Propaganda and Democracy: a History
Research Project.
This research project investigates how and why we came to see propaganda and democracy as stellar opposites in the wake of WWII.
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The story starts in the 1890s-1900s, when the development of mass psychology in Europe shattered the democratic ideal of the involved and knowledgeable citizen. This trend triggered new reflections about how political mobilization should replace proactive participation in democratic states.
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In the 1910s, political actors in the United States, Europe, and Russia began to defend propaganda as a mode of political mobilization suited to "mass democracy." By the 1930s, however, both Fascist and Nazi theorists, along with their opponents, had separated propaganda from democracy, positioning the two in opposition to one another.
After WWII, while theorists of decolonization and civil rights leaders around the world sought to rehabilitate propaganda as a key element of democratic progress, liberals and social democrats in Europe and the US were associating it with totalitarianism. Due to the concerted efforts of Cold War academic trendsetters like Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, and Jürgen Habermas, democracy increasingly came to be linked with various forms of deliberation from the 1950s onward. By the 1980s, opposition to propaganda was viewed as a defining feature of liberal democracy.