Propaganda has been a popular subject for scholarly discussion. Recently, scholars have extended the concept of propaganda to cover intellectual activities and communications quite different from propaganda as it had been known in World War I and World War II in the first half of the twentieth century and in the subsequent Cold War. We do not think these extended meanings are useful{1}; but we will discuss them in a later article. We define propaganda narrowly.
Our definitions turn upon the degree to which two elements are present in propaganda. These two elements were part of the concept of propaganda in the early twentieth century. They are:
- Coercion of political beliefs by government, andOur definition of propaganda contrasts the citizen under the influence of propaganda to the ideal of the "free, rational citizen" of Western liberalism. The free rational citizen is the autonomous, mentally healthy, adult citizen. She—
- Deception by the government.
- Is not physically or psychologically enslaved,
- Knows her own economic, social, and political self-interests,
- Has objective information about the issues before her,
- Can deliberate rationally about political policies and doctrines, and
- Is freely able to choose among them.
To the extent that she is not able to exercise her citizenship in this manner, because of information communicated to her by the government, she is under the influence of propaganda.
Lasswell, author of a classic study of propaganda during World War I, referred indirectly to the ideal of the rational citizen when he observed that following the war many persons realized they had been fooled by propaganda.
"Some of those [persons who participated in World War I] who trusted so much and hated so passionately have put their hands to the killing of man, they have mutilated others and perhaps been mutilated in return, they have encouraged others to draw the sword, and they have derided and besmirched those who refused to rage as they did. Fooled by propaganda? If so, they writhe in the knowledge that they were the blind pawns in plans which they did not incubate, and which they neither devised nor comprehended nor approved."{2}
The notion that the autonomous rational person can be said actually to exist has long been challenged by social scientists. From Marx and Freud to post-modernists today, many philosophically oriented social scientists have argued that the person is a social construction so embedded in social and historical contexts that the notion of autonomous individual rationality is absurd. Among political scientists, however, the hypothesis of the "rational man" [pc: gender-neutral rational person] thesis has staged a comeback since the 1980s. It explains electoral political behavior well. It is fair to say that the possibility of autonomous rationality accords with every person's common experience in a sufficiently powerful way that makes our (conventionally) narrow definition of propaganda realistic.
Notes
1. For example: Alex S. Edelstein, Total Propaganda: From Mass Culture to Popular Culture. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997.
2. Harold D. Lasswell. Propaganda Technique in the World War. First edition, 1927. Reprint. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1972. Page 8.
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