Total Propaganda: A Paving-Over

One of the key questions before sociologists and political scientists of the current day is how propaganda works. It's well agreed that propaganda works on other people, and most will accept that they are themselves susceptible to propaganda, but no one wants to admit that propaganda does actually work on them and, therefore, there is little understanding of how it works in the particular. This is one of the central motivating questions of Jacques Ellul's Propagandes (published in English as Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes). As one of the more thorough explorations of propaganda available in English, at least of those who purport to serious and wholistic analysis, it seems to be a good place to begin when attempting to learn more about the subject. His answer is the concept of “total propaganda”, an all-consuming, surrounding propaganda force that pushes people into actions against their conscious will. Unfortunately, Ellul's scholarship is sloppy, frequently dishonest, and clearly pre-determined in a way that shapes his use of evidence rather than his ideas being shaped by the evidence he has. The purpose of this commentary on the first chapter of Ellul's Propagandes is twofold. First, I want to draw out the mistakes in Ellul's work in a more thorough way than is possible in a two-page book review so that I can support these misgivings. Second, I want to develop a new concept to counter Ellul's idea of "total propaganda". This new concept is the linked (but distinct) propaganda campaign-machine.