Daniel Lerner

Daniel Lerner (born October 30, 1917 in Brooklyn , † May 1, 1980 in Santa Cruz , California) was an American propaganda researcher. He was a professor of sociology and a specialist in psychological warfare .

Life

Lerner's father was a Jewish emigrant from the Russian Empire . During World War II , Lerner was the chief editor of the SHAEF's Psychological Warfare Division . After the Allied victory in the ETO (European Theater of Operations), this unit was converted to the Information Control Division of OMGUS and Lerner became Chief of Intelligence . In 1946 he left the military and returned to New York University to do a doctorate.

From his own experience, German and Allied propaganda material and surveys of prisoners of war and former PWD colleagues, he wrote his dissertation (“Sykewar”) in 1945, which is a standard work on the type and effect of Allied propaganda in World War II. On two trips through Europe in 1946/47, on behalf of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, he added to the German propaganda archive he had collected during the war (today: Lerner (Daniel) Collection ).

In 1953 Lerner moved to MIT in Cambridge. In 1958 he became Ford Professor of Sociology and International Communications at the Center for International Studies (CIS) there . He taught at various universities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East at times.

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During the Cold War, Lerner drafted a development policy concept for the Third World as an alternative to Soviet socialism . According to this, unlike in the “modernization theory” of his institute colleague Walt Whitman Rostow , less industrial progress (hardware material) would be the basis for “modifying the predisposition of third world individuals in the direction of western development”, but rather psychological barriers and unwillingness to adapt new behaviors ("software problems").

Furthermore, contrary to the widespread belief that the rise of revolutionary elites was caused by capitalism and its problems, he considered this rise to be a consequence of the collapse of monarchies, dictatorships or colonial regimes in the respective countries.

Most of Lerner's research, which took place between 1950 and 1969, was funded by MIT. His job was to review the effectiveness and efficiency of American propaganda and politics, such as Voice of America in comparison to other radio stations, which were paid for by the State Department during the heyday of the Cold War .

Later development policy and communication researchers criticized Lerner's ideas of Western dominance and ethnocentrism, which he himself saw as “new, left anti-American propaganda”, as “unscientific and atheoretical”.

Awards

• Bronze star
• Purple heart

Works

As an author

• Sykewar. Psychological Warfare against Germany, from D-Day to VE-Day . George W. Smart, New York 1949 (together with Richard Crossman ; partly online ).
• The Nazi Elite . Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. 1951 (with an introduction by Franz L. Neumann).
• The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East . 4th ed. Free Press, New York 1967 (EA New York 1958).
• World Revolutionary Elites. Studies in Coercive Ideological Movements . 2nd ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, Masas. 1965 (with Harold Dwight Lasswell ).
• Paper bullets. Great Propaganda Posters, Axis and Allied Countries in WWII . Chelsea House, New York 1977, ISBN 0-87754-048-9 .

As editor

• World revolution elites. Studies in coercive ideological movements . Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 1980, ISBN 0-313-22572-9 .
• The human meaning of the socal science . Meridian Books, New York 1960.
• France defeats EDC . Praeger, New York 1957.
• Values ​​and development. Appraising Asian experience . MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1976, ISBN 0-262-12074-7 .

literature

• Hubert Neuhäuser: On the problem and analysis of social modernization. A comparative study of some of Daniel Lerner's and Paolo Freire's approaches . Studienverlag Brockmeyer, Bochum 1981, ISBN 3-88339-184-0 (also dissertation, University of Bochum 1979).
• Sven Papcke and Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff (eds.): Key works of sociology . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2001, p. 267, ISBN 3-531-13235-0 ( Google book search ).
• Hemant Shah: The production of modernization. Daniel Lerner, mass media, and the passing of traditional society . University Press, Philadelphia 2011, ISBN 978-1-439-90624-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Daniel Lerner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Daniel Lerner in the bibliographic database WorldCat