Necessary Illusions

hideThis article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for books. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (November 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) This article does not cite any sources. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (November 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

First edition
Author	Noam Chomsky
Publisher	South End Press, Pluto Press
Publication date	June 1989
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	422
ISBN	0-89608-366-7
OCLC	19457706
Dewey Decimal	302.2/3 19
LC Class	P95.8 .C48 1989

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies is a 1989 book by United States academic Noam Chomsky concerning political power using propaganda to distort and distract from major issues to maintain confusion and complicity, preventing real democracy from becoming effective. The title of this book borrows a phrase from the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Nearly the entire first half of the book is based on Chomsky's five 1988 Massey Lectures on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio from November 1988 and extends his and Edward S. Herman's propaganda model to a variety of new situations. The remaining appendices address criticisms of the work and provide additional detail.

As a genre of political thought, parallels exist between Niebuhr's "necessary illusions" and the "noble lies" of Plato and Leo Strauss, "public relations" of Edward Bernays and "myth making" of Niccolò Machiavelli. Likewise, Chomsky's analyses in Necessary Illusions represent a refocus on the use of these patterns of power, which he implies to underscore the failure of populations – particularly in a representative democracy – to learn from history in this regard.

See also[]

• John Taylor Gatto: The Underground History of American Education
• Adam Curtis: Century of the Self

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Necessary Illusions

This article about a book on the media is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

• v
• t