ABSTRACT
In 1928, in the apogee of historical modernity and with the modernist literary and artistic movement at its height, Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer of studies on the psychology of the masses, wrote a book called Propaganda to warn of the deliberate manipulation of popular opinion in the liberal democratic societies of the time. Almost 40 years later, the Frankfurt School, and in particular one of its most prominent members, Herbert Marcuse, who wrote One-Dimensional Man, pointed out the wrong direction taken by political and economic leaders, who had reduced people to simple commodities with exchange value and with no more existential references than those that came from mass media and advertising. At the time, the Second Vatican Council called for a shifting of the mindset towards humanisation and away from reification. Both philosophical or social and religious theories criticised the excesses and inequalities of the prevailing model of capitalist production, holding them up against the deprivations brought upon their own people by the socialist states of the time. Neither the supposed freedom of the former nor the equality of the latter was justifiable or acceptable.
