Bernays and group psychology

JUL 12 2017

An essay on Edward Bernays' debt to crowd psychology, and his conviction that the public's irrational drives could be organised by an unseen professional class. It sets out his own vocabulary - the engineering of consent, the deliberate creation of desire - and connects it to the campaigns that made him famous. Bernays' confidence in his own influence was itself a piece of self-promotion and should be read sceptically.