Propaganda and Democracy

Allen Wood

Received: 19/05/2016
Final Version: 05/07/2016

BIBLID 0495-4548(2016)31:3p.381-394
DOI: 10.1387/theoria.16384

ABSTRACT: We are surrounded by communication of many kinds whose aim is to persuade rather to convince, to ma-
nipulate rather than to reason. Advertising and much public discourse is like this. How should we react to this
fact? Perhaps even more importantly: What does this fact mean about modern society? Not all persuasion is re-
grettable or to be disapproved. Not all persuasion is propaganda. And perhaps not even all propaganda is neces-
sarily bad. This last point was the focus of a controversy between W. E. B. Du Bois, who held that propaganda
could be used for good, and Alain Locke, who held that all propaganda corrupts our thinking. My own view is
that propaganda can be used for good, but Locke was perfectly right to be worried about it.
Keywords: propaganda, democracy, Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jason Stanley.

RESUMEN: Estamos rodeados de muchos tipos de comunicación, cuya finalidad es persuadir antes que convencer, ma-
nipular antes que razonar. La publicidad y gran parte del discurso público es así. ¿Cómo deberíamos reaccionar
a este hecho? Quizá más importante aún: ¿qué dice este hecho acerca de la sociedad moderna? No toda persua-
sión es lamentable o debería desaprobarse. No toda persuasión es propaganda. E incluso quizá no toda propa-
ganda es necesariamente mala. Este último punto centró la controversia entre W.E.B. du Bois, quien sostenía
que la propaganda podría utilizarse para un buen fin, y Alain Locke, quien sostenía que toda propaganda co-
rrompe el pensamiento. Mi propio punto de vista es que la propaganda puede utilizarse para un buen fin, pero
que Locke tenía razón al preocuparse por ella.
Palabras clave: propaganda, democracia, Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jason Stanley.

Persuasion and propaganda

We are surrounded by communication of many kinds whose aim is to persuade rather to

convince, to manipulate rather than to reason. We are being constantly manipulated into
forming beliefs or attitudes, or to have feelings of certain kinds; or beliefs and attitudes we
already have, but ought to criticize and perhaps reject, are instead being reinforced rather
than questioned. Advertising and much public discourse is like this. How should we react
to this fact? Perhaps even more importantly: What does this fact mean about modern soci-
ety?
Not all persuasion is regrettable or to be disapproved. Our feelings as well as our ra-
tional judgment are part of our humanity; emotions even constitute an essential part of our

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rational capacities themselves. Not all persuasion is propaganda. Perhaps not even all prop-
aganda is necessarily bad.
This last point was the focus of a controversy between W. E. B. Du Bois, who held that
propaganda could be used for good, and Alain Locke, who held that all propaganda cor-
rupts our thinking.1 My own view is that propaganda can be used for good, but Locke was
perfectly right to be worried about it. More specifically, Du Bois maintained that artistic
propaganda could encourage self-respect among African Americans, while Locke argued
that propaganda can never reframe the issues in a debate, but must accept the received per-
ceptions of them, and can contribute to any debate only on those terms.
If propaganda is seen as a form of persuasion, then we can easily understand both
claims and find justice in them. For persuasion can reinforce attitudes and emotions, in-
cluding good ones, such as self-respect. To the extent that some of our values and per-
ceptions are already correct, persuasion can reinforce them. To the extent that they are
incorrect, propaganda can encourage their rejection. This seems to be the function as-
signed to propagandistic art by Du Bois. There is no reason to think that Locke would
dispute the claim that it can serve this function. But Locke’s thought is that persuasion,
and therefore propaganda, always operates within the confines of already recognized
concepts and familiar attitudes. For instance, it is only where the concept of self-re-
spect and the attitudes associated with it are already familiar that persuasion could op-
erate, whether by encouraging and reinforcing self-respect or by undermining it. Locke
is therefore correct in seeing it as incapable of disrupting perceptions and changing peo-
ple’s attitudes in fundamental ways. It was this creative disruption that Locke thought
was the true vocation of art.
Plato’s objections to rhetoric, as presented in Gorgias, make a very similar point to
Locke’s. Socrates argues that rhetoric is not a true craft (technē), because a craft aims at
some good and presupposes knowledge of that good. Rhetorical persuasion, by contrast, is
an empirical routine (empireia) of persuasion, based only on already accepted beliefs both
about what is good and about how to achieve apparent goods (Plato, Gorgias 449-465). To
the extent that background beliefs and perceptions about the good and how to achieve it
are false or pernicious, persuasion is powerless to correct them. On the contrary, to the ex-
tent that the persuader is ignorant regarding these matters, even well-intended persuasion
will necessarily mislead and corrupt. Rhetoric, Socrates argues, does not even provide the
orator with genuine power, if power is understood as something that benefits its possessor.
For what rhetoric enables the orator to do may be bad for the orator if the orator does not
know where his own good lies. Even regarding ends that are good, rhetoric involves no gen-
uine knowledge about how to achieve them, but operates only in terms of accepted preju-
dices about how certain effects are to be achieved (Plato, Gorgias 466-468). And there may
also be a non-accidental connection between knowledge of what the human good consists
in and knowledge of how to achieve it. It may be an illusion to think that regarding the hu-
man good we could possess only instrumental knowledge without also prudential or moral
knowledge. Knowledge of the good is holistic, and ordinary beliefs may involve many dif-
ferent kinds of related falsehoods and illusions about it. About this Plato is deeply wise,
even if we think he is wrong about many other things.

1 There is an excellent article about this controversy: Harris (2004).

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Propaganda and undermining propaganda

Propaganda in a broad sense may be thought of as persuasion used for political purposes.
But there is a narrower and somewhat technical sense of ‘propaganda’ explicated by Jason
Stanley which he calls ‘undermining propaganda’. Undermining propaganda does seem
necessarily deceptive and pernicious. For undermining propaganda is communication that
represents itself as favoring certain ideals or values but which in fact serves subtly to under-
mine, weaken or discredit the very same things it represents itself as supporting (Stanley,
2015, pp. 52-54). Stanley contrasts undermining propaganda with supporting propaganda.
In the context of a modern liberal democracy, Stanley contrasts ‘demagoguery’ (undermin-
ing propaganda with respect to democratic values and processes) with what he calls ‘civic
rhetoric’, which encourages and reinforces the values and ideals that make a liberal democ-
racy function (Stanley, 2015, pp. 82, 115-117).
Propaganda in Stanley’s somewhat technical sense of ‘undermining propaganda’ might
seem like a rather special phenomenon, a rather narrow sense of the term, covering only a
relatively small part of the extension of ‘propaganda’ regarded as political persuasion. But
this appearance is actually quite deceptive. In fact, much of the propaganda to which we
are exposed, and much of the propaganda that proves politically effective, takes the form of
undermining propaganda. Undermining propaganda turns out to be a very important phe-
nomenon on which to focus, not merely because it is widespread and powerful, but more
fundamentally because it owes its prevalence and power to the way it serves the political
needs of modern society. It is worth pausing to consider why it does.

The paradox of modernity

Since the industrial revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, there has been an
incredible expansion of the capacity of the human species to understand, control, and make
use of nature to satisfy human needs. There has also been an incredible increase in the ex-
tent and complexity of the network of forms of cooperation, especially in the kinds of skill
developed and the division of human labor, and in the degree of coordination, both actual
and potential, among human beings. In all these ways, there has also been an incredible ex-
pansion in the capacity human beings have for leading satisfying and fulfilling lives.
This has gone hand in hand with the growth of certain ethical conceptions pertain-
ing to the form the human community should have. These conceptions have become wide-
spread, though they are still far from universal. They include the idea that human beings
—all human beings, all human lives— have worth and dignity; also that it is a human right
for every human being to have the freedom to shape one’s own life through free choice. Jus-
tice requires that all, and not merely a privileged few, should have this freedom. Human be-
ings ought to address one another on terms of equality and mutual respect. None should
be in a condition of servitude or subjection to another. People should be able to claim as a
right against society whatever they need to lead a life that is independent, not vulnerable to
the control of others. The only legitimate limits on that freedom are those necessary to pro-
tect a like freedom for all others.
In the modern world there is a widespread consensus on these values and ideals –
even if in places they are still controversial. At the same time, modernity has witnessed the

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growth of technological, economic, and social capacities of the human species, enabling it
to realize them to an extent unknown or even undreamt of in earlier ages. Yet there has
been a painful —even an astonishing— gap separating humanity’s aspirations and also its
vastly increased capacities to realize them, from the actual lives people lead. Modern society
has failed to use its resources to achieve both individual and collective freedom. The vast
majority of human beings do not enjoy the material conditions of a free and fulfilling life.
Resources that might fulfil our aspirations are in the hands of only a few, and used to sub-
jugate others. This is done chiefly through economic mechanisms, above all scarcity of the
opportunity to labor – chiefly in the form of the high unemployment that dogs capitalist
economies throughout the world. In a society with these features, yet in which government
ostensibly both serves the interest of the governed and serves with its consent, it is also nec-
essary for the privileged also to maintain political control. Formally democratic institutions
must become empty hulls whose content is deeply undemocratic. In political institutions,
in the economy, in modern culture, in our everyday way of life, things are the virtual oppo-
site of what modernity tells itself that they should be.
This paradox is at the root of many ways in which the most persistent feature of mod-
ern culture is its own self-hatred. This self-hatred is exhibited in a wide variety of ways. It
shows itself in forms of art and forms of popular culture that in effect repudiate the world
around them, either by exhibiting values that conflict with those perceived to be dominant
in everyday life or —perhaps even more often— by adopting an ironical and self-under-
mining attitude both toward everyday life and to the values on which it supposedly rests.
Such ‘counter-cultural’ attitudes are often accompanied by a sense that adopting them is in
some sense ‘revolutionary’ – seeking a wholly new way of life, of which, however, this coun-
ter-culture has no clear conception and no determinate program for creating. Sometimes,
as in certain forms of so-called ‘post-modernist’ thinking, the essential values of modernity
themselves —ideas like universalism, human equality and human dignity— are repudiated
at least on the surface, perhaps by showing the ways in which they themselves were origi-
nally the products of thinkers whose views about sex and race were conspicuously backward
by our present-day standards. Counter-culture, however, has no way around modernity and
no path toward anything that could be called ‘post-modernity’. Its use of the latter phrase,
in fact, is really little more than a confession of defeat and intellectual bankruptcy.2
Modernity’s self-hatred shows itself also in reactionary, self-described ‘conservative’ or
‘fundamentalist’ forms of culture, especially in politics and religion, that try to defend im-
agined social or religious traditions, or an imagined past, and ostensibly seek to reform or
transform the world around them in accordance with these perceptions. Sometimes these
‘fundamentalist’ values serve to support past social forms and resist attempts based on mo-
dernity’s essential values to modernize or reform them. They serve to reinforce racist or
ethnically tribalist attitudes, or repressive, backward and unenlightened attitudes in mat-
ters of sexuality, such as those involving the basic human rights of LBGT people, when

2 When it was becoming clear that the U.S. imperialist adventure in Southeast Asia was becoming a
quagmire, and even an unwinnable disaster, it was reportedly recommended by Senator George Aiken
(R-Vermont) that what we ought to do is “declare victory and go home.” Whether he was being seri-
ous and merely confused, or intelligent ironical, is open to doubt. I see post-modernism as an equally
futile response to the paradox of modernity. Post-modernism’s name for itself may reflect its own pro-
found confusion, or its preferred stance of irony – or both.

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these are finally being recognized for the first time. Or they seek to return women to the
essentially unfree social status they have traditionally occupied and are only recently begin-
ning to be liberated. But such reactionary movements cannot do this successfully in a mod-
ern context in a way that openly denies the equal dignity of all human beings. The modern
egalitarian belief in universal human dignity is itself rooted in the same Judaeo-Christian
religious traditions to which the reactionaries want to return. In fact, it is only the modern,
more consistent and more rational working out of those same traditions. So fundamental-
ists cannot radically repudiate the modernist values on whose consistent progress in poli-
tics, morality and culture it is dedicated to combatting.
Sometimes the fundamentalist self-hatred of modernity reveals its moral and intellec-
tual bankruptcy in especially flagrant forms by representing its opposition to the modernist
conception of equal human dignity as if it were really a purer form of support for this con-
ception. Thus policies that would take us backward, returning half the human race to its
traditional condition of non-personhood by denying women the right to make decisions
about their own bodies, is represented as an extension of the equal right to life to a whole
new set of (embryonic or fetal) persons. Likewise, all measures through which a liberal dem-
ocratic state might protect people from want, and the vulnerability to servitude, that inevi-
tably goes with it are instead stubbornly opposed because they are represented as intrusions
on freedom (the freedom of the privileged minority who oppress the rest).
Both fundamentalist anti-modernism and hyper-intellectual post-modernism are in
the end nothing but forms of modernity’s self-hatred because those who exhibit these atti-
tudes are, of course, themselves thoroughly modern human beings and nothing else. They
are products and representatives of modernity, even some of its most typical products and
representatives, even some of the most suitable objects for its endemic self-hatred. That
they sometimes pretend to be something other than his displays nothing but the incredible
self-deception and denial that characterizes modernity’s self-hatred and expresses the abys-
mal depth of its essential paradox.
This is what I am calling ‘the paradox of modernity’. It is a paradox because there is a
natural assumption that a society’s practices will realize its professed goals, or at the very
least its historical trends will not move in a direction diametrically opposed to them. But
this is what happens when economic inequality and oppression grow steadily in a society
that professes freedom and dignity for all. Modernity is essentially a social order engaged
in a basic struggle with itself. Its values are fundamentally rationalistic, universalistic, egali-
tarian, grounded on the freedom of every individual; and it has given itself the economic
and social capabilities to realize all these values. But the modern social order is in direct and
conflict with these same values. It is profoundly anti-egalitarian and oppressive, condemn-
ing the vast majority to unfreedom, placing them at the mercy of a tiny minority of oppres-
sors and to an irrational and inhuman economic and political system.

The need for undermining propaganda

A society with these characteristics needs a great deal of undermining propaganda if it is to

remain stable, especially when the economy itself is subject to periodic crises and virtually
permanent instability. People must look to political institutions to express the values they
think underlie social life. But given the social reality, this requires that they believe social,

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economic and political institutions to rest on values directly contrary to the values the actual
institutions in fact embody. People must in effect be persuaded that social reality is the vir-
tual opposite of what it actually is. People must be made to think that the very institutions
that deprive them of freedom are institutions on which their freedom depends. They must
be made to perceive conditions that benefit only a privileged few as conditions that benefit
all. They must come to regard the conditions of their oppression as conditions of their free-
dom, and to perceive political and economic changes that might liberate them as just the
opposite: a looming catastrophe from which they are protected by only the continued do-
minion of their oppressors. That is why public expression of the accepted values of freedom,
equality and human rights must assume forms that undermine these values in practice.
People cannot be rationally convinced of such patent falsehoods. But they can be per-
suaded and manipulated into accepting them. In fact, people must be persuaded of these
falsehoods if the existing social order is to remain stable and secure, with its wide gap be-
tween what it promises and what it delivers -- with the direct contradiction between the val-
ues it professes and those it practices. This can happen only if public perceptions, common
beliefs and shared emotions are under the sway of undermining propaganda. What is needed
is a background of ideological beliefs and attitudes that support and reinforce the prevailing
society and its political institutions. Stanley’s book is important because it calls our atten-
tion to undermining propaganda, and shows the forms it takes, thereby documenting how
widespread it is. Stanley makes a convincing case that undermining propaganda rests on, and
at the same time reinforces, what he calls ‘flawed ideology’. Stanley also explains how people
can not only be victims of such propaganda and ideology but even create and promulgate it,
without being conscious of so doing, and without being, as individuals, evil or deceptive peo-
ple. The prevalence of flawed ideology and undermining propaganda need not be the result
of some vast conscious conspiracy of the powerful against the rest of us. Instead, flawed ide-
ology interacts with people’s needs to sustain their group identities which preserve the con-
ditions for the only way of life for themselves that they are capable of understanding.
Just as the oppressive social system needs undermining propaganda to sustain it, so do the
individuals caught in this system. The oppressors cannot sustain their sense of who they are if
they see themselves as oppressors, nor can the oppressed see themselves as victims – unless of
the very forces that might liberate them. Stanley shows how propaganda need not be inten-
tionally deceptive, how it need not be produced by people who are moral scoundrels, and how
it may successfully manipulate people who are not mere fools or dupes. Propaganda may of-
ten even be true. For example, actual anecdotal evidence based on selective attention to truths
may sustain stereotypes that express and support flawed ideologies. Just as these ideologies
support the undermining propaganda that reinforce them, so both are natural products of the
society they express and whose self-perception and self-understanding they so badly distort.
As Karl Marx observed long ago, people fall under illusions because they find themselves in
social conditions that require them. Stanley’s book helps us to understand how this happens.

Modernity and liberal democracy

Stanley focuses on the way undermining propaganda works in a society that professes to be
calls ‘liberal democratic’ political order. His book contains a sustained argument that the
forms of undermining propaganda to which Stanley calls our attention are mortal threats

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 Propaganda and Democracy 387

to liberal democracy. His book naturally raises the question whether we actually live in
a liberal democracy, even an imperfect one, or whether it is instead quite a different po-
litical order whose claim to being a liberal democracy is merely an illusion supported by
flawed ideology and undermining propaganda. He cites the studies of Martin Gilens and
Benjamin Page (Gilens and Page, 2014) which argue that our political order is an oligar-
chy rather than a democracy. He presents the views of twentieth century political theorists,
such as James Burnham, who in 1941 argued approvingly that our political order is becom-
ing ‘managerial’ rather than democratic, and Samuel Huntington, who warned in 1976
that “too much democracy” threatens to make our society politically ungovernable (Burn-
ham, 1966, Huntington, 1976). Stanley relates these observations to considers arguments
that go back at least to Plato that democracy is not a workable political idea at all, precisely
because it is so fatally vulnerable to the forces of ideology, propaganda and demagogy.

Is liberal democracy possible?

Well into Stanley’s book, on p. 221, he asserts that his main thesis has been “that demagogy
will be [politically] effective.” He is correct in saying this; this claim follows a long and complex
argument —too long and too complex to be summarized here— that supports this disturbing
conclusion. But Stanley then asserts that he is “less concerned with defending a reaction to this
conclusion” and adds that “this argument has a lengthy philosophical tradition as an objection
to democracy.” This observation must give us pause. Much of Stanley’s argument throughout
the book has taken for granted that liberal democracy is both a possibility and a good thing. He
explicitly refrains from endorsing the claims of Gilens and Page, and cites Burnham and Hunt-
ington with evident disapproval. Stanley writes as if our actual political order is a liberal dem-
ocratic one, albeit an imperfect or incomplete one within which inequality, flawed ideology,
propaganda and demagogy are dangers and imperfections. His remark on p. 221 is therefore
surprising. It is even unconvincing if it is intended to distance Stanley himself from his com-
mitment to the ideas that we are living in an imperfect liberal democracy, and that our task is
to make it less imperfect. This has clearly been his position for the entire book.
Yet it seems to me that Stanley is also perfectly right that the argument of his book as
a whole might be used to make a strong case for an anti-democratic conclusion. If propa-
ganda and demagogy are so powerful and pervasive —moreover, if they have such deep
roots in human psychology— then the right conclusion, disturbing though it is, might after
all be the Platonic one that liberal democracy is not a workable idea. Recent developments
in American political life must surely sharpen our questions about this.
Some years ago, the late Ronald Dworkin published a book with the challenging title:
Is Democracy Possible Here? (Dworkin, 2008). Political developments since then have made
the same question even more urgent and more troubling. Stanley’s book raises worries that
are deeper still: Is liberal democracy really possible anywhere? Plato famously argued that it
is a fundamentally flawed and unworkable ideal, leading inevitably sooner or later to dema-
gogy and tyranny.3 Was he right? Are the apparent “imperfections in liberal democracy” re-

3 Plato’s best known arguments against democracy are found in Republic, Book VIII (especially 556-
566). According to Plato, the democratic state, like the democratic man, will be tolerant, anarchic, li-

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388 Allen Wood

ally no such thing, but only our perception of a fundamentally oligarchic and unfree social
order sustaining itself indefinitely through a widespread illusion fostered by ideology and
propaganda?
These thoughts are bound to occur to a reader of Stanley’s book. Or at any rate, they
forced themselves upon me. Stanley’s argument leads quite naturally, perhaps even in-
evitably, to the conclusion that a vision of our society something like Burnham’s is cor-
rect: We do not, and cannot, live in a liberal democracy. On the contrary: the inevitable
shape for a modern society is a managerial social and political order, highly unegalitar-
ian, highly undemocratic, which, however, achieves stability precisely by assuming the
false appearance of democracy, with the help of demagogy and undermining propaganda.
That seems what Gilens and Page say our actual society is like. The argument of Stanley’s
book might well be used to support the conclusion that it not only is like that, but is in-
evitably like that.
This is a conclusion, however, that I doubt any of us can consistently accept. It cer-
tainly cannot be accepted by anyone who shares the values, described earlier —characteris-
tic of the Enlightenment and traceable all the way back to the heart of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition— that all human beings have dignity, all are fundamentally moral equals, that all
have a right to a life free from the domination of others. Whether or not liberal democracy
exists, or even can exist, it is not possible for a modern human being who shares these values
to renounce the ideal of liberal democracy in its entirety, or embrace as acceptable a social
order one in which people are not recognized as both free and equal – a socially order fun-
damentally unegalitarian, characterized by the domination of the few and the oppression of
the many.
It is not uncommon, of course, for people to defend what they might describe as a
“moderate” view – that we should seek a liberal democracy but not one that goes “too far”
in a democratic direction. This seems the position Stanley associates with Huntington. In
our politics, however, such views, in their actual incarnation of such views always involve a
conspicuous condition of denial regarding social reality. In fact, they always involve subjec-
tion to the very flawed ideologies that are supported by, and in turn produce, just that very
propaganda and demagogy to which Stanley brings our attention. Huntington, for exam-
ple, thought of himself as a liberal on domestic issues. Even Burnham did not openly fa-
vor a society built on inequality and oppression; his managerial society is defended on the
grounds of its efficiency, and he accepts (in a spirit of triumphant irony, not of straightfor-
ward approval) the appearance of democracy as the cloak it must wear in order to enforce
its economic rationality. None of our politicians do or even could openly defend a manage-
rial oligarchy of the kind portrayed by Gilens and Page.

centious, and self-indulgent. The disdain for wisdom, order and discipline characteristic of popular
rule will result in a citizenry easily misled by a demagogue whose tyranny exhibits the same ugly traits
in a single ruling individual. Such a ruler will transform democratic anarchy into the harsh autocratic
dominion of his own individual thoughtless whims and depraved desires. However, Plato thinks of oli-
garchy not as an unjust order that needs democracy as its ideological mask, but instead as an order that
is corrupt, but still superior to democracy, which tends to degenerate into democracy, just as democ-
racy is apt to degenerate into tyranny (see Republic 551-556).

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Freedom as social self-transparency

To defend as inevitable our existing political order as it actually is would clearly require er-
ror, self-opacity, and deception. That is precisely why modernity hates itself, and also why
modern society is so deeply characterized by ideology, undermining propaganda and dema-
gogy. If in modern society managerial oligarchy is inevitable, then given the basic values of
modernity it is equally inevitable that we should be not only unwilling but even unable to
understand and accept the social reality around us for what it is. The greatest loss in such
a social order is what we might call the loss of “social transparency,” the capacity to under-
stand the society around you and then be a willing participant in that society based on that
correct self-understanding. For Hegel, this social self-transparency is the highest form of
freedom human beings can conceive, and he argued that it is the freedom actually found in
modern ethical life and the modern state.4
But if Stanley’s arguments hold, Hegel has to be deeply wrong about modernity. For
these arguments show that we necessarily accept the world around us only by misunder-
standing it, failing to see the contradiction between our ideals and our reality. The conclu-
sion is that we are inevitably unfree. We are trapped in a world that is necessarily opaque
to us – a social world we can neither rationally accept nor defend, nor even clearsightedly
understand. It is no consolation whatever that what keeps us trapped is the fact that most
people will find acceptable the world as it is only because they are unable to see things as
they are. For the gap between ideology and reality will still be there. It will manifest itself –
and it does manifest itself, in a variety of social and individual pathologies, making is mis-
erable, discontented and fundamentally unfree. Demagogy then exploits them, keeping us
trapped right where we are.
But don’t these thoughts themselves – that liberal democracy is impossible, that the only
kind of society we are capable of wanting or accepting is one that we can never have -- now
begin to look like only one more form of the flawed ideology by which we are trapped? Of-
fered to people whose concept of human dignity compels them to seek liberal democracy as
the only acceptable political arrangement, the line of argument I have just developed could
even serve very well as a form of undermining propaganda. For it presents itself as favoring
liberal democracy but then serves to undermine that value by tending to convince us that
liberal democracy is impossible and unworkable, thereby undermining our strivings for it.
There is good reason, then, for Stanley, almost casually and well over 200 pages into his
book, to let drop the startling remark that he is not concerned to defend any particular re-
action to his conclusion that undermining propaganda is prevalent in modern society. But
is this not merely his way of trying to avoid the problem I’ve just been raising? The problem
is that Stanley’s conclusion could easily be seen as defending Platonic arguments that liberal
democracy is impossible, and this could be just another piece of undermining propaganda
in relation to our flawed and imperfect liberal democracy. Thus I do not think Stanley can
honestly avoid the problem just by saying he is not concerned to defend any particular reac-
tion to his book’s central thesis. Throughout the book, Stanley’s own commitment to lib-
eral democracy, and the values that support it, it has been evident. I therefore put to him
the unavoidability of the problem raised by the argument of his book, and ask him what

4 See Hegel (1991), pp. 11, 21, 275-277.

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conclusion he does honestly want to draw from his argument that undermining propa-
ganda is inevitable in a democratic society.

Marx on the paradox of modernity

Karl Marx was the historical philosopher who I believe had the deepest understanding of
what I have called the paradox of modernity. He conceptualized modernity as “capitalism”
or “modern bourgeois society,” and provided a penetrating analysis —both economic and
philosophical— of its alienation, exploitativeness, its inhumanity and unfreedom ideologi-
cally masking itself as freedom and justice. He saw clearly the ways in which capitalism sep-
arates human beings from one another and from their common humanity, making them
selfish and hateful even as it punishes these vices in people as it creates and re-creates them.
It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His view of capi-
talism was far too favorable. Marx saw, and partly explained, the periodic crises to which the
capitalist economy is subject, its fundamental instability, and also the way in which it com-
bines a degree of productivity unimagined in earlier ages with brutal oppression, servitude
and poverty for the majority of the members of society. Marx took these to be clear signs
that capitalism was bound to be a merely transitional social and economic form. For him,
the paradox of modernity was an indication that it could not last. Marx could not bring
himself to believe that our species, even in the depraved state capitalism has placed it, could
indefinitely tolerate such an irrational social order, especially when these irrationalities were
accompanied by prodigious productivity and by new forms of sociability that evidently pro-
vide humanity with all the means necessary to create a new and higher form of society.
Marx’s preferred images for the transition from the capitalist social order to this higher
future were obstetrical. He saw capitalism as pregnant with this higher future. The birth of
a new society, though painful and accompanied by birth pangs, he viewed as the natural and
inevitable outcome of the historical process that would resolve the paradox of modernity
and bring humanity’s social practices into line with both its potentialities and its aspirations.
I will not try to explain where Marx went wrong. If I could, I doubt that I could any
longer continue to regard the paradox of modernity as a paradox. It has recently been sug-
gested that Marx’s obstetric metaphors betray a false and naïve belief on Marx’s part that
the transition from capitalist to post-capitalist (socialist, communist) society was going to
be “automatic” – not anything we need to think about or plan for. This is then seen as the
source of Marx’s ‘utopophobia’ – his refusal to provide a political plan or program which
would take us from the capitalist present to a higher future (Leopold, 2016). This “pho-
bia” is then condemned as a fateful error that has stood in the way of Marxist practice and
Marxian thinking. The claim then is that utopian thinking is needed to correct Marxist
‘utopophobia’ and put us on the right path.
It is not my aim to defend Marx against the charge that he made mistakes in thinking
about this transition. Indeed, I have just said I think we are now sadder and wiser observ-
ers of the fact that capitalism seems not to be a merely transitional form. Perhaps it is even
a treacherous bog, in which humanity may be doomed to perish in agony through the long-
term effects of the very technology that Marx thought was its great gift to the human future.
I also take no direct position on the question whether ‘utopophobia’ in later Marxists has
been an error – though I will shortly have something to say that might bear on those issues.

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 Propaganda and Democracy 391

What I first want to dispute is what I regard as a totally false explanation of Marx’s re-
luctance to indulge in utopianism. Marx never thought the transition to post-capitalist so-
ciety would be ‘automatic’ and free from trouble. His obstetric metaphors do not support
this explanation, but even suggest the very opposite. To think that childbirth is either au-
tomatic or pain-free would not occur to a woman who has given birth, or to anyone, such
as a midwife, partner or husband, who has accompanied a mother through the experience.
Marx’s ‘utopophobia’ must have had an entirely different motivation. What was it? Marx
was, I suggest, a Hegelian, who had severe reservations about either predicting or prescrib-
ing the historical future. He certainly hoped for, and sought to bring about, a transition
from capitalism to something more human and rational. His bold expressions that the
transition would be ‘inevitable’ (which now seem so questionable to us) were expressions of
this hope and also exhortations to his contemporaries. But thinking that something is inev-
itable is not the same as thinking it is automatic, nor does it imply any clear conception of
what you think is inevitable.
That Marx did not have a plan or a utopia to realize is instead a matter of where he saw
himself in the process. He thought he could identify the class and the movement —the
proletariat and the working class movement— that would bring about the transition. But
he was too modest and cautious (too Hegelian, or shall we say, too pragmatic?) to think
himself in a position to direct the process or lay out blueprints for it. He left this task for
later stages of the movement. Perhaps it is a just criticism of them that they did not do the
job right. Whether ‘utopian’ thinking or something else might be the right way to go about
it at a later stage is not something about which I think there is good reason to ascribe any
position to Marx. He merely thought that such planning was premature in his own time.

An alternative to the political?

One side of Marx’s thinking that bears on the main theme of this essay is his attitude to-
ward the political state as a social form, and the political as a way of thinking about hu-
man society more generally. Marx rejected the anarchism of Bakunin and others who
favored the immediate abolition of the state.5 But Marx thought that one important
achievement that would be necessary for the victory of the working class and the over-
coming of class society was the decline, even eventually the cessation, of the political state
as the organizing force of human society. Rightly or wrongly, Marx thought that the state

5 In some critical literature on Marx, this has been seen as ominous – as though it makes Marx respon-
sible for the totalitarian politics of the self-described “Marxism” in the Soviet Union, China or other
places. But that’s absurd. In fact, it shows only that Marx thought some working class political agency
was needed for the near future, and also that he wanted to distance himself from the pointless violence
(what we might today call ‘terrorism’) inspired by anarchist ideas in his own day. You do not need to
favor totalitarianism in order to oppose terrorism. Marx’s politics, to the extent that he had a political
stance, was always that of the radical democrats of his day, who favored open institutions, freedom of
expression and universal suffrage. That his self-described followers elsewhere took contrary positions
is a striking fact, which is often overlooked for a variety of reasons, some of them no doubt due to a
blindness induced by terrible historical experience, but many of them, especially in the West, reflecting
badly on the self-honesty of who view Marx in this way.

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392 Allen Wood

is only a superstructural expression, a necessary enforcement-vehicle, of ruling class inter-

ests (whether bourgeois or proletarian). Marx fully shared the consensus of modern po-
litical theory since Hobbes that the political state is fundamentally a coercive institution.
Of those philosophers (including two of Marx’s own favorites – Aristotle and Hegel)
who thought of the state as the highest expression of rational human community, Marx
thought they were guilty of a profound error about what the political state is and what it
can do in human life.
Marx’s thought on this point might be applied to the idea that what we need to re-
solve the paradox of modernity is only a successful form of liberal democracy. Marx deci-
sively rejected that thought. In effect, he held that the highest aspirations of humanity in
the modern age —its commitment to freedom, human dignity and community— were
not best pursued in political terms at all. This is why he rejected the ideals of right, justice
and equality as vehicles of working class demands. He thought some form of distribu-
tive right would be needed in the transition, but hoped that post-capitalist society would
come to think of things in a different way. That’s why he recommended Louis Blanc’s
slogan: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” not as sys-
tem of just distribution to be enforced on people but as something society might inscribe
on its banners only after “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right has been crossed in its
entirety.”6
Marx’s thought is that neither liberal democracy nor any other political form is an ad-
equate expression of modern humanity’s aspirations. The thought was already expressed
even more eloquently by an earlier figure (now much neglected) in to the same tradition:
“Life in the state is not one of the human being’s absolute aims. The state is, instead, only
a means for establishing the perfect society, a means which exists only under specific cir-
cumstances. Like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abol-
ishing itself. The goal of all government is to make government superfluous” (Fichte, 1988,
p. 156). Fichte also formulated the goal itself with striking clarity: “We can at least catch a
glimpse beyond ourselves of an association in which one cannot work for himself without
at the same time working for everyone, nor work for others without also working for him-
self” (Fichte, 1988, p. 168). Marx and Engels put the same idea in these words: “In place
of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an asso-
ciation, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all” (Marx and Engels, 1975-, 6:506).

6 “Critique of the Gotha Program,” (Marx and Engels, 1975-, 24:86-7). If this were to be principle of
just distribution enforced by society in the form of obligations, rights and claims, it would be a truly
monstrous principle. Imagine a society that coercively extracts every last bit of social contribution
from each person that their abilities afford, and in which the needy, in order to get their basic needs
satisfied, must press their claims on society by providing evidence of their need. To associate Marx
with such horrid thoughts is to read the passage in which he quotes the slogan in a way totally and di-
rectly opposed to what it explicitly says. But I have no doubt that some who are incapable of thinking
in any terms except those of politics and state coercion will continue to read it that way. It even counts
as a form of undermining propaganda to interpret critics of what you favor in a way that is directly
contrary to what they say, and makes it easy for you to reject their criticisms. For this enables you to
pretend not to dispute the critics’ actual insights while at the same time rejecting the practical conclu-
sions the critics validly draw from them.

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 Propaganda and Democracy 393

Neither of these ideas conceives of society as a political association – a form of coercion

protecting the rights of individuals or enforcing their claims against each other. Liberal de-
mocracy, even at its best, is a mechanism for doing this, even if the coercion is exercised in
the public interest and its terms are determined by a state in which all citizens have equal
power and are equally respected as parties to public debate. The thoughts just quoted from
Fichte, and then from Marx and Engels, conceive of society entirely differently: as an asso-
ciation in which people achieve their own freely chosen aims by freely advancing the freely
chosen aims of others. Only a society that operates in these terms could realize the values
we moderns share, using the resources and modes of co-operation modernity puts at our
disposal. Only such a society could overcome the paradox of modernity.
At this point we need to return to the idea drawn from Alain Locke mentioned at the
beginning of this essay. The problem with all propaganda —with civic rhetoric as much as
undermining propaganda— is that it leaves unchanged and unchallenged the presupposi-
tions of the current debates, and cannot change the terms in which we think about things.
We cannot content ourselves with defending the ideal of liberal democracy, or any other
merely political ideal, as “civic rhetoric” aims to do. Again, no merely political form can
ever overcome the paradox of modernity. It is important, as Locke emphasized, that we get
beyond propaganda in order to open up social and historical possibilities that transcend the
accepted categories and debates.
It is important, however, that the idea of “making the state superfluous” should not be
confused with the way the phrase “smaller government” is used in our present day propa-
ganda. We are nowhere close to making the political state superfluous. Those who urge us
to make the state “smaller” never think it should cease to protect the property of the rich
and powerful; they are interested only in curtailing its protection of the rights of the poor,
and sometimes even its provision of public services needed by all. The possibilities Fichte
and Marx were trying to open up have nothing in common with that.
Besides, we are far from having solved the difficult task Marx left to the future of the
working class movement, nor do we even any longer have an identifiable movement like
one whose vocation Marx thought would be to accomplish this task. Achieving a true and
workable liberal democracy looks from our present vantage point like a far more necessary
step toward the post-political condition envisioned by Fichte and Marx than any utopian
schemes we might dream up. Marx’s ‘utopophobia’ would therefore seem entirely justified
from our present standpoint. However, if liberal democracy itself is impractical -- or if it is
even an illusion: only the form of ideological appearance through which the managerial so-
ciety inflicts itself upon us —then the paradox of modernity would seem to be our fate—
permanently, or at least for any future that we can now foresee.

Some final thoughts

As part of my invitation to Stanley, then, let me state briefly the conclusion regarding these
difficult questions that I would draw from his book. I accept Stanley’s main argument. I
acknowledge a practical commitment to the political aims of liberal democracy and think
we need to face up to the apparent conflict between his argument and that commitment.
We do so by recognizing that if we are capable of understanding anything, the first thing
we understand —because it is a presupposition of any understanding at all— is that noth-

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394 Allen Wood

ing in human life is necessary or inevitable as long as we have the power to understand it
and to act on that understanding. Understanding our condition always places us outside
it and beyond it. Understanding already presupposes we are free agents in relation to what
we understand, and therefore have the power to resist and change it. What we understand
is that we live in a condition that makes undermining propaganda unavoidable, and there-
fore threatens the very possibility of liberal democracy. Once we come to understand this,
we see that our fate is to strive for liberal democracy while knowing the odds of success in
this striving are not good. But we must go on striving because our understanding of human
beings as free, equal, and possessed of dignity and human rights, gives us no other choice.
That, I believe, is the comfortless conclusion we ought to draw from Stanley’s challenging
book.

REFERENCES

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University Press.
Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin Page. 2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups
and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12/3, pp. 564-81.
Harris, Leonard. 2004. “The Great Debate: W. E. B. Dubois vs. Alain Locke on the Aesthetic,” Philosophia
Africana, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2004).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. W. Wood, tr. H.B. Nisbet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huntington, Samuel. 1976. No Easy Choice: Political Participation in Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA:
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Leopold, David. 2016. “On Marxian Utopophobia,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2016).
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1975- . Marx-Engels Collected Works. New York: International Publishers.
Cited by Volume: page.
Plato. 1980. Gorgias, translated by Terence Irwin. Oxford: Clarendon. Cited by Stephanus number.
Plato. 2004. Republic, translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett. Cited by Stephanus number.
Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

ALLEN WOOD is Ruth Norman Halls Professor at Indiana University and Ward W,and Priscilla B.Woods Pro-
fessor emeritus at Stanford University, and has been visiting professor at the University of Michigan,
University of California, San Diego and Oxford University. Wood is author of numerous articles and over
a dozen books in philosophy, especially about classical German philosophy: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and
Marx. During year-long periods of research, he has been affiliated with the Freie Universität Berlin and
the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. He is on the editorial board of eight philosophy journals, six book series and the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
ADDRESS: Department of Philosophy, Indiana University Bloomington, 1033 E. Third St., Sycamore Hall
026, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. E-mail: awwood@indiana.edu

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