Book Review: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, expresses a dark vision of propaganda, democracy and human nature. Ellul was a professor of law and social history and he built a reputation on social and political philosophy. Propaganda is written from a sociological point of view and sees propaganda as a sociological phenomenon. Although technology and society have changed enormously since 1962, some of Ellul’s insights about propaganda and human nature are disquietingly close to what modern experience and science is revealing in real time.

Two caveats merit mention. First, some of the social norms that were in place have since fallen away. Norms that constrained propaganda and how propagandists used it in democracies have weakened or disappeared. In this sense, the situation we live in today is more perilous that what Ellul described in 1962. Second, some of his arguments run counter to current conventional wisdom. Changed technology and social circumstances have rendered some of Ellul’s assertions somewhat or mostly no longer true. Ellul seems to struggle with a period of flux where technology and social norms were rapidly changing, while the impacts of the recent Nazi and Stalinist past still echoed powerfully in his mind. Ellul fought the Nazis as a member of the French resistance.

Like others who study propaganda, Ellul sees propaganda as sometimes capable of obliterating truth and creating fake reality. He writes: “History shows that plain truth can be so thoroughly snuffed out that it disappears, and that in certain periods the lie is all powerful. . . . Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs of true believers. For modern man, propaganda is really creating truth.” That is conventional wisdom today.

He saw the US, Russia and China as the world’s main sources of propaganda, with other regions and nations being less influential globally. Ellul argues that propaganda in earlier times was often based mostly on blatant, outrageous lies, but the propaganda of his time was more sophisticated and based on more truthful content because the public was too educated. Thus truths, truths out of context, half-truths and mixed truth-lies was the dominant form of propaganda. However, even with propaganda that starts out as lies-based morphs into content that contains some truth because truth sometimes has power if it is positioned properly.

Ellul makes a disturbing assertion that for propaganda to be effective, the people it is used on must be educated. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear what he means by educated, but he seems to imply college graduates. That assertion appears to go against mainstream current belief that the more education a person has, the more resistant to propaganda they tend to be. Ellul argues that intellectuals are the most susceptible to propaganda in part because they falsely believe they cannot be deceived or used. There may some truth in that. Nonetheless, it isn’t clear that educated intellectuals, whatever that means, are more or less susceptible to propaganda than other groups.

Disappointingly, Ellul refuses to define propaganda. At various places he says what traits it has or does not have, but what it is remains a matter for personal interpretation of his heavy prose. That is unsatisfying. Another concern is that Ellul does not rely on empirical experiments or statistics to assess what propaganda does and doesn’t do. Instead, he relies on personal observation and logic. That is suspicious. Nonetheless, some of his observations intuitively ring true and/or have some empirical support in later research.

Ellul does assert some qualities of propaganda that modern research has supported as true. For example, he claims that propaganda can generate beliefs mainly through provoking emotional responses and not by facilitating reasoned thinking or logic. He also argues that as time passes and propaganda narratives are adopted and internalized, there is a tendency for affected minds to (1) harden and become resistant to inconvenient or contradictory facts, truth and logical reasoning, and (2) become unable to discern detail and nuance or their relevance. Loss of detail and nuance allows for simplification of issues and moral questions and that leads to greater persuasive power for more propaganda. Regarding the weakness of facts, Ellul comments that “even a proved fact can do nothing against crystallized opinion.” The same holds for sound reasoning. All of that is undoubtedly true. It accords with empirical findings from modern cognitive and social science research.

Ellul sees propaganda as the greatest danger to democracy and civil liberties. He argues that propaganda inherently and necessarily tends toward totalitarianism. Lies and deceit take away the ability of deceived people to consent or object to what they have been deceived about. That is authoritarian, not democratic. In this regard, he anticipates one of the key arguments that Sissela Bok asserts in her 1999 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (my book review is here) is the reason that lying to the public is immoral. Ellul predicts that over time with the advance of mass communications, both authoritarian and democratic governments will increasingly resort to technological tyranny to infringe on and attack fact, truth, reason and civil liberties. He claims that nations that do not resort to propaganda will weaken. In democracies, this is necessary simply because the masses participate in governance and the government itself must have some way of communicating both facts and its preferred narratives.

Ellul predicts that because of the increasing cost of propaganda, political parties would be forced to turn to private sources of wealth. In turn, that will “indenture themselves to a financial oligarchy.” That prediction has turned out to be true. It also reflects a truth that, with few exceptions, money is power. Because propaganda is power and money can buy it, the logic seems solid and unassailable. In addition to money buying power in political parties, wealthy people and interests can cut out the economic waste of buying a middleman and go directly to government to buy favors, advantages and influence. That is something that is done in abundance these days.

What Ellul leaves is the critical unanswered question: Assuming it is possible to do so at all, how can propaganda be used in defense of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, social civility, facts, truths and sound reasoning? The political playing field favors tyranny-oligarchy-kleptocracy. It is heavily stacked against democracy, the rule of law, etc. If Ellul is basically correct in his vision of the future, he projects a sobering, frightening vision. American democracy has not yet arrived at a satisfactory answer, or any answer at all.