Two Ways of Thinking about Propaganda

Or: Why I'm a Bad Philosopher

I’ve spent the past few months reading and thinking about propaganda. As a philosopher, I, quite naturally, read some of the recent philosophical literature on propaganda. But I also read three “classics” in the literature on propaganda and the formation of public opinion: Edward Bernays’ Propaganda, Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes and Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion. Lippmann’s book is excellent, but it isn’t really about propaganda; indeed, in places he seems surprisingly uninterested in the possibility that someone might want to shape public opinion to their own ends. Bernays and Ellul, on the other hand, were both writing about propaganda. Their books have more in common than their titles: they both view propaganda as a technology of social control. Bernays—in a way that is frankly quite frightening—is an enthusiastic supporter of propaganda; he views it as a tool for engineering consent, but he wants to use it to engineer consent. Ellul is, to say the least, more ambivalent.

When I started this project, I expected to focus on what the philosophers had to say about propaganda. I am a philosopher, not a social theorist. But I’ve found that there is a lot of value in these books—perhaps more than in the contemporary philosophical literature on propaganda. This post is an attempt to explain why.

When philosophers and social theorists talk about propaganda, they often seem to be talking about different things. The philosopher wants a definition of propaganda—a set of conditions that cleanly separate propaganda from other forms and techniques of communication. Moreover, the philosopher typically wants a definition that fits with our intuitions about what propaganda is, particularly the intuition that propaganda is a bad thing.¹ The social theorist, in contrast, treats propaganda as a sociological phenomenon, a feature of modern societies which has certain functions and serves certain purposes. Where the philosopher wants to know what propaganda is, the sociologist wants to know what propaganda does.

It might seem like these approaches should be compatible, indeed quite separate. You might agree on what counts as propaganda while disagreeing about its social role, or accept a particular sociological account while disputing the proper definition. But any attempt to maintain this independence faces some serious problems. Some definitions might smuggle in sociological assumptions. A sociological analysis might resist the sort of conceptual clarity and precision that philosophers want. The result is that these two approaches, the philosophical and the sociological, sometimes pull in quite different directions.

The Sociology of Propaganda

Let me start by examining three figures—Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul and Walter Lippmann—who are good examples of how a sociologist might think about propaganda. Their aim is to understand propaganda as a social system. Put together, they tell something approaching a complete story: Lippmann diagnoses a central epistemological problem, Bernays offers a technological solution, and Ellul highlights the dystopian nature of that solution.

In Public Opinion Lippmann frames one of the most basic problems of political epistemology: how do we form an opinion about the world outside our own immediate experience? As he put it:

"In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine"

Lippmann’s answer to this problem is that we rely on stereotypes—interpretive frames that we use to filter and organize the overwhelming mass of information confronting us. But, while we can’t do anything but use them, these interpretive frames inevitably distort our understanding. They are simplifying schemes that impose order but distort our picture of the world. The result is that the world, or at least large portions of it, frequently defies our attempts to understand it.

You might think that someone who endorses this view should also endorse a different view: people will tend to have different, sometimes radically different, views about the world because they are using very different frames and stereotypes to interpret it. But, at least in Public Opinion, Lippmann does not endorse this view, or even defend the value of “ideational heterogeneity” (people having lots of different ideas about the world). Instead, he argues that democratic governance requires a high degree of convergence in public opinion. Any democratic society is going to need a tool to manufacture consent:

"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. ... [A]s a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.... Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables."

Lippmann’s view is something like this: in a democratic society, certain ideas need to be widely agreed upon because, otherwise, there would not be sufficient public support for the things that the government might want to do. Propaganda is a tool for manufacturing this consent.

While Lippmann recognised the necessity for propaganda, he doesn’t tell us that much about propaganda or how the propagandist operates. In Propaganda Bernays is more expansive. But, where Lippmann recognise the necessity for propaganda as a means of manufacturing consent, Bernays is positively enthusiastic about it. I’ll let Bernays speak for himself:

“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions” (p. 38).

“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment … But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all received identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” (p. 48).

Propaganda is a chilling book. It is full of brash pronouncements about the power of propaganda to shape attitudes and behaviour, to move people to act and think in the ways desired by the propagandist. Even if you are—as I certainly am—inclined to view most of these claims as hyperbole, perhaps even themselves propaganda, what is chilling is not Bernays’ confidence in the power of propaganda but his conviction that it can be a good thing.

For Bernays, the difference between good and bad propaganda is simply that good propaganda is in the service of truth whereas bad propaganda is not. It isn’t hard to see the problem here. The propagandist may themselves be a “true believer”, or—more often---acting on behalf of someone who is a true believer. They are therefore either in no position to recognise that they are propounding bad propaganda, or have a vested interest in not recognising that this is the case. Their audience is in an even worse position; for Bernays, and for Lippmann, it is propaganda which shapes the audience’s opinions in the first place, so someone subjected to a constant stream of bad propaganda is going to be in no position to see that this is so.

What's striking about Bernays' account is not just his enthusiasm for propaganda, but his focus on propaganda as a comprehensive social technology. Bernays views propaganda as a system for managing public opinion and he has a vision where a technocratic elite control this system. Ellul views propaganda in the same way but he is—to say the least—less excited about it. For Ellul, propaganda is "the air we breathe"—it is a necessary and ubiquitous feature of modern technological society. Modern mass society creates problems that only propaganda can solve: how do we integrate millions of people into complex systems they cannot hope to understand? How do you coordinate behaviour across a vast population? How do you ensure that members of a society have enough in common for that society to function?

Propaganda is, for Ellul, the social glue that holds mass society together. But Ellul is less than sanguine about mass society, or about our prospects for escaping propaganda. Indeed, the very tools we might use to try and resist it—education, rational analysis, democratic participation—are themselves part of the system shaped by propaganda. It is hard to see how we could step outside the system to critique it when our critiques are formed within it.

One important feature of Ellul’s account of propaganda is that it is as much a feature of democratic political systems as it is of authoritarian or fascist ones. Propaganda always serves to uphold the system, but different systems—as well as different political purposes and causes—call for different kinds or techniques of propaganda. For Ellul, democratic political systems require more sophisticated propaganda techniques. A democratic state requires popular participation and support. But public opinion is slow to form, unstable, and unpredictable. Propaganda is the means by which democratic governments “channel and shape” public opinion in ways that support their political ends.

A crucial respect in which propaganda in democratic states is more sophisticated is that it often takes the form of rational persuasion.

“There is such a thing as rational propaganda, just as there is rational advertising. Advertisements for automobiles or electrical appliances are generally based on technical descriptions or proven performance—rational elements used for advertising purposes. Similarly, there is a propaganda based exclusively on facts, statistics, economic ideas.”

In fact, Ellul thinks that, as society progresses, propaganda becomes increasingly fact-based:

“the more progress we make, the more propaganda becomes rational and the more it is based on serious arguments, on dissemination of knowledge, on factual information, figures, and statistics.”

It is simply a mistake to view propaganda as necessarily connected with falsehood, lies, and deception. Propaganda in the form of blatant falsehoods is simply a symptom of insufficiently advanced society. The more developed a society, the more likely it is to utilise rational propaganda. To be sure, the (rational) propagandist does not simply provide facts, figures and statistics. They provide a sample of relevant facts designed to support the opinions they would like their audience to form and reinforce the behaviours they would like that audience to exhibit.

Here’s an example of how this works in practice. A crude propaganda campaign would simply declare, whether in simple words or crude images, that immigrants are dangerous. A more sophisticated, more rational campaign would present crime statistics, unemployment figures, and the like—all real, all with sources—but carefully selected and framed in a way that leads the audience towards the same conclusion as the crude propaganda campaign. (If you want an example with a different political valence: imagine a public vaccination campaign that cites real figures about the efficacy of the vaccine but neglects to break those figures down by demographic group so as to prevent the audience from considering whether those figures are directly relevant to them).

Ellul offers what appears to be a definition of propaganda:

"Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization."

But this is a very open-ended definition. It essentially defines propaganda as a set of methods of social control used by a group (such as a political party) on a population that has been “primed” to be receptive to these methods. This priming is itself typically the result of previous propaganda operations. If you are worried that this sounds a bit circular, bear in mind that Ellul has a typology of propaganda methods, starting from the most basic ones designed to move already existing groups of people to action, often in the form of civil disorder and unrest. The circularity is therefore not a flaw in Ellul’s analysis. Propaganda creates the conditions for more propaganda. It shapes people who then demand the kind of simplified, emotionally satisfying information that propaganda provides. The target of propaganda becomes complicit in their own manipulation.

The Philosophy of Propaganda

Where a social theorist likes Ellul wants to understand what propaganda does—how it works, why it exists—the philosopher tends to want to try and define propaganda. Typically—though with some exceptions²—the definition is something like this: propaganda is “epistemically flawed” messaging. The propagandist crafts messages that lead people to form beliefs that are false, or at least inapt or misleading in some way.

Sheryl Tuttle Ross's influential account of propaganda is illustrative. Ross sets out the capture the “pejorative” character of propaganda: propaganda is a form of persuasion that is in some way illegitimate. Here is her definition:

Propaganda is (1) an epistemically defective message (2) used with the intention to persuade (3) a socially significant group of people (4) on behalf of a political institution, organization, or cause.

The key conditions here is (1), which captures the pejorative character of propaganda: propaganda is bad because the propagandist produces messages that are epistemically defective. A message can be epistemically defective simply because it is false. But it can be defective in subtler ways. For example, a video depicting an immigrant committing a crime may be an accurate representation of something that happened. But it invites the viewer to form false beliefs about immigrant criminality in general.

Other philosophers have built on Ross’s definition. Constant Bonard, Filippo Contesi and Teresa Marques have an account which replaces messages with the broader category of “communicative acts” (commands, questions, pictures, gestures). They also have a more expansive conception of what can make a communicative act/message epistemically defective, and they specify that propaganda must be produced for political ends (a state education system is, for them, not inherently propagandistic).

Amelia Godber and Gloria Origgi focus less on the falsity of what is communicated by propaganda and more on the ways in which propaganda interferes with our ability to rationally deliberate. For them, the key feature of propaganda is not so much what it tries to get us to believe but how it tries to get us to believe it. The propagandist may present us with facts, evidence, reasons. But they do so in ways that distort our ability to think about those facts. They may present a very biased subset of the relevant facts. Or they may present a more representative subset, but in ways that impede our ability to properly assess those facts.

Beyond the similarity in the definitions of propaganda they offer, these accounts have a few other things in common. First, they are all attempts to capture a “commonsensical” or “pretheoretical” conception of propaganda. They are meant to accord with our “intuitions” about what is (and what isn’t) propaganda. Thus, because propaganda is typically viewed as a bad thing, any definition must capture this “badness”. Further, despite the fact that there are deep historical connections between propaganda, marketing and public relations, these connections are not part of the “ordinary” concept, so we don’t want a philosophical account of propaganda to reflect these connections.

Second, they all view propaganda as primarily influencing beliefs. The propagandist wants to get their target audience to believe things—that immigrants are criminals, that the enemy is committing atrocities, that their country is a force for good. To be sure, the reason why the propagandist wants to get their target to believe things is often as a means to influence their behaviour. Someone who thinks the enemy is evil is going to be more inclined to go to war to fight the enemy. But the influence on behaviour is indirect, via influence on belief.

Third, while they view propaganda as inherently a communicative act—the propagandist is communicating something to their target audience—they don’t have anything to say about the ways in which the propagandist might try to shape that audience, or about the sort of relationship between propagandist and audience that is required for propaganda to achieve any sort of uptake. The idea seems to be that we can think about propaganda purely in terms of the features of individual acts of propaganda. This atomistic account stands in stark contrast to more holistic accounts, which emphasise the broader communicative ecology—how the propagandist cultivates their audience over time, and the institutional frameworks that help them do this.

But what is wrong with an atomistic, belief-centric account of propaganda? What is wrong with trying to make sense of ordinary intuitions? Who could object to someone trying to give analytical clarity to a messy concept like propaganda?

Ellul versus the Philosophers

Maybe I’m just not a very good philosopher, but I find what Ellul—and for that matter Bernays—has to say about propaganda to be a good deal more insightful than what most philosophers have to say about it. Some of this is perhaps just a matter of taste; I’m not convinced that there is an ordinary concept of propaganda to analyse, or that the attempt to analyse it is much more than a way of making a particular way of thinking about propaganda—a way that might carry an implicit political valence—more precise. We learn how a 21st-century philosopher understands propaganda, not what propaganda is. Ellul’s approach is, I think, preferable on methodological grounds: it simply gives us more insight into the phenomenon we are meant to be interested in.

Ellul does of course have a definition of propaganda: it is a set of methods that an organized group employs in order to bring it about that a mass of individuals participates, whether actively or passively, in its actions. But this isn’t meant to be the sort of definition that clarifies that much (or the sort that is intended to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for something being an act of propaganda). The methods that the propagandist employs may vary immensely: the propagandist charged with creating civil unrest needs one set of tactics (agitation propaganda); the propagandist charged with ensuring the stable functioning of a mature democratic society needs a quite different set (Ellul calls this “integration propaganda”). What unifies these disparate methods is that they are means of controlling a population. Thus a simpler formulation of Ellul’s account of propaganda would simply be that it is a set of techniques for achieving social control. This tells us the sort of thing propaganda is, but it doesn’t define it in any meaningful sense.

Where Ellul offers real insight is when it comes to how propaganda (when it works) manages to achieve a degree of social control. But Ellul’s explanation of this requires rejecting two of the features of the philosophers’ accounts of propaganda. First, for Ellul, the propagandist aims at shaping action rather than belief:

The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine but to make the individual cling irrationally to a course of action.

This passage is a little bit misleading, in that Ellul did think that propaganda also worked at the level of ideas. But it typically works not by modifying ideas but by giving existing ideas—and prejudices—a firmer shape. Ellul called this “psychological crystallisation”:

Propaganda furnishes objectives, organizes the traits of an individual's personality into a system, and freezes them into a mold... prejudices that exist about any event become greatly reinforced and hardened by propaganda; the individual is told that he is right in harboring them; he discovers reasons and justifications for a prejudice when it is clearly shared by many and proclaimed openly.

The result is the transmutation of existing ideas and prejudices into firmer judgements:

he [the target of propaganda] now has a supply of ready-made judgments where he had only some vague notions before the propaganda set in; and those judgments permit him to face any situation.

As these passages should make clear, Ellul isn’t really talking about propaganda as a means of shaping and modifying beliefs in the philosopher’s sense of the term. It would be more accurate to say that, for Ellul, the aim of propaganda is to shape its target—to make them the sort of person who will do (and want to do) what the propagandist would like them to do. This will inevitably lead to the target of propaganda having certain beliefs, but this is, if you like, simply an upshot of the larger “game” that the propagandist is engaged in.

Second, Ellul doesn’t think it makes much sense to think about propaganda in terms of isolated, one-off acts of propaganda. In fact, he thinks that, if you view propaganda this way, you will come to the conclusion that it is singularly ineffective (as above: the propagandist needs to start by creating a willing audience for their propaganda). Ellul takes the opposite approach: propaganda is not an aberration, a form of defective communication that individuals and state actors engage in from time to time. It is everywhere. It is what holds modern society together—or, occasionally, what you might use to fracture a society, as when propaganda is used in the service of starting a revolution.

Of course, there is no such thing as “modern society”. There are multiple modern societies, and different societies work in very different ways. Ellul doesn’t think there is a single set of techniques for keeping any modern society together. Rather he thinks that, in any society, there will be forms of propaganda that help hold that society together. In cohesive democratic societies integration propaganda is particularly important. Integration propaganda operates through advertising, education, and entertainment, creating conformity not through force but through the subtle presentation of social norms. For instance, the promotion of the "American Dream" serves as a form of integration propaganda that shapes values and behaviours without appearing to coerce anyone into accepting those values or performing those behaviours.

For Ellul, a technological society isn't merely one with advanced gadgets; it's a society organised around technique, efficiency, and instrumental rationality. Any technological society has advanced physical infrastructure—roads, hospitals, schools, airports, etc. Propaganda is the counterpart to this physical infrastructure—it is a means of ensuring compliance from the members of a modern technological society. Compliance requires more than just simply “going along” with things. It requires psychological integration. For Ellul, propaganda always has this totalising nature—though in authoritarian regimes the totalising nature takes on an undeniably more frightening aspect than in democratic regimes.

You might wonder whether Ellul ever bothers to give any evidence that propaganda—understood in this distinctive way—actually works. Let me be clear: he is a social theorist in the grand tradition. Do not read Propaganda expecting to find a wide array of citations to studies that provide bits of empirical evidence for the various claims he advances. But in a way to ask the question is to misunderstand what Ellul is trying to do. His account of propaganda is intended as an explanation of something that he thinks is undeniable and is very much in need of explanation: what holds a complex modern society together? His answer is that modern societies are held together—to the extent that they are held together—by a complex set of techniques for social control. That is, they are held together by propaganda.

Ellul’s sociological approach to propaganda might frustrate the philosopher looking for a nice, clean set of conditions for counting something as propaganda. But, whatever its limitations, it captures some of the essential—or at least the most interesting—features of propaganda that the philosophers’ approach is liable to miss. By fixating on propaganda as a form of messaging that implants false or misleading beliefs, we miss the more important impact of character on action and character. By treating propaganda as a discrete category of defective communication, or by focusing on one-off acts of propaganda, we fail to understand propaganda as a pervasive feature of technological society. Finally, by viewing propaganda as a central means by which states try to control their citizens we come to understand why, though many take such a dim view of propaganda, it is everywhere. We may want to do away with propaganda. But, if Ellul is right, that might require also doing away with modern society. Whatever the problems of modernity, this seems like a high price to pay. We are therefore left in the uneasy position of both recognising the necessity of certain forms of propaganda and wishing we could live without it.

1. Not all philosophers. The two honourable exceptions I am aware of in the recent philosophical literature on propaganda are Megan Hyska and Cory Wimberly.

2. These are the exceptions I mentioned earlier (Hyska and Wimberly).