ABSTRACT
It is in the context of industrialisation, urbanisation and the formation of the nation state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that we need to situate concern with propaganda in social science research. It was these transformations, brought about by the accelerating growth of industrial capitalism, which were central issues in the classical tradition of sociology. They are reflected, for instance, in Tönnies’ concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, in Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, and in Simmel’s urban sociology, as well as in Marx’s political economy. While European social thought is best known for grappling with the significance of these profound changes in ways of life, concern about them reached a distilled form in American ‘mass society’ theory:
The movements of population and the contact between people from the ends of the earth, the opening of world markets, and the spread of modern technology, the growth of cities, the operation of mass media of communication, the increasing literacy of the masses of people all over the world, have combined to disintegrate local cohesion and to bring hitherto disparate and parochial cultures into contact with each other. Out of this ferment has come the disenchantment of absolute faiths which expresses itself in the secular outlook of modern man.1
