Edward Bernays

In The Assault on Reason, Al Gore traces the decline of public reason partly to Edward Bernays and his public-relations engineering of “consent” — the manufacture of desire that Gore follows forward into modern Propaganda. Bernays sits in the book’s lineage of how the marketplace of ideas was displaced: the fusion of psychologically driven PR with electronic broadcasting that, in Gore’s telling, supplanted the rational discourse of print culture. Gore’s argument is that this engineering of opinion erodes the “well-informed citizenry” and the counterfeits a genuine “consent of the governed” (Misinformation).

Context: Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer of public relations and propaganda, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who applied psychological theory to mass persuasion. His 1928 book Propaganda argued that the deliberate manipulation of public opinion was a necessary feature of democratic society — a thesis later widely cited (and criticized) as a founding text of the modern PR and advertising industries.

Where this appears

• The Assault on Reason — listed among the People threads as the PR theorist of manufactured “consent” whose engineering of desire Gore traces into modern propaganda