Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, by Jacques Ellul — Summary
Synopsis
Ellul’s central thesis is that propaganda is not an occasional abuse of power but a structural necessity of modern technological society. Both the state and the individual need it: the state because it cannot govern mass societies without manufacturing psychological consent, and the individual because he cannot bear the weight of modern life — its information overload, its anonymity, its demands for sacrifice and adaptation — without an organizing myth. The propagandee is therefore not merely a victim but an accomplice who craves the very thing that dispossesses him.
The argument is built through a systematic anatomy of propaganda’s external machinery (totality, continuity, organization, orchestration of media), its internal operating principles (exploitation of existing myths, timeliness, work on the undecided), its sociological preconditions (mass society, atomized individualism, concentrated media, average culture), and its psychological effects (crystallization of latent impulses, alienation, dissociation, dependence). Ellul then traces propaganda’s consequences outward into ideology, public opinion, political parties, labor, churches, and democratic governance itself. Two appendices — one on measurability, one on Maoist methods — extend the analysis to empirical and comparative ground.
The book matters for this vault because it supplies the deepest available theory of why democratic citizens can be psychologically formed into anti-democratic dispositions without any visible coercion — what Ellul calls “the totalitarian man with democratic convictions.” That mechanism connects directly to the vault’s investigations into democratic erosion, affective polarization, the thymic drivers of populism, and the structural role of media environments in shaping political subjectivity. Ellul’s distinction between agitation propaganda and integration propaganda is especially useful for understanding how stable democracies produce conformity through apparently benign institutions.
Chapter I.1 — External Characteristics
Ellul opens this section by arguing that modern propaganda never addresses a purely isolated individual and never addresses a mass as though it were an abstract collective without persons inside it. Its distinctive external form is that it reaches individuals only insofar as they are already embedded in a crowd, a milieu, or an invisible social current. The propagandist is interested in persons not in their singularity but in what they share with others: common fears, desires, myths, resentments, and reflexes. Propaganda becomes possible where one can work on averages, recurrent emotions, and collective susceptibilities rather than on the irreducible complexity of one person in dialogue.
That is why Ellul insists that propaganda ends where genuine dialogue begins. A one-to-one exchange in which a person can answer, object, hesitate, and reason is precisely the situation least favorable to propaganda. The isolated individual resists too much, and persuasion at that level is too slow. Modern propaganda therefore presupposes a social setting in which individuals are already connected, or can be treated as connected, whether through shared institutions, simultaneous media exposure, or the awareness of belonging to a larger public undergoing the same stimuli. Even apparently personal contact, such as canvassing or petitions, works because the person senses the organization and the larger stream behind the encounter.
Ellul’s key paradox is that propaganda must treat the person as part of a mass while simultaneously making him feel personally addressed. If people are spoken to too openly as a crowd, they feel degraded and refuse to identify with the message. The propagandist must therefore preserve the listener’s vanity. Each person must feel seen, singled out, respected, and called upon individually, even while in reality he is being handled as one interchangeable unit among many. The effectiveness of propaganda depends on this double movement: mass integration on the one hand, personal flattery on the other.
This is one reason the modern mass media are so central. Newspapers, radio, cinema, and television create what Ellul describes as a diffused psychological mass: people are physically separated but mentally synchronized. The newspaper reader sits alone, the radio listener sits alone, the film spectator seems solitary even in a theater, yet all are receiving the same impulses, myths, emphases, and frames at the same time. The result is the “lonely crowd,” a condition in which the person experiences himself as an individual while actually participating in a collective psychic environment. For Ellul, this is the ideal terrain for propaganda.
He pushes the point further by saying that propaganda often requires the fragmentation of smaller, more coherent groups before it can fully operate on their members. A strongly organized small group can resist outside influence better than a mass of separate individuals linked only through media or general social atmosphere. Propaganda is strongest when it can break down older solidarities, isolate people within a mass society, and then reconnect them through new circuits of symbolic influence. In that sense, mass society and propaganda are not accidental companions; they reinforce one another.
The second major trait of section I.1 is totality. Propaganda, Ellul says, must be total, meaning that it cannot be confined to one channel, one occasion, or one zone of life. The propagandist must use every available instrument: press, radio, film, meetings, schools, posters, human contacts, and whatever other media exist. A modern individual should not encounter the message at only one point, because then he can compartmentalize it, resist it, or forget it. He must instead be surrounded by converging signals until the propaganda becomes the atmosphere he breathes.
Different media play different roles in this encirclement. Some are better for rational explanation, some for emotional suggestion, some for repetitive conditioning, and some for creating the sense of direct personal involvement. Ellul’s point is not that one medium supersedes the others, but that the propagandist must orchestrate them. A complete propaganda operation distributes functions among media and combines them so that each reinforces the effect of the others. The power lies in coordination, not merely in message content.
Totality also means that propaganda aims at the whole human being. It does not seek only to implant an opinion in the intellect. It works on emotions, habits, values, imagination, memory, and social behavior. It invades not only public judgment but the individual’s daily rhythms, his sense of what is normal, admirable, shameful, or inevitable. Ellul stresses that propaganda wants to create an all-encompassing environment in which the person no longer encounters neutral spaces. The target is not a belief held at arm’s length but a mode of living within a symbolic universe.
For that reason propaganda spills into domains that seem, at first glance, not purely political. Ellul says it penetrates education, diplomacy, cultural production, literature, and even history itself. It rewrites the past, rearranges examples, sanctifies some figures, erases others, and turns inherited culture into support material for the present campaign. The point is not simply censorship. It is the integration of all socially authoritative voices into one persuasive environment. When that happens, propaganda ceases to look like an external pressure and begins to appear as reality itself.
A total propaganda also mixes forms that analysts too easily separate. Ellul emphasizes the necessary combination of overt and covert propaganda, direct and indirect propaganda, agitation and integration, and various emotional or rational forms. Overt propaganda can mobilize rapidly, but it also provokes defenses; covert propaganda works more slowly, insinuating premises and creating the climate in which overt appeals later become effective. Modern propaganda does not choose one form over another. It layers them. What matters is the overall ensemble, not the purity of a type.
The third external characteristic is continuity. Real propaganda cannot be occasional. It must be continuous enough to leave no gaps and lasting enough to shape a person over time. Ellul dismisses the idea that a brief electoral campaign, or a short burst of messaging around one event, deserves the name in the full sense. A two-week effort may persuade here and there, but it does not create the environment of dependence, repetition, and habituation that defines genuine propaganda. Propaganda must stretch across days, months, and years.
Continuity matters because constant repetition wears down resistance. The individual cannot refute the same pressure every day. He hears a statement, then hears it again in altered form, then finds it illustrated by events, repeated by commentators, echoed by neighbors, embodied by institutions, and linked to emotions already active within him. The cumulative effect is not simply that he accepts a proposition; it is that he loses the energy needed to stand outside the stream. Propaganda becomes stronger not because every argument is convincing, but because the barrage itself is exhausting.
Ellul adds that this continuity must be maintained even when current events do not naturally provide excitement. Artificial agitation is therefore one of propaganda’s necessary arts. The public must be kept in a state of alertness, concern, anticipation, or emotional readiness. Only then can the next message attach itself to something already active in consciousness. In that sense, continuity is not merely repetition of content; it is the production of a persistent psychological climate.
The fourth characteristic is organization. Propaganda does not operate in a vacuum; it depends on institutions capable of giving it continuity, discipline, repetition, and practical consequence. A message has far greater effect when it is backed by a party, a state apparatus, a union, a bureaucracy, or another concrete organization that can surround individuals materially as well as symbolically. For Ellul, this is one of the reasons authoritarian systems often outmatch looser democratic systems in propaganda: they bind words to organized networks of action, surveillance, ritual, and social placement.
At the same time, organization reveals something deceptive about propaganda’s human face. Door-to-door visits, meetings, and personal contacts seem intimate, but the person speaking is not really present as an individual engaged in mutual exchange. He is the delegate of an apparatus. His words have been calculated in advance, and his apparent spontaneity is part of the technique. The warmth of personal presence is used because it is effective, not because propaganda has returned to authentic human relation. Ellul sees in this simulated intimacy one of propaganda’s deepest falsifications.
The final and decisive external characteristic is what Ellul calls orthopraxy: propaganda aims less at right belief than at right action. Modern propaganda is not primarily trying to win a doctrinal conversion in the old sense. It wants participation, obedience, mobilization, reflex action, and committed behavior. The person may continue to hold private opinions that are inconsistent or even contradictory, but if he acts in the required direction, propaganda has succeeded. Action comes first; belief is then reorganized afterward to justify what has already been done.
This is why Ellul gives such importance to pre-propaganda. Before an individual can be pushed into decisive action, he must be made psychologically ready through slow, often imperceptible preparation. Pre-propaganda forms reflexes, associations, emotional habits, and collective myths. It creates a climate in which certain symbols automatically trigger reactions and certain grand images—race, nation, class, leader, productivity, historical destiny—acquire sacred force. Only then can active propaganda intervene at the opportune moment and convert readiness into action.
Once action has been obtained, the effect becomes far more durable. The man who has acted now needs to justify himself, to remain consistent with his own deed, to seek new companions, and to continue along the line he has taken. In this way propaganda becomes self-reinforcing. It no longer merely persuades from outside; it is ratified from within by the individual’s own conduct. That is the culmination of Ellul’s analysis in I.1: modern propaganda is external not because it is superficial, but because it constructs a complete social machinery—mass setting, personal address, media totality, continuity, organization, and action—that surrounds the individual and then enters him through the paths that society itself has prepared.
Chapter I.2 — Internal Characteristics
In the second section, Ellul shifts from the outward machinery of propaganda to its inner operating principles. He begins by rejecting both a naïve faith in propaganda’s omnipotence and a complacent dismissal of its limits. Propaganda cannot create anything whatever in a person, cannot simply erase deeply rooted convictions at will, and cannot manufacture beliefs out of empty space. Firmly reasoned opinions, durable prejudices, stable stereotypes, and long-settled religious or political commitments are often resistant to direct attack. But for Ellul this does not prove propaganda weak. It shows instead that effective propaganda works indirectly and must begin with an exact knowledge of the psychological terrain.
That terrain includes sentiments, opinions, stereotypes, myths, and the sociological structure of the audience. The propagandist must know what people already fear, hope for, admire, resent, or take for granted. Propaganda is therefore never a universal kit of ready-made slogans that can be applied anywhere in the same way. It must be tailored to a concrete public. The more exact the prior analysis, the more precisely the desired action can be calculated. Ellul treats this knowledge not as a secondary aid but as the very core of propaganda technique.
One consequence follows immediately: do not attack established opinions head-on. A propaganda that directly challenges a durable cliché or a settled collective judgment is usually wasting its energy. The frontal assault only alerts people to their own coherence, stiffens resistance, and produces defensive reactions. Effective propaganda is subtler. It knows that opinion and action are not neatly aligned. A person may hold one set of explicit views and still behave in a way that contradicts them. The propagandist therefore works in the gap between what people say they believe and what can move them to act.
From this perspective, existing opinions are not obstacles to be smashed but materials to be used. Ellul shows how propaganda can redirect rather than negate, can take a preexisting sentiment and steer it into a new trajectory, or can place it inside a new ambiguity until its original force is weakened. The point is not to persuade people that they were wrong in a clean, rational debate. The point is to lead them, step by step, where they did not intend to go, while preserving their impression of continuity with themselves. Propaganda wins not by resolving contradictions but by exploiting them.
Ellul also insists that propaganda cannot create something out of nothing. It must attach itself to existing psychological mechanisms, prior conditioned reflexes, familiar stereotypes, circulating ideologies, and already present needs. These needs can be material—bread, work, safety, peace—or psychological, such as the need for belonging, certainty, dignity, relief from anxiety, or an explanation of one’s condition. A propaganda that does not answer a need remains gratuitous and therefore weak. This is one reason experimental tests so often miss the point: they expose subjects to messages that have no real relation to the needs active in their lives.
Yet Ellul does not reduce propaganda to mere repetition of what already exists. He argues that it can be creative through combination. By rearranging existing elements, placing them into new constellations, and wrapping them in ambiguity, propaganda can make genuinely new formations emerge. It does not invent ex nihilo, but it can synthesize. It can transform available sentiments into a new political direction, or fuse scattered frustrations into a coherent myth. Its creativity is therefore parasitic rather than sovereign: it invents by reorganizing what society and psyche have already supplied.
From there Ellul moves from the individual to society. Propaganda must not only use elements already present in persons; it must also express the fundamental currents of the civilization in which it operates. It cannot successfully oppose the basic psycho-sociological structure of its age. Beneath political divisions and class conflicts, every society rests on tacit presuppositions that its members largely share without articulating them. These presuppositions are part of the environment itself. Propaganda works when it speaks their language, even if indirectly; it fails when it collides with them.
Ellul identifies four major collective presuppositions of the modern technological world: that human life aims at happiness, that man is naturally good, that history advances in endless progress, and that everything is ultimately material. Whether one is bourgeois or proletarian, liberal or socialist, one generally moves within these assumptions. Propaganda that demanded austerity instead of happiness, denied progress, or placed spiritual ends above material ones would, in his account, find almost no audience in modern mass society. The deepest premises of an age establish the boundaries of persuasive possibility.
Alongside these tacit presuppositions stand the great social myths. Ellul says that in modern society the two foundational myths are Science and History, and upon them rest others such as Work, Happiness, Nation, Youth, and Heroism. A myth, in this context, is not a simple falsehood but a charged image that gathers belief, emotion, and direction into one activating symbol. Propaganda must build on such myths because they furnish the sacred content through which men experience collective life. It does not merely repeat them. It hardens them, sharpens them, and turns diffuse beliefs into motives for action.
This dependence on myths also explains propaganda’s forward-looking structure. It must align itself with what a society experiences as its own evolution. In modern technological civilization, that means speaking the language of industrial growth, administrative development, productivity, national strength, and future improvement. Even when nostalgia can be used in advertising, political propaganda cannot permanently orient itself toward restoration. It must promise tomorrows. It rides the wave of collective expectation and reinforces it. Ellul even argues that some directions become almost impossible to propagandize against, because they are too deeply identified with modernity itself.
Still, propaganda cannot be uniform everywhere. Besides the broad currents of a civilization, it must take account of local milieus, national traditions, and conflicts between the outlook of a subgroup and that of the larger society. Ellul’s point is not relativistic; it is strategic. Where local and national tendencies clash, the propagandist must judge which tendency is historically stronger and more deeply connected to the great myths of the age. The message must be adapted to the actual balance of forces. Hence propaganda in Africa or Asia, in his period, cannot simply duplicate propaganda in Europe or North America, because the relevant myths and social realities are not yet identical.
Another internal law is timeliness. Propaganda in its explicit form must attach itself to current events, because the public is responsive above all to what feels immediate, dramatic, and contemporary. People are seized not by abstract truths in themselves but by timely manifestations of deeper collective realities. News functions like the visible wave that reveals the sea beneath it. The great myths and presuppositions provide the underlying mass, but current events provide the point of emotional capture. Propaganda therefore uses what is happening now to awaken structures that are much older and deeper.
The effect of timeliness is double. First, it ensures relevance: people feel that the message concerns the urgent world they inhabit. Second, it short-circuits reflection. Current events come too fast for slow comparison and careful contextualization. They strike individuals who are already dependent on news and therefore vulnerable to rapid framing. Propaganda takes advantage of this by linking a timely event to a preexisting center of interest—war, peace, technology, national destiny, professional life, political crisis—and directing the public toward the desired conclusion before reflection can stabilize itself.
This leads Ellul to the question of the undecided. The real field of propaganda is not the already convinced militant, nor the person wholly detached from collective life, but the vast middle zone of people whose opinions are vague, shifting, and socially formed. These people participate in the centers of interest of their society without possessing a fully elaborated doctrine. They live amid the pressures of collective life, and that makes them especially available to propaganda. The more intense the life of a group, Ellul argues, the more receptive its members become to propaganda, whether that collective intensity is spontaneous or artificially produced.
He therefore formulates a practical rule: propaganda works best where there is both a strong center of interest and an intense collective life organized around it. Modern politics and technology are powerful precisely because they engage masses of people simultaneously and emotionally. Religion, by contrast, is less available to propaganda in a secularized society because it no longer functions as a general focus of public interest. The propagandist must locate the places where collective attention is already concentrated, because those are the points at which the undecided majority can be moved.
Ellul ends the section with one of his sharpest distinctions: propaganda does not usually lie most effectively about facts, but about interpretations and intentions. On verifiable local facts, propaganda often has to remain reasonably accurate, because obvious falsehood destroys credibility. Even with larger facts, outright fabrication is often less useful than selective presentation, omission, decontextualization, suggestive arrangement, and the strategic use of accurate but disconnected data. A fact can be true and still be made to serve a false conclusion. Silence about surrounding circumstances is one of propaganda’s great arts.
The deeper falsehood lies elsewhere. Propaganda moves from fact to moral meaning, from event to intention, from description to accusation. It proclaims the purity of its own motives while attributing to the enemy exactly the designs it harbors itself. Because intentions cannot be conclusively proved or disproved, this is the safest domain for manipulation. Thus propaganda becomes, in Ellul’s analysis, a machinery for producing false systems of judgment while retaining an appearance of factual seriousness. It may tell the truth about some data and still falsify the world by the way it frames causes, values, and purposes.
That is why his closing definition matters. After surveying these internal characteristics, Ellul defines propaganda as a set of methods employed by an organized group in order to secure the active or passive participation of a mass of individuals who have been psychologically unified through manipulation and incorporated into an organization. The definition gathers everything from I.2 into one sentence: prior knowledge of the terrain, use of existing needs and myths, conformity to social presuppositions, attention to timeliness and the undecided, and the systematic shaping of interpretation rather than simple false statement. The internal secret of propaganda is not that it says anything at all, but that it knows exactly where to attach itself in order to make men move.
I.3 — Categories of Propaganda
1. Ellul opens this section by warning that propaganda is never a single, uniform phenomenon. Different regimes use different methods, symbols, rhythms, and psychological techniques, so any definition that is too narrow will miss part of the reality. Soviet propaganda under Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev cannot simply be treated as one unchanged system, just as American propaganda, Hitler’s propaganda, Chinese propaganda, and the propaganda of the FLN in Algeria cannot be collapsed into one model. The point of the section is to sort out this diversity by identifying the main internal types of propaganda rather than merely classifying it by country or regime.
2. The first distinction is between political propaganda and sociological propaganda. Political propaganda is the familiar kind: a government, party, administration, or pressure group uses deliberate techniques of influence in order to change public behavior. Its aims are explicit, calculated, and limited. It can be strategic, when it establishes a general line and an overall campaign logic, or tactical, when it seeks immediate results within that larger framework. Ellul treats this as the most visible form of propaganda, the one people usually have in mind when they hear the word.
3. But he insists that political propaganda does not exhaust the subject. There is also sociological propaganda, which is far broader and more pervasive. This is the set of pressures by which a society integrates the greatest possible number of people into its own way of life, standardizes behavior, spreads its style abroad, and secures obedience without necessarily issuing direct commands. In that sense, propaganda is not only something done by the state or by parties. It can also be something emitted by an entire social order, sometimes consciously and sometimes almost automatically.
4. The key difference is the direction of causality. In political propaganda, someone begins with a doctrine or objective and deliberately transmits it. In sociological propaganda, by contrast, existing economic, social, cultural, and technical conditions slowly make an ideology seep into habits, reflexes, and judgments. People absorb a civilization before they ever encounter a slogan. What works here is not the concentrated campaign but the environment itself: the daily atmosphere, the accepted standards, the repeated images, and the ordinary practices that quietly shape the individual from the outside.
5. Because of that, sociological propaganda is diffuse rather than dramatic. It is not usually conveyed through catchphrases or openly militant appeals. It spreads through advertising, films, education, public relations, technology, journalism, social welfare, and all the apparently normal institutions that define the setting in which people live. Ellul’s point is severe: when these institutions, taken together, produce a general conception of life, they are doing propagandistic work even if nobody announces that propaganda is taking place. The deepest propaganda changes the environment first and the mind afterward.
6. This kind of propaganda acts gently. It does not usually demand immediate sacrifice or overt commitment. Instead, it conditions people little by little, introducing an ethic and a hierarchy of values in benign and scattered forms until they become second nature. That is why Ellul sees sociological propaganda as the ideal preparation for later, more direct campaigns. Once a society has already formed people’s instincts, tastes, prejudices, and assumptions, explicit political propaganda meets far less resistance. The terrain has been prepared in advance.
7. Ellul treats the United States as a major example of sociological propaganda. The American way of life, in his reading, does not merely offer comfort or efficiency; it creates conformity, admiration for a certain model of civilization, and the sense that this model is naturally superior. A style of life turns into an ethical criterion. Once that happens, judgments about good and evil become tied to what appears “American” or “un-American,” modern or backward, normal or deviant. The social environment itself becomes a mechanism for producing consent.
8. He also stresses that this sociological propaganda does not remain wholly spontaneous. It may begin as an unplanned outgrowth of a civilization, but it tends over time to become more conscious, more organized, and more exportable. Governments, pressure groups, industry, and cultural institutions learn to use what society already emits. Even so, its success abroad is uneven, because a style of life cannot always travel intact. Technical or industrial publications may persuade, while brochures or more overtly cultural messages fail. Sociological propaganda is strongest when it rides on living social realities, not when it merely imitates them.
9. The second major distinction is between propaganda of agitation and propaganda of integration. Agitation propaganda is the explosive form most people notice first. It is usually linked to opposition, revolt, and moments of crisis. Its function is to arouse, to disrupt habits, to mobilize passions, and to push people toward action, sacrifice, and upheaval. It is therefore common in revolutionary movements, but Ellul insists that governments can use it too, especially when they want to force society into a drastic new course.
10. His examples make that point clear. Lenin after the seizure of power, the Soviet Five-Year Plan campaigns, and Chinese drives for extreme mobilization all count as agitation propaganda even though they are directed by ruling authorities. What matters is not whether the source is in or out of power, but whether the propaganda is trying to wrench people out of ordinary life and make them endure hardship for a dramatic collective objective. Agitation propaganda is made for moments when the propagandist wants tension, exaltation, rupture, and movement.
11. For that reason, agitation propaganda relies on simple and elementary passions. It feeds on resentment, hatred, deprivation, humiliation, envy, the thirst for justice, or the craving for revenge. It is flashy because it is easy to recognize and easy to make. It does not need subtle argument. It needs emotional ignition. Ellul is skeptical of intellectuals who mistake the slogans of agitation for profound political consciousness. In his view, this form of propaganda succeeds precisely because it can attach enormous lies or simplifications to a few intensely felt emotions.
12. Integration propaganda is the opposite pole. It belongs above all to developed societies and to stable governments. Instead of destabilizing the social body, it seeks to stabilize, unify, reinforce, and normalize it. Rather than throwing people into a revolutionary fever, it reconciles them to a structure of life and converts existing practices into conscious adherence. It explains the world they already inhabit, justifies it, and teaches them to desire the behavior that this world requires. This is the preferred propaganda of established power because it produces order rather than explosion.
13. Ellul also argues that integration propaganda works best in comfortable, informed, and relatively cultivated milieus. The more educated and socially integrated the public, the better this propaganda functions. That is why modern democratic societies are not outside propaganda but deeply dependent on one of its most sophisticated forms. A major political problem then appears: how does a revolutionary movement move from agitation to integration once it takes power? The transition is hard, because the passions unleashed in the first phase do not automatically become discipline, patience, and obedience in the second.
14. The third distinction is between vertical and horizontal propaganda. Vertical propaganda is the classic type: it comes from above, from the leader, expert, priest, party, or technician, and it is directed downward at a crowd through centralized means of communication. Even in a mass meeting, the propagandized person remains psychologically isolated, because his cries and gestures are responses to the leader rather than genuine communication with others. He may be active in appearance, but in Ellul’s account he is fundamentally passive, because the initiative, interpretation, and will all come from outside him.
15. Horizontal propaganda is more modern and, in Ellul’s eyes, more formidable. Here the decisive space is the small group, where individuals speak, discuss, criticize, and gradually arrive at the “correct” conclusion as if they had discovered it themselves. Chinese political cells and American group-dynamics practices are his main examples. The method seems egalitarian and rational, because it seeks conscious adherence and uses discussion rather than command. Yet it is still propaganda, because the setting, the information, and the process are arranged so that the supposedly free conclusion is already built into the situation.
16. Horizontal propaganda therefore requires a dense organization of small, homogeneous groups, a large network of instructors or cadres, weak competing loyalties, and a fusion of propaganda with education. It is more difficult to build than vertical propaganda, but it binds more deeply because individuals publicly participate in producing the line they will obey. Ellul closes the section with one last distinction, rational versus irrational propaganda, to show that modern propaganda often presents itself through facts, statistics, and information. Yet for the ordinary person the factual scaffolding does not survive as reasoning. What remains is an impression, a myth, a feeling of certainty. Modern propaganda is increasingly rational in content and increasingly irrational in effect.
17. That final point is one of Ellul’s sharpest. Information overload does not liberate the public; it often incapacitates judgment. The non-specialist does not retain the logic of a technical article, a statistical bulletin, or a factual film. He retains a vague but powerful emotional image: that a system is admirable, that a nation is progressive, that a policy is necessary. In this sense propaganda can be exact, even scrupulous with facts, and still remain propaganda. What matters is not literal falsehood but the production of an emotional and practical response from material that looks objective. That is why, for Ellul, the modern age does not mark the decline of propaganda but its perfection.
II.1 — The Sociological Conditions
1. Ellul begins this section with a paradox that governs everything that follows: for propaganda to exist in its modern form, a society must be at once individualist and massified. These two qualities seem contradictory, because individualism appears to elevate the person while mass society appears to erase him. Ellul argues that this opposition is largely theoretical. In practice, the liberation of the individual from small, traditional communities does not produce a sovereign human being. It produces isolated people placed face to face with society as a whole, and that isolation is exactly what makes mass society possible.
2. The destruction of local organic groups—family, parish, village, brotherhood, traditional community—does not leave a social vacuum. It leaves individuals stripped of immediate attachments and therefore reorganized into a mass. At the same time, if strong organic groups are rebuilt, the society loses both its radical individualism and part of its mass character. Ellul’s point is that the isolated individual and the mass are two sides of the same reality. Modern propaganda depends on capturing both at once: the solitary person who receives the message and the larger aggregate that gives the message its force.
3. He then distinguishes between the theory of individualism and its social reality. The theory says the individual is the master of his own life and the final judge of his own choices. The reality is the opposite. Once the older, protective structures are gone, the person is exposed to innumerable influences and no longer has any durable shield against them. In that condition the individual is not emancipated but vulnerable. He is less grounded, less defended, and more easily penetrated by forces operating at the scale of the whole society.
4. Small organic groups matter here because they protect as well as constrain. Ellul notes that a soldier firmly integrated into a military unit or a militant fully absorbed into a monolithic party is harder to reach by outside propaganda than the same person as a detached citizen. The reason is not that such people are free of influence; it is that they are already embedded in a structured setting with its own emotional and intellectual life. That setting filters outside suggestion. Propaganda becomes powerful only when the person has been detached from such direct, thick forms of belonging.
5. Ellul describes the nineteenth-century breakdown of family, church, and village life as a decisive turning point. The uprooted individual, often urbanized and geographically mobile, loses inherited criteria and becomes responsible for judging everything by himself. He is asked to become the measure of all things. That sounds noble in abstract liberal theory, but Ellul emphasizes its practical consequence: the person now bears a crushing burden of judgment without stable support, tradition, or shared frames of reference. He must improvise standards in a world he does not control.
6. This condition produces the ideal psychological environment for propaganda. Permanent uncertainty, mobility, social exposure, and the absence of protection make the individual malleable. Ellul is blunt: what many people imagined as liberation from small groups actually opened the person to the state, to social currents, and to mass influence. The peasantry is one of his recurring counterexamples. Precisely because peasants historically remained rooted in a stable and structured milieu, they were harder to propagandize. That resistance had to be broken before modern propaganda could fully seize them.
7. So the first sociological condition of propaganda is not simply atomization but atomization within a society that continues to function. A society that is only dissolving cannot sustain propaganda. Modern propaganda requires a society that is reorganizing itself as a mass society: dense, durable, and capable of maintaining collective currents of opinion. The Western societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided that setting, which is why propaganda emerged there with such force.
8. Ellul’s definition of mass society is precise. It is not merely a temporary crowd gathered in one place. It is a permanent social structure marked by density, weak local frameworks, strong collective currents, common material preoccupations, and a certain psychological unity. People may seem diverse, but they share enough habits, interests, stereotypes, and expectations for propaganda to act on them directly. Mass society gives the propagandist a common field of intervention.
9. He also stresses the passage from crowd to crowd in modern life. The individual moves continually through assembled collectivities—street, factory, subway, meeting hall, cinema—and this repeated immersion alters his psyche. He becomes more suggestible, more excitable, more credulous, and more available for standardized influence. Propaganda does not need to create this psychological disposition from nothing. Mass society has already done much of the work in advance by reshaping the person through collective life itself.
10. Out of this setting come symbols and stereotypes, which Ellul treats as privileged instruments of propaganda. In mass society they are more abstract, more numerous, more detached from lived reality, and therefore easier to manipulate than in older, small-scale societies. At the same time there is an increasing gap between latent private opinion and public opinion. What people privately feel can be repressed or erased, while public symbols become the surface on which propaganda operates. The further opinion moves from direct experience, the easier it becomes to organize.
11. Demography matters here. Propaganda needs population density, frequent contacts, urban concentration, and regular exchanges of opinions and impressions. The “majority effect” only works when the majority is felt as an immediate and massive presence. Even apparently individual acts such as buying a newspaper, going to the cinema, or listening to a radio broadcast are social acts in this environment. They presuppose a mass structure, and once that structure exists, the instruments of propaganda can rely on it and amplify it.
12. Ellul adds a psychological dimension by citing the frustrations of mass life: abstract relations without intimacy, insecurity, anxiety, contradictions between moral preaching and competitive reality, between stimulated desires and limited means. Propaganda answers this unstable condition. It speaks to the individual’s private unease, but it does so by acting on the mass. That is why prestige propaganda centered on a leader and propaganda centered on the majority are, for Ellul, closer than they look. Both derive their force from the person’s need to find security in a collective form.
13. The leader matters only insofar as he appears to embody the mass. He must not seem radically different from ordinary people; he must appear as their sublimation or condensation. When someone follows such a leader, Ellul says, he is really following the group that the leader represents. A leader cut off from his public loses propagandistic power. The point is important because it prevents us from imagining propaganda as the work of a solitary manipulator. The leader succeeds only because mass society has already created the need for him.
14. Ellul then answers the objection that modern societies also contain parties, unions, churches, and family associations. Do these not block propaganda by recreating organic life? His answer is largely no. These newer groups are fragile, late, and formed inside an already propagandized society. They may resist one specific campaign, but they do not resist the phenomenon of total propaganda. On the contrary, they often become relay stations for it. Even the remaining older groups, such as family and church, survive increasingly by adopting propagandistic methods themselves.
15. A second objection is historical: what about Russia in 1917, China, Indochina, or the Arab world? Ellul’s reply is that propaganda became effective there only to the extent that traditional structures were shattered and new mass conditions were created, sometimes violently and very quickly. Soviet propaganda advanced as the old organic world was destroyed. Communist China, in his view, achieved through force in a few years what Western societies reached over a far longer period: the sociological environment in which propaganda could be total and effective. These cases do not refute his thesis; they confirm it.
16. The subsection on opinion develops the argument further. In primary groups, opinion forms directly through common experience and immediate contact; that kind of opinion is a poor terrain for propaganda. In large, secondary societies, however, public opinion is indirect. It forms through intermediaries, channels, and symbolic representations. It must then be expressed through newspapers, parties, associations, elections, and other mediating structures. Propaganda belongs to this second world. It works where people do not know events firsthand but receive them through organized representations.
17. For Ellul, public opinion in large societies has three decisive characteristics: it concerns matters people do not directly experience; it cannot express itself except through channels; and it unifies enormous numbers of people who do not share the same life, language, standards, or social position. Such opinion can exist only by way of abstract symbols that stand in for reality. That is why propaganda can crystallize it. It takes vague, pre-conscious, second-hand attitudes and turns them into a conscious public state. Where secondary opinion dominates primary opinion, propaganda finds its natural terrain.
18. The final condition is the mass media of communication. Without them there is no modern propaganda. But Ellul adds two qualifications: the media must be concentrated enough to permit orchestration and continuity, and they must reach the public widely enough to become part of daily life. Centralization matters because scattered independent outlets cannot envelop the individual across all channels. Diffusion matters because propaganda fails if nobody receives it. The ideal situation for propaganda is a concentrated system of newspapers, film, radio, and television with mass uptake across the population.
19. Ellul then makes one of his hardest claims: the propagandized person is not merely a victim but also an accomplice. People buy the newspaper that flatters their sentiments, subscribe to the outlet that reflects their own opinions, and willingly expose themselves to the medium that will reinforce and activate those opinions. Propaganda, in other words, does not only change minds; it hardens, sharpens, and mobilizes diffuse predispositions. The reader thinks he is choosing freedom, but in many cases he is choosing the particular propaganda he wants to receive.
20. The section ends by drawing the full circle. Mass media do not simply address a preexisting public; they help create that public. The act of buying a television, reading a newspaper, or attending a film inserts the individual into the psychological structure of the mass and opens him to the organized flow of messages. Modern propaganda becomes possible only when this twofold process is complete: concentrated sources on one side and a widely diffused, socially prepared audience on the other. Under those conditions, propaganda is no longer an occasional technique. It becomes a normal function of modern society.
Chapter II.2 — Objective Conditions of Total Propaganda
Paragraph 1 — In this section, Ellul argues that total propaganda does not become effective simply because a state, party, or movement wants to deploy it. It requires a specific social environment. Propaganda, in his view, is not an all-purpose instrument that can be applied anywhere with equal success. It becomes powerful only when a society has already developed the material, cultural, and mental conditions that make large populations reachable, comparable, and susceptible to standardized influence. The section is therefore less about propaganda techniques than about the social preconditions that allow those techniques to work.
Paragraph 2 — Ellul’s first condition is a certain average standard of living. Modern propaganda, especially integration propaganda, cannot work well on people who remain outside the circuits of modern life or who are crushed by material deprivation. To be propagandized in a stable way, people must have some access to media, some regularity in daily life, and enough distance from sheer survival to be available for broader symbolic appeals. A person wholly absorbed by hunger, shelter, or immediate danger may be capable of revolt, panic, or violence, but not of the kind of long-term orientation and disciplined adherence that modern propaganda seeks.
Paragraph 3 — This leads Ellul to distinguish sharply between agitation and integration. The very poor can be stirred up. They can be driven toward rage, rebellion, or destruction. But that is not the same thing as being durably formed, organized, and guided by propaganda. Integration propaganda aims to keep people within a social and political order, giving them motives, habits, and frameworks through which they interpret events. That requires a degree of stability. Poverty, in Ellul’s account, blocks that stability because it narrows consciousness to immediate necessity and leaves little room for sustained ideological or civic conditioning.
Paragraph 4 — For that reason, modern propaganda is most effective not at the extremes of the social scale but in the large middle zone. Ellul says it reaches best into the upper working class and the middle classes because those groups possess just enough security, education, and routine to respond to generalized messages. They have enough comfort to think beyond subsistence, but not so much independence or detachment that mass appeals lose their grip. Total propaganda is designed for the dense average mass, not for elites and not for those living at the margins of modern civilization.
Paragraph 5 — Ellul extends this argument by observing that propagandists themselves also tend to come from the middle strata. The wealthy are too far removed from ordinary life to grasp the symbolic world of the average citizen, while the poor generally lack the educational distance and strategic position needed to formulate broad persuasive systems. The propagandist therefore emerges from the social group most capable of understanding the average person while still possessing the literacy, abstraction, and institutional access needed to shape mass messages. Propaganda is thus socially rooted both in its audience and in its makers.
Paragraph 6 — Rising living standards, moreover, do not weaken propaganda. Ellul thinks they generally strengthen it. As populations become more secure materially, they become easier to standardize. Better housing, better nutrition, more predictable work, and wider access to communication do not produce autonomous personalities by themselves. They often produce people more ready to fit into a normalized social pattern. Propaganda benefits from that normalization because it works most efficiently where people share common rhythms, common concerns, and common channels of information.
Paragraph 7 — Here Ellul introduces the theme of adjustment. Modern societies increasingly seek to create a “normal” human type, a socially adjusted person who fits institutional expectations and collective routines. This normalization can be pursued in different ideological languages, but the result is similar: society becomes more homogeneous and therefore more governable through psychological means. Propaganda is tied to this process because it reinforces and accelerates the production of the average, adapted individual. It does not merely persuade isolated minds; it helps shape the standard social type on which mass influence depends.
Paragraph 8 — Ellul suggests that the creation of normalcy can occur under very different political banners. The formulas differ, but the drive toward conforming individuals remains. He points to examples from both anti-communist and communist contexts to show that the pressure to make individuals “fit” is not confined to one regime type. What matters is the effort to produce a common frame of behavior and judgment. Propaganda is effective when society itself is already pressing individuals toward adjustment, because the message then confirms a broader social movement rather than trying to create one from nothing.
Paragraph 9 — The second major condition is an average culture. Ellul does not mean high culture or intellectual refinement. He means a minimum of literacy, symbolic competence, and general education. Propaganda requires people who can receive signs, connect fragments of information, recognize references, and respond to slogans or abstractions. The uncultured person, in this argument, is not liberated from propaganda by ignorance; rather, he is often outside the reach of sophisticated propaganda because he lacks the symbolic equipment needed to process it.
Paragraph 10 — This point allows Ellul to reverse a comforting liberal assumption. More education does not automatically protect people from propaganda. In many cases it makes propaganda easier. A modern propagandist relies on newspapers, radio, images, political vocabulary, statistical language, and national or social symbols. These instruments become effective only when the audience has been prepared to decode them. Literacy and elementary schooling widen the field of influence. Education, then, is ambivalent: it enlarges intelligence, but it also furnishes the channels through which mass suggestion can enter.
Paragraph 11 — Ellul reinforces that claim with historical examples. Where movements wanted to propagandize peasant or colonial populations, one of their first steps was often to teach reading while simultaneously supplying doctrine. Literacy campaigns were not neutral preliminaries followed later by politics. They were part of the same operation. The point was not simply to enlighten but to make populations reachable through newspapers, pamphlets, slogans, and organized interpretation. A propagandized public has to be able to read, classify, and repeat. Technical access to symbols is therefore a political condition.
Paragraph 12 — The symbolic dimension matters because propaganda rarely works by brute command alone. It works through simplified signs that condense complex realities into emotionally charged and socially intelligible forms. Flags, labels, myths, party language, civic formulas, and recurring narratives all presuppose a public able to understand them at least partially. A person with no such symbolic framework may still be moved by fear or anger, but not incorporated into the more stable world of total propaganda. Ellul’s emphasis is that propaganda depends on a preexisting cultural preparation supplied by modern society itself.
Paragraph 13 — The third condition is information. Ellul insists that propaganda does not flourish in a vacuum of facts. On the contrary, it often relies on a public already saturated with information. Information introduces citizens to distant events, technical questions, and public problems that they do not experience directly. Once people know that such issues exist, they begin to form vague opinions and emotional predispositions about them. Propaganda then enters that space, selecting, arranging, magnifying, and orienting those raw materials into a coherent response. Information opens the door; propaganda organizes what comes through it.
Paragraph 14 — That is why Ellul rejects the view that propaganda feeds mainly on crude falsehood. He argues that it usually works from real facts, but facts detached from lived experience and inserted into a framework of interpretation. The more modern life confronts people with remote and complex issues, the more dependent they become on mediated explanations. Shared information creates a shared mental environment. Once large numbers of people receive the same news, the same categories, and the same problems, they also become available to the same persuasive direction. Information standardizes perception before propaganda standardizes judgment.
Paragraph 15 — The last condition is the existence of strong ideologies and myths. Ellul distinguishes ideology from myth by saying that ideology is more conceptual, more explicit, and often more passive, whereas myth sinks deeper into the personality and has greater power to move people to action. Yet propaganda needs both. It attaches itself to collective beliefs already present in society—nationalism, democracy, socialism, ideas of progress, happiness, or work—and uses them as points of attachment. Ideology does not mechanically determine propaganda. It serves as a peg or pretext. Propaganda takes those diffuse collective beliefs, gives them form and direction, and can ultimately transform ideology into a mobilizing myth.
Chapter III.1 — The State’s Necessity
Paragraph 1 — In this section, Ellul shifts from social preconditions to political compulsion. His central claim is severe: the modern state needs propaganda, not merely because rulers are cynical or manipulative, but because the structure of contemporary politics leaves it with little alternative. Once the masses enter political life, government can no longer function in the old way. Propaganda becomes a regular instrument of rule, not an occasional abuse. Ellul wants to show that this necessity arises even in regimes that regard themselves as democratic, liberal, and benevolent.
Paragraph 2 — He begins with the simple fact of mass participation. In earlier eras, rulers could govern at a distance from the population. Politics could remain the affair of courts, diplomats, and small elites. Modern demographic density, transportation, and communication have ended that separation. The masses are physically and symbolically present. Governments are exposed to their reactions, and citizens are exposed to political affairs in return. The old possibility of secluded power has disappeared. That change is not, for Ellul, primarily an achievement of democratic doctrine; it is a social and technical transformation of the political environment.
Paragraph 3 — Because the masses are now present, political decisions affect everyone more directly and visibly than before. War mobilizes whole societies, taxation penetrates everyday life, and the state’s decisions shape economic and social conditions on a broad scale. As a result, people expect to care, to know, and to judge. Even when their interest is superficial, it is real enough to constrain government. Citizens have become accustomed to political information and to the idea that public affairs concern them. A government that tried simply to retreat into secrecy would collide with expectations that modern political life has made permanent.
Paragraph 4 — Yet the state cannot simply obey public opinion. This is the heart of Ellul’s dilemma. Public opinion exists, and modern government must take it into account. But public opinion is unstable, fragmented, and irrational. It does not express itself clearly through elections, and it changes too quickly for coherent policy to rest on it. If government followed every fluctuation, it would become incapable of acting. In addition, many state functions are technical, strategic, and long-range in ways that ordinary opinion cannot direct. The government therefore cannot govern either against opinion or by surrendering to it.
Paragraph 5 — Ellul’s conclusion is blunt: if the government cannot follow opinion, then opinion must be led to follow the government. This is where propaganda enters. The state must do more than announce decisions. It must create the conditions under which those decisions appear understandable, acceptable, necessary, and even desired. Propaganda is thus not an accidental supplement to policy. It becomes the mechanism by which policy secures a stable psychological environment. The state uses it to reduce the gap between what government must do and what the public is prepared to accept.
Paragraph 6 — He also argues that ordinary governmental information tends naturally toward propaganda. A benevolent government may sincerely wish to explain itself to the public. But once explanation aims at securing adherence, confidence, and endurance, it ceases to be simple information. It begins to organize perceptions and direct judgments. The line between informing and propagandizing becomes porous because government cannot be satisfied with citizens who merely know; it needs citizens who accept, support, and internalize. Explanation becomes orientation. Communication becomes an instrument of political cohesion.
Paragraph 7 — This need is stronger in democracy because democratic government depends on the appearance and experience of participation. Citizens must not only endure decisions; they must feel tied to them. The state therefore seeks to make people identify with acts they did not actually initiate. Propaganda integrates the governed into governmental action by persuading them that public policy expresses their own will or interest. It manufactures the emotional and symbolic bond between rulers and ruled that democracy, in principle, claims already exists. Without that bond, the formal machinery of democratic legitimacy starts to look empty.
Paragraph 8 — Ellul then approaches the matter from the side of legitimacy. Modern governments, including dictatorships, feel compelled to invoke the sovereignty of the people. Even authoritarian regimes arrange plebiscites, elections, or demonstrations of public approval because naked force alone appears insufficient. The belief that power rests on the people has become so strong that rulers must either satisfy it or simulate satisfaction of it. Propaganda is indispensable to that simulation as well as to any real effort to anchor power in consent. It gives visible shape to the claim that government expresses the collective will.
Paragraph 9 — But Ellul is not satisfied with the simple notion of popular compliance. He insists that modern states require active adherence to particular decisions, not merely passive acceptance of the constitutional order. A regime must secure assent again and again for reforms, crises, wars, reorganizations, and sacrifices. Propaganda supplies that repeated mobilization. It does not merely ask citizens to obey the legal framework. It asks them to consent psychologically to the ongoing movement of government, to feel implicated in actions whose planning and technical rationale remain beyond their reach.
Paragraph 10 — He uses managed public consultation to illustrate the point. When governments invite the population to discuss major proposals, the process often appears participatory while remaining tightly framed from above. The public is encouraged to think, speak, and react, but within a prearranged universe of interpretation. Such consultation secures more than silence; it secures the feeling of involvement. For Ellul, this is a quintessential propagandistic achievement. The state does not simply order obedience. It produces the conviction that the people have examined the issue and freely arrived at the approved conclusion.
Paragraph 11 — Propaganda also allows the state to reverse the visible direction of power. Instead of appearing to impose decisions on the public, government can make it seem that public opinion itself demanded those decisions. Ellul sees this as one of modern propaganda’s most effective operations. The state stimulates, shapes, and channels sentiments until the response it wants appears spontaneous. Once that happens, the government can present itself as obedient to the people while in fact the people have first been prepared to want what government intended to do. The circle of legitimacy is closed through psychological means.
Paragraph 12 — Ellul then broadens the argument by introducing international competition. Democracies do not operate in isolation. They confront rival regimes that also use propaganda and psychological action. In such a world, propaganda becomes a weapon of political survival. A state that refuses to shape opinion may find its population influenced by foreign systems that do not share its values. The necessity of propaganda therefore arises not only from internal governance but also from ideological conflict between political orders. In a battle among regimes, psychological passivity can look like unilateral disarmament.
Paragraph 13 — This external pressure connects to an internal one: the erosion of civic and national cohesion. Ellul notes that many defenders of democratic societies justify psychological action as a means of restoring patriotism, discipline, and common values. They describe it as education rather than propaganda, as a legitimate effort to fortify citizens against nihilism, indifference, or hostile doctrines. In military settings this appears especially attractive. Armies want recruits who understand and embrace the civilization they are supposed to defend. Civic formation is then presented as a moral necessity rather than a manipulative enterprise.
Paragraph 14 — Ellul is skeptical of that distinction. He argues that once the state selects preferred values, inculcates reflexes, excludes rival values, and uses the most efficient means to do so rapidly at scale, the operation is propaganda regardless of the name attached to it. Information, education, human relations, and psychological action may look different in theory, but in practice they converge whenever political authority organizes consciousness for collective ends. Good intentions do not change the nature of the process. A democratic state that seeks to form loyal citizens through mass psychological means is still engaging in propaganda.
Paragraph 15 — The section ends on one of Ellul’s harshest judgments. Even when propaganda is used in the name of liberty, national defense, or democracy, its effects on personality are fundamentally similar to those produced by enemy propaganda. It tends to reduce freedom by shaping the inner frameworks through which people perceive and choose. Ellul’s conclusion is not that modern states are always malicious, but that they are structurally driven toward a technique that corrodes the very autonomy they claim to protect. The liberal, democratic, humanist state, no less than others, finds itself compelled to use propaganda as a means of governing.
Chapter III.2 — The Individual’s Necessity
Ellul begins this section by overturning the comforting moral picture in which propaganda is something done by a predatory state to an innocent citizen. Even if one grants that governments use propaganda because modern politics leaves them little alternative, that still does not explain why propaganda works so consistently. For Ellul, the missing half of the explanation is the individual himself. The modern individual is not simply conquered from outside; he is already situated in social and psychological conditions that make propaganda attractive. The propagandee is not blameless material molded at will. He is, in a deeper sense, prepared for propaganda by the very structure of technological society and by needs that he often does not recognize in himself.
The first layer of this necessity is objective. Modern states no longer govern above the heads of the masses; they govern through populations that are mobilized, informed, taxed, recruited, administered, and constantly called upon to participate. But “the masses” are made up of individuals, and each individual experiences the demands of modern society as pressure, burden, and sacrifice. Propaganda becomes necessary from the citizen’s point of view because it gives meaning, direction, and tolerability to those demands. In Ellul’s reading, propaganda does not enter an empty space. It arrives where daily life has already been made heavy by obligations that would otherwise be difficult to endure.
One of Ellul’s central examples is work. He argues that modern society demands a level of labor discipline, productivity, and sustained commitment greater than what earlier ages expected from ordinary people. Industrial and technological organization require punctuality, repetition, specialization, and submission to rhythms not chosen by the worker. Material necessity alone is not enough to secure this sort of obedience over time. People need reasons that make their place within the machine feel justified. Propaganda supplies those reasons by presenting labor as meaningful, dignified, necessary for national development, or morally praiseworthy. It does ideological work where coercion by itself would be too fragile or too costly.
The same logic applies to the growing material sacrifices imposed by the state. Ellul points to the tax burden of modern citizens, which far exceeds that of earlier eras. A government that takes so much from people cannot rely on naked compulsion alone; it must continually explain itself, legitimize itself, and persuade people that the burdens are reasonable, useful, or noble. Propaganda functions here as an instrument of psychological integration. It helps the individual accept exactions that might otherwise appear intolerable, or at least incomprehensible. In that sense, propaganda does not merely decorate political decisions after the fact; it helps create the mental environment in which those decisions become bearable.
War is the most extreme example of this mechanism. Modern war is vast, prolonged, impersonal, and technically organized on a scale that far exceeds traditional combat. Citizens must be prepared not only to fight, but to live under permanent mobilization and to accept destruction, abstraction, and distance. The older motives for war—defending one’s field, family, village, or ruler—no longer suffice in the same way. The individual is asked to die for systems, balances of power, ideological blocs, or strategic necessities too remote to be grasped spontaneously. Propaganda is therefore indispensable because it translates those abstract demands into emotionally usable motives. It gives the citizen a framework within which enormous sacrifice can seem intelligible.
Ellul then widens the argument beyond sacrifice to adaptation. The technological environment is not natural to human beings. It subjects them to impersonal systems, technical rules, institutional routines, and a social organization for which they are not spontaneously fitted. Modern society therefore produces discomfort, maladjustment, and tension. One answer is managerial and therapeutic: the cultivation of “human relations,” workplace techniques, and psychological accommodations that make organized life more tolerable. The other answer is mythic and ideological: to place the individual inside a symbolic world strong enough to offset the coldness and fragmentation of technical existence. Propaganda belongs to this second response. It gives a story, a horizon, and a collective meaning that help the individual bear an otherwise inhospitable environment.
A decisive part of Ellul’s argument concerns information. Modern man is not uninformed; on the contrary, he is saturated with news. This matters because propaganda does not replace information from the outside; it grows out of the very conditions created by abundant information. The citizen is exposed daily to events, crises, statistics, incidents, dangers, controversies, and fragments of reality. Yet this accumulation of information does not amount to understanding. It multiplies contact with events while depriving the individual of the distance needed to interpret them. Propaganda becomes necessary precisely for the informed person, because information by itself leaves him scattered rather than oriented.
Ellul insists that news presents facts in pieces. A report gives details, not totality; episodes, not structure. To understand what an event means, the individual would need time, detachment, and a broad view. But the rhythm of modern media makes that impossible. Before yesterday’s event has been interpreted, today’s event arrives and displaces it. The individual remains trapped in immediacy. He receives a continuous stream of disconnected particulars that he cannot synthesize into a coherent picture of the world. In this situation, propaganda performs an organizing function. It offers the interpretive grid that ordinary information withholds.
This is especially powerful because the content of news in politics and economics is overwhelmingly negative: crises, dangers, failures, threats, scandals, conflict. Left alone with such information, the individual experiences the world as unstable and menacing. He comes to feel that he lives in a time of permanent catastrophe without possessing the means to judge the scale, causes, or significance of events. For Ellul, this is one of propaganda’s great opportunities. Propaganda steps into the gap between the abundance of alarming facts and the scarcity of intelligible meaning. It does not merely calm fear; it reorders fear.
That reordering takes two main forms. First, propaganda provides explanation. It supplies causes, enemies, sequences, and a narrative line that makes otherwise chaotic events seem readable. Second, it provides value. It tells the individual not only what is happening, but how to judge what is happening and which side he belongs on. In Ellul’s formulation, modern consciousness needs both explanation and standards. Without them, awareness becomes despair. Information opens the world, but propaganda makes that opened world livable by imposing direction and hierarchy on it.
The second half of the section shifts from objective pressures to subjective dispositions. Ellul argues that modern individuals, especially in mass society, live in overcrowded, organized, anonymous environments that erode autonomy. They belong to immense institutions, but only as partial and replaceable units. They are assigned functions without controlling the whole. This breeds passivity. The individual increasingly acts through rules laid down elsewhere, inside structures he did not design and cannot master. The result is a peculiar psychological condition: he is formally included in collective life, yet inwardly experiences diminishment.
That diminishment is unbearable because human beings do not readily accept insignificance. Ellul argues that the individual needs to feel that he matters, that he is someone, that he can assert himself, that he possesses dignity and initiative. Propaganda answers this need by flattering the self even while absorbing it into the collective. It tells the citizen that he is free, important, active, and historically relevant at the very moment when social organization reduces his real room for independent action. In this way propaganda performs a double move: it compensates for humiliation and simultaneously deepens integration into mass movements.
Ellul extends this insight to colonial and post-colonial situations. Peoples who have been subordinated, treated as minors, or denied equal standing are especially susceptible to appeals centered on dignity, self-assertion, and historical redemption. Propaganda can seize on this craving for restored stature and convert it into intense political energy. The point is not confined to empire; it illustrates the broader mechanism by which diminished persons or groups become eager for symbolic elevation. Propaganda is powerful wherever individuals hunger to recover a sense of self that ordinary social arrangements deny them.
Another source of need lies in repression. Organized society demands self-control, routine, and conformity, and therefore leaves little room for the uninhibited expression of deep impulses. Yet those impulses do not disappear. Resentment, hatred, aggression, erotic desire, and fantasies of power remain alive beneath disciplined conduct. Ellul argues that propaganda offers collective channels through which such impulses can be released without appearing purely antisocial. It can authorize hatred of an enemy, justify hostility as moral duty, and turn violent or forbidden feelings into legitimate participation. This is one reason propagandistic mobilization feels liberating to those caught in restrictive societies.
Authoritarian regimes understand this especially well. They know that tightly managed populations require controlled forms of decompression. Propaganda can therefore provide symbolic outlets, tolerated mockery, designated villains, ritualized indignation, or campaigns in which private frustrations are redirected outward. Such mechanisms do not free the individual in any genuine sense; they manage his tensions. But precisely because they permit release without demanding authentic independence, they are psychologically effective. Propaganda becomes a socially supervised discharge of impulses that the normal order cannot openly accommodate.
Anxiety occupies an even deeper place in Ellul’s analysis. He treats it as one of the dominant emotional facts of modern society. Anxiety feeds on real threats, exaggerated dangers, contradictory demands, competition, insecurity, and the sense of being surrounded by hostile forces one cannot master. Rational correction is weak against such states. To tell anxious people that the danger is smaller than they think does little good, and may even intensify their distress. Propaganda works more effectively because it does not simply deny anxiety; it gives anxiety an object, a posture, and a response. It arms the individual psychologically by offering a target, a certainty, and a role.
Beyond fear lies guilt and contradiction. Modern individuals live amid competing values, incompatible obligations, and social judgments that leave them feeling accused. They cannot easily believe themselves innocent, coherent, or fully justified. This generates a powerful need for self-exoneration. Ellul distinguishes simple rationalization from the broader search for justification that marks both individuals and collectivities. Propaganda is extraordinarily useful here because it supplies ready-made excuses, noble motives, and collective narratives through which people can see themselves as right, necessary, or virtuous even when reality is more ambiguous. It dissolves contradiction by giving man a story in which he is already acquitted.
At the collective level, Ellul suggests that many ideologies function in precisely this way: not as disinterested accounts of the world, but as grand justifications for interests, choices, resentments, and ambitions. Propaganda thrives on these justificatory needs, especially in novel situations where inherited explanations no longer suffice. It enables the individual to live not within the full tension of reality, but within a simplified moral universe in which conflicts are interpreted in advance and resolved symbolically before they are resolved in fact. That is why propaganda can feel almost salvific. It supplies something like a secular equivalent of reassurance, orientation, and absolution.
Ellul’s conclusion is severe. Contemporary man does not merely endure propaganda; he wants it, solicits it, and in a sense calls it forth. The propagandist is not a solitary monster imposing an unnatural practice on society. He answers a demand generated by the modern condition itself. The propagandee is therefore the accomplice of the propagandist, even when he loudly denounces propaganda in the abstract or imagines himself immune to it. Technological society, with its demands for participation, adaptation, explanation, release, and justification, makes propaganda structurally indispensable. At the same time, because individuals remain passive and tempted to withdraw into private life, the state also needs propaganda to fight indifference and compel engagement. The section ends, then, by joining social necessity and psychological desire into a single claim: propaganda persists because modern society requires it and modern individuals, in crucial ways, do too.
Chapter IV — Psychological Effects of Propaganda
Chapter IV turns from the conditions that make propaganda possible to the transformations propaganda produces once it takes hold. Ellul’s first point is that propaganda’s effects are not limited to visible outcomes such as votes, adherence, or public declarations. It penetrates more deeply, working on impulses, emotional structures, and the organization of mental life itself. He also insists that these effects are inseparable from the media that carry them. Radio, press, film, and other channels already alter perception and disposition in their own ways, and propaganda takes advantage of those preexisting effects while adding its own. What matters, therefore, is not a single message but an orchestration of techniques that gradually reshapes the subject.
The first major effect is what Ellul calls psychological crystallization. Propaganda takes diffuse tendencies—prejudices, fears, irritations, resentments, half-formed convictions—and gives them sharp contour. What was once vague becomes directed; what was once intermittent becomes stable; what lacked an object now finds one. In that sense, propaganda does not usually invent feelings from nothing. It captures and organizes what was already latent in the individual, then hardens it into a usable pattern. The psychological gain for the propagandist is immense, because a person whose inner impulses have been given form is easier to mobilize and more difficult to dislodge.
This crystallization is especially visible in the treatment of hatred and enmity. Once propaganda has oriented a person’s hostility toward a designated adversary, retreat becomes far harder. The individual now possesses not only an emotion but also a publicly reinforced justification for that emotion. He is given reasons, labels, and formulas with which to stabilize his antagonism. Reconciliation becomes unlikely because propaganda equips him in advance for every encounter; it supplies ready-made judgments before experience has a chance to complicate them. In this way, propaganda closes the mind not through crude coercion alone, but by making certainty emotionally comfortable.
Ellul connects this process to stereotypes. Propaganda standardizes ideas, codifies value judgments, and furnishes durable mental shortcuts that save the individual the effort of thinking anew. The person still feels that these judgments are his own, but in fact they derive from collective formulas circulated with enormous force. Media technologies reinforce the process by lending the appearance of objectivity and ubiquity to what are, in reality, guided interpretations. What might otherwise remain flexible opinions become rigid frames. Propaganda does not simply plant one idea among others; it reworks the whole climate in which ideas are received.
Once established, these stereotypes and value scales move inward. They cease to be external slogans and become part of the person’s psychic center. Ellul stresses that they occupy a far more important place in the propagandized individual than they would in someone not captured by propaganda. The individual’s personality begins to organize itself around collective affirmations that he experiences as intimate convictions. This is why propaganda can appear so durable. It is not just remembered; it is incorporated into the structure by which the subject perceives, evaluates, and reacts.
A crucial element in that incorporation is self-justification. Ellul had already argued that modern individuals crave narratives that acquit them. In Chapter IV he shows how propaganda satisfies that craving by resolving inner tensions and supplying moral permission. It gives the person a set of reasons that make his prejudices, aggressions, loyalties, and fears appear legitimate. As those reasons accumulate, the person becomes more internally unified in a dangerous way: conflict, hesitation, and self-criticism diminish. Propaganda builds what Ellul calls monolithic individuals, people whose inner divisions have been sealed over by an external doctrine that now functions as their own certainty.
That monolithic quality brings psychic relief, but at a cost. A person whose tensions have been reduced in this way becomes progressively closed to novelty. New facts, unfamiliar arguments, and disruptive experiences are filtered through a hardened framework that already knows what to conclude. Ellul notes the irony that such a person often denounces all competing views as “propaganda,” while treating the doctrine that formed him as plain truth. In this sense, propaganda produces not merely conviction but impermeability. It installs a defensive structure that protects the subject against ambiguity.
Ellul even suggests that propaganda gives the individual something resembling a religious personality. The propagandized subject organizes himself around irrational but collectively shared certainties that function as sacred points of reference. The appeal is not only cognitive; it is emotional, moral, and ritual. Such a person no longer merely agrees with a line of thought. He depends on it as a principle of order and salvation. This quasi-religious dimension helps explain why propaganda can survive factual refutation. What is at stake is less a proposition than a whole structure of belonging and meaning.
To clarify the severity of these effects, Ellul compares the propagandized individual to the neurotic personality described by Karen Horney. He is careful not to say that propaganda simply creates clinical neurosis, but he insists on a striking analogy. Anxiety, hostility, diminished self-respect, the drive for power, dependence on collective approval, projection of blame outward, and flight from internal conflict all recur in the propagandized personality. Propaganda calms conscious anxiety, yet it does so by organizing the subject around mechanisms that closely resemble neurotic compensation. The result is not health but a managed instability.
The second major effect is alienation. Ellul uses the term in a strong sense: to become other than oneself, to belong to another, to be dispossessed of one’s own judgment and center. Propaganda succeeds here because it mobilizes a preexisting wish in the individual to escape the burden of being a separate self. People already tend to seek refuge in something larger—a leader, a group, a cause, a mass identity. Propaganda seizes that tendency, intensifies it, and gives it institutional form. Alienation is therefore not an accidental by-product. It is one of propaganda’s deepest accomplishments.
The first thing lost in alienation is personal judgment. Propaganda narrows the sphere in which thought can genuinely operate, dictates ends and limits, and gradually atrophies the habit of critical examination. Ellul underlines that what disappears in this way does not simply spring back when the campaign ends. Faculties unused become weakened. Moreover, propaganda presents precisely the kinds of political and collective objects on which the individual feels least able to exercise independent judgment. He therefore accepts the substitute of public opinion, mistaking that manufactured consensus for his own voice. Alienation works because the subject speaks through formulas he experiences as spontaneous.
This alienation often takes the form of identification. The individual projects himself into a leader, hero, party, nation, or historical movement and lives through that intermediary. Alternatively, he fuses with the mass and draws identity from collective excitement. In both cases he abandons the difficult work of personal selfhood and finds emotional shelter in participation. Ellul describes this as a regression toward an infantile state, not because the person becomes unintelligent in a simple sense, but because dependency, imitation, and borrowed grandeur replace autonomy. The subject feels larger precisely by ceasing to be fully himself.
Alienation also appears in propaganda’s management of needs. It offers artificial satisfactions for real frustrations and then goes further by creating needs that did not previously possess such intensity. A person genuinely suffers from isolation, powerlessness, insecurity, or blocked desire; propaganda gives symbolic relief without changing the underlying condition. At the same time, it invents new anxieties, new prestige concerns, new expectations, new political or social “problems,” and then offers itself as the answer. The individual is therefore alienated twice over: first from his real situation, which remains unresolved, and second by his growing dependence on fabricated satisfactions.
Ellul emphasizes that this alienation becomes more complete when the individual believes himself autonomous. The greater his conviction that he is thinking, choosing, and acting on his own, the deeper the dispossession may be. Propaganda is strongest not when it is openly recognized as command, but when it is internalized as free conviction. This paradox is central to the chapter: modern propaganda often works by making dependence feel like self-expression. The subject experiences manipulation as authenticity.
A third psychological effect is dissociation. Ellul situates this in the broader setting of technological society, where labor itself is divided between those who plan and those who execute. Modern institutions already separate thought from action, meaning from performance. Propaganda intensifies the split because it seeks action, adherence, and participation with as little reflection as possible. It teaches people to respond, enlist, repeat, and engage before or without understanding. This produces a divided person whose public activity and inner life no longer fully coincide.
The problem becomes acute when a person is exposed to two intense and opposed propagandas. Ellul argues that such conflict can generate two main defensive responses. The first is inertia: skepticism, abstention, withdrawal, a refusal to choose when every choice feels manipulated. The second is the opposite—flight into involvement. Unable to tolerate uncertainty, the individual throws himself into engagement simply to escape the tension of competing claims. Ellul even notes that successive contradictory propagandas over time can have similar effects, as when disillusionment after one ideological regime prepares the ground either for deep cynicism or for a new desperate need to attach oneself elsewhere.
From here Ellul moves to one of his bleakest conclusions: propaganda generates the need for more propaganda. Once an individual has been formed by it, he cannot easily do without it. The process is cumulative, a kind of psychological snowball effect. The subject has been relieved of anxiety, given a role, granted justification, inserted into a collective, and trained to receive direction from outside. Remove propaganda abruptly, and what appears is not liberation but vacuum. The person has lost capacities that would make independent life bearable.
Ellul explains this dependence through two complementary notions. The first is mithridatization: over time, the individual becomes numb to the explicit intellectual content of propaganda. He seems harder to move by arguments, slogans, or dramatic appeals because repetition has desensitized him to their surface. But this does not mean he has become free of propaganda. He is insulated only against content in the narrow sense. The deeper habits, needs, and reflexes remain intact. The person still turns to the newspaper, the radio, the political signal, because the dependence is no longer primarily informational.
The second notion is sensibilization. Even as the subject grows dull toward explicit messages, he becomes more responsive to tiny cues, emotional tones, symbols, or brief reminders. The full machinery that once shaped him no longer needs to be activated with the same intensity. A small stimulus can trigger large reactions because the groundwork has already been laid. Propaganda now functions through boosters rather than foundations. This is why the person comes to require a constant supply of renewal: to sustain certainty, self-esteem, and moral reassurance. He needs repeated confirmation that the world still makes sense and that he still belongs in it.
When such confirmation stops, disintegration follows. Ellul argues that both groups and individuals begin to unravel in the silence left by vanished propaganda. Anxiety returns, self-importance collapses, justification fades, and the subject finds himself once again alone before a world he has been trained not to face directly. This helps explain the durability of propaganda’s effects. They do not endure merely because messages are remembered, but because psychic structures have been altered. Ellul adds one qualification: propaganda cannot wholly reverse the deepest tendencies of an epoch. It lasts best when it amplifies collective currents already present in society. Still, within those limits, its hold can be profound.
The final section of the chapter insists on ambiguity. Propaganda does not produce a single, simple effect; it acts through contradictions. It can heighten anxiety in some respects and relieve it in others. It can intensify tension in order to mobilize, then reduce tension by giving a path for release. Ellul connects this in part to the difference between agitation propaganda, which stirs unrest and movement, and integration propaganda, which stabilizes and absorbs the individual into an existing order. The same apparatus can wound and soothe, excite and pacify, depending on the political function required.
He traces the same ambiguity in moral life. Propaganda furnishes self-justification and good conscience, but it can also awaken guilt, shame, and bad conscience when those emotions are useful. It can bind a group together around common symbols, yet it can also dissolve groups by sowing suspicion, doubt, and fragmentation. It can politicize every sphere of life, convincing citizens that all questions demand public commitment and sacrifice; but it can also produce privatization, encouraging people to retreat into personal comfort, fatalism, and indifference so that power may act unchallenged. Authoritarian systems exploit this particularly well: by persuading citizens that politics is too complex, too dangerous, or too futile for ordinary involvement, they win passivity as effectively as others win militant participation. The chapter ends by showing propaganda not as a crude instrument with one predictable outcome, but as a flexible psychological regime capable of manufacturing both fervor and withdrawal—whatever better serves the needs of power.
V.1 — Propaganda and Ideology
Ellul begins by arguing that propaganda and ideology were once linked in a fairly stable and familiar way. A society or group, he says, always rests on shared beliefs, and when those beliefs are given intellectual legitimacy they become an ideology. In that older framework, ideology came first and propaganda followed. Propaganda served as a relay mechanism: it helped spread the doctrine, consolidate it inside the group, and carry it beyond the group’s borders.
In that traditional arrangement, ideology was not passive. Most ideologies, in Ellul’s view, tend toward action because people who believe they possess the truth rarely keep it to themselves. They want to impose it, defend it, or extend it. This dynamic can operate inside a nation, where one social group tries to prevail over others, or outside it, where national or imperial ideologies try to expand into other societies.
Ellul notes that ideological expansion can happen in several different ways. Sometimes it advances through organized force, as when armies carry a political creed with them. Sometimes it spreads more diffusely, through psychological penetration rather than conquest, until a population gradually absorbs a new set of assumptions. In both cases, ideology remains the central reality and propaganda appears as one possible instrument of its expansion.
Under the old model, propaganda was therefore secondary and limited. It did not yet aim to seize the whole person or reorganize the entire social environment. Its task was narrower: transmit beliefs, popularize ideas, and fortify commitment. Its style and methods varied according to the ideology it served, which meant propaganda still took its shape from an external doctrine rather than functioning according to its own logic.
Ellul insists that this older relation has been decisively overturned in the modern age. The turning point comes with Lenin and, in a more radical form, Hitler. What they grasped, he says, is that modern politics is dominated by means rather than ends. The crucial question is no longer which doctrine is truest, but how fully one can mobilize available instruments and techniques.
Lenin, in Ellul’s reading, recognized that a political movement could not rely on doctrine alone. Tactics, organization, and the disciplined use of all available means became primary. Marxist doctrine was not abandoned, but it was subordinated to political action. The doctrine survived increasingly as something adjusted to strategy rather than something strategy had to obey.
Hitler pushes this logic even further. If Lenin still retained some nominal end, Hitler, for Ellul, reduced politics to pure mobilization. The doctrine itself became fluid, disposable, and subordinate to immediate effectiveness. What mattered was not fidelity to a coherent worldview, but the uninterrupted intensification of action.
That shift changes the status of ideology altogether. Ideology no longer governs propaganda; propaganda decides what part of ideology will be used, altered, emphasized, or ignored. Doctrinal content becomes far less important than symbols, images, slogans, and emotional cues. As long as certain familiar forms are preserved, propaganda can revise the underlying substance without losing its grip on the masses.
Ellul’s core claim is that modern propaganda has become autonomous. Its purpose is no longer mainly to spread ideology. Instead, propaganda now follows its own technical requirements and serves the efficiency of the organization behind it, whether party, state, or other large institution. In that system, ideology is only one manipulable element among many.
This is why the modern propagandist cannot really be a believer. He may personally hold convictions, but professionally he must bracket them. He uses ideologies the way a technician uses tools. Since he must constantly switch themes, adapt messages, and manipulate inherited beliefs without reverence, he becomes detached from doctrine and oriented above all toward operational success.
Ellul rejects the comforting idea that propaganda-heavy regimes were fundamentally driven by sincere doctrine. Even in movements like Nazism or Communism, he argues, ideology was often accessory rather than sovereign. The real objective was power, cohesion, and mass mobilization. Doctrine mattered only insofar as it helped gather, orient, and activate a population.
For that reason, the decisive criterion becomes utility. The propagandist asks not whether a doctrine is true, but whether it can furnish effective words, symbols, and predispositions. If a prevailing ideology obstructs mobilization, it must be bent, diverted, partially integrated, or neutralized. If it offers emotional and psychological leverage, it can be used regardless of its original meaning.
Ellul gives examples of this instrumental use of ideology to show how cynical the process can become. A propagandist may invoke nationalism, democracy, religion, anti-colonialism, or social justice without believing in any of them. What matters is that such beliefs already exist in public opinion and can therefore be used to obtain consent, reflexive adherence, or disciplined action.
At this point ideology can be handled in two principal ways. First, it can be reduced to a system of catchwords that trigger learned reactions. Terms such as democracy, nation, peace, or justice cease to function as concepts requiring reflection and become stimuli that automatically set off political responses. Second, ideology can be elevated into myth, acquiring emotional density, totalizing power, and a more commanding hold over consciousness.
Ellul emphasizes that propaganda is especially effective at turning vague beliefs into myths because mass communication compresses, amplifies, and dramatizes them. When a belief is reformulated in a sharper, more urgent, more emotionally loaded way and broadcast through large media systems, it gains force far beyond what it possessed as ordinary doctrine. Ideology then stops being an articulated worldview and becomes a lived symbolic environment.
Finally, propaganda uses ideology to justify action. It gives individuals the sense that what they are doing is morally legitimate because it appears aligned with widely shared collective beliefs. This is one of propaganda’s great strengths: it furnishes not only motives, but a good conscience. People feel secure because their actions seem to echo a communal truth rather than a private impulse.
Ellul concludes that the relation has now reversed so thoroughly that action produces ideology more often than ideology produces action. People act under propagandistic pressures, and only afterward build the beliefs that rationalize what they have done. Ideologies not taken up by propaganda become ineffective abstractions; ideologies that are taken up are broken apart and instrumentalized. In both cases, propaganda wins and ideology loses its independence.
V.2 — Effects on the Structure of Public Opinion
Ellul opens this section by saying that the most important effect of propaganda on public opinion is not simply that it changes what people think about a given issue. The deeper transformation is structural. Propaganda alters how public opinion is formed, how it circulates, what kind of consistency it acquires, and what relation it bears to personal judgment.
In the ordinary liberal picture, public opinion emerges from discussion, controversy, and reciprocal exchange among individuals. Ellul argues that propaganda destroys that model. Once propaganda takes charge of an issue, the matter is no longer genuinely open to argument. Statements are presented as ready-made truths, interpersonal communication weakens, and centralized media become the decisive channels through which socially consequential opinion is formed.
He therefore rejects the idea that public opinion is simply the sum of private opinions. What propaganda works on is not a collection of mature individual judgments but a vague, latent, unstructured disposition that he describes as a kind of raw opinion. Propaganda crystallizes that diffuse material into something sharper, more explicit, and more collectively visible.
This process of crystallization is one of his main themes. Propaganda takes unstable, shifting, partially formulated inclinations and fixes them around specific points. It gives them direction, boundaries, and recognizable forms. In doing so, it narrows the field of vision of both the individual and the public by organizing thought around stereotypes and selected targets.
What matters here is not full rational coherence. Ellul says propaganda hardens opinion at strategic points, creating a kind of skeleton rather than a complete system. If key nodes are secured, the rest of the opinion field can be guided from them. A successful propaganda does not need to explain everything; it only needs to lock in the decisive orientations.
Once crystallized, public opinion becomes resistant to contradiction. Facts, evidence, and argument lose force because the opinion has already been stabilized emotionally and symbolically before rational examination can intervene. The result is not merely conviction, but impermeability. Propaganda thus creates a public opinion that absorbs confirmation and rejects dissonance.
Ellul also argues that propaganda unifies opinion by stripping away its internal contradictions. Catchwords, repeated formulas, and fixed oppositions produce a more monolithic public mentality. What had once been nuanced or mixed becomes aligned under a reduced set of labels, and individual originality is gradually eroded by the hardening of collective patterns.
His example of class consciousness is important. Marxist propaganda, he says, did not merely inform workers of their condition; it transformed a scattered awareness into a whole criterion of judgment, a stereotype, and a stable belief-system for collective interpretation. In that sense, class consciousness became not just a social fact but a product of sustained propagandistic work.
A second major effect is simplification. Propaganda accelerates the formation of public opinion by reducing complexity. Complex problems, mixed positions, and layered judgments delay collective formation because they resist rapid consolidation. Propaganda solves that problem by flattening differences and forcing issues into crude oppositions.
This is why it tends to divide the field into two camps only: yes or no, friend or enemy, loyal or treacherous. Intermediate positions are not merely overlooked; they are actively reassigned to one pole or the other. The person who resists a given orthodoxy but does not embrace its opposite is still forced into the enemy camp. Simplification is not a flaw in propaganda; it is one of its essential operating principles.
Ellul connects this simplification to the growth of prejudice. Public opinion formed under propagandistic conditions becomes unreal, rigid, and childlike because it is built out of stereotypes and emotionally charged shortcuts. Prejudices may arise spontaneously, but propaganda systematizes them, integrates them into public discourse, and turns them into a stable mechanism for mass response.
He then turns to the gap between private and public opinion. Drawing on Stoetzel, Ellul argues that people think in two registers: as individuals and as members of a social body. Propaganda widens the distance between these registers. Public opinion becomes increasingly standardized and external, while private opinion remains more intimate, fragmented, and less socially effective.
As propaganda intensifies, private opinion is devalued. The major media do not transmit personal judgment upward into public life; instead, they project already constituted public opinion back onto individuals. The person no longer reworks collective messages into a genuine personal synthesis. He is carried along by an impersonal current that seems bigger, more authoritative, and more real than anything he could formulate on his own.
That prepares the transition from opinion to action, which Ellul sees as propaganda’s most striking achievement. Propaganda is not primarily satisfied with opinions that remain verbal or contemplative. Its aim is to turn the public into a participating crowd. Even when action remains limited to speech, slogan repetition, or symbolic gestures, the important shift is from spectatorship to involvement.
Ellul is careful here: propaganda may not create the deepest underlying attitudes from nothing, but when it channels people into repeated action it reshapes behavior and eventually feeds back into attitude formation. A person who acts under propaganda no longer remains merely a holder of views. The action itself reorganizes later responses, habits, and interpretations.
He accepts part of Leonard Doob’s account of how action emerges: people act when they feel urgency, are shown a concrete course of action, believe the action can succeed, and expect some reward or satisfaction from it. Propaganda can supply all of those elements. It names the crisis, prescribes the response, promises efficacy, and surrounds the individual with examples of similar behavior.
But Ellul adds something he considers decisive: no one acts in isolation. Propaganda succeeds because it is collective before it is individual. It integrates people into a group, gives them a sense of shared actuality, and produces the feeling that they confront the same urgent present together. The media do not merely inform them; they bind them into a common field of concern.
Once that group is formed, propaganda places it in front of an immediate world that seems to demand intervention. The group has no alternative frame of reference from which to judge the situation from a distance, so it cannot step back into contemplation. It feels pressed toward action because propaganda has made the present moment seem total, exclusive, and decisive.
At the same time propaganda magnifies opinion by displaying it back to itself through powerful media. Opinion sees itself on screens, hears itself in broadcasts, and thereby acquires grandeur and apparent certainty. It no longer feels like a scattered belief; it feels like an embodied truth. This self-recognition gives public opinion confidence and momentum.
That is why Ellul ends by claiming that propaganda can substitute for leadership itself. In a group without a real leader, propaganda can perform the leader’s functions: crystallize diffuse feelings, define a line of action, and move the group forward. The visible chief may remain only an image or symbol, while the real directing force is the propagandistic system that tells the group what reality is and what it must now do.
Chapter V.3 — Propaganda and Grouping
Ellul opens this section by admitting that “grouping” is a deliberately broad label. He is not trying to produce a full sociology of every collective body, but to isolate a recurring effect of propaganda on social organization itself. His key distinction is between the groups that produce propaganda and the groups that receive it, though in practice the two often overlap. To make the problem concrete, he follows propaganda through three major institutional worlds: political parties, labor organizations, and churches. The common thread is that propaganda does not merely persuade individuals inside these bodies; it gradually changes the structure and behavior of the bodies themselves.
The first general effect is partition. Propaganda, Ellul argues, always marks off an in-group against one or more out-groups. Modern media are often celebrated as instruments of communication, but for him they frequently achieve the opposite result: they reinforce enclosed milieux. People tend to consume the propaganda of the group to which they already belong, not the propaganda of rivals. The Communist reads the Communist press, the Protestant reads the Protestant press, the nationalist listens to nationalist appeals, and each becomes more deeply confirmed in the justice of his own camp.
That closed circulation has a corrosive consequence. Each group is steadily reassured that it is right and that its adversaries are wrong, dangerous, or malicious, while the opposing groups never actually encounter the arguments made against them. Criticism does not become dialogue; it becomes one-sided reinforcement. The result is not debate but mutual opacity. Members of rival groups cease to inhabit the same moral and factual world, so the other side is no longer an interlocutor to be answered but an enemy to be denounced or an alien presence that cannot truly be understood.
Ellul is careful to say that this partitioning does not cancel the formation of public opinion. Propaganda can still move masses, especially the undecided and the politically unformed. It can also work across different levels of affiliation: someone resistant to Communist appeals as a Socialist may still be affected by them as a Protestant, and someone untouched by foreign propaganda as a French patriot may still be influenced by it as a believer in capitalism or liberalism. In other words, propaganda partitions society and generalizes opinion at the same time; it separates on one plane while integrating on another.
The hierarchy of groups matters here. A “higher” collective level can often absorb lower ones without abolishing their separate existence. National propaganda, for instance, can create unity inside a country while leaving party, class, union, or religious partitions intact beneath it. That helps explain why propaganda can produce internal cohesion and external hostility simultaneously. It also explains why propaganda between equal blocs, such as rival geopolitical camps, mainly intensifies separation: where no side possesses higher legitimacy in the eyes of the other, propaganda ceases to persuade and chiefly hardens antagonism.
Ellul illustrates this logic with the Soviet example. Mass propaganda for the general public presents a glowing image of the regime and avoids serious contradiction, because it must preserve faith despite people’s disappointing everyday experience. At the same time, specialized journals for technicians can publish harsh and highly specific criticism of particular sectors. This is possible only because propaganda presupposes and deepens social partition: the doctor will not read the town-planning journal, the public will not read the specialist review, and one nationality will not read another’s local press. Contradictory messages can therefore coexist inside a single regime because different audiences are enclosed in different informational compartments.
This leads directly to political parties. A party that moves from occasional electoral campaigning to permanent propaganda must change its structure. It can no longer rely on loose committees and sporadic interventions. It needs sections, cells, disciplined activists, rapid channels of command, and a continuous apparatus capable of reaching public opinion at every moment. Propaganda therefore pushes parties toward centralization, technical organization, and permanent mobilization.
The internal architecture of such a party becomes overwhelmingly vertical. Homogeneity and speed are essential to propaganda, so horizontal discussion among the rank and file becomes a danger rather than an asset. Local variations are hard to justify to militants who have been trained in uniformity, and the party increasingly resembles a chain of transmission rather than a deliberative association. The organizational style required by propaganda thus mirrors the partitioning it creates in society: communication narrows upward and downward, not outward.
A further result is the split between cadres and masses. Those who design propaganda become subjects—technicians, strategists, decision-makers—while sympathizers and voters become objects to be studied, tested, manipulated, and mobilized. Ellul insists that this is not a moral accident but a structural feature of propaganda itself. Once a party adopts the propagandist viewpoint, the public is treated instrumentally, as material to be shaped for an end. That fosters a certain contempt among propagandists for even their own followers and helps explain why propaganda so often personalizes power around a leader who condenses the party’s will.
Propaganda also changes the larger party system. Because it is expensive, technically demanding, and cumulative, it advantages large parties over small ones and entrenched forces over new entrants. If one party masters propaganda while rivals cannot match it, domination follows. If all major parties acquire comparable propaganda machinery, political life tends to polarize into large competing blocs. In either case, the field narrows. New parties and new ideas find it increasingly difficult to emerge because the means of reaching mass opinion are already monopolized by organizations with money, staff, media access, and habit.
This is why Ellul says propaganda tends almost inevitably toward a two-party structure or, more broadly, toward systems in which only a few large formations can survive. Even where many parties continue to exist formally, propaganda favors those already recognized as major contenders. The party with a majority mandate can convert its very status into propaganda capital, while the minority is forced to answer on terrain already shaped by its opponent. The struggle becomes less about doctrine than about who can maintain the most powerful and continuous apparatus of psychological occupation.
Financial consequences follow from this. As propaganda costs rise, parties can no longer depend on voluntary contributions alone. They need major funding, institutional backing, or state support. That pushes them closer either to wealthy interests or to a state that itself acquires ideological commitments. Once public opinion has been permanently aroused and kept in motion, parties and governments alike are compelled to treat it as something that must be managed continuously, not simply consulted at election time. Propaganda therefore becomes one of the forces that transforms constitutional politics into permanent opinion management.
Ellul then turns to the world of labor, where his argument is deliberately provocative. He does not say that the workers’ material situation is irrelevant, but he insists that the labor problem is not exhausted by wages, security, or ownership formulas. Even in Communist countries, where official ideology claimed to have solved the workers’ condition, the worker still remained subordinated to the machine, absorbed into technical production, and deprived of genuine control. What changed most significantly was not the factual condition itself but the worker’s perception of it: his sense that he belonged to history, to justice, to the future.
That is why propaganda becomes so important in labor politics. It can offer a psychological solution where a fully material solution remains absent or incomplete. By giving workers hope, dignity, historical mission, and an image of future centrality, propaganda integrates them into a system that still leaves many structural problems intact. Unions, meanwhile, encounter the same logic as parties. The moment they seek broad influence through propaganda, they need money, media, and technical means; and once they acquire those means, they cease to be purely insurgent bodies and become established institutions participating in the social game.
Propaganda therefore domesticates labor organizations even as it amplifies their voice. A union that succeeds in mobilizing opinion becomes a recognized power, must negotiate with the state, and gradually becomes a “have” rather than a “have-not.” It wins influence at the cost of integration. Ellul’s point is not that labor propaganda is fraudulent, but that propaganda shifts the center of gravity from direct worker solidarity and concrete struggle toward bureaucratic organization, public-image management, and system-level participation.
The churches confront the harshest dilemma of all. If they refuse propaganda, they remain slow, patient, personal, and therefore increasingly ineffective in a civilization dominated by mass media. If they embrace propaganda, they submit Christian life to the laws of myth, simplification, mass mobilization, and institutional power. In that case Christianity is reduced from a lived spiritual adventure to an ideology among others, something to be marketed, defended, and manipulated. For Ellul, propaganda thereby becomes one of the strongest forces of de-Christianization: either the church withdraws and loses social presence, or it propagandizes and loses part of its soul.
Chapter V.4 — Propaganda and Democracy
Ellul begins this section with a blunt claim: in the modern world, democracy needs propaganda. This is not an accident or a marginal abuse. From the moment politics depends on public opinion, party competition, and mass participation, propaganda appears as one of democracy’s normal instruments. Historically, he notes, modern propaganda arose first in democratic settings, where parties needed votes and governments needed to mobilize nations. In that sense, propaganda is not foreign to democracy but entwined with the rise of mass democracy itself.
Yet the fit is deeply paradoxical. Democratic theory assumes an individual capable of reasoned judgment, free choice, self-control, and deliberation. Propaganda works through myth, emotional shock, psychological pressure, and reflex rather than reflective judgment. The democratic image of the citizen and the propagandistic image of the masses are therefore in tension from the start. Ellul’s point is not that democracies are hypocritical when they use propaganda, but that they are driven by circumstances to use an instrument whose logic cuts against their own professed anthropology.
He explains that this necessity becomes clearest when one looks at practical conditions rather than principles. Democracies exist in mass societies, compete with organized adversaries, and must present themselves outwardly as coherent wholes even when internally plural. In an age of Cold War and permanent psychological conflict, they can no longer rely on procedural legitimacy alone. They are compelled to defend themselves, justify themselves, and influence others at scale. Propaganda thus becomes not just an electoral convenience but a strategic necessity.
A major reason for this drift is the democratic belief that truth will prevail by its own force. Ellul thinks that conviction once belonged to the democratic faith in progress, but that it no longer corresponds to the realities of modern political life. Facts do not simply impose themselves on overinformed populations; they must be arranged, dramatized, and emotionally validated. In practice, propaganda creates what people experience as truth. That is why democracies cannot defeat rival systems merely by “informing” people. Truth without propaganda, he says in effect, has become politically powerless.
This creates the famous problem of “democratic propaganda.” Ellul rejects the naïve idea that propaganda becomes democratic simply because it spreads democratic content. Democracy, in his view, is actually a poor propaganda object unless it is heavily transformed, simplified, and mythologized. Nor is the issue solved by saying that democracy civilizes any instrument it adopts. The instrument matters. The primacy of means means that propaganda imposes its own rules on whatever doctrine it carries, including democratic doctrine.
He is equally skeptical of the claim that democratic pluralism neutralizes propaganda. Legally, democratic societies may lack a state monopoly over speech, but materially they are dominated by concentrations of media power. Newspaper chains, news agencies, film studios, and broadcasters create private monopolies or oligopolies that ordinary citizens cannot match. The central modern struggle is therefore no longer the nineteenth-century struggle between the state and the individual over freedom of expression. It is a struggle among states and powerful organizations over the technical means of opinion formation, with the individual reduced to the object at stake.
That shift makes the language of freedom more ambiguous than democrats admit. Democracies cannot allow every propaganda current to operate without limit; they censor what they judge immoral, subversive, or hostile to freedom itself. In wartime that seems obvious, but Ellul argues that the Cold War turns exceptional controls into a more permanent condition. Once propaganda is recognized as a weapon of war, democracies feel pressure to unify it, police competitors, and define enemies of democratic order. The line between protecting democracy and hollowing it out becomes increasingly unstable.
To be sure, Ellul grants that democratic propaganda often differs in tone from totalitarian propaganda. It tends to rely more on facts, more nuance, and a residual respect for the audience as human beings rather than pure raw material. Democratic propagandists often retain a bad conscience; they hesitate, qualify, and stop short of total mobilization. They do not always seek to envelop the whole of life, and they may still acknowledge that opponents possess some fragment of good faith or reason. All of that marks a real moral difference.
But those same traits are precisely what make democratic propaganda weak as propaganda. Effective propaganda, for Ellul, must be abrupt, total, mythic, and technically cold. It must provoke action without prior thought. It requires a sharp division between subject and object, a willingness to manipulate, and the capacity to simplify without remorse. Respect for the individual, openness to nuance, and reluctance to use myth all inhibit effectiveness. That is why he reaches his severe conclusion: there is no genuinely democratic propaganda in any strong sense. When propaganda remains democratic in spirit, it is mediocre; when it becomes effective, it ceases to remain democratic in spirit.
This contradiction becomes brutal in foreign policy. Straight information addressed to foreign populations, Ellul says, is mostly useless because people trust their own governments, their own psychological world, and the propaganda already surrounding them. To penetrate a foreign consciousness, democracies must therefore resort to myth. They use symbols such as Peace, Freedom, Justice, or Democracy itself. Only myth can leap the barriers of nationality, resentment, and contrary ideological formation.
Yet as soon as democracy is turned into a myth, it is altered at its core. Democracy was meant to be a regime of opinion, discussion, plurality, and contestation. Myth belongs to belief, emotional adhesion, and unquestioned symbolic truth. To present democracy mythically is therefore to present its opposite. Such propaganda may work as psychological warfare, but it prepares people not for democratic habits but for another form of collective belief. It reinforces precisely the kind of mentality—credulous, unified, emotionally charged—that democracy should restrain.
The damage does not stay abroad. A myth projected outward eventually rebounds inward, because foreign propaganda is only credible if it seems backed by the whole nation. That creates pressure for domestic unanimity, marginalization of dissent, and the reduction of minority voices whose contradictions might weaken the national image. At the same time propaganda personalizes the unity it seeks, embodying the nation in a leader. Ellul sees here the emergence of “massive democracy”: a system of ceremonies, participation, single-voice allegiance, and political liturgy that can still call itself democratic while losing the substance of democratic pluralism.
Domestic propaganda produces an equally profound transformation. Because modern citizens are flooded with facts and cannot organize them by themselves, the democratic state is driven to offer an official framework of explanation—a public truth. Information, to be effective, must be woven into a comprehensible picture that speaks not only to intelligence but to emotion. From this need there arises what Ellul calls an etiological myth: an all-embracing explanation of reality. At that point democracy ceases to be simply secular and procedural; it begins to function religiously, demanding participation, consensus, and emotional integration.
Modern media intensify the process. Ellul is especially alert to television, which can bring public figures closer to voters and simulate a kind of direct democracy, but which also favors spectacle, emotional immediacy, and visual domination. Democracies, he argues, are not naturally gifted in visual propaganda. To compete with more theatrical regimes, they are tempted toward mass ceremonies, staged enthusiasm, and collective display. Even where there are multiple propagandas, the result is not a freer citizen. The individual is attacked from all sides and tends either toward passivity or toward blind, total commitment—both of which are anti-democratic dispositions.
Ellul’s final claim is the harshest of the chapter. Propaganda can certainly spread democratic formulas, send people to the polls, and wrap itself in the language of liberty. But at the psychological level it forms a different kind of human being: someone who craves simplicity, certainty, integration, and moral division, someone impatient with ambiguity, skeptical inquiry, and minority rights. In other words, propaganda can manufacture what he calls a totalitarian man with democratic convictions. That is why a democracy maintained by propaganda ultimately works against the democratic way of life it claims to preserve.
He therefore ends not with consolation but with warning. The worst mistake is to treat propaganda as harmless noise or to flatter ourselves that free individuals are naturally immune to it. For Ellul, that illusion only disarms resistance. A serious defense of freedom begins by acknowledging the weapon’s power, the vulnerability of modern human beings, and the fact that propaganda—whatever the intentions of those who wield it—moves in one fundamental direction: toward the erosion of truth and the weakening of liberty.
Appendix I — Summary of “Effectiveness of Propaganda”
Ellul opens Appendix I by drawing a strict distinction between two kinds of effects. One is the direct, intended effect sought by the propagandist: changing an opinion, obtaining a vote, sustaining morale, provoking surrender, selling a product, or pushing a group toward a concrete action. The other is the wider and often deeper set of unintended consequences that propaganda produces in people and institutions. In this appendix he brackets those broader effects, which he had already discussed elsewhere, and focuses only on direct effectiveness. Even that narrower question, however, turns out to be far harder to answer than most researchers suppose.
His first claim is brutal: propaganda cannot be judged by a single, simple standard because its objectives are radically heterogeneous. A propagandist may want obedience, enthusiasm, resignation, hatred, consumer desire, party discipline, electoral success, or the fragmentation of an enemy’s smaller groups. These goals are not comparable, and success in one domain may coincide with apparent failure in another. A campaign that does not win many votes may still harden militants, strengthen internal solidarity, or damage rival organizations. For Ellul, any method that measures one isolated outcome and then declares propaganda a success or a failure is already misunderstanding the phenomenon.
He then attacks the fantasy of a clean baseline. Real people are never untouched by prior propaganda, so there is no neutral “before” state from which effects can be measured with confidence. Soldiers already carry patriotic and military conditioning before a new campaign reaches them. Civilians already inhabit a climate shaped by newspapers, institutions, myths, and previous messages. Even supporters of a cause usually became supporters through earlier propaganda. That means the measurable change produced by any one operation is often minor beside the cumulative formation that made the operation possible in the first place.
The problem becomes worse when several propagandas collide. If one tries to measure whether a campaign demoralizes the enemy, one is in fact trying to calculate the difference between two active systems of influence: the hostile propaganda and the target’s own counter-propaganda. Ellul argues that this cannot be done in real time. At best, one gets retrospective reconstruction, and retrospective reconstruction is weak because it comes after the emotional and political circumstances have changed. The same objection applies to election campaigns. Vote shifts are relatively easy to count, but electioneering is, for Ellul, one of the crudest and least complete forms of propaganda: brief, fragmented, poorly orchestrated, and usually lacking the slow preparatory conditioning that gives propaganda its real force.
He also insists that even the most basic quantitative questions are unstable. It is difficult to know how many people were actually reached by a leaflet, speech, film, newspaper, or meeting, and harder still to know how many were influenced. Without that denominator, percentages of effect are shaky from the start. Beyond this, propaganda often works in depth rather than at the surface, often with delayed effects rather than immediate ones, and often through a long period of incubation during which it is impossible to say whether it has succeeded, failed, or merely not yet matured. Add the question of cost—whether rising expenditure produces proportionate gains—and the researcher is left with problems that are central yet largely unanswerable.
Another decisive obstacle is that propaganda operates inside a web of reciprocal social interactions. Public opinion shapes the propagandist; propaganda shapes the public whose reactions then reshape propaganda; the individual perceives messages through a personality already altered by prior messages. These circular processes make isolation nearly impossible. Ellul’s broader point is that propaganda is not an external force that lands on a stable society from the outside. It is embedded in a total social environment, mixed with institutions, tensions, myths, events, and collective behavior. To extract it from that setting in order to produce a pure measurement is to destroy the very thing one is trying to study.
From there Ellul turns to the methods commonly used to measure effectiveness and rejects them almost one by one. Laboratory-style experiments, where small groups are exposed to pamphlets, films, or talks and then compared with a control group, tell little about real propaganda. The issues tested are usually not urgent, the duration is too short, the media are too limited, the social environment is artificial, and there is no crowd dynamic, organizational integration, or call to meaningful action. Such experiments may measure a weak and temporary influence, but they do not reproduce the conditions under which propaganda actually functions. To draw large conclusions from them is, in his view, a category mistake.
Opinion surveys fare only slightly better. Polls can capture short-term reactions in moments of crisis, elections, or intense agitation, but they are much less capable of detecting deeper transformations, mythic absorption, or the gradual work of sociological propaganda. They are also bad at registering intensity. Two groups of equal size may look identical in a poll while differing enormously in organization, conviction, discipline, and readiness for sacrifice. For Ellul, that difference is often what matters most. A propaganda that leaves vote totals unchanged but turns one camp into a fervent, organized, action-ready minority may be more important than one that shifts a modest number of opinions on paper.
Retrospective studies of prisoners, refugees, or defeated populations are no more trustworthy. Interrogating German prisoners after 1945, for example, does not reveal how they behaved while immersed in Nazi propaganda; it reveals how they spoke after defeat, captivity, fear, exhaustion, and a changed strategic environment. The same applies to civilians answering questions after a regime has collapsed. Ellul thinks such research often assumes that propaganda should appear as explicit, conscious adherence to slogans. But the real effect may lie elsewhere—in conduct, in reflexes, in learned submission, in ways of interpreting events, or in the ability to keep acting for a regime even when explicit doctrine is confused or half-forgotten.
He is equally harsh on the prestige of mathematical method. Statistics can measure only narrow, simplified, decontextualized external phenomena. To quantify, one must strip the subject from its emotional, historical, and symbolic environment, reduce a complex phenomenon to a simplified variable, and focus on visible behavior while ignoring the deeper mechanisms that may matter most. Ellul does not deny that numbers have some use, but he denies that they give the truth of propaganda. Worse, researchers often smuggle metaphysical commitments into supposedly scientific work. Some assume in advance that human beings remain inwardly autonomous and therefore cannot be deeply conditioned. Others assume democratic citizens must remain sovereign in judgment. Ellul’s complaint is not that these hopes are morally illegitimate, but that they should not masquerade as neutral empirical conclusions.
When he addresses arguments for propaganda’s ineffectiveness, he starts with the supposed stability of stereotypes. Yes, many stereotypes are hard to dislodge. But that does not prove propaganda is weak, because propaganda itself can create stereotypes so durable that even shocking facts fail to erase them for long. A doctrine may suffer a temporary shock from events, yet soon recover its old emotional force once those events are absorbed into excuses, reinterpretations, or forgetting. The real lesson, for Ellul, is not that propaganda fails against stereotypes, but that it often succeeds so well that it manufactures stereotypes with the same durability as inherited ones.
He then tackles the theory of pre-existing attitudes, according to which propaganda can only activate tendencies already present in the individual. Ellul grants a narrow truth here: a single speech or article will indeed be filtered through prior dispositions. But he argues that total propaganda is something else entirely. When messages surround people constantly, across media and over long stretches of life, prior attitudes erode. The individual is not facing one isolated stimulus but a continuous psychological environment. In such conditions, pre-existing attitudes may matter at the beginning of a campaign, yet they become secondary once propaganda has had time to organize habits, emotions, and responses at scale.
Claims that propaganda merely produces indifference are also, in his view, often backward. In totalitarian settings, apparent withdrawal into apathy can itself be a successful effect, because paralysis, passivity, and retreat into private life may be exactly what the regime needs. Likewise, the idea that two propagandas cancel one another out in democracies is too superficial. Opposing campaigns are rarely equal in intensity, coherence, timing, or organizational support. And what many observers call propaganda is often just flat information badly presented. Civic broadcasts that bore the audience are not proof that propaganda fails; they are proof that information lacking drama and immediacy cannot compete with techniques designed to seize attention and emotion.
His historical examples are meant to settle the matter at the broadest scale. The rise of class consciousness in the modern labor movement, the gradual diffusion of socialist assumptions in France, the revolutionary victories of 1917 and 1933, the communization of populations in Eastern Europe and China, and the creation of anti-colonial nationalism in places without prior nationhood—all of these, he argues, are unintelligible without propaganda. He is careful not to reduce history to propaganda alone; economic conflict, institutions, events, and social change all matter. But he says those factors do not mobilize masses by themselves. Propaganda is what coordinates them, translates them into shared consciousness, and turns latent conditions into organized movement.
He strengthens the point through contemporary practice. Political leaders, military planners, and major businessmen all behave as if propaganda works, and they keep investing in it because they are interested in efficacy, not in romantic illusions. Those who have lived inside intense systems of propaganda tend to recognize its force more readily than those who observe from more liberal environments and therefore fail to notice the propagandistic forms surrounding them. In Ellul’s formulation, Americans who deny the force of propaganda often accept the effectiveness of public relations and human relations without noticing that these are the local, normalized forms propaganda takes in their own society.
Advertising gives him a more concrete field. He does not say that commercial advertising allows simple generalization to every political case, but he insists that its practical effectiveness is beyond serious doubt. It creates demand for products that nobody previously needed, turns repeated exposure into habit, and can be tracked in sales when firms stop advertising and lose ground. Even the Soviet reintroduction of advertising matters to him as evidence: a regime that once denounced advertising as capitalist waste brought it back once production and competition within consumption made persuasion useful again. That reversal, for Ellul, is a confession in practice that propaganda in the commercial sphere works.
He goes further still and argues that propaganda reaches into private life more than reassuring theories admit. Campaigns around alcohol, birth rates, and educational choices show that individual behavior can change even without a dramatic transformation in explicit public opinion. He points to pronatalist propaganda in fascist and wartime societies, antialcohol efforts in France, Japan’s postwar campaign for lower birth rates, and French efforts to redirect students from the humanities toward science and technology. His point is not that propaganda determines everything, but that if it can influence conduct in intimate areas where people have direct experience and personal motives, then it can surely influence them in politics and economics, where their direct knowledge is weaker and the issues are more distant and emotionally mediated.
Rumor and fashion provide the final reinforcement of this claim. People are highly susceptible to messages that spread through imitation, repetition, and social circulation, even when the original source is obscure. A rumor gains force as it travels; a fad can engulf a society with little rational grounding; individuals imitate because their milieu imitates. These phenomena are not identical to organized propaganda, but they reveal a human receptivity that propaganda can exploit. Even when individuals imagine themselves resistant to overt persuasion, they remain vulnerable to the social mechanisms through which belief, excitement, and conformity are transmitted.
Yet the appendix does not end in triumphalism. Ellul closes with limits. Propaganda sent from outside a nation is usually weaker than propaganda carried by nationals speaking in the language, symbols, and daily realities of their own people. That is why, in his view, Communist international influence often worked best through national communist parties rather than direct Soviet address. There are also limits in prediction: no propagandist can foresee with certainty how each individual will respond, because social position, culture, prior experience, and personality affect the translation of stimulus into action. For that reason, modern propaganda increasingly aims not at perfectly predicting isolated individuals but at pre-educating populations, reducing individual variation, and creating collective attitudes from which responses become more calculable.
The appendix therefore reaches a double conclusion. Precise measurement of propaganda is mostly beyond our tools, and many of the methods presented as scientific are too narrow to grasp the phenomenon. But from that uncertainty one should not infer weakness. On the contrary, once one looks at long-term historical transformations, commercial behavior, private conduct, rumor, fashion, and the cumulative shaping of groups, propaganda appears to Ellul as one of the decisive operative forces of modern mass society. Its effects are often hard to count, often indirect, often delayed, and often inseparable from the broader social field. But precisely because it works through that field and not outside it, it is powerful.
Appendix II — “Mao Tse-tung’s Propaganda”
Solid Chapter Summary
1. Core argument. In Appendix II, Jacques Ellul argues that Mao did not invent a wholly new theory of propaganda so much as apply Leninist principles with unusual rigor to Chinese conditions. The appendix begins from three material facts: China lacked developed mass media, the number of people to be reached was immense, and the revolutionary struggle was inseparable from war. Given that setting, Ellul says Maoist propaganda rested on two pillars—education and organization. Those two words, however, are used in an expansive sense. They do not refer simply to teaching ideas or building institutions, but to the systematic remaking of human beings and the construction of a social environment in which those human beings would act in the desired political direction.
2. Education as total transformation. Ellul insists that “education” in Mao’s system is not mere instruction, not the simple transmission of facts, and not neutral information. Rather, it is directed information folded into a larger effort to reshape the whole person. In his reading, Maoist education aims to alter feelings, reactions, habits of judgment, and the general picture of the world through which people interpret reality. The goal is not that people merely know revolutionary doctrine, but that they come to feel and perceive through it. Propaganda therefore becomes a moral, emotional, and psychological operation, not just an intellectual one.
3. Organization as lived environment. The second pillar, organization, means surrounding individuals with a web of institutions and collective structures that act on them continuously. Ellul emphasizes that the aim is not simply repression from above. The individual is not supposed to remain a passive object trapped inside organizations; he is supposed to become an active participant in them. That is crucial to Ellul’s reading of Mao: people are more deeply shaped when they feel that they are taking part in a common work. The propaganda system therefore does not stop at messaging. It extends into participation, routine, discipline, and the social forms through which daily life is experienced.
4. Wartime propaganda in controlled zones. In the period of revolutionary war from 1926 to 1949, propaganda in conquered or partly controlled territories focused on spreading basic Marxist theses in forms that ordinary peasants could absorb. Ellul describes a combination of slogans, explanations, meetings, marches, banners, and denunciations of the rich and exploiters. The political line was attached to concrete desires, above all the desire for land redistribution. He stresses that the purpose was less to trigger sudden rebellion than to produce a slow, deep infusion of economic and political ideas into local populations. The army became the key site of concentrated political education, where cadres and soldiers were shaped not only militarily but ideologically.
5. Political mobilization rather than instant uprising. One of Ellul’s sharpest observations is that Maoist propaganda sought “political mobilization” rather than immediate insurrection. A slogan was not treated as a promise the leadership itself would directly fulfill. Instead, the slogan stirred the population so that the people themselves would undertake the work necessary to realize it. In this sense, propaganda was a method of activating labor, sacrifice, and commitment. Ellul also describes the treatment of enemy prisoners in this wartime period: captured soldiers were intensively reeducated, then released, so that their changed attitudes would become propaganda inside the opposing army. Even the act of release served as a theatrical demonstration of Communist generosity and confidence.
6. Occupation, withdrawal, and ideological residue. Because revolutionary forces often had to occupy and later abandon zones, Maoist propaganda had to be portable and renewable. Ellul argues that one purpose of short-term occupation was to leave behind a population already ideologically prepared. When the revolutionary army withdrew and the enemy returned, it did not return to politically neutral territory. It entered a social field already altered by prior propaganda. Ellul says this allowed Mao’s forces gradually to contaminate the enemy’s position from within. Misery, oppression, and diffuse resentment were taken as raw material; propaganda then supplied explanation, identified enemies, gave shape to a liberation myth, and connected that myth to cooperation with Communism.
7. Peasant Unions as mass psychological structure. On the organizational side of the wartime struggle, Ellul identifies three main instruments. The first is the Peasant Union. These were broad, apparently open organizations that gathered peasants into discussion groups, spread slogans, and made ideological explanations intelligible at village level. Their importance, in Ellul’s account, was not military but psychological. They allowed the Party to polarize opinion, create collective identities, and reach remote populations far more effectively than schools alone could have done. Their scale mattered: propaganda became socially embedded because it operated through naturally existing communities and shared local routines.
8. The parallel hierarchy. The second organizational instrument was what Ellul calls the parallel hierarchy: a clandestine revolutionary administration built alongside the official structure of the enemy state. This underground order had its own finances, police, and practical functions. Its importance lay in converting abstract propaganda into lived social experience. Rations, wages, supplies, and small forms of governance made ideological commitments tangible. Ellul emphasizes that such action had to feel internal, not externally imposed. Maoist organization therefore tried to avoid appearing bureaucratic and instead fostered a sense that people themselves were participating in the transformation of their society. Once that feeling of participation existed, action justified itself and drew individuals more deeply into the movement.
9. The Red Army as propaganda machine. The third great instrument was the Red Army. Ellul presents it not simply as a fighting force but as a political apparatus whose tasks included propaganda among the masses and organization of those masses. Soldiers had to be taught why they fought, then turned into transmitters of doctrine. The army’s effectiveness as propaganda depended on its relation to the population: it had to live among the people, represent them, serve them, and share their interests. Ellul underlines Mao’s famous “fish in water” formula to explain that the army could function as propaganda only because it was socially rooted. Where those prior conditions were absent, Maoist methods could not simply be copied.
10. After 1949: continuity under new conditions. Once victory was achieved, Ellul says the governing principles of propaganda remained the same but their application changed. Mao publicly described ideological work in terms of discussion, criticism, persuasion, and education. Ellul treats this language with skepticism. He points to the Hundred Flowers episode as a pattern in which criticism was temporarily encouraged so that critics could be identified, exposed, and then repressed through arrests, prison, and reeducation. What appears as liberal opening thus becomes, in his interpretation, a tactical phase inside a larger propaganda system. The appendix therefore presents post-1949 propaganda as more institutionalized but no less manipulative.
11. Integration, detachment, and terror. Ellul argues that even a propaganda regime centered on education still relies on terror. The object is twofold: first, to integrate individuals as deeply as possible into the new political order; second, to sever them from older loyalties such as family, village, and inherited forms of social life. Maximum conformity is required because those older structures compete with the state for allegiance. Ellul also links propaganda to economic mobilization. Campaigns of accelerated development, collective effort, and national emulation depend, in his reading, on sustained emotional excitation and ideological persuasion. Propaganda is not marginal to production; it is what makes extraordinary social exertion politically and psychologically possible.
12. First educational innovation: literacy and early conditioning. Ellul then describes three post-1949 innovations in the educational side of propaganda. The first is the widening of classic propaganda methods through mass literacy, the circulation of newspapers and brochures, and the extension of ideological formation into childhood. Education begins very early, shaping reflexes and receptivity from the nursery onward. This enlarges the reach of propaganda because the state is no longer forced to rely only on oral transmission, meetings, and symbols. It can now combine those older forms with print, schooling, and the systematic conditioning of children. The result, in Ellul’s account, is a society in which propaganda penetrates every level of instruction.
13. Second innovation: managed discussion. The second innovation is the expansion of organized discussion through the formula “Unity-Criticism-Unity.” Ellul does not treat this as genuine deliberation. In his reading, discussion occurs only within a restricted circle of people who already share the essential premises of the regime. The leader begins from the assumption that truth is already known. Objections are encouraged not in order to discover truth collectively, but in order to wear down resistance, absorb dissent, and bring participants voluntarily to the officially correct conclusion. This is propaganda in dialogic form: it uses speech, criticism, and apparent openness as methods of alignment. Those who can be integrated are persuaded; those outside the circle are coerced or eliminated.
14. Third innovation: the “mold.” The third and most revealing innovation for Ellul is Mao’s theory of the mold, or remolding. Here propaganda becomes an explicitly repeated effort to shape every person according to an ideal model of the Socialist human being. Ellul contrasts this with Marx’s expectation that a new social order would gradually produce a new type of person and with Lenin’s more voluntarist but still less fixed notion of revolutionary formation. Mao, as Ellul reads him, posits a recognizable prototype to which people must be repeatedly fitted. Remolding is periodic, systematic, and universal; even committed Communists require it. The appendix stresses the existence of clear criteria for judging what counts as “good,” so that both behavior and conscience can be measured against doctrinal norms.
15. Encirclement as total social pressure. Ellul briefly returns to the notion of encirclement, which he treats elsewhere as a form of horizontal propaganda. The point here is that post-revolutionary propaganda no longer depends primarily on the army. Instead, the whole social environment becomes the propagandistic medium. Individuals are surrounded by institutions, expectations, discussions, education, rituals, and judgments that all point in the same direction. Propaganda is therefore most effective not when it appears as a single message, but when it becomes the atmosphere of social life. The army loses its privileged role because the regime itself has become a continuous mechanism of ideological enclosure.
16. Brainwashing: secondary but revealing. The appendix ends with Ellul’s discussion of “brainwashing,” which he treats as famous but secondary within Mao’s larger system. Its aim is not mere destruction of the enemy but retrieval and transformation. Ellul breaks the technique into stages: first, the prisoner is uprooted from his previous social world through isolation, uncertainty, humiliation, sleep and food deprivation, and the breakdown of normal temporal and spatial habits; second, he is subjected to unending repetition of slogans and accusations that weaken interior resistance; third, he is drawn into managed group discussion designed to produce doubt, guilt, and the desire for purification. At that point, explanations can replace disorientation, supplying both a personal justification for punishment and a total worldview that reinterprets history, society, and the self. The process culminates in self-criticism and active acceptance of the new line. Ellul nonetheless limits its importance: it is slow, personnel-intensive, applicable only to selected individuals, and often temporary unless the surrounding society reinforces the imposed worldview. The final note on French efforts in Algeria reinforces his larger point that these methods cannot simply be copied mechanically; without a compelling ideology and disciplined cadres, the system fails.
See also
- thymos — Ellul’s argument that propaganda answers the modern individual’s craving for dignity, recognition, and self-importance is a propaganda-theoretic account of the same thymic needs Fukuyama identifies as drivers of political instability.
- arendt — Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian propaganda in atomized mass societies runs parallel to Ellul’s, but Ellul extends the argument to democratic and commercial propaganda, where Arendt largely stops at the totalitarian case.
- tocqueville — Ellul’s portrait of the isolated individual in mass society — formally free, substantively defenseless — reprises Tocqueville’s account of democratic despotism through the lens of twentieth-century media technology.
- mcluhan — Ellul treats media as constitutive environments that reshape perception before any message is sent, an argument structurally close to McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” though Ellul is more politically severe.
- democraticerosion — Chapter V.4 is one of the strongest theoretical accounts of how propaganda corrodes democratic substance from within, producing citizens psychologically unfit for the regime they formally inhabit.
- han_psychopolitics_resumo — Han’s psychopolitics can be read as the neoliberal successor to Ellul’s integration propaganda: where Ellul describes conformity produced by mass media and state messaging, Han describes self-exploitation produced by digital platforms and achievement culture.