Critical Notice of Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works

How Propaganda Works is a brilliant, rich, and wide-ranging exploration of the interactions between ideology, inequality, democracy and propaganda. Read as a piece of analytic political philosophy, it is radical, arguing for bold theses about democracy: legitimate democratic deliberation, Stanley contends, requires not only political equality but also substantive material equality. Read as a piece of analytic epistemology and philosophy of language, it is more modest, but nevertheless very compelling, extending well-established work in fascinating but methodologically conservative ways. In particular, on Stanley’s view ‘the truth-conditional, cognitivist picture … gives us an elegant account of what happens when communication fails, due to propagandistic manipulation’ (p. 126). Stanley is thus not trying to think outside the box so much as trying to move or expand the box, using familiar, proven tools to make the job easier. The book generously rewards careful study and thought, and any short summary of its arguments will have to omit important nuances. Nevertheless, I start by providing a sketch of some of the main points. I then raise some concerns, and explore other paths to conclusions that are less radical than Stanley’s, but in a similar spirit.