ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Michel Foucault’s notion of problematization to focus on how propaganda took the influences of political economy, French royalism, and crowd psychology to create an analysis of its specific situation. Public relations counsels were able to combine their own observations, their clients’ needs, and a host of social analyses from across the Atlantic to create a unique problematization of corporations and their relationships with their publics. Propagandists depicted corporations as beset by problems of scale and dehumanization, a gathered and radicalizing urban population, and the shifting alliances of the state from business to the unions. Corporations were drawn amid a swirling host of threats that only public relations could solve. Public relations counsels were thought to be uniquely able to govern the publics in the way that corporations needed because of their knowledge of crowd psychology, their precision and cost-effectiveness in transforming public conduct, and their work constituting group norms, which bypassed the restrictions of liberal rights and allowed a private system of government to be established.
