
How Think Tanks Became Engines of Royal Propaganda - pepys
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/222421/think-tanks-jacob-soll-propaganda
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pipio21
The article does not make sense.

Propaganda comes from the Church and means "Spreading the news", basically
what Jesus told disciples to do. The meaning later changed to spreading
partial information with the objective of controlling the masses.

The real propaganda comes from mass media, so it really starts with Gutenberg
press, but it gets really powerful with the invention of the offset printing
method.

Before that, it was just the law of the strongest, if you were against the
king or Emperor, Ceasar, khan or the Senate, they will simply kill you, people
spent most of the time working because life was extremely hard. No much
propaganda as we know it.

Scientists being propaganda? Give me a break! After french
revolution(revolutionaries were the first to identify the mass of the people
as powerful, before that they were nobodies), all the scientific institutions
in France were closed for being Royalist.

This actually meant France to lag in scientific matters against England, even
when it was France who started it.

American think tanks have nothing to do with this as they come from
industrialists, that did not even exist in Europe at the time of the Royal
institutions.

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vic-traill
I am not a historian, and as such I found this to be an interesting review of
the arc of the relationship between patron and scholar, the evolution of the
latter into what we now call an expert and an attendant change of scholarship
into patron-directed propaganda.

Which isn't surprising, I suppose. You couldn't eat scholarship, so one was
certainly beholden to one's patron.

But it's more nuanced than the personal relationship; sociologically over time
institutions develop out of these relationships with complex motivations and
histories. Out of good things more nebulous structures may evolve, over time.

A good grist-for-the-mill read, I thought.

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cowardlydragon
Didn't even read the article:

.... because the Royals were paying their salaries?

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visakanv
Read the article, and you're right.

