Some Problems of War Propaganda—A Note on Propaganda New and Old

Discussions of propaganda in this world crisis tend to be highly practical; they usually culminate in recommendations on how to propagandize. Without adopting the pretense of detachment, to which I have no claim, I shall attempt in this paper to widen the scope of the discussion by reporting on two concepts of propaganda upon which, explicitly or implicitly, I believe propaganda practices are based. These two concepts are to some extent opposed to each other; they coincide largely with two systems of government, if those systems are taken as 'ideal types' (Max Weber), and with two doctrines of men. Antitheses like democratic and totalitarian propaganda, good and bad propaganda, have been used to describe them. Another antithesis may be even more telling: the psychological hypotheses underlying the concepts here discussed are different in their relation to modern psychological insight, the one being based on an overage psychology, the other on what more recent findings suggest. We may therefore speak of propaganda, old and new.1

Without discussing the definition of propaganda, I here use the term in the widest sense of communication from authority and start with the assumption that in every society some means