Jason Stanley's book, How Propaganda Works, is a welcome and needed work in social and political philosophy. It creatively weaves political philosophy, social theory, analytic epistemology, feminism, philosophy of language, philosophy of education, formal semantics, and social psychology. The central goal of the book is to explain how propaganda works in a liberal democratic society. Propaganda exists in totalitarian regimes through the mechanisms of social control like the mass media. That is not surprising. But, does propaganda exist in the United States? The fact that propaganda exists in the United States is perhaps not novel; the novelty of Stanley's book is its philosophical explanation of the mechanism behind propaganda. Stanley does this with the rigor, clarity, and depth that you would expect from such a distinguished philosopher. In what follows, I will provide a brief description of the main arguments of each of seven chapters and offer several observations....
