Dead Men’s Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies, reviewed by Sue Curry Jansen

as well as frequently overlooked figures like Paul Kecskemeti and Nathan Leites and their contemporaries: the "dead men" who made contributions to the comparative study of communication from the 1920s until mass communication emerged as an independent academic discipline in the United States in the 1950s.They were sociologists, political scientists, journalists, policy scientists.Some of them were migr European scholars displaced by the political upheavals of the century of total war.They were variously affiliated with universities, government, private foundations, and the RAND Corporation: most were involved in propaganda analysis.Rantanen refers to them as "the forefront generation" (ix).However, she points out that they "did not only research propaganda, they were also propagandists" (x): their propaganda served the