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How Propaganda Works

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http://bookforum.com/inprint/022_02/14617

EXCERPT: [... Jason Stanley's ...] new book, "How Propaganda Works," is the fruit of his turn from his core specialties to politics. In altering his focus, [Jason] Stanley follows a long line of academic specialists in linguistics, sociology, political science, psychology, and communications who have sought to dissect the various ways that propaganda insinuates itself into public life.

[...] The results are decidedly mixed. On the plus side, the book crackles with brilliant insights and erudition, while also managing to explain the arcane preoccupations of analytic philosophy in a way that’s accessible to a wider audience. He is particularly strong in applying his own specialties, language and epistemology, to the subject at hand.

Yet his book unfortunately also suffers from a shortcoming typical of the academic-philosophy genre: It reads more like a series of related journal articles on a topic than like a book engaging with a pressing issue on a sustained basis. Although the writing is clear from page to page, Stanley often leaves his subject for prolonged tangents that only specialists would care about and that do little to advance the book’s argument.

How "Propaganda Works" runs into trouble early on, when it seeks, in its second chapter, to define its basic terms of inquiry. Stanley begins by rejecting the “classical sense of propaganda” as derived from Immanuel Kant -- which holds that propaganda is “manipulation of the rational will to close off debate" -- as well as the closely related “biased speech” definition advanced by Noam Chomsky: that propaganda is “speech that irrationally closes off certain options that should be considered.” In Stanley’s view, neither account explains the popular appeal of propaganda, especially in a liberal democracy, or its relationship to ideology.

Such objections are puzzling. Stanley claims he is offering an account of what propaganda is --a metaphysical definition-- but it’s unclear just how the popular allure of propaganda for its audience should inform a metaphysical, as opposed to a psychological, account.

“The essence of political propaganda,” Stanley argues, “is that it is a kind of speech that fundamentally involves political, economic, aesthetic, or rational ideals, mobilized for a political purpose.” Specifically, what distinguishes propaganda is its tendency to undermine the very ideals that its disseminators invoke as they craft it. For example, when oil companies pay so-called experts to make skeptical claims about climate change, such experts will base their authority on an implicit appeal to the objectivity of science. But at the same time, of course, their careers as leased company mouthpieces completely undercut the aims of objective science at their foundation.

Still, as Stanley continues to enumerate examples of propaganda and its abuses, it becomes clear that he’s relying on an unrealistic conception of the politically interested manipulation of the truth. Consider this one...


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