ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts the liberal notion of public opinion with how it functioned and was theorized in propaganda and public relations. Public opinion in propaganda was not the considered opinion produced by a debate within the public but a grid for the analysis of the relations of force that produced public conduct. Contrasting public opinion as it appears in figures like John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jürgen Habermas with propagandists like Edward Bernays and John Price Jones, the chapter makes a useful contrast in how power and government are differentially viewed. Propagandists tended to analyze public opinion as relations of force extending from the public and to the public that constitute the status quo at any given time. What is key in public relations counsels’ notion is that public opinion is space for the interaction of forces, not ideas, and what is produced from it is not some kind of considered idea but a particular set of conducts definitive of the present. The public relations’ counsels use of public opinion reflects that propaganda is best viewed as government through subjectification rather than some kind of deception or falsification.
The chapter uses this mature concept of propaganda developed from archival research to show the insufficiencies in many early conceptions of propaganda. In particular, the ideas of Upton Sinclair, Jason Stanley, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu are critiqued.
