Throughout the political spectrum, successful arguments often rely on fear appeals, whether implicit or explicit. Dominant arguments prey on people's fears - of economic failure, cultural backwardness, or lack of personal safety. Counterarguments feed on other fears, suggesting that audiences are being duped by emotional smokescreens. With chapters on the political, institutional, and cultural manifestations of fear, this book offers diverse investigations into how insecurity and the search for certainty shape contemporary political economic decisions, and explores how the rhetorical manipulation of such fears illuminates a larger struggle for social control.

The study of propaganda's uses in modern democracy highlights important theoretical questions about normative rhetorical practices. Edited by Gae Lyn Henderson and M. J. Braun, Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy: History, Theory, Analysis advances our understanding of propaganda and rhetoric. Essays focus on historical figures, examining the development of the theory of propaganda during the rise of industrialism and the later changes of a mass-mediated society. Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy offers new perspectives on the history of propaganda, explores how it has evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and advances a much more nuanced understanding of what it means to call discourse propaganda.