PR! A Social History of Spin Chapter 1: Visiting Edward Bernays Stuart Ewen

Interviewing Bernays Bernays and Lippmann Bernays drew a connection between his work and that of Walter Lippmann. Bernays holds hierarchical view of society “Throughout the interview, Bernays expressed an unabashedly hierarchical view of society.

Interviewing Bernays The Intellectual Few: Repeatedly, he maintained that although most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought, there exist an ‘intelligent few’ who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history.” (9)

Interviewing Bernays Bernays’ view of Democracy “Bernays…was clearly no democrat.” A Political Hallucination In the interview, he “conveyed his hallucination of democracy: A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.” (10)

Interviewing Bernays Bernays and the Public Relations Professional In Bernays words: “by my definition, a public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his or her or its viability depends.” (11) “Public relations [is] a response to a trans-historic concern: the requirement that, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.” (11)

Interviewing Bernays What gave Birth to Modern Public Relations In Bernays’ view, public relations and propaganda in the modern period was a response to the rise of a “social conscience” among the masses. (12) Rise of Social Conscious: Threat to Established Power The emergence of a “social conscience,” writes Ewen, represented, or signaled a “historic shift in the social history of property” in Bernays thinking. (p. 12) This admission on Bernays’ “inadvertently…shed…light on the conditions that gave birth to the practice of public relations.” (12)

Interviewing Bernays Rise of Social Conscious: Threat to Established Power “The ‘social conscience’ to which Bernays had referred arrived at that moment when aristocratic paradigms of deference could no longer hold up in the face of modern, democratic public ideals that were boiling up among the ‘lower strata’ of society.” (13) New Mechanisms of Social Control To confront democratic urgings, elites had to devise new mechanisms of social control. “In the crucible of these changes, aristocracy began to give way to technocracy as a strategy of rule.” (13)