Public Relations and Neoliberalism

Abstract

AbstractThis book is about public relations. But it is also about how an entire generation has learned to think, speak, and live within a market-driven neoliberal logic, using the distinctive language practices and vocabularies of “PR.” To chart this cultural shift, a detailed historical analysis of the little-known Mont Pèlerin Society and its followers in the twentieth century shows how the relationships that joined money, power, and an ideological agenda impelled a partnership with public relations that led to its wider propagation and proliferation in society. Today, these conditions not only determine what or whose voices are heard, but they form an iron grip on the public imagination, deafening the public to the cries of those marginalized individuals and groups entrapped by circumstance and subject to fear, vulnerability, and hardship, or to the science that is critical to the planet’s survival. The book focuses on two of the most pressing global issues of the present: climate change denial and the elision of the human rights of people seeking to become members of a nation-state through refugee status, political asylum, and immigration. Public debate determines politics, but all too often politics lags, or stumbles and falls, as the many voices jostling for attention in the contest of ideas become caught up in conflict and language games and fail to make any real mark at all. The distinctive language practices of public relations, organized around an all-encompassing, free-market-based view of the world, make this new reality happen in ways that are sometimes counterintuitive.