Propaganda ed. by Paul Baines and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy (review)

Propaganda has been much researched and discussed during the last century, and current events will probably call even more attention to the subject. Such attention will, in turn, reignite old debates in the academy and the public about what propaganda is and what it does—debates that scholars of rhetoric are well poised to join. The concept of propaganda, after all, raises inherently rhetorical questions about the ethics and effects of communication. This four-volume collection of major works on the topic of propaganda, published by the SAGE Library of Military and Strategic Studies, offers scholars of rhetoric an opportunity to engage the long and interdisciplinary history of propaganda studies. The price for the whole set makes it prohibitively expensive as an individual purchase, but as a library-located reference, it is a useful campus resource and a comprehensive introduction to the various ways propaganda has been studied and used since the turn of the twentieth century.

The editors begin the first volume with a helpful introduction to the series in which they offer a framework to sort the ensuing essays and survey the historical development of the word “propaganda.” They also include a summary of seven classic definitions of propaganda, a table of 12 different types of propaganda, and a two-page chart of 47 “key” books published about propaganda between 1928 and 2012. From there, volume 1 offers a general overview of propaganda’s nature and use during the last century. A summary of various studies in the psychology of propaganda-related activities follows in the second volume. Volume 3 analyzes propaganda surrounding military conflict, and volume 4 details modern developments in the study and practice of propaganda.

After the editors’ introduction, the essays in the first volume go on to show how propaganda has been theorized and used during the past century. The essays fall into three categories. The first includes primary sources, such as a propaganda-focused excerpt of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and an excerpt of Edward Bernays’s 1928 book, Propaganda, a seminal contribution to the public relations industry; second, scholarly essays attempting to define propaganda and methods suitable for studying it, which includes David Drescher’s essay defining propaganda as part of a broader “typology” of possible kinds of international communication; third, scholarly case studies of historical propaganda, including Lyn Smith’s essay tracing the history of Britain’s Information Research Department and O’Shaugnessy’s lead essay studying how Hitler “sold” Nazism as a brand.

This volume does not quite achieve its stated purpose to “illustrate and further elucidate what propaganda actually is” (xxxvii), because its essays’ authors define propaganda in ways that frequently contradict each other. The problem is analogous to a hypothetical edited collection that would introduce rhetoric by compiling every major definition of it in back-to-back essays that do not refer to each other. Readers with no background in the literature will often get lost and frustrated. But the editors’ introduction helps make sense of these many definitions, and those willing to do the hard work of comparison and synthesis will find much value here. Essays by such important writers on propaganda as Leonard Doob, Harold Lasswell, Alfred McLung Lee, and Edward Bernays sit alongside contemporary case studies in propaganda’s nature and historical effects. A more comprehensive collection of essays on propaganda does not exist.

Volume 2 surveys psychological research relevant to propaganda. The goal, according to the editors, is to “show how propaganda works on the human psyche, politically and sociologically” (vii). To that end, the volume contains essays from disciplines like psychology, marketing, and communication science. James Dillard and Jason Anderson summarize communication science research, while Ted Brader examines the role of emotion in political advertisement. Rhetoricians will find a few familiar names: Michael Blain lists Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault as primary inspirations (3), and J. Michael Sproule offers a revisionist history of the “progressive propaganda critics” of the...