Precis of How Propaganda Works

Abstract

The overarching goal of How Propaganda Works is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality. My aim was to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice. I do so by arguing that material inequality, like other forms of inequality, has pernicious epistemic effects. Inequality results in anti-democratic flawed ideologies, such as the ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology underlying the division of labor, the subjects of the last two chapters. Propaganda plays crucial roles both in preventing us from recognizing these epistemic harms, in the form of demagoguery, and in repairing them, in the form of civic rhetoric.