Public Opinion (book) - The Manufacture of Consent

The Manufacture of Consent

When properly deployed in the public interest, the manufacture of consent is useful and necessary for a cohesive society, because, in many cases, “the common interests” of the public are not obvious, and only become clear upon careful analysis of the collected data — a critical intellectual exercise in which most people either are uninterested or are incapable of doing. Therefore, most people must have the world summarized for them by the well-informed, and will then act accordingly.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . s a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

— Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Chapter XV

The political élite are members of the class of people who are incapable of accurately understanding, by themselves, the complex “unseen environment” wherein the public affairs of the modern state occur; thus, Lippmann proposes that a professional, “specialized class” collect and analyze data, and present their conclusions to the society’s decision makers, who, in their turn, use the “art of persuasion” to inform the public about the decisions and circumstances affecting them.

Public Opinion proposes that the increased power of propaganda, and the specialized knowledge required for effective political decisions, have rendered impossible the traditional notion of democracy. Moreover, Public Opinion introduced the phrase “the manufacture of consent”, which the public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman used as the title of their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).