Comment by staticautomatic

Bernays' work is certainly important but I think the amount of credit he's typically given for the idea that propaganda could be wielded in peacetime is undeserved. That distinction really belongs to Walter Lippmann, who had begun formulating the idea 5-10 years earlier and articulating it in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), well before Propaganda (1928). Propaganda was really more of a formalization of something that was already understood to exist.