The 1928 work where Edward L. Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud, architect of the "Torches of Freedom" campaign, and the man who all but invented modern public relations — set out, with disarming candour, how the consent of a democratic public is manufactured. Rarely required reading, frequently quoted, almost never read in full. A compact collector's hardback of the text.
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Edward L. Bernays | United States hardback edition
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
— opening line, 1928
Edward L. Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud, architect of the 1929 "Torches of Freedom" campaign that recast cigarettes for American women as symbols of liberation, and the publicist who later helped sell the 1954 Guatemalan coup to the U.S. press — wrote Propaganda in 1928 as both a manifesto and a practical handbook. It is the founding text of modern public relations, and it is more candid about its own subject than almost anything written about it since.
Across eleven short chapters, Bernays argues that mass democratic society makes the organised management of opinion not only inevitable but necessary. He sets out how newspapers, professional associations, civic bodies, businesses, schools and political leaders co-operate — sometimes by design, often by habit — to shape what publics believe and what they want. He names the techniques, identifies the actors, and is unembarrassed about both.
Bernays is rarely required reading in journalism schools and almost never quoted by his professional descendants. That is part of his importance: a primary source on the deliberate engineering of consent that the industry built around him would prefer to discuss only in summary. For students of media, persuasion, advertising, political communication and the social history of the twentieth century, Propaganda is one of the most cited and least-read primary texts of the period. This edition exists so that more people can read what the man himself actually wrote, in his own short, plain prose.
Edward L. Bernays (1891–1995) was an Austrian-American writer and public-relations pioneer whose career spanned more than seventy years. His other works include Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Public Relations (1952) and his autobiography Biography of an Idea (1965). His campaigns helped shape twentieth-century American consumer life and political communication in ways still visible today.
This edition is available for purchase only by customers in the United States. The original 1928 text entered the U.S. public domain in 2024; copyright status in other jurisdictions may differ.
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Edward L. Bernays · Paperback · 99pp
The 1928 work where Edward L. Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud, architect of the "Torches of Freedom" campaign, and the man who all but invented modern public relations — set out, with disarming candour, how the consent of a democratic public is manufactured. Rarely required reading, frequently quoted, almost never read in full.
Edward L. Bernays · eBook · 99pp
The complete original 1928 text in a DRM-free EPUB: Edward L. Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud, architect of the "Torches of Freedom" campaign, and the man who all but invented modern public relations — on how the consent of a democratic public is manufactured. Instant U.S.-only digital edition.
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