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, 85–101.

39. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, 1–3.

40. Address to the National Association of Manufacturers titled “Where We Are

Headed in Public Relations by John W. Hill, June 3, 1943, Box 39, John W.

Hill Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

41. Ibid.

42. Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads, 18–19.

43. Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check (Pasadena: Upton Sinclair, 1919), 313.

44. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory, 87.

45. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 44.

46. Ibid., 44–45.

47. Ibid., 128–129.

48. Ibid., 128.

49. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 82.

50. Lee, Publicity, 44.

51. Raucher, Public Relations and Business, 101.

52. Ivy L. Lee as quoted in Ray Heibert, Courtier to the Crowd: The Life Story

of Ivy Lee (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966), 167.

53. “About API,” American Petroleum Institute, accessed January 9, 2018,

www.api.org/about.

54. The Ivy L. Lee papers contain thousands of examples and well over 100 fold-

ers of material on his work building, developing, and propagating associa-

tions. For a few examples see: Matter Sent Out from Ivy L. Lee, Ivy Ledbetter

Lee Papers, Box 32, Folder 5–7; Box 33, Folder 5–7, 11; Box 27, Folders 24,

25, 28, 34; Box 28, Folder 7, 14, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare

Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

55. Eric F. Goldman, Two-Way Street: The Emergence of the Public Relations

Counsel (Boston: Bellman, 1948).

56. Creel, How We Advertised America, 5.

57. Ibid., 5.

58. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 148–149.

59. Creel, How We Advertised America, 184.

60. The issue of the overlapping nature of relationships of subjectiﬁcation will

be discussed further in Chapter 5.

61. Stanley Kelley Jr., Professional Public Relations and Political Power (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 32.

62. Lee, Publicity, 60.

63. Bernays, Propaganda, 96–97.

64. Ibid., 65.

65. Unpublished manuscript “The Twisting Trail” by James D. Ellsworth,

December 1936, Box 5, Pgs. 65–66, Scott Cutlip papers, Wisconsin Histori-

cal Society.

66. Document titled “The Bell System” by James D. Ellsworth, Box 5, Pg. 1,

Scott Cutlip papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

67. Article “Truths from Business” appearing in The Forum by Theodore Vail,

November 1917, Box 1, Theodore Vail Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

68. Untitled and unpublished manuscript by Arthur Page, undated (approx.

1927), Box 62, “Writings” folder, Pg. 36, Arthur Page Papers, Wisconsin

Historical Society.

69. McCauley, Getting Your Name in Print, v.

70. Curtis, Century of the Self.

71. Calvin Coolidge, “Address Before the American Association of Advertising

Agencies, Washington, D.C., October 27, 1926,” The American Presidency

Project, accessed August 1, 2016, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=412.

72. Allan Brandt, The Cigarette Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 84–85.

73. Leach, Land of Desire, 42.

74. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2014), 236.

75. Michel Foucault, Dits et ècrits IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 237.

76. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimen-

sions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault,” Parrhesia

2 (2007): 44–65. I also have sympathy for Harrer’s view that subjectiﬁca-

tion and subjectivation are closely related in Foucault’s own writing and no

absolute distinction is possible. I follow Milchman and Rosenberg because

the distinction they argue for between the terms mirrors one I want to make

in this text. See Sebastian Harrer, “The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s

Lecture Series ‘Herméneutique du Sujet’,” Foucault Studies 2 (2007): 75–96.

77. Mayer, How to Do Publicity, 1.

78. Quiett and Casey, Principles of Publicity; Lee, Human Nature and the Rail-

roads, 16; Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 152–153.

79. Bernays, Propaganda, 10, 19, 27, 37; Barton, “The Mainspring of Business

Activity,” 18; Quiett and Casey, Principles of Publicity, 1.

80. Jones, At the Bar, 32–33.

81. Ellul, Propaganda, 25.

1. Prepared remarks delivered at the AT&T General Sales Conference by

Arthur Page, January/February 1927, Volume 5, Arthur Page Papers, Wis-

consin Historical Society.

2. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 777.

3. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), 271.

4. Ibid., 169.

5. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, 1.

6. Lee, Publicity, 61.

7. Ibid., 58–59.

8. For more information about the charge that corporations were soulless and

the response to this charge by corporations, see Marchand, Creating the

Corporate Soul, 1–5.

9. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, viii–ix.

10. For a more extensive consideration of this topic in political economy, see

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,

1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2008), 27–50.

11. Adam Smith, An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,

ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 25.

12. Ibid., 456.

13. Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads, 107.

14. Bernays, Propaganda, 51–52.

15. Bruno and Blythe, The Modern Torchbearers, chapter 3.

16. Lee, Publicity, 56, 47.

17. Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads, 8, 12.

18. Talk before Annual Meeting of Ofﬁce Equipment Manufacturers Institute

“Industry’s Job in Public Relations,” John W. Hill, Toronto, June 17, 1938,

Box 39, Pg. 7, John W. Hill Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

19. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, ix. For a similar perspective from

another author, see S. M. Kennedy, Winning the Public (New York: McGraw

Hill, 1921), 126–133.

20. Kennedy, Winning the Public, 127 (emphasis added).

21. Bernays, Propaganda, 11, 14.

22. Ibid., 104.

23. Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 6.

24. Lee, Publicity, 38.

25. Bernays, Propaganda, 9–10.

26. Ibid., 9, 35.

27. Raucher, Public Relations and Business, 125.

28. Van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 161, 186–187.

29. Adams, Progressive Politics, 142.

30. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1922),

177, 188.

31. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (New York: Rout-

ledge, 1994), 256–257; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects

of Sociology (London: Heinemann Educational, 1973), 75–87.

32. Eugene E. Leach, “Mental Epidemics: Crowd Psychology and American

Culture, 1890–1940,” American Studies 33, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 25–26.

33. Raucher, Public Relations and Business, 30, 117, 131–135.

34. Ibid., 128.

35. Cutlip, The Unseen Power, 13.

36. Excerpts from the Memoirs of James D. Ellsworth, undated, Box 5, James D.

Ellsworth folder, Pg. 56, Scott Cutlip Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

37. Riis and Bonner, Publicity, 78.

38. Ibid., 146.

39. Cutlip, The Unseen Power, 308.

40. University of Wisconsin Class Notes, William H. Baldwin, 1912–1913,

Micro 809, Reel 1, William H. Baldwin Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

41. Speech to Newspaper Publishers, June 16, 1931, Box 135, Folder Speeches

1930–1931, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

42. Article “Getting Your Second Wind in Business” published in American

Magazine under the pseudonym Joseph French Johnson, Bruce Barton,

May 1920, Box 125, Folder American Magazine, Bruce Barton Papers, Wis-

consin Historical Society.

43. Person Correspondence from Bruce Barton to Walter Lippmann, Bruce Bar-

ton, 12/31/31 and 11/13/33, Box 39, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin His-

torical Society.

44. For an example of how Le Bon and McDougall’s ideas about how demo-

cratic publics should be engaged in complicated issues informs Barton’s eve-

ryday work see: Letter to the Editor of the Rochester Times Union, “Urges

Advertising to Promote Peace,” Bruce Barton, February 12, 1929, Box 131,

Folder Printer’s Ink, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

45. Draft article submitted to the New York Herald Tribune, Bruce Barton,

June 1933, Box 131, Folder New York Herald Tribune, Bruce Barton Papers,

Wisconsin Historical Society.

46. Roy L. Smith, Capturing Crowds (New York: Abingdon Press, 1923), 72, 76.

47. Ibid., 56, 72–73.

48. Ibid., 68.

49. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Benn,

1896), 66.

50. Smith, Capturing Crowds, 145.

51. Ibid., 16.

52. Ibid., 93.

53. Irving Squire, Informing Your Public (New York: Association Press, 1924), 5.

54. Abram Lipsky, Man the Puppet: The Art of Controlling Minds (New York:

Frank-Maurice, 1925), 11.

55. Mary Swain Routzahn, Traveling Publicity Campaigns (New York: Russell

Sage Foundation, 1920), 106.

56. Herbert Heebner Smith, Publicity and Progress (New York: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1915), v.

57. Ibid., 37–38.

58. Address before National Association of Manufacturers “Organizing for

Public Relations,” John W. Hill, November 30, 1942, Box 39, Pg. 9, Bruce

Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

59. Chapter draft “Some Deﬁnitions of “The Public Interest” Have Been

Attempted,” John W. Hill, Box 41, Folder Anniversary Book, Pgs. 9–10, Bruce

Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

60. Adams, Progressive Politics, 84.

61. Alfred McClung Lee, “Trends in Public Relations Training,” Public Opinion

Quarterly 11, no. 1 (Spring 1947): 83–91.

62. For a booklist from course offered at New York University by William H.

Baldwin see: New York University Lecture Notes 1950–1951, First Lecture,

Micro 809, Reel 8, William H. Baldwin Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

63. Gardner Edward Hall, Effective Business Letters (New York: Ronald Press,

1915), 256.

64. Lyle M. Spencer, Editorial Writing (New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1924), 205.

1. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1995), 58.

2. Ibid., 56.

3. Ibid., 24.

4. Tönnies read and annotated Ferguson’s Essays at least twice in 1880 and

1885. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2001), 64.

5. Ibid., 22.

6. Ibid., 52.

7. Ibid., 57.

8. Ibid., 83.

9. Ibid., 53.

10. Bernays, Propaganda, 92.

11. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, 175.

12. Ibid., 175.

13. Although some may not consider Lippmann a crowd psychologist and more

of a popular author because he lacks a PhD and university appointment,

his books Public Opinion and The Phantom Public were tremendously

inﬂuential and dealt with all the key elements of crowd psychology. In this

respect, Lippmann can be likened to Le Bon, who similarly lacked a univer-

sity appointment and its professional credentials but nonetheless produced

tremendously popular and inﬂuential work.

14. Van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 133.

15. Le Bon, The Crowd, 1.

16. Ibid., 12.

17. Ibid., 3.

18. Ibid., 19.

19. Ibid., 55.

20. Ibid., 11.

21. Ibid., 5.

22. William McDougall, The Group Mind (New York: Putnam, 1920), 64.

23. William Conway, The Crowd in Peace and War (New York: Longmans,

1915), 97–98.

24. Ibid., 106.

25. Ibid., 73–74.

26. Ibid., 106.

27. Gabriel Tarde, “On Communication,” in Gabriel Tarde On Communication

and Social Inﬂuence, ed. Terry Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2010), 281.

28. Van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics.

29. Tarde, On Communication, 278.

30. Adams, Progressive Politics, 102.

31. Tarde, On Communication, 281.

1. Bernays, Propaganda, 159.

2. Address to AT&T General Operating Conference “What Publicity and

Advertising Can Do to Help Operation,” Arthur Page, May 1927, Articles

and Addresses 1927–1956, Volume 5, Arthur Page Papers, Wisconsin His-

torical Society.

3. Transcript of radio talk hosted by Merle Thorpe “The New Business World”

featuring Bruce Barton, November 30, 1929 Box 135, Folder Speeches 1929,

Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

4. Transcript of a Discussion amongst Propagandists “An Informal Talk with

Some Old Friends,” William H. Baldwin, 1935, Reel 7, Image 862, William

H. Baldwin Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society. See also Wilder and Buell,

Publicity, 3.

5. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 137–138. See also Kennedy, Winning

the Public, 82–83.

6. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 150.

7. Bernays, Propaganda, 41.

8. Unpublished manuscript “The History of Fundraising,” John Price Jones,

August 1930, Box BC-2, Volume 2, Pg. 13, John Price Jones Company Col-

lection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

9. McDougall, “The Group Mind,” 57–58.

10. Bernays, Propaganda, 50. See also: Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads,

14; Quiett and Casey, Publicity, 367; Smith, Capturing Crowds, 68; and

Address delivered to the John Price Jones Staff Conference “Philanthropy

and the Mass Mind,” Eugene L. Belisle, March 3, 1933, Box BF-10, Folder

1933 Annual Staff Conference, John Price Jones Company Collection, Baker

Library, Harvard Business School.

11. Magazine article “Let’s Advertise This Hell!” published in The American

Magazine, Bruce Barton, May 1932, Box 131, Folder American Magazine,

Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

12. Address to AT&T General Operating Conference “What Publicity and

Advertising Can Do to Help Operation,” Arthur Page, May 1927, Articles

and Addresses 1927–1956, Volume 5, Arthur Page Papers, Wisconsin His-

torical Society.

13. See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 165.

14. Bruno and Blythe, The Modern Torchbearers, chapter IV.

15. See Lee, Publicity, 47 and Bernays, Propaganda, 92.

16. Le Bon, The Crowd, 63.

17. Address to AT&T Trafﬁc Conference, Arthur Page, November 11, 1927,

Articles and Addresses 1927–1956, Volume 5, Arthur Page Papers, Wiscon-

sin Historical Society.

18. “Mr. Page’s Address to the Bell Telephone Laboratories,” Arthur Page,

June 15, 1929, Articles and Addresses 1927–1956, Volume 5, Arthur Page

Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

19. Thomas F. Woodlock, “The Children of Marxism,” in Thinking It Over

(New York: McMullen, 1947), 52.

20. Bernays, Propaganda, 11–12.

21. Ibid., 19.

22. See Transcript of radio talk hosted by Merle Thorpe “The New Business

World” featuring Bruce Barton, November 30, 1929 Box 135, Folder

Speeches 1929, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

23. Cutlip, The Unseen Power, 102–103.

24. Le Bon, The Crowd, 67.

25. Ibid., 55.

26. Ibid.

27. Unpublished article “A Statement About Public Relations and Its Practition-

ers,” Pendleton Dudley, June 15, 1965, Box 5, Folder Dudley-Anderson-

Yutzy, Pg. 2, Scott Cutlip Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society. See also

Kennedy, Winning the Public, 22; Lipsky, Man the Puppet, 33; Lee, Human

Nature and the Railroads, 15, 18; Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion,

169–170.

28. Le Bon, The Crowd, 67. See also Lippmann, Public Opinion, 89.

29. John Price Jones, Principles of Successful Fundraising (New York: John Price

Jones, 1936), 38. See also, Speech at the National Manufacturers Association

“The Public,” Bruce Barton, December 4, 1935, Box 136, Folder Speeches

1934–1935, Bruce Barton Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society and Ivy L.

Lee, Publicity Methods for Engineers (Chicago: Hammond Press, 1922), 174.

30. Le Bon, The Crowd, 67.

31. Ibid., 67.

32. Ibid., 69.

33. Ibid., 56.

34. Ibid., 64.

35. Quiett and Casey, Publicity, 363.

36. Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 222. See also, Jones, At the Bar of Public Opin-

ion, 69, and Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 92. Note here that the

usage of a priori in Bernays is close to the way that Foucault will use the term

in The Order of Things 43 years later.

37. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An

Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Boston:

MIT Press, 1991), 42.

38. Immanuel Kant, Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, trans.

Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 135.

39. Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” New Ger-

man Critique 3 (Autumn 1974): 50.

40. Bernays, Propaganda, 34.

41. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press,

1954), 7.

42. Ken Kurson, “SHOCKER: US Govt Spent $4.34 Billion on Outside PR in

Last Seven Years,” December 9, 2015, http://observer.com/2015/12/shocker-

us-govt-spent-4-34-billion-on-outside-pr-in-last-seven-years/.

1. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” interview by

P. Rabinow, in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1 (New York: New Press,

1998), 118.

2. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 137.

3. Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads, 95.

4. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, vii–viii.

5. Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 3.

6. Mayer, How to Do Publicity, 46.

7. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty

Years’ Work Among Them (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1967), 27.

8. Van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 29.

9. Unpublished manuscript “The History of Fundraising,” John Price Jones,

August 1930, Box BC-2, Volume 2, Pg. 13, John Price Jones Company Col-

lection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

10. Jones, At the Bar of Public Opinion, 4.

11. Wilder and Buell, Publicity, 5.

12. Ibid., 6.

13. Ibid., 6.

14. Jones, At the Bar of Public Opinion, 32–33.

15. Bernays, Propaganda, 20.

16. Lee, Human Nature and the Railroads, 8.

17. Ibid., 8.

18. Bruno and Blythe, The Modern Torchbearers, chapter 5, Pg. 2 (unnumbered).

19. Unpublished manuscript “The History of Fundraising,” John Price Jones,

August 1930, Box BC-2, Volume 2, Pg. 80, John Price Jones Company Col-

lection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

20. Ivy Lee’s Publicity contains a transcript of a question and answer session

with journalists and journalism students. One of the primary points of criti-

cal contention is the co-optation of journalism by propagandists like Lee for

corporate purposes. See Lee, Publicity, 25–43.

21. For a useful cataloging of early tactics of co-optation by early propagandists,

see Creel, How We Advertised America. The text is usefully organized into

chapters devoted to different tactics.

22. Miguel Vatter, “Foucault and Hayek,” in The Government of Life: Foucault,

Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, ed. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (New

York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 171.

23. Creel, How We Advertised America, 17.

24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Colom-

bia University Press, 2014), 146.

25. Mayer, How to Do Publicity, 10.

26. Kennedy, Winning the Public, 127. See the following address by Arthur Page

for a glimpse into how similar issues were handled at AT&T, Address to

AT&T Public Relations Course “Talk on Public Relations,” Arthur Page,

March 28, 1932, Articles and Addresses 1927–1956, Volume 5, Pgs. 1–2,

Arthur Page Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.

27. Étienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjectivation,” in Supposing the Subject,

ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1996), 9.

1. An earlier and abbreviated version of this chapter was published as “The

Job of Creating Desire: Propaganda as an Apparatus of Government and

Subjectiﬁcation,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2017):

101–118. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State Uni-

versity Press.

Jones, At the Bar of Public Opinion, 29–30.

2. Jones, At the Bar of Public Opinion, 29–30.

3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: J. M.

Dent, 1961), 297, 300.

4. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, “Public Opinion and the Classical Tradition:

A Re-Evaluation,” Public Opinion Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 143–156.

5. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, vol. I (London: Long-

mans, Green, 1875), 110.

6. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, but

It Does Not Apply in Practice’,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 84–85.

7. Upton Sinclair, “Poison Ivy,” in The Brass Check (New York: Arno and New

York Times, 1970), 311.

8. Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2015), 8.

9. Ibid., 291.

10. Arnold Farr, “Herbert Marcuse,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

December 18, 2013, accessed August 1, 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/

entries/marcuse/.

11. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed.

Robert C. Tucker (London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 173.

12. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-

Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 117.

13. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 4, 32.

14. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 118.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 95.

17. Ibid., 126.

18. Nick Crossley, “On Systematically Distorted Communication: Bourdieu and

the Socio-Analysis of Publics,” Sociological Review 52 (2004): 88–112.

19. Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” in Sociology in Question

(London: Sage, 1993), 150.

20. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 244.

21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New

York: Vintage Books, 1990), 17.

22. Ibid., 156.

23. Cutlip, The Unseen Power, 178.

24. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 297.

25. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 99.

26. Ibid., 106.

27. Ibid., 68.

28. Ibid., 82.

29. Ibid., 113.

30. “The History of Fundraising,” August 1930, Box BC, vol. 1, 113–114, John

Price Jones Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

31. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 113.

32. Ibid., 152.

33. Cutlip, The Unseen Power, 195–196.

34. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 155.

35. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7, 241.

36. Ibid., 6.

37. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 171.

38. Ibid., 106.

39. Ibid., 156.

1. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924).

2. US Department of Health and Human Services, Reducing Tobacco Use:

A Report of the Surgeon General (Atlanta: US Department of Health and

Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center

for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Ofﬁce on Smoking

and Health, 2000), 14.

3. Glen M. Broom, Cutlip and Center’s Effective Public Relations, 10th ed.

(Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2009).

4. Ibid., 3.

5. Ibid., 340.

6. Ibid., 337.

7. Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Garden City: Garden

City, 1922), 72.

8. Celia Lury, “Brand as Assemblage,” Journal of Cultural Economy 2, nos.

1–2 (2009): 70.

9. Dave Doherty, “The Era of Micromanufacturing,” Digikey.com, October 16,

2017, accessed July 30, 2019, www.digikey.com/en/blog/micromanufacturing.

10. Lury, “Brand as Assemblage,” 72.

11. Harold Van Doren, Industrial Design: A Practical Guide (New York:

McGraw Hill, 1940), x.

12. Leach, Land of Desire, 39.

13. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 36–41.

14. Curtis, Century of the Self.

15. A. Fuat Firat and Nikhilesh Dholakia, “From Consumer to Construer: Trav-

els in Human Subjectivity,” Journal of Consumer Culture 17, no. 3 (2017): 9.

16. Russell W. Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self,” Journal of Consumer

Research 15, no. 2 (1988): 139–168.

17. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,

trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 8.

18. Alan Bradshaw and Nikhilesh Dholakia, “Outsider’s Insights: (Mis)under-

standing A. Fuat Firat on Consumption, Markets and Culture,” Consump-

tion, Markets and Culture 15, no. 1 (2012): 124.

19. The background of much of the co-optation literature in marketing is prob-

ably the work of Sidney J. Levy. More recent work done more directly on

co-optation has been done by Moor, Firat, Venkatesh, Dholakia and others.

For examples, please see: Elizabeth Moor, “Branded Spaces: The Scope of

‘New Marketing’,” Journal of Consumer Culture 3, no. 39 (2003): 39–60

and Fuat Firat and Alladi Venkatesh, “Liberatory Postmodernism and the

Reenchantment of Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research 22, no. 3

(1995): 239–267.

20. Jonathan Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in

America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 235.

21. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Penguin, 1981),

132–139.

22. Broom, Cutlip and Center’s Effective Public Relations, 270.

23. Jacquelyn Smith, “Two Reasons Why KIND’s CEO Won’t Use the E-Word,”

Business Insider, June 2014, accessed July 30, 2019, www.businessinsider.

com/why-one-ceo-hates-the-word-employee-2014-6.

24. Broom, Cutlip and Center’s Effective Public Relations, 214.

25. For examples of recent ways that new data about publics is being used in

employee morale programs please see the journal Personnel Psychology or

the following article for an overview: Erin White, “How Surveying Workers

Can Pay Off,” Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2007, B3.

26. Pavel Krapivin, “How Google’s Strategy for Happy Employees Boosts Its

Bottom Line,” Forbes, September 2017, accessed July 30, 2019, www.forbes.

com/sites/pavelkrapivin/2018/09/17/how-googles-strategy-for-happy-

employees-boosts-its-bottom-line/#443f2ce822fc.

27. “50 Happiest Companies in America for 2013,” Career Bliss, Decem-

ber 2012, accessed July 30, 2019, www.careerbliss.com/facts-and-ﬁgures/

careerbliss-50-happiest-companies-in-america-for-2013/.

28. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, 13–30, 54–64.

29. “Culture Matters: Building on Our Own It! Culture,” Pﬁzer, accessed

July 30, 2019, www.pﬁzer.com/ﬁles/investors/ﬁnancial_reports/annual_

reports/2014/business_colleagues.htm.

30. Robbins, Human Relations in Railroading, IX, 31.

31. For a great description of how public relations and marketing have pen-

etrated the practice of government, please see Liz Moor, The Rise of Brands

(New York: Berg, 2007), 82.

32. Eric Hellweg, “2012: The First Big Data Election,” Harvard Business

Review, November 2012, accessed July 30, 2019, https://hbr.org/2012/11/

2012-the-ﬁrst-big-data-electi.

33. Sarah Green Carmichael, “The Analytics Lesson from the Obama Campaign,

Keep Your Data Organized, Secure,” Harvard Business Review, November

2012, accessed July 30, 2019, https://hbr.org/2012/11/the-analytics-lesson-

from-the.

34. Lury, “Brand as Assemblage,” 77.

35. Moor, The Rise of Brands, 82.

36. For recent examples of how the mass media have heralded the rise of big

data, please see: Olivia Goldhill, “How Big Data Got So Powerful,” Quartz,

July 2019, accessed July 30, 2019, https://qz.com/1656462/how-companies-

use-big-data-to-proﬁt-from-your-personal-info/; Gil Press, “Big Data Is

Dead: Long Live Big Data AI,” Forbes, July 2019, accessed July 30, 2019,

www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2019/07/01/big-data-is-dead-long-live-big-

data-ai/#536da6301b05; Alison DeNisco Rayome, “Big Data: 3 Biggest

Challenges for Business,” TechRepublic, June 2019, accessed July 30, 2019,

www.techrepublic.com/article/big-data-3-biggest-challenges-for-businesses/;

and Louise Matsakis, “Big Data Supercharged Gerrymandering: It Could

Stop It Too,” Wired, June 2019, accessed July 30, 2019, www.wired.com/

story/big-data-supercharged-gerrymandering-supreme-court/.

37. Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” New York Times,

February 2012, accessed July 30, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/

magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&mtrref=undeﬁned

&gwh=78FA8EA57BE65EEEFA33653868CEA359.

38. Broom, Cutlip and Center’s Effective Public Relations, 4–6.

39. Lee, Publicity, 47, and Human Nature and the Railroads, 18.

40. “What Is Persuasive Design?” Interaction Design Foundation, accessed July 30,

2019, https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/03/micromanufacturing-the-future/.

41. Jenny Radesky, “Persuasive Digital Design: Appealing to Adults, Problem-

atic for Kids?” University of Michigan Health Lab, February 2018, accessed

July 30, 2019, https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/health-tech/persuasive-digital-

design-appealing-to-adults-problematic-for-kids.

42. Ibid.

43. For a cross section of different approaches to limiting screen time, please

see Klaus Wölﬂing, Kai Müller, et al., “Efﬁcacy of Short-term Treatment

of Internet and Computer Game Addiction: A Randomized Clinical Trial,”

JAMA Psychiatry, July 2019, accessed July 30, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1001/

jamapsychiatry.2019.1676; “Supporting People Who Support Families,”

Children’s Screentime Action Network, accessed July 30, 2019, https://

screentimenetwork.org; and “Advocating for Kids Wellbeing in the Digital

Age,” Common Sense Media, accessed July 30, 2019, www.commonsense

media.org/kids-action#.

44. While many thinkers have traversed the argument I gave in brief earlier,

Todd May was one of the earliest to use it in the context of developing politi-

cal goals outside of the priority of the concept of human nature. Please see

Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (State

College: Penn State University Press, 1994).

45. My choice of the smoking cessation movement as a point of reﬂection might

seem odd, when I could have chosen, for instance, the movements against

relations of sex, sexual, or racial subjectiﬁcation. Odd perhaps, but it can be

explained for two reasons. First, these movements against subjectiﬁcation—

against sexist, homophobic, and racist relations of subjectiﬁcation—have

largely targeted the state and social norms rather than corporations. Where a

corporation has been targeted it often has not been the corporation’s propa-

ganda that has been the target but its hiring, promotion, or other practices.

As I will detail in a moment, what is interesting about the smoking cessation

movement from the point of view of this text is that it is aimed primarily

against corporate propaganda and its ability to shape conduct and create

publics (i.e., smokers and tobacco users).

46. US Department of Health and Human Services, Reducing Tobacco Use, 5.

47. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Best Practices for Compre-

hensive Tobacco Control Programs—2014” (Atlanta: U.S. Department of

Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion,

Ofﬁce on Smoking and Health, 2014), 18–29.

48. Ibid., 7.

49. Ibid., 6, 20.

50. US Department of Health and Human Services, Reducing Tobacco Use, 41.

51. CDC, “Best Practices,” 22.

52. Ibid., 19.

53. Stanley, How Propaganda Works, 80–83.

54. CDC, “Best Practices,” 40–41.

55. Ibid., 7.

56. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 147–151.

57. CDC, “Best Practices,” 8.

58. The ideas in this last paragraph take their point of departure from Rancière’s

conception of democracy, though it is out of the purview of this book to

elaborate them too greatly here. For more behind my thinking, please see

Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (New York: Verso, 2014).

59. Lury, “Brand as Assemblage,” 7.

60. I am not arguing that all forms of domination are equally bad—they are not

equivalent. What I am arguing is that seeking to supplant propaganda’s admin-

istration of public subjectivity and conduct with another regime of administra-

tion does not strike at the fact that the administration itself is objectionable.

61. Ibid., 6.

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Importance Internet and computer game addiction represent a growing mental health concern, acknowledged by the World Health Organization. Objective To determine whether manualized cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), using short-term treatment for internet and computer game addiction (STICA), is efficient in individuals experiencing internet and computer game addiction. Design, Setting, and Participants A multicenter randomized clinical trial was conducted in 4 outpatient clinics in Germany and Austria from January 24, 2012, to June 14, 2017, including follow-ups. Blinded measurements were conducted. A consecutive sample of 143 men was randomized to the treatment group (STICA; n = 72) or wait-list control (WLC) group (n = 71). Main inclusion criteria were male sex and internet addiction as the primary diagnosis. The STICA group had an additional 6-month follow-up (n = 36). Data were analyzed from November 2018 to March 2019. Interventions The manualized CBT program aimed to recover functional internet use. The program consisted of 15 weekly group and up to 8 two-week individual sessions. Main Outcomes and Measures The predefined primary outcome was the Assessment of Internet and Computer Game Addiction Self-report (AICA-S). Secondary outcomes were self-reported internet addiction symptoms, time spent online on weekdays, psychosocial functioning, and depression. Results A total of 143 men (mean [SD] age, 26.2 [7.8] years) were analyzed based on intent-to-treat analyses. Of these participants, 50 of 72 men (69.4%) in the STICA group showed remission vs 17 of 71 men (23.9%) in the WLC group. In logistic regression analysis, remission in the STICA vs WLC group was higher (odds ratio, 10.10; 95% CI, 3.69-27.65), taking into account internet addiction baseline severity, comorbidity, treatment center, and age. Compared with the WLC groups, effect sizes at treatment termination of STICA were d = 1.19 for AICA-S, d = 0.88 for time spent online on weekdays, d = 0.64 for psychosocial functioning, and d = 0.67 for depression. Fourteen adverse events and 8 serious adverse events occurred. A causal relationship with treatment was considered likely in 2 AEs, one in each group. Conclusions and Relevance Short-term treatment for internet and computer game addiction is a promising, manualized, short-term CBT for a broad range of internet addictions in multiple treatment centers. Further trials investigating the long-term efficacy of STICA and addressing specific groups and subgroups compared with active control conditions are required. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01434589

On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, But it Does not Apply in Practice’

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May 2019

How Propaganda Works

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May 2015

JASON STANLEY

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

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Dec 1985

The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society

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Jan 1989

Jürgen Habermas

The Subject of Power

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Jan 1982

M. Foucault

Foucault and Hayek: Republican Law and Liberal Civil Society

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Apr 2014

Miguel Vatter

The chapter by Vatter discusses Foucault’s claim that the neoliberal project consists in the introduction of legal principles into the economic order. Vatter offers an analysis of the neoliberal jurisprudence of Hayek and its role in his economic thinking. Whereas Hayek’s jurisprudence emphasizes “judge-made law,” which no longer carries any inherent reference to republican principles of constitutionalism, Vatter argues that Foucault’s critique of the neoliberal “economic rule of law” is premised on his adoption of a republican conception of freedom as the constituent power of law-making belonging to a people that is irreducible to the conduct of a population.

From consumer to construer: Travels in human subjectivity

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Jan 2016
J Consum Cult

A key component of how human beings organize their lives is how they perceive and make sense of what it means to be human, that is, their subjectivity. Human subjectivity has taken on different dominant forms across history, the consumer being one of the most dominant contemporary forms. Based on current and potential trends, we argue, with a deliberate tone of optimism about transformative potential of the human condition, that if the contemporary iconographic culture is transcended, there is the possibility of a subject that transcends the consumer, a construer subject. In contrast to what largely exists in extant literature – extrapolating from the consumer subjectivity to posthuman subjects – we envision the possibility of an epochal cultural change that will provide the ground for a construer subjectivity to emerge. We offer some preliminary insights into what such subjectivity may entail.

Latino Public Opinion

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Jan 2011

This chapter discusses Latino public opinion, which was closely monitored since the 1990s through a series of successive large-scale opinion polls, first taking a look at the general form and patterns that help characterize Latino public opinion. It then examines the continuities and changes that occurred between the Latino National Political Survey and the Latino National Survey, in order to provide some insight to understanding the components and evolution of current Latino public opinion. The chapter also discusses transnationalism and the views of Latinos on foreign policies, as well as the effects of Latino public opinion.

How Propaganda Became Public Relations: Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public

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