Today (Wednesday 8 May) marks the launch of Dead Men’s Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies by Terhi Rantanen, Professor of Global Media and Communications in LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. The book is open access and free to read from today through LSE Press, the School’s publisher of high-quality, open access research in the social sciences.
In Dead Men’s Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies, Terhi Rantanen investigates the shaping of early comparative communications research between the 1920s and the 1950s, notably the work of academics and men of practice in the United States. Often neglected, this intellectual thread is highly relevant to understanding the 21st-century’s challenges of war and rival streams of propaganda.
Borrowing her conceptual lenses from Karl Mannheim and Robert Merton, Rantanen draws on detailed archival research and case studies to analyse the extent and importance of work outside and inside the academy, illuminating the work of pioneers in the field. Some of these were well-known academics such as Harold Lasswell and the authors of the seminal book Four Theories of the Press. Others operated in the world of news agencies, such as Associated Press’s Kent Cooper, or were marginalised as émigré scholars, notably Paul Kecskemeti and Nathan Leites. Her study shows how comparative communications, from its very beginning, can be understood as governed by the Mannheimian concepts of ideology and utopia and the power play between them. The close relationship between these two concepts resulted in a bias in knowledge production, contributed to dominant narratives of generational conflicts, and to the demarcation of Insiders and Outsiders.
By focusing on a generation at the forefront of comparative communications at this pivotal time in the 20th century, this book challenges orthodoxies in the intellectual histories of communication studies.
Professor John C. Nerone, Professor Emeritus of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says: “Dead Men’s Propaganda offers a fascinating account of the genealogy of comparative communications. Terhi Rantanen draws on decades of archival research to present nuanced and vivid portrayals of key figures in communication research and propaganda studies in the forty years following the First World War. Using concepts drawn from Karl Mannheim and Robert K. Merton, she shows how a generation of scholars and professionals from different fields and countries negotiated the ideological currents and utopian visions of their age. Anyone interested in the history of communication research has to read this book.”
This book is primarily intended for second year and upwards undergraduate students in media and communications studies, comparative communications, propaganda studies, and sociology students. Each chapter is also downloadable on its own for use in courses considering only some of the ten theorists covered.
