In today's discourse the term "propaganda" is often used to designate information manipulation and often serves to discredit unwanted arguments and opponent narratives. In general view propaganda is most often associated with authoritarian forms of rule, while its historical origins are placed in the time of first organized forms of human life.
Due to mentioned and other conceptual confusions and ahistorical generalizations, the subject of study will be focused on the historical understanding of the emergence of modern propaganda as a specific new scientific technique, which has to be analysed together with related phenomenons like mass society, social sciences, war principles of organizing society and media of mass communication in the beginning of the 20th century. The focus will be on understanding the fundamental features of this new technique with the help of those authors ( like E.L. Bernays, I. Lee, W. Lippmann, H. Lasswell, J. Goebbels), who formulated the first written apology and laid down the fundamentals for propaganda manipulation and legitimize its use as a universal technique for efficiently organizing and manipulating society. Students will read and discuss the historical context, the basic premises, definitions and theorems, which introduced and legitimized modern propaganda techniques and how they were developed as PR, "agenda setting", " opinion management "," engineering of consent ", etc.
This historical perspective will allow us to question some crucial aspects of this decisive phenomenon of our technical society: propaganda as anti-politics, the role of social sciences, public vs. media audience, behavior vs. political action, social engineering, technocracy...