There are countless Propaganda courses, tutorials, articles available online, but for some, having a book is still a necessity to learn. This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
- Propaganda (2004)
- Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1973)
- Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian (2001)
- How Propaganda Works (2016)
- Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (2018)
- Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics) (2018)
- Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (2001)
- Propaganda Technique in the World War (2013)
- This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019)
- Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (1996)
Propaganda (2004)
“Bernays’ honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.”—Noam Chomsky“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1973)
From one of the greatest French philosophers of the 20th century, comes a seminal study and critique of propaganda. Taking not only a psychological approach, but a sociological approach as well, Ellul’s book outlines the taxonomy for propaganda, and ultimately, it’s destructive nature towards democracy.
Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian (2001)
Renowned interviewer David Barsamian showcases his unique access to Chomky’s thinking on a number of topics of contemporary and historical import. In an interview conducted after the important November 1999 “Battle in Seattle,” Chomsky discusses prospects for building a movement to challenge corporate domination of the media, the environment, and even our private lives.
How Propaganda Works (2016)
Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren’t problems for us―not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid.
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (2018)
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or “Fake news” entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality?
Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics) (2018)
Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam.
Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (2001)
Americans create 57% of the world’s advertising while representing only 6% of its population; half of our waking hours are spent immersed in the mass media.
Propaganda Technique in the World War (2013)
2013 Reprint of 1938 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) was a prominent scholar in the area of propaganda research. He focused on conducting both quantitative and qualitative analyses of propaganda, understanding the content of propaganda, and discovering the effect of propaganda on the mass audience. Lasswell is credited with creating the mass communication procedure of content analysis.
This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019)
We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We’ve lost not only our sense of peace and democracy – but our sense of what those words even mean.
Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (1996)
Science of Coercion provides the first thorough examination of the role of the CIA, the Pentagon, and other U.S. security agencies in the evolution of modern communication research, a field in the social sciences which crystallized into a distinct discipline in the early 1950s.
Best Propaganda Books Everyone Should Read
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some propaganda books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
Collected Works of Periyar E V R
Author(s): Periyar E V Ramasamy
ID: 2295761, Publisher: The Periyar Self Respect Propaganda Institution, Year: 9380826435, Size: 2 Mb, Format: pdf
This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
Author(s): Peter Pomerantsev
ID: 2438064, Publisher: Faber & Faber, Year: 30 July 2019, Size: 465 Kb, Format: epub
Edward Conze's The Psychology of Mass Propaganda
Author(s): Richard N. Levine, Nathan H. Levine
ID: 3680633, Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2023, Size: 23 Mb, Format: pdf
Please note that this booklist is not definite. Some books are absolutely chart-busters according to The New York Times, others are written by unknown authors. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant links you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.