ABSTRACT
In the early published and archival texts of propagandists, one of the common ways they developed the need for propaganda was through a critical look at the failures of liberalism. Public relations counsels argued that liberalism failed to understand that the primary target of government is not the rational autonomous individual but the irrational and suggestible crowd. The relationships that were needed to govern the crowd and to preserve civilization were not those of the individual (freedom, democracy, and the pursuit of economic self-interest) but were subjugation to the rational and economic elite. Propagandists drew from Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, and other crowd psychologists to argue that democracy was increasingly failing but could not be supplanted because it had become a religion to the masses. Instead of doing away with democracy as might have been best, public relations counsels needed to appear to work within the framework of liberalism and yet still produce the government that their clients and civilization itself needed.
The end of the chapter addresses a debate within the historical literature about crowd psychology and its influence on the anti-liberal ideas of propaganda and public relations. This chapter uses archival research to document the deep influence of crowd psychology on the major figures in propaganda and public relations.
