Historians have always revelled in Elizabeth as perhaps the first monarch who set out to be loved by her people and who saw how such affection was politic. The nearer we come to our own time, the more admiring analysis we find of the skills she brought to this game. We find ourselves recognising them as tricks and techniques we have made into an important trade. And we also find that Elizabeth, as a Renaissance figure, was – in her very modernity – reaching back to classical skills from the inauguration of her reign to its end.

In 1558, as Queen Mary I lay dying in her bed, Philip II of Spain, Mary’s husband, sent his ambassador to consult with Elizabeth. Count de Feria reminded the queen-in-waiting that she would owe her throne to the king of Spain. His case was strong. Since Philip’s marriage to Mary in 1554 he had protected Elizabeth from the Queen’s wrath. It was Philip who finally persuaded his wife to recognise Elizabeth as her rightful successor.

Elizabeth replied that neither the king of Spain nor the nobility of England had paved the way for her reign. That honour, she said, went to her popularity among the English people. Feria wrote to his master, “She is much attached to the people… and is very confident that they are all on her side; which is indeed true”. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 54, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The rebuke Elizabeth gave Feria took guts. As Elizabeth waited for Mary I to die, her future was far from assured. She faced a sea of existentially threatening reputational issues that threatened to delegitimise her reign.

Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn who was executed for treason, adultery and incest. Officially her mother was decreed never to have married Henry VIII; though that made an absurdity of the adultery allegation. In the reign of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son and successor, Elizabeth was accused of having sexual relations with Thomas Seymour, her stepmother’s husband and the old king’s sixth wife (such a dalliance was taboo in both religions). Seymour was executed in 1549 for treasonable activities that seemingly had Elizabeth’s assent and perhaps even her active participation. After Edward VI died young in 1553, Mary I reintroduced Catholicism to England and, on good evidence, suspected Elizabeth of being complicit in a Protestant rebellion bent on deposing her. In response Mary I had Elizabeth sent to the Tower of London. She was made to enter via Traitors’ Gate, which traditionally meant that an execution was imminent. Even though Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, was persuaded to release Elizabeth, she still regarded her half-sister as a bastard child of an infamous woman. As Elizabeth waited to become Queen, neither the Catholic nor Protestant church recognized the legitimacy of her birth. Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne was also arguably more credible than Elizabeth’s (see part 1).

Meanwhile, England was a relatively poor and weak European power. Its economy was struggling; its army and navy were in a pitiful state and no match for the might of Spain or France.

Princess Elizabeth circa. 1546

So, when Elizabeth became Queen of England at the age of 25, her authority and legitimacy were questionable. Her realm was in danger of being overwhelmed by foreign foes.

Elizabeth I and her Privy Council advisers, not least the great Sir William Cecil and formidable Lord Walsingham, were well prepared to meet the challenges they inherited. They had all spent years reading Renaissance literature that revealed the anatomy of the rhetorical arts and the secrets of persuasion. In particular, they had been taught to wrap compelling narratives in the convenience of symbolic metaphors-in-motion, otherwise known as allegories, which appealed to diverse audiences for conflicting reasons. They now had the opportunity to use that knowledge to add world-changing spark, spice and substance to religious and political expression.

Their Elizabethan Renaissance was the age of emblems, symbols and celebrity. The fashion in England was to weave iconographical and allegorical representations of perceived truths and morals into the fabric of sermons, paintings, proclamations, pamphlets, poetry, pageants and other spectacles.

As Roy Strong explains in The Spirit of Britain, some of the images were kept obscure on purpose. The fashion was to produce coats of arms with pompous Latin mottos, fancy wax seals and abstract patterns in paintings and on clothes that carried hidden meanings, which looked and sounded medieval but were in fact of modern origin. Only the most educated members of elite society understood their messages. This obliqueness was a form of self-expression. It was the pursuit of the wealthy, which had a nostalgic and romantic attachment to the old feudal etiquette and styles. For instance, men loved to dress up as knights even though that position in society had been abolished.

In whatever form ideas were spread, the aim was to paint images in people’s imaginations. However, what concerns us more here is communication that reached out to the wider public.

Over the course of Elizabeth I’s reign she developed a compelling narrative theme that was updated regularly. Carefully managed public events were written up in pamphlets which were distributed nationwide. The narrative was then spread to a much larger audience by word of mouth. Above all, the retelling was staged managed literally at the theatre, which, with audiences often as large as 3000, was the major mass medium of the era:

Rather than use the Church as a communications channel to effect public persuasion, a path that might possibly have brought about open rebellion, Elizabeth turned to the Stage. Although this was by no means an open policy, that she did so has been attested to repeatedly by diplomats, intelligence agents, and educated contemporary observers. [Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Traders in business and aristocrats on estates and people on the street then discussed what they had heard and seen. It was also mulled over by members of all classes sharing a drink in England’s taverns.

Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569

The objective of Elizabethan image-makers was to compose allegories that got people talking about what was being communicated. Hence allegories designed for mass consumption required people to be able to interpret accurately what was being represented:

…the mentality which now turns to the comparative triviality of the crossword puzzle, then pondered on the sophisticated riddles of the emblems and impress.  [Shakespeare in His Own Age, Allardyce Nicoll, page 181, Cambridge University Press, 1976]

Deciphering and pondering these abstractions on a mass scale required a more literate and politically engaged public. This was something Elizabethan England positively encouraged. However, this social advancement had unintended consequences. As Roy Strong hints at here:

In this manner the visual arts were verbalised, turned into a form of book, a ‘text’ which called for reading by the onlooker. There are no better examples of this than the quite extraordinary portraits of the queen herself, which increasingly, as the reign progressed, took on the form of collections of abstract pattern and symbols disposed in an unnaturalistic manner for the viewer to unravel, and by doing so enter into an inner vision of the idea of monarchy. [The Spirit of Britain, Roy Strong, page 177, Pimlico, 2000]

Ironically, then, allegories designed to be easily understood by a broad audience risked being maliciously and humorously misrepresented. For example, J E Neale tells us in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how “drunken Burley of Totnes” regaled his neighbours with stories about how Lord Robert “did swive” the virgin Queen [page 80]. Shakespeare had the queen of the fairies, which was an allusion to Elizabeth, sleep with an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1601, on the eve of his armed rebellion, the Earl of Essex sponsored a public performance of Richard II in the forlorn hope that its storyline would incite London’s masses to join him. Essex and his followers were seduced by the play’s account of Henry Bolingbroke (Essex saw himself) overthrowing Richard II (he saw Elizabeth I) who had abdicated too many of his powers to court advisors (he saw Cecil and Raleigh).

Elizabeth’s successor James I, the first of the Stuarts, continued to communicate through allegories and to encourage the arts. But there was a feeling that the education of the masses had gone too far under the old regime. The Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon told James that he should reduce the number of schools teaching grammar because there was no point producing more scholars than the state could employ. He added that by educating farmers and artisans the realm had become full with “indigent, idle and wanton people, which are but materia rerum novarum [substance of new things]”.

Sadly, toward the end of James I’s mostly peaceful, tolerant and prosperous reign he articulated the old maxim of the divine right of kings. His successor Charles I lost his head defending that right and became an iconic victim of a 16th-17th-century power struggle that encompassed most of Europe .

Sections of Europe’s public, particularly the merchant classes, developed an increasingly distinct identity that was expressed assertively in political and religious matters. New printing presses and better communication links also ensured that new and dissident ideas spread over great distances at great speed. The ruling elites soon discovered, too late in Charles I’s case, that they could not, as they had in times past, easily ignore or silence their opponents.

The Reformation was a public inquisition on the meaning and value of familiar symbols, beliefs and practices that challenged the old elite’s privileges and prejudices. The new ways that dissidents advocated were for many ideas worth dying for, let alone arguing for. At the heart of it was a fundamental dispute about the relationship between religion and politics; it was a test of power between competing factions within society.

People on one side questioned the validity of the old order. They saw God’s word in a new light. On the other, the forces of the counter-Reformation for the salvation of souls defended the old ways. Somewhere in the middle were the humanists who became the catalyst for the creation of a new secular world order. The three tendencies intertwined, but they were really at constant loggerheads in terms of argument, doctrine and the future of society.

Throughout Europe these differences were debated in print and in the pulpits. However the divisions expressed ran much deeper than just a Catholic versus Protestant schism. They also pitted Catholic against Catholic and different Protestant tendencies against each other and monarchists against republicans and vice versa.

For instance, Cervantes pokes fun at the Spanish Inquisition, the church and monks in Don Quixote (1605 – 1615), revealing how the old order in Spain was being undermined from within. The Dutch Catholic humanist Desiderius Erasmus was one of many who delivered a radical, and at times hilarious, critique of his own church’s ecclesiastical abuses: “Luther was guilty of two great crimes – he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly”.

Whichever side people took, the ancient world’s rediscovered wisdom and the contemporary humanists who promulgated it influenced how they expressed their own ideas.

To its credit, since the early-15th-Century the Catholic hierarchy in Rome had been funding humanist writers to develop Ciceronianism, the literary movement of the Renaissance. It first encouraged the translation of Greek and Rome classics and the construction of a library in Rome devoted to humanist thought. It then hired humanists to overhaul the church’s Latin communications and to give its sermons more verve. Amazingly, in 1458 it elected the humanist Pius II Pope. He had a reputation as a Casanova (he had two illegitimate children), diplomat and belletrist. He courageously wrote about his life in the style of Cicero in his tell-all Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a wearer of the Papal tiara. Among many salacious revelations, the book describes how he was invited to an orgy in Britain, and how his election as Pope was rigged by a group of cardinals conspiring in the urinals. Subsequent popes may not have been inclined toward humanism in quite the same manner as Pius II, but they continued to make full use of its insights and practitioners. For instance, in the 1520s the Church used Cicero-style polemics to combat Martin Luther’s doctrines; one of which, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, was written by the English Catholic humanist Thomas More.

So by the time Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, the Catholic Church had already spent more than 100 years acquiring a modern voice. It was capable of using rhetoric and humanist writers to produce eloquent arguments in robust pamphlets, proclamations, speeches, broadsides, treatises and invectives designed to rouse people’s spirits and influence their opinions.

Indeed, as early as 1568 the Catholic Church was training secular youth in the Netherlands to oppose English Protestantism. In 1580 a year-old school in Rome sent the first Jesuit missionaries to England to reclaim the land for Catholicism.

Almost twenty years after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Pope Gregory XV consolidated these efforts in his Congregation of Propaganda Fide.

Elizabethan England was, however, more than a match for the Pope’s PR machine. The Queen herself was a great communicator. While her closest advisers Sir William Cecil and Lord Walsingham were the world’s first modern spindoctors and arguably the best to have ever practiced the art. She also had the support of William Shakespeare. He is thought to have worked for a company of actors and playwrights known as Queen’s Men and later The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which produced patriotic propaganda for the masses. In her 1947 book, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, the American intellectual Lily Campbell states that:

Each of the Shakespeare histories serves a special purpose in elucidating a political problem of Elizabeth’s day and in bringing to bear upon this problem the accepted political philosophy of the Tudors. [Quoted in Gary B. Goldstein's Did Queen Elizabeth use the theater for social and political propaganda?, 2004]

Moreover, there was Edmund Spenser, who wrote the allegorical poem Faerie Queene in Elizabeth’s honour. It proved to be a potent piece of nationalistic propaganda:

Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine,
Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine,
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile,
To thinke of that true glorious type of thine (full text here)

Elizabeth I: The Pelican Portrait - an allegory of her selfless love

Elizabeth and her inner-circle were visionaries. Their advantage over both their contemporaries and near successors was their understanding that feudal society’s mores and morals and all forms of immutable religious faith no longer provided sufficient glue to maintain stability. Tyranny was also of limited appeal to them, though not without its uses, given the rise of powerful new social forces capable of asserting their will. Instead, they accepted that the monarchy’s long-term survival meant letting go of some aspects of their control over society. They saw the need to relax somewhat their hold on people’s religious beliefs and practices. They conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that they no longer had a proper monopoly over debate and the dissemination of ideas within their realm. Though censorship remained a frontline weapon wielded with zeal.

Rising to the challenge of recasting her reputation, Elizabeth’s communication strategy was brilliantly formulated to redefine her ambiguities as strengths. Her intention was to make cognitive dissonance work for her.

Elizabeth I took the facts of her position and decisions and made sure that their merit was made glamorous and comprehensible. She made sure that her behaviour was seen (accurately, actually) to be the epitome of statecraft for her people. Everything was tweaked and honed to unite a wide range of audiences who might otherwise threaten her rule.

The first narrative salvo was fired during Elizabeth’s pre-coronation pageants before she’d had a chance to achieve anything. It was a bold and inspired example of Renaissance creativity in practice. Her confidence in her narrative reflected the ancient world’s humanist mantra that people could establish themselves in the esteem of an audience through eloquent words and telling images.

Elizabeth I’s pre-coronation pageants were a mixture of pomp, ceremony and unceremoniousness. It was very much a charm offensive that showcased her trademark touchy feely PR style. But there was more.

As Elizabeth was wheeled through London’s streets she insisted on stopping to talk to passersby. She also replied to the scriptwriters’ themes and interacted with the performances of the actors at the various pageants. As Professor Dale Hoak maintains, this effectively turned the procession into a conversation between the queen and her people:

…something Richard Mulcaster, the ‘reporter’ [he wrote the defining account of the event within a week of it] who helped script the pageants realized was unprecedented. [The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, The Transformation of the Tudor Monarchy, Dale Hoak, which can found in Westminster Abbey Reformed: 1540 - 1640, by C S Knighton and Richard Mortimer, page 135, Ashgate, 2003]

Elizabeth encouraged what Mulcaster described as “baser personages” to converse with her in private. They would handover flowers or express their goodwill, while she “staid her chariot, and heard theyr requestes”. According to J E Neale’s biography of Queen Elizabeth I this seemingly unbecoming behaviour from a monarch shocked the envoy from the Italian city of Mantua, who recorded that, “she exceeded the bounds of gravity and decorum” [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 63, The Reprint Society, 1942].

Ditchley Portrait highlighting her divine powers

Hoak says that Elizabeth I was the first English monarch to exploit the psychological possibilities of a coronation’s spectacle. Her proactive approach demonstrated that she valued her subjects’ opinions and their support. Her behaviour at the pageants communicated that she was their servant as well as their Queen. The seeming unity on the streets of aristocratic courtiers, London magistrates, merchants and artisans signified that the bonds linking the monarch to her people were reciprocal. It conveyed the impression that the bond she had with her people transcended social and official status and that she considered other classes to be level with the nobles in importance. Back then no other kingdom in Europe would have positioned their monarch’s relationship to their people at their coronation in such a populist manner.

Much of Hoak’s information comes from Richard Mulcaster’s account of the pageants in The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London To Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion. Mulcaster’s pamphlet, like the pageants he partly drafted, was paid for by London’s commercial elite; but the narratives and allegories of the pre-coronation pageants were most likely the co-creation of wealthy aldermen, Elizabeth and her advisers.

Mulcaster’s text provides some insights into the anxieties surrounding Elizabeth’s coronation. Describing the scene of London’s aldermen handing her one thousand marks in gold, Mulcaster records the exchange of words between Randolph Cholmley, London’s Recorder, and Elizabeth. Cholmley reportedly tells her to “mynd” [the purpose] of the gift. When Elizabeth accepts the money, from the people upon whose tax contribution her state depended, she replies, “no wille in me can lacke.” She adds, “neither doe I trust shall ther lacke any power”. And to drive home her message, she says, “for the safetie and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if nede be to spend my blood”. As Susan Frye assesses:

For just a moment, Elizabeth’s response breaks out of the mould of gracious obedience to make sure of the bargain: I will perform my part, but you must support my sovereignty. [Elizabeth I The Competition for Representation, page 42, Oxford University Press, 1993]

Frye is being astute. Elizabeth I was not yet secure. At the same moment as she celebrated her accession she was negotiating, if only symbolically, with her people about the terms of her rule. The pageants were helping the Queen to gauge public opinion as much as to influence it.

Our concern here is her PR messaging, rather than the events themselves. So let’s review in some more detail the narrative that emerged from her five pre-coronation pageants and from her first post-coronation speech.

Elizabeth I was painted in the mind’s eye as a “queen with the heart of a king”. She was presented as being very much her father’s daughter. This was an image that served her well thirty years later when she rallied her troops to resist the Spanish Armada:

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. [1588: Speech to the Troops at Tilbury]

Indeed, Elizabeth’s rhetoric in 1588 was consistent with how she presented herself in 1558. J E Neale writes in his biography of Queen Elizabeth how Spain’s ambassador Count Feria noted at the beginning of her reign that she longed “to do some act that would make her fame spread abroad in her lifetime, and, after occasion memorial for ever” [page 67]. Her messaging always reflected this aspiration.

Elizabeth I: The sieve is a symbol of chastity and purity

At the pre-coronation pageants Elizabeth made a virtue of being the product of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the woman blamed for the social turmoil after the break with Rome. She glossed over how her father had denied the legitimacy of her own birth in his will and Second Act of Succession. She instead blamed the problems of her society under the Tudors, not on the Tudors, but on the consequences of the War of Roses, which ended in 1485. The positive messages here were that she was a Tudor and a bringer of unity and concord, the unifier of the two warring houses of Lancaster and York. She was committed to maintaining the peace and that above all was what people wanted to hear.

The pageants’ allegories drew extensively on familiar themes from the Old Testament. Elizabeth explained her escape from the Tower of London, where they kept lions, as if she had had the same God-given help as Daniel when he miraculously escaped Nebuchadnezzar’s lions. The message was communicated by her in a prayer (women didn’t normally lead prayers in public so this was significant). She implied that God had saved her from the Tower so she could become Queen.

Elizabeth also portrayed herself as the new Deborah; a Hebrew goddess, female judge and military leader who rid the land of Canannite idolatry (a clear allusion to Catholicism) and restored good governance to Israel (a dig at Mary I). The allegory made great play of how she would consult the estates of England for the good of her citizens, the same way that the Old Testament in chapters 4 and 5 of Book of Judges said Deborah had.

For the consumption of the educated classes Elizabeth’s character was endowed with mythological qualities associated with the three Roman vestal virgins: Minerva, Vesta and Diana. She was compared most favourably to the goddess Diana, acclaimed for her light, inaccessibility, virginity, sovereignty, supremacy and impassibility.

At the pageant at Temple Bar she was proclaimed as the modern embodiment of two mythological giants, Gogmagot the Albion and Corineus the Britain. This allusion to English folkloric tales linked her spirit and lineage with the mystical founding fathers of England. It also had the benefit of invoking the images of well-known Old Testament characters of almost the same names – see here & here. Such allusions were designed to touch and provoke potent nationalistic and Biblical sentiments that reached out to everybody.

At the pageant Truth, the Daughter of Time, Elizabeth was heard to say “and Time hath brought me hither.” The pageant was:

…set in the form of two hills. One was green and beautiful, and on the summit was a handsome youth, gay in dress and spirits, standing under a green laurel tree: this represented a flourishing commonwealth [Respublica bene instituta]. The other all withered and dead, and a youth in rude apparel sat mournfully under an arid tree: this was the decayed commonwealth [Ruinosa Respublica]. Between was a cave from which Time emerged, leading her daughter Truth who carried and English Bible in hand. [Queen Elizabeth by J E Neale, pages 61/62, The Reprint Society, 1942]

The message had a double edge. The City was expressing what it wanted from her, which was Protestantism. She responded by implying with her actions and words that she was on their side. Elizabeth seemingly confirmed her role as the personification of the Truth by kissing the English Bible and then theatrically holding it aloft before hugging it to her bosom. Afterward she thanked the City for giving her the book. She said with God’s help she would oversee the renewed glory of the commonwealth after Mary’s rule had allowed it to wane. She was going to stamp out vices, which the audience took to be Catholicism, and uphold virtues, which they took to be Protestantism. The crowd cheered; though at the time it was unclear just what plans Elizabeth had in mind for the future of her realm.

The second salvo was fired several weeks after her coronation. Elizabeth I’s maiden speech to Parliament and her Privy council, read for her by Sir John Mason, declared that from now on she stood free from any reputation that had dogged her in times past or present (one assumes she meant before the pre-coronation pageants). Then, addressing the male audience on the sensitive topic of her gender and her marriage intentions, she said:

…albeit it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage, yet it is not to be feared but He will so work in my heart and in your wisdom as good provision by his help may be made in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir. That may be a fit governor, and peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me. For although I be never so careful of your well doings and mind ever so to be, yet may my issue grow out of kind and become perhaps ungracious. And in the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

Elizabeth Coronation portrait

It was a bold position to take. She had declared openly that she was minded not to marry; previously that option had been regarded as unthinkable. But marriage was not out of the question either. Creating this elbowroom was important. It was used as tool of her diplomacy. Beginning with proffering a maybe to marry Philip II, she went on to feign her intention to marry numerous suitors from states whose neutrality she required for a while.

The allegory of the Virgin Queen and Mother of England contained the overarching narrative of Elizabeth’s reign. God had preserved her so she could be wedded to her people. This way she took the judgement of her reputation out of the hands of man and placed it in the higher authority of God. This positioned her almost on the same level as the most elevated female from the New Testament: the Virgin Mary. Of course Catholics worshiped the Virgin Mary’s icon, but that was a practice now frowned upon in Protestant England. Instead, Elizabeth was portrayed as the sacred one, the deliverer of England’s people to a better world. This nationalist sentiment resonated with both England’s Protestants and Catholics.

The appropriation of this familiar theme for a new purpose and person was a stroke of brilliance.

It took the heat out of the thorny problem of finding an heir to throne that had bedevilled the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I. It allowed her to escape the constraints of traditional female virtue that positioned good women as passive creatures. As Susan Frye says in Elizabeth I, The Competition for Representation, the image of the Virgin Queen portrayed her instead as being free from the confines of marriage and male dominance; she had no husband, father, brother or other male relatives to obey. This was, therefore, a power play.

This clever use of the art of rhetoric persuaded the public, and not least elite society, to alter their perception of what to expect from Elizabeth as a woman and monarch. It provided Elizabeth with the necessary consent to play the man’s role in society as England’s legitimate Queen. Yet Elizabeth’s greatest PR masterstroke was not this, but it was the way in which she was able to unite and motivate her people.

One of the major issues she confronted was filling the vacuum at the heart of English communal life in the wake of the demise of overt Catholicism. Austere Puritans and pious parsons positively discouraged much of the seasonal fun and frolics the old religion had once encouraged in village life. In response, Elizabeth once again revealed her conservative instincts by getting her branding gurus to redefine past practices to serve contemporary purposes.

In 1586 William Warner published his popular poem Albion’s England, which set out a romantic vision of English traditions. It even eulogised the legend of Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws living in Sherwood Forest:

As Paske [Easter] began our Morrisse, and ere Penticost our May, Tho Robin Hood, Liell John, Frier Tuck, and Marian deftly play, And Lord and ladie gang till Kirke with Lads and Lasses gay. [Quoted in Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment, François Laroque, page 336, Cambridge University Press, 1991]

Warner implied with wit that Catholic and older pagan irreverent festivities were part of a patriotic culture that celebrated England’s glorious past, which supposedly began with Noah’s flood. Albion’s England met with some ecclesiastical resistance. However because the poem was passed by the censors it gave courage and support to those wanting to restore May Day, Whitsun and summer fun to the parishes and greens of England’s towns and villages.

As I outlined in part 1, Elizabeth I had a great understanding of contemporary realities. There was substance, policies, inspired leadership and a great grasp of ambiguity behind everything Elizabeth did. Above all, we should note that Elizabeth I was her own agency for change (she was not at the mercy of fate). She redefined Renaissance England according to her will and what was possible.

While Elizabeth clearly admired Cicero for his eloquence and insight into how to communicate effectively, she was just as influenced by his views on the principles governing the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Throughout her reign she showed a commitment to the Ciceronian maxim: Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex; the welfare of the people is the ultimate law. She even, for example, created the basis for the world’s first welfare state by introducing the Poor Law, which took a compassionate view of the state’s responsibility to alleviate poverty, in 1601.

English Renaissance communication techniques might appear primitive to us, perhaps. But let’s not forget what Daniel Boorstin says in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. He maintains that today’s PR, marketing and advertising executives are “simply the acolytes of the image”. He suggests that modern image-makers obscure the origin of content so that form takes on new meaning, in much the same way that Elizabeth I did. (I shall review the views of Boorstin in the second half of On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game).

Overall, Elizabeth’s positioning, messaging and policies were ahead of their time. From her cautious beginning she wrapped romance, war, progress and a new national identity in an evolving and compelling meta-narrative. Roy Strong summarizes the uniqueness of her PR achievement well:

Never before had so many lay people been drawn into the creation of a new national identity, one in which the arts were seen to play a crucial role. Even then nothing could have quite prepared anyone for the explosive energy of creation which followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. [The Spirit of Britain, by Roy Strong, page 174]

By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, she had inspired and united a kingdom previously murderously divided by two major religions of almost equal weight.

Out of the Elizabethan era came English nationalism, a new mercantile spirit, English colonialism and a cultural revolution. But from a PR perspective there was something even more significant and lasting to celebrate.

Elizabeth I’s near-separation of politics from religion defined a new space outside of public life, which was its modern counterpart: the private sphere.

What more should it take to become a PR icon than that?

Related posts:

1. Queen Elizabeth I: PR Icon (part 1)

Elizabeth I was a wonderful ruler, of course. She is worth a close look as a communicator because she became a world leader not least by canny manipulation of the media available to her. Using persuasion in preference to coercion, she took a weak position and made herself strong; she made sure people understood that she served a wide interest, not herself; she deployed glamour and argument to keep her people in line. She also had a perfect command of ambiguity. What modern PR and leader wouldn’t like that record?

Her father Henry VIII knew a thing or two about image making, but Elizabeth I was the first European monarch really to rely on rhetoric rather than brute force. From the outset she acknowledged that public opinion mattered most of all to the success of her reign. She also understood what few other leaders did. That was how to exploit Greek and Roman classical thinking and practice to shape the contemporary world. She was the monarch the humanist northern Renaissance created and had been waiting for.

Elizabeth I’s classical education provided her with an intellectual’s familiarity with philosophy, a ruler’s insight into political intrigue, and a poet’s way with words. She had the confidence to negotiate with world leaders and their ambassadors in person in English, French, Latin, Spanish and Italian. There was something more: to put it bluntly, her advisers, and foreign ambassadors, found it hard to bullshit this master of bullshitting.

She grasped that while messages mattered more than muscle, they had to be transmitted by innovative means if they were to connect with her subjects.

Elizabeth I knew how to use compelling public spectacles in London and in the provinces for PR purposes. She introduced the English to celebrity culture. She cultivated glamour at her court. It was her means of controlling squabbling courtiers who jostled to become and stay one of her favourites. The relatively new-fangled printing presses reproduced her speeches and proclamations for distribution by preachers and mayors, which went on sale in pamphlet form within weeks of major events.

Under Elizabeth I there was an expansion of literacy. Famously, her reign produced the genius of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene in her honour. The period’s explosion of professional playwrights, actors and theatre companies is described by Roy Strong in his delightful The Spirit of Britain, A Narrative History of The Arts, thus:

The Elizabethan drama was an astonishing and unique phenomenon equal in every way, and indeed exceeding in artistic achievement, all other aspects of that great cultural renaissance which occurred during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and which was to stretch over into the first decade of the reign of James I who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603. That it happened at all was due to a quite exceptional set of circumstances, the foundation stone of which was the Renaissance recasting of the role of man as a being who had the ability to choose and fashion his own destiny. [The Spirit of Britain, A Narrative History of The Arts, Roy Strong, pages 203/204, Pimlico, 2000]

Roy Strong adds that Elizabeth I led a cultural revolution. She defined the majesty of her reign in drama and imagery which even today is instantly recognisable as Elizabethan. Her taste in painting favoured distinctive styles, particularly in portraits and miniatures by the likes of Nicholas Hilliard. When it came to fashion she loved to see flamboyant clothes at court, and she encouraged symmetrical but ornate architecture that transformed the look and feel of England.

Elizabeth’s cultural revolution encompassed political and spiritual matters. In a departure from past practice, she put ambiguity at the heart of her policymaking on the most contentious and divisive issue of the day: religion. In the process, she founded new traditions, new rituals and a new identity for England.

But at the start of her reign Elizabeth I’s grip on power was far from assured. She could not even count unconditionally on Protestants. The example of Mary I’s reign seemed to prove Henry VIII’s warning that a queen would either have to marry at home or abroad. If she married abroad she opened the realm to foreign control, and if she married at home the result would most likely be civil war between rival factions.

Mary I did indeed subject England to foreign influence through her unpopular marriage to Philip II of Spain. She also created social instability at home by burning at the stake 300 Protestants and by restoring Catholicism. Not least she alienated London’s wealthy aldermen, Guilds and merchant adventurers who were largely Protestant (Catholics lived mostly in the north of England).

Moreover both of England’s major religions shared a fear of the “monstrous regiment of women” (regiment here means regime). This phrase was conjured in a tract published anonymously in Geneva by John Knox, the Scottish leader of the Reformation and a former religious adviser to Edward VI. It was released just a few months before the death of Mary I. In it he ranted:

To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature; contumely [an insult] to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice. [The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, by John Knox, 1558]

After Mary I died the Catholics had the same woman trouble. Their champion to displace Elizabeth I was Mary Queen of Scots. She was also perceived as being an impatient, innately weak and foolish woman who in common with her entire sex was capable, in John Knox’s words, of acting as ”neither speaker nor advocate for others”.

Today’s female PRs can thank Elizabeth I for driving a coach and horses through that misogynistic myth.

Elizabeth I not only worried about the powerful pro-Catholic lobby at home. She also knew that if she provoked the Pope he would back Mary Queen of Scots, Catholic great granddaughter of Henry VII, who arguably had a stronger claim to the throne of England than she did:

If the succession to the throne had gone by mere heredity, then strictly speaking Mary was the nearest heir, for not only was Elizabeth illegitimate by Catholic Canon Law, but, until Parliament could meet, she was also illegitimate by English law. The danger was no airy, merely speculative one. Mary’s father-in-law, the King of France, might quite well induce the Pope to declare against Elizabeth in favour of Mary, or even depose her and commit the fulfilment of his sentence to French arms. Provided, however, that Elizabeth made no open move against Catholicism, then she could count on Philip II [king of Spain] exerting his powerful influence in her favour at Rome. Good Catholic though he was, the last thing that Philip could tolerate was a French conquest of England. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, pages 56/57, The Reprint Society London, 1942]

The PR challenge for Elizabeth I, then, was to convince the world – Protestant and Catholic – that they should accept her as a legitimate ruler. J. E. Neale in his authoritative biography Queen Elizabeth describes how she negotiated her first major challenge:

In the first public document of the reign ‘and &c’, was put at the end of the Queen’s titles, where in her father’s and brother’s reigns the title of Supreme Head of the Church had been. It was both a bold and a cautious step; bold because implicitly it maintained the theory of the English Reformation that the supremacy of the Papacy was usurpation of the Crown’s ancient authority, and that no parliamentary statute was needed to confer headship of the Church on the monarch; cautious because after all, no more appeared than the words ‘et cetera’, which left the Catholic world guessing and hoping about the future – hopes which Elizabeth in her talks with Feria [Count de Feria envoy of King Philip II of Spain] did her brilliant but shameless best to sustain. [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 56, The Reprint Society London, 1942].

By appointing herself Governor of the Church of England as opposed to Supreme Head, Elizabeth I avoided being condemned by Pope Paul IV as a heretic for breaking Mary I’s reunification of England with Rome. Instead, she allowed the Pope to hope that in the future the position of Supreme Head could be his once again. Yet Elizabeth I was being disingenuous. Her opaque policies, as we shall explore below, were designed to lower tensions between the two great religions and to prevent wars with foreign powers she was unlikely to win.

In 1559 she introduced another radical change with the Act of Uniformity, which defined the Church of England until the late 20th century. The Act reversed many of the Lutheran-influenced reforms of Edward VI. It brought back to churches the use of ornaments and vestments. It kept the ring on the finger in the marriage service and the sign of the cross at baptisms. It also blurred the difference between the Catholic and Protestant Communion services by merging their prayer books. Though Catholic parliamentarians opposed the Act, the reforms were popular with the faithful of both religions.

To appease the Pope, she retained her half-sister’s Mary I’s Catholic ambassador at Rome as her agent. She feigned a maybe to an offer of marriage from Mary I’s former husband King Philip II of Spain. She also offered her hand in marriage to other Catholic princes. At home she punished Puritan radicals for acts of dissidence by imposing fines and other penalties on them. She made it known that Mass was still said in her private chapel; John Knox responded that one Mass was more fearful to him than 10 000 armed enemies. Meanwhile, proposals from Protestants to reform the clergy’s hierarchical titles such as Archbishop, which were clearly Catholic leftovers, were vetoed. In short, Elizabeth I kept her own religious views – which are best described as conservatively Protestant – hidden behind a veil of confusion.

Elizabeth I’s “misleading” signals (we’ll assume Philip II was willingly duped, because she rejected his marriage proposal on the grounds that she was a heretic) meant that she avoided being excommunicated until 1570. So for the first twelve years of her reign, with the Pope’s seeming blessing, she corresponded, negotiated and flirted with her Spanish and French equivalents on equal terms.

However as Elizabeth I’s reign progressed, the threat from a number of home-grown plots began to change her attitude toward Catholics. This was particularly so after 1570 when Pope Pius V issued his Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelsis (ruling from on high, meaning God), in support of a Catholic rebellion in the north of England. The Pope declared her a pretended queen and wicked heretic, who should be overthrown by English Catholics.

That year’s Ridolfi plot to assassinate Elizabeth I came as another major shock to her regime. Led by a renowned Florentine Catholic banker with links to Spain and Rome, it provided yet more evidence of support for a Catholic restoration. The plot’s English leader was the Duke of Norfolk, the realm’s most senior nobleman. He had just been partially forgiven for his involvement in the northern rebellion. Yet Elizabeth I was once more reluctant to take his life. This time, however, Parliament’s outrage proved too strong to resist. In 1572 he was executed for treason. Though Mary Queen of Scots was spared despite the authorities possessing proof that she played a leading role in the conspiracy. It worth noting that it was often Elizabeth I’s preference to spare the lives of rebels and to rely on public opinion for her reward and protection.

In 1580 Pope Gregory XIII deactivated the Papal Bull. He advised English Catholics to obey their queen until a suitable opportunity was found to overthrow her. His major motivation for the suspension was to allow Jesuit priests the right to wander England in pursuit of their missionary, propaganda and subversive agenda. Elizabeth I, with no illusions, allowed them in to England until she got wind of Spain’s military preparations in 1585.

Three years later Pope Sixtus V reactivated the Papal Bull, adding regicide to Elizabeth I’s list of sins after she executed Mary Queen of Scots for being an incorrigible plotter. However, Elizabeth had once more been a reluctant executioner:

“What”, she asked, “will my enemies not say, when it shall be spread, that for the safety of herself a maiden could be content to spill the blood, even of her own kinswoman?” [Queen Elizabeth, J E Neale, page 259, The Reprint Society London, 1942]

The chopping off of Mary Queen of Scot’s head in 1587 exposed finally the futility of Philip II of Spain’s self-delusions about Elizabeth’s faith. The next year he sent the Spanish Armada to dethrone her, which was the first of four ill-fated Armadas Spain rallied to restore Catholicism in England.

Regardless, most English Catholics opposed the plotters and stayed loyal to their queen because they had come to see themselves as being English first and Catholics second. That acceptance of Elizabeth I’s legitimacy was the consequence and triumph of her PR strategy. It was a classic case of opinion forming: she had developed a new identity for her people, and sold it to them. It was in important degree a secular identity to do with pride in a sovereign nation – and its sovereign – rather than in religion and its foreign (never mind heavenly) sources of authority.

Nevertheless as Elizabeth I became increasingly threatened by foreign Catholic powers, people were executed for upholding their religious beliefs. Yet under her regime Protestant bigots who persecuted Catholics in the name of the state could not also claim to be acting in the name of God, because the Queen was not the Supreme Head of the Church. Instead, they had to cite temporal law as their shield.

In his masterpiece History of Civilisation in England VI Henry Thomas Buckle notes the historical significance of this shift. He says Elizabeth I’s reign was the first modern government without the central participation of spiritual authority. He adds:

Although many persons were most unquestionably executed merely for their religion, no one ventured to state their religion as the cause of their execution. The most barbarous punishments were inflicted upon them; but they were told that they might escape punishment by renouncing certain principles which were said to be injurious to the safety of the state. It is true, that many of these principles were such as no Catholic could abandon without at the same time abandoning his religion, of which they formed an essential part. But the mere fact that the spirit of prosecution was driven by subterfuge, showed that a great progress had been made by the age. [History of Civilization in England VI, Henry Thomas Buckle, page 339, Longmans Green and Co, 1873]

As Buckle and Neale so deliciously depict in their books, Elizabeth I’s strategy did more than seduce popes, Catholic kings and ambassadors into entertaining her fictions. It also turned England’s religious leaders into hypocrites. They denied what they really believed, which was rooted in feudalism, and which actually mirrored Catholic doctrine: that heresy was treason; God’s law was supreme. They, who had once claimed to act in the name of God, whose authority was embodied in their monarch or Pope, now acted in the name of man, whose power was embodied in the Queen. It was socially progressive, but not entirely honest.

Buckle says that Elizabeth I’s rule set the tone for our current epoch, which according to him, is defined by scepticism and the spirit of secular inquiry. Roy Strong makes a similar point in The Spirit of Britain. He says that her reforms had as much to do with the cultural direction of England as they did with beliefs. I concur with them that Elizabeth I’s regime was undoubtedly socially progressive and humanist in essence.

How the new age measured reputation differently

To understand Elizabeth I’s reign we need to consider the period in which Elizabeth I ruled. We also need to be clear about the difference between the two Rs: the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The birthplace of the Renaissance was Italy. There, it was neither a political nor a religious outburst. It was instead inspired by the rediscovery of classical literature in monastery libraries. This set off a massive revival of arts and learning. It sparked an individualistic outlook that prized self-expression and having fun.

In contrast, the Reformation’s heartland was in the more austere North of Europe. It was a politicized reform movement that focused on the nature of the link between church and state, and which questioned matters of doctrine and ritual. It led to political turmoil and radical change. Not least it sparked Protestantism and the counter-Reformation, which led to many wars and the creation of new states.

The combined impact of the Renaissance and Reformation introduced new sets of socially-derived values against which the reputations of leaders of states and religions were measured. As result, the changes that were unleashed led to a division of Europe between largely Catholic states in the south and Protestant ones in the north; though the two Rs transformed the cultures, religions and states in both regions.

Elizabeth I ruled at a time when the link between church and state was becoming increasingly strained. Throughout Europe monarchs were resisting papal influence. Princes were overthrowing republics and vice versa. Aristocrats were corrupting both republics and monarchies, while pretenders to Europe’s thrones opposed one another in the name of competing religions.

Increasingly, the so-called “divine rights of kings” was no longer accepted as providing sufficient grounds to confer legitimacy on a sovereign. Modern leaders were being asked to fulfill new expectations or face the consequences. In 1581, for instance, the Estates General in the Netherlands effectively fired Philip II of Spain, on the grounds that he was an unfaithful servant who had broken his contract:

 God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects (without which he could be no prince), to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them. And when he does not behave thus, but, on the contrary, oppresses them, seeking opportunities to infringe their ancient customs and privileges, exacting from them slavish compliance, then he is no longer a prince, but a tyrant, and the subjects are to consider him in no other view.  [The Dutch Declaration of Independence, 1581]

Elizabeth I was among the first to comprehend how to establish legitimacy with the support of a positive reputation in the post-feudal age. In the midst of social turmoil, she grasped that both monarchies and republics were being held to similar criteria to sustain their right to retain power. These were acceptance by their public, call it the power of public opinion; the delivery of stability, in the form of social cohesion; and maintenance of security in the face of external threats (most of her reign was spent at peace, which helped make England rich).

It was the success leaders had in managing such challenges which made or destroyed their reputation and cemented or axed their right to rule legitimately (arguably that’s where Mary I, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I went tragically astray).

In contrast, under feudalism rulers had to proclaim (though, as the Reformation exposed, it was largely hypocritical) to be the epitome of virtue. Church leaders and princes relied for their good reputations, as defenders of the public good, on their adherence to eternal virtues of rank, birth, fealty, chivalry, courage, self-sacrifice, honour and loyalty, particularly to their religions. Failing that, as they often did, they relied on tyranny.

Under the feudal system there was no separation of spiritual authority from church and state; heresy was treason. Popes saw themselves as “Vice Regents of Christ upon Earth.” Though of course, the leaders of Protestant states, such as Henry VIII in England, claimed to be on a similar mission, except that theirs was confined to a particular state (that is, they took the Pope’s role).

Meanwhile, the commercial classes of merchants and manufacturers were increasing their social and political weight. This was a new age of joint stock companies, global trading, banking and lending. There were new commodities and gold flooding in from the New World, and there was more trade between Europe’s nations than ever. In the case of the Netherlands, their merchants’ wealth was such that they could afford their own navy and army to see off their king.

As things became more complex and conflicted, a professional layer of civil servants dedicated to public service arose out of the middle classes to administer their rapidly centralizing states. For example, when Henry VIII destroyed the Catholic church he took its wealth and power for himself and he relied on his civil servants to administer his realm. Elizabeth I continued that process – though she was far less autocratic – and went on to forge what became in embryo a modern parliamentary state administered by civil servants from the centre.

In this maelstrom of change wisdom plucked from rediscovered classical literature became tremendously influential. The ideas it ignited seemingly provided the solution to the turmoil. The most important of these were drawn from the legacy of Cicero’s Roman Republic. Two of his concepts were particularly appealing; not least, in practical rather than republican terms, to Elizabeth I.

They were Cicero’s notions of “concordia ordinum,” which relates to agreement between the classes, and “Virtus and Fortuna,” that refers to how people could overcome their God-given fate or fortune. This was revolutionary thinking in feudal times. These radical lines of thought were popularised in contemporary books, for example by Petrarch in The Remedies of Both Kinds of Fortune (1366) and later by Giannozzo Manetti in The Dignity and Excellence of Man (1532).

Petrarch in particular is famed for being the founder of modern humanism. He wrote about the beauty and gifts of the body, the joy of love, the glories of nature, colour, and the wonders of the sun. He celebrated the virtues of courage, prudence and intelligence. He urged people to focus on the public good and not to be afraid to take risks. In short, he inspired people to set out to create paradise while they were still alive.

These humanist principles resonated with the educated elite among the emerging social classes. The humanist outlook of these and other Renaissance writers helped define the identity and value systems of the new forces in society. It helped set a new concept of the public interest based on forging a consensus between social classes. It helped society determine what was wanted from their leaders in the nascent world.

By 1603, when Elizabeth I died, ritual had found a new expression in court spectacle and festivals of state which apotheosised the success of her rule and images and portraits. The cult of the Virgin Queen had successfully replaced that of the Queen of Heaven. [The Spirit of Britain, A Narrative History of The Arts, by Roy Strong, Pimlico, 2000, page 149]

She was an infuriating and often ambiguous Queen. Paradoxically, that was what made her a great one. She deserves to be revered as, among many other things, a PR icon.

No related pages.

Marshall McLuhan as portrayed by Playboy Magazine

There’s a lot to be admired about the “prophet of the electronic age” who said “if it works it’s obsolete.” Marshall McLuhan coined the term the “Global Village.” He also produced classic phrases such as “the media is the message,” “the media is the massage”, and the “Age of Anxiety.” And he’s credited with conjuring “turn on, tune in, drop out,” over lunch with the 1960s advocate of LSD trips, Timothy Leary.

McLuhan was the archetypal-media studies guru. Not only was he an icon of the 1960s counterculture, he also went on to become the “patron saint” of the newly launched Wired Magazine in 1996. They identified with McLuhan’s vision of decentralized, personal, and liberating electronic technological development that transcends time and space. They warmed to his vision of how electronic media would wipe away contemporary society’s traditional values, attitudes and institutions.

There is after all, as Andrew Keen has pointed out, much in common between the wired generation’s utopianism and the communal ideals of the hippies. As McLuhan told Playboy Magazine in 1968:

“The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.”

That language, in the form of “one world, people and planet,” is endorsed by much (too much because it’s complete nonsense) of the mainstream corporate and PR world today: see here and here.

McLuhan: still Wired

Still, for some good reasons, McLuhan remains an inspirational thinker to a new generation of youth. He appeals to those who want to break free from looking at the present in the rear-view mirror. He appeals to those who wish to create something completely different to what’s gone before and to those, including corporations and politicians, who wish to appear “in touch” and “cool.” In McLuhan’s words:

“These kids are fed up with jobs and goals [traditional ones, anyway], and are determined to forget their own roles and involvement in society. They want nothing to do with our fragmented and specialist consumer society. Living in the transitional identity vacuum between two great antithetical cultures, they are desperately trying to discover themselves and fashion a mode of existence attuned to their new values; thus the stress on developing an “alternate life style.”

In Wired‘s launch issue interview with a virtual McLuhan, whose consciousness they said had been preserved in a programmed bot, he says that the real message of media today is ubiquity. It is not something that we do. Rather it is something we are part of from the outside that excites all our senses. It is, he said through Wired‘s medium, as if we have amputated not our ears or our eyes, but ourselves, and then established a total prosthesis – an automaton – in our place. He (ok, his cyber-ghost) adds:

“Postindustrial man has a network identity, or a net-ID. The role is now a temporary shift of state produced by a combination of environmental factors, like in a neural network. This possibility has always been latent in the concept of role, but in the machine age this was perceived as a danger, while today it is simply a game – we no longer see shifting roles as dangerous and taboo and therefore theatrically compelling. Rather, we follow these shifts as if we were doing a puzzle or kibitzing a chess game. Yes, the medium is the message, but this does not mean and never meant that the content of the medium is a conscious reflection on itself. The medium is the message because it creates the audience most suited to it. Electronic media create an audience whose shifting moods are as impersonal as the weather.”

So, regardless that McLuhan’s name is no longer household fare (unlike, say, Warhol’s), his influence remains as significant among cyber-nerds as it was among beatniks. In fact his thinking is arguably more significant today, given the amount of hype that surrounds the cyberspace, Web 2.0 world.

So what was he really about?

He sought to explain the world through the prism of communication and its tools. He ruminated on the drivers of human progress from its primitive tribal, oral preliterate cultural forms through to the invention of phonetic language, the Gutenberg printing press and the modern electronic age. His work explored the relationship between technology, forms of thought and different types of human organisation.

He probed the relationship between the physical senses and tried to assess how their interaction in different ratios modified how we perceived ourselves and our world.

McLuhan’s insights were in many ways visionary and intuitive rather than theoretical. Sometimes they were comical. For instance, he tried to explain to readers of Playboy Magazine how it was not naked women or those in high-definition mini-skirts that turn us men on most, but women with glasses and open-mesh silk stockings. He rightly, in my view, suggested that us men tend to turn low definition images of women into our ideal form. In contrast high definition images (use your imagination) do not engage us to the same extent. He also once remarked:

“I have no theories about anything. I make observations by the way of discovering contours, lines of force. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.”

But we shouldn’t let his tomfoolery fool us. He was a Canadian professor of literature and philosophy with a doctorate from Cambridge University in grammar, logic and rhetoric (otherwise known since antiquity as the Trivium).

John and Yoko Lennon supposedly discussing Marshall McLuhan

He maintained that whereas the invention of the phonetic alphabet opened up closed societies, which had depended on the product of speech and ear, and then detribalised them, the modern electronic age would end our focus on the visual image (more later).

Viewing all forms of technology as media, or what amounts to extensions of ourselves, he was fascinated by the social consequences of innovations. He described, for instance, perhaps presumptuously, how the jet-plane’s speed rendered old national groupings of social organisation unworkable; perhaps the way Twitter supposedly does to national laws and institutions.

Picking up on a theme beloved by social media enthusiasts today who claim all PR is online (whether it is internet based or not), McLuhan stated:

“Once a new technology comes into the social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated” [Understanding Media, page 161]

He added, with some feel for its liberating potential, that typography:

“…created a medium in which it was possible to speak out loud to the world itself, just as it was possible to circumnavigate the world of books previously locked up in a pluralistic world of monastic cells.” [ibid pages 161/162]

So his focus was holistic, in the sense that he was interested in how typography, for instance, came to influence every phase of the arts and sciences.

McLuhan studied the dynamics of human communication at the level of experience. He looked at the relationship between how our senses perceive the world and how technological progress changes our mental processes and how we think. He tried to trace how different social organisations, beliefs and politics arose as a result of the mediating influence of new channels of communication.

His intention, though on this he falls short, was to explain how human consciousness developed.

McLuhan argued that the technology of a period creates the human environment. In that sense technology is not a neutral force, but a transformative one. In his view, media and the other tools humans invent are active forces that shape the human galaxy in unexpected ways.

Of course, he was right to point out that new technologies create new possibilities and new realities. The railways, for instance, brought the townspeople to the countryside and country folk to the towns. Railways opened the American West more than horse and cart ever did. Besides taking the travail out of travel, they narrowed the distance and time between places. They altered how we lived our lives in myriad ways, from commuting to holidays to the movement of freight. Later they served as highways for the high-speed telegraph.

McLuhan is perhaps best known today for saying that the medium is the message:

“This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

He saw media as being like a Russian Doll: the content of a medium is always another medium:

“The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is to be asked, ‘What is the content of speech,’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought which is itself nonverbal.’”  [Understanding Media pages 23/24]

McLuhan over-eggs his media

The problem that McLuhan never really engaged was to try to explain the content of thought. According to him, the formative power of the media are the media themselves. But it is tautological to believe that thought’s content equals the media’s content and vice versa. Explaining things that way begs the question where ideas really spring from in the first place, and leaves the influence of the rest of society out of the picture. Surely, though the two clearly shape each other.

Indeed and here is my big contention, and where it differs from the techno-Utopian view: thought shapes media more than media shapes thought. (Later, I will argue this a lot. But for now I will say that on the big stuff, we are not unlike, say, the Greeks in our thinking.)

That’s not how McLuhan saw it. He believed that we cannot remain immune from the influence of what we observe in the media. He said, and it is a compelling viewpoint, that humans make their tools and are then remade by them.

McLuhan as conflicted dystopian

The key intellectual issues in McLuhan-studies probably come down (as so often) to the irreconcilables in his thought. He was conflicted as to whether increased media was building a great society or destroying it.

McLuhan was supposedly interested (and here’s a useful explanation of what follows) in the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and paleontologist who believed that God had created an evolutionary process, which had produced the “noosphere“. This was a sort of globalised consciousness (but also a spirituality) which God was pulling toward himself as a sort of final purpose of Creation. Give or take your appetite for this sort of thing, you can probably see how it fits the increasingly mediated world that McLuhan was pondering and is an idea of shattering (and maybe dangerous) optimism.

But McLuhan also seemed to accept a set of old-fashioned anxieties about the power of media. What’s not widely known is that, as a religious man, McLuhan was influenced by Pope Pius XII’s views. The Pope believed that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depended upon maintaining “an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.” This prompted McLuhan to comment:

“Failure in this respect has for centuries been typical and total for mankind. Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.” [Page 34, Understanding Media].

Indeed, that fits with what we have identified as one of McLuhan’s great faults: he over-estimated the media’s power and influence. That’s not to say they wield an insignificant influence in society, not at all. It is to say that I cannot agree with his media-centric view of the world, particularly when he starts trying to explain the success of the Nazi’s in Germany thus:

“That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to the radio and to the public address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilisation.” [ibid page 262]

He said that radio encouraged “webs of deep tribal involvement” and that the message of radio was “one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.” He was saying: never mind the content, take a look instead at how something (radio, TV or the internet) engages our subliminal emotions because it represents a primitive extension of our nervous system that can strike long-hidden chords. In his words, in the non-visual world of subatomic physics, radio encouraged a newly found human involvement that bred anxiety and insecurity and unpredictability. Radio (for that read any new media) lowers our horizons and dulls our brains. If it were not so, we would never allow the media to influence us, said McLuhan. Therein lies a common theme that still dominates debate today about the destructive power of new technology.

Of course, he said that radio’s malevolent influence in Germany and places such as Russia did not stretch to the United states of America:

“Radio, the medium that resuscitated the tribal and kinship webs of the European mind in the 1920s and 1930s did not work in England or America. There, the erosion of tribal bonds by the means of literacy and its industrial extensions had gone so far that radio did not achieve any notable tribal reactions.” [ibid page 274]

But in the US and UK he turned his (over-serious) ire on TV instead. McLuhan worried that it wouldn’t help Johnny learn to read. He lamented that it gave Johnny a whole new set of perceptions instead, which he described as the “psychic and social disturbance created by the TV image.” He also accused TV of introducing a kind of rigor mortis into politics.

He remarked:

It is the extraordinary degree of audience participation in the TV medium that explains its failure to tackle hot issues. Howard K. Smith observed: ‘The networks are delighted if you go into a controversy in a country 14, 000 miles away. They don’t want real controversy, real dissent at home.”’ [ibid pages 269/270]

He also worried, unnecessarily as it happens, about the impact of TV on the future of comics, national magazines, and the movies.

McLuhan really did believe in the power of the media to control society. He cited Fidel Castro as an example of the new “tribal chieftain who rules his country by a mass-participational TV dialog and feedback.” He said that Castro controlled his country on camera (not by force or fear or restricting free speech, mind you) by giving Cuban people the impression of being directly and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. Arguably, Col Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein tried the same trick and found it wanting.

McLuhan’s misplaced angst about the power and potential threats and corruption of society by new media has a long pedigree. It even turned Plato against written texts, which were a new fangled inovation in his time. He said they robbed us of our ability to use our memories and risked making us lazy. It also informed Cervantes’ hilarious character Don Quixote who set out on his mad adventure having been first hypnotized into helplessness by trashy novels of galantary and wandering Knights.

McLuhan’s pessimistic outlook that suggests we live in a “post-literate” society is mirrored today by people who argue that the internet is destroying our culture. Supposedly all today’s youth can do is scroll, skim and scan. Meanwhile the internet is undermining existing media, and reducing everybody’s capacity to concentrate and read books (see a useful critique of Nicholas Carr’s new book The Shallows, which is very much in the McLuhan clan of thought). And, yet, McLuhan’s writing also fuels bloated thinking of those who claim that the Arab Spring was sparked by the internet rather than home-grown discontent.

McLuhan on public vs private sphere

There is a rather lovely thought at the heart of McLuhan’s thought. This is that communication created individualism. Or, put another way: the mass media allowed both the public and – more surprisingly – the private sphere to flourish. It’s an over-egged thought, though.

He explains well how the media’s influence developed. He describes how script and papyrus were the mediators of the ancient world. But they lacked the reach to enable mass communication, and in so far as they were consumed by the mass, that was done in public when texts were read aloud. However, that changed with the advent of the mechanical revolution that began with the mechanization of phonetic script in the form of the Gutenberg press. It was this invention that was more important during the Renaissance than any rediscovery of the ancient text of rhetoric and the wisdom of the Greeks, he said.

The man at work

What’s really interesting about McLuhan is his examination of how the public sphere became separated from the private one. I think it is true, as McLuhan says, that the modern private sphere – as distinct from its public counterpart – came into existence in the 13th century. He believed it came about with, and only because of, the introduction of mass media and the ability of people – for the first time – to read and think in silence in private.

I don’t dispute McLuhan’s view that in the age before the private sphere came into being, opinions and roles in society were mostly fixed by the fortunes of birth and the rigidities of the ancient or feudal hierarchies. That was a time when people knew their place. Until books and manuscripts were reproduced in large quantities on mechanical assembly lines, the means of communication did not have the power of extension to create a mass public. In McLuhan’s words:

“Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment – it created the PUBLIC.” (ibid, introduction)

But was it technology that sparked the paradigm shift? Or was it one factor among many, such as history, war, serendipity and culture? In his book Mind, Self and Society George Herbert Mead said that language was the content of our minds, and added that that “is only a development and product of social interaction.” His was a more rounded sociological approach that highlights, I suggest, how narrow McLuhan’s methods of thought were.

Besides, plenty of classical scholars argue convincingly that the Greeks invented the private sphere (the mind) and did it, in public, in theatres. They did it by starting to have characters addressing, as persons, individuals in their audience, as persons. The idea of private, separate interiorities, each of which has ideas, was (rather oddly) explored in public.

Of course, the planned effort to influence the public sphere by influencing the opinions of people in their private refuges cuts to the heart of what PR is about. Individuals and organisations have conflicting opinions, interests and experiences. In the public sphere such differences have to be reconciled in a battle of opinion for influence and power. Otherwise decisions-making cannot take place in a consensual manner.

I say, in contrast to McLuhan’s account, the rise to prominence of PR in the world can be accounted for by the clamour of an emergent public’s struggle for a voice in society’s affairs. In my view, the study, practice and arguably the perfection of rhetoric as a tool of persuasion, is firmly rooted in ancient Greece’s democratic forums. That was, after all, the period when opinions, reputations and winning debates determined outcomes for the first time in history. But as we know, ancient Greece’s democracies were a peculiar and temporary phenomenon. (I shall explore at another time how the public’s voice came to matter historically).

But there is something else missing in McLuhan’s narrative that should not go unremarked. There’s no mention of Max Weber’s protestant ethic and little said about Adam Smith’s or Karl Marx’s explanation for the formation of capitalism and the market economy. And when it comes to explaining the relationship between the modern public and private spheres, I suggest that Jürgen Habermas is much more useful than McLuhan.

So, McLuhan ignores the emergence of new social categories of civil society that separated the public from the private spheres. He gives scant attention to the emergence of the modern state, commerce, wage labour, and the formation of the nuclear family. Instead, McLuhan’s reviews the different mediums of exchange and communication, such as money, typography, film, radio  and ads etc. and focuses his attention on how the phonetic alphabet magically created our state of mind, the modern state and world.

While I reject some of his reasoning, there’s no doubt that when books, pamphlets and newspapers became mass commodities which could be owned, reading in private became a mass pastime. This in turn changed how humans experienced the world of ideas. It also changed how they interacted with each other. It did, as McLuhan claims, encourage, if you like, the internalisation of the thought processes that a private and individualized outlook requires to take root in the human psyche. It created a new sphere of human existence from which major social changes in the fabric of society flowed.

Does digital kill the individual?

It is perhaps ironic that McLuhan, a devout Catholic, who was worshiped by the individualists attending the Summer of Love festivals, where God was proclaimed dead, should be the bearer of the news of the imminent demise of individualism. The modern dilemma that troubled McLuhan most was that while the printing press had made individualism possible, the electronic age rendered it dead. He described the present period as one of transition toward retribalization.

Society, he said, was moving from individualism to “corporate interdependence.” But he warned that instantaneous mass communication and mass consumerism were creating a new crisis in human history. The changes were moving faster than people’s ability to cope. With such observations (or probes as he called them) he caught in the embryo the emerging angst of what became the anti-globalisation lobby.

He described advertising as  a “self-liquidating form of mass entertainment,” and said that it created the impression that a woman could “iron shirts without hating her husband.” He observed that far more time and thought went into creating them than was expended on writing features and editorials. He wrote:

“They (advertisements) are subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists. [Understanding Media 202/203]

This is all pretty much what we see in Moan (sorry, Noam) Chomsky and Naomi Klein.

Indeed, he also seems to have seen the pitfalls of identity politics, with its Tyranny of Small Differences and the endless modern litany of “memory, identity and loss”:

“As man is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identities, and in the process unleash tremendous violence.”

Massaging the message

He also perhaps overstated the changes, while capturing something worth noting, when he said provokingly:

“Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and physically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent.” [Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy, page 5]

He saw the media as an extensions of our senses. And, just as many social media buffs describe the internet and cloud computing as a near-sentient network, McLuhan said that electronic media was a sort of planetary-wide nervous system that produced a group or global consciousness. Of course, in reality, computers even at their most advanced and most highly networked are not anything like a human brain or conscious of anything whatsoever.

Nevertheless, from many angles, he correctly foresaw how the demarcation line between our private and public lives would increasingly become blurred. He said that a century of electronic media had reduced time and space in a planetary embrace that had caused the implosion of human society. He said of the electronic age:

“All our alienation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanctity of the individual; as they yield to the intensities of the new technology’s electric circus, it seems to the average citizen that the sky is falling in.”

He also sensed in 1964, in a visionary flow of thought that makes him sound like a 21st-century Google executive director, that:

“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media” [Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, page 19]

McLuhan thought that the new electronic interdependence would recreate the world in the image of a global village. He obviously said that before China blew such notions (including his argument about the phonetics being at the heart of progress) out of the water by doing its own thing to boost globalisation in its own unique undemocratic manner.

There is also much New Age angst buried in McLuhan’s thinking;

“This book (The Gutenberg Galaxy) will try to explain why print culture confers on man a language of thought which leaves him quite unready to face the language of his own-electo-magnetic technology.

“..certainly the electromagnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.” We live in a single constricted space resonant of tribal drums.” [Gutenberg Galaxy, pages 30/31]

The problem here is that McLuhan pits man’s creation against man: as in the machine strikes back. Moreover, the logical implication of his notion of the “global village”, a useful expression if ever there was one, is that national divisions in a globalised world would dissolve (it was very much in tune with John Lennon’s Imagine, except that McLuhan believed in Heaven above and Hell below us). But, paradoxically, our increasingly globalised economy has more nations today than ever; certainly there’s many more than when McLuhan was writing in the 1960s.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that Marshall McLuhan books should not be read. On the contrary, they remain classics worthy of exploration for the many insights they contain. But that’s no reason to buy into his main technological determinist message.

No related pages.

Sandbu, economics leader writer at the Financial Times, explains:

“…decisions that transform and create economic value affect people’s lives. That makes them morally significant in many ways, the most obvious being how they determine whom the business activities enrich and whether they make people worse off in the process.” Page 16

Sandbu says Kant’s relevance as a philosopher rests on the stress he places on the intuitive primacy to moral thinking of universality and autonomous rational (informed) decision making:

“Rational autonomy, then–the will freely directed by reason–is the fundamental moral value: It is what moral action is and it is what freedom is. Acting against morality is to act against reason and, therefore, to be unfree, in thrall to one’s [or somebody else's] inclinations [manipulation].” Page 149

What is most useful about Kant’s thinking and Just Business‘s contribution is that they provide methodologies for thinking through business ethics. They also provide useful insights into how to develop PR strategies.

In essence, Sandbu argues that firms should align their moral values in the Kantian Enlightenment tradition, which says that people and institutions:

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as end and never merely a means.” Page 149, quoting Kant

In defence of the great philosopher’s real-world relevance, Sandbu clarifies that:

“We should emphasize the ‘merely’. Kant does not say you may never treat someone else as instrumental to your own goals; that would rule out most business and, indeed, a lot of other innocent non-business human interaction.” Page 151

What Sandbu is saying is that if business, or any institution, wants to obtain consent for its activities – which is the licence to operate PRs seek to ensure – then it needs to be able to morally justify how it behaves. The key to success lies in being able to demonstrate that any other rational person in a similar position would have made similar choices. The premise is that whenever somebody’s pursuit of self interest is being restricted it can be justified if it can be shown:

“…that he would himself accept the principle that requires the limitation, if he did not seek to make an exception for himself. Similarly, whenever the social contract theory permits someone to pursue his self-interest in ways that harm the interests of others, it justifies this to them by showing that they themselves would have endorsed the principle permitting the conduct in question had they thought they had an equal chance to be in a position to benefit from doing the same.” Pages 179/180

This draws on the famous position of the social contract theoretician John Rawls: one should act in a way which creates a situation one wouldn’t mind being parachuted into. It is also like the position adopted by many global enterprises: they should behave in the worst-regulated countries much as they would in the best-regulated:

“It also provides a systematic approach to partial compliance theory, which deals with the moral rules governing how to behave when others violate morality (as opposed to the ideal compliance theory, which deals with the right thing to do provided everyone complies with the rules.” Page 196

This approach acknowledges that everybody has pre-determined objectives of some sort. Its practical value is that it helps us work out what business, or indeed any client, ought to do when faced with moral dilemmas.

Kant’s methodology helps us speak honestly and directly about difficult issues such as corporate social responsibility or worker and workplace-based rights:

We can [using Kant's philosophical reasoning] assess the right content of any particular right-claim by asking whether the purported rights protects the claimant’s rational autonomy. A right to organize would seem straightforward to defend on this basis; a right to periodic holidays with pay, in contrast, much more dubiously so. We can similarly begin to determine the content of our imperfect duties by considering, in the situations we find ourselves, which action would not merely respect the autonomy of others but actively promote it. In this light, periodic holidays with pay start to look more plausible…” Page 151

Sandbu also uses Kant’s logic in a way that I believe helps PRs avoid setting their clients up to be accused of greenwash. Using Kant’s moral reasoning, he argues that CSR that’s positioned by PRs as being good for the bottom line lacks moral value. That’s because, as he says, it is not because we will receive rewards that we should save drowning people:

“Only if the motivation behind them [CSR initiative] is to do ‘the right thing’ – that is, only if businesses in question see CSR as a categorical imperative, something they should do whether it benefits them or not – only then, according to Kant’s reasoning, can their action be said to be of moral worth.” Page 144

So, according to Kant, Sandbu and me, Milton Friedman (see part-1) was right about that issue all along.

Universal values matter

The proposition that there are universally valid moral values in an increasingly globalised world is not to be sniffed at. The recent Arab uprisings have vividly reminded us that the virtues of freedom, democracy and individualism have universal appeal.

The rebellions in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen also undermine the claims of those who say there are multiple valid versions of human rights and value systems based on, say, Asian or Arabic values. Similar cultural-relativist views have been popularised within our own societies in the form of multi-cuturalism. However, the version of it that said that everybody’s culture had a right to exist in its own separatist bubble has been abandoned because it was seen as divisive and as undermining the values of western society (by western I mean Enlightenment-based, which speaks to the universal validity of our values). Though, of course, respect for each other’s traditions remains as important as ever.

When it comes to understanding universal values, Amartya Sen has helped us see things clearly:

“[The] so-called Asian values that are invoked to justify authoritarianism are not especially Asian in any specific sense… The people whose rights are being disputed are Asians, and [the] case for liberty and political rights turns ultimately on their basic importance…[This] is as strong in Asia as it is elsewhere.” Page 129, origin Amartya Sen, Human Rights and Asian Values

Sandbu’s criticism also focuses on the logical inconsistencies and moral shortcomings of the cultural relativist’s beliefs. He says, and I agree, that just because a majority of people believe something is right in China or Iran or Saudi Arabia, does not make it right:

“For the notion of moral advancement and moral decay presuppose that some moral beliefs are better than others, precisely what relativism denies. But surely, attempts at social reform or resistance against it, while variably noble or contemptible, are not illogical. Of the many things one could say about Martin Luther King or Strom Thurmond, that they made no sense is not one.” Page 56

So Sandbu is a realist. He accepts, as I believe we all should, that there is something positive and pragmatically useful in social relativism’s thinking. Cultural differences are owed respect and we cannot simply impose our society’s ways and means without modification in countries that oppose them. Sandbu qualifies this point well:

“…the least experience with the diversity of the human experience suggests different rules may indeed apply, morally speaking, in different cultural contexts. Realizing this does not require us to accept any alleged moral equivalence of national cultures – not just because such moral equivalence does not follow from an admission that cultural practices matter (that is the logical mistake of cultural relativism), but because there is nothing special about national cultures.” Page 187

To reconcile this seeming contradictory position he draws on the useful work of Donalson and Dunfree. They say there’s a need in such communities for “moral free space” and for “micro-social” contracts to function based on their own established norms. We should, they say, acknowledge the existence, up to a point, of an indeterminate social contract that’s based on pragmatism. I agree (see my CSR: it’s not the same in Lagos as in London).

Dare to question

Martin Sandbu has written neither a manifesto nor a textbook. But while Just Business is clearly judgmental, its author attractively invites readers to subject his prejudices and preferences to the same critical analysis he applies to the theories he rejects. So the book makes no bold claims to having resolved all of the issues Sandbu examines:

“The social contract approach is not without problems of its own.” Page 195

What emerges from Just Business is that Sandbu is no dogmatist. He does not say that we should accept Kant’s views on rational morality – his categorical imperatives – as being absolutely right. He acknowledges, there’s worthy debate about that. He even rebukes Kant, using Kant’s own methodology, for being absurd for arguing that one must always tell the truth, even to a murderer who demands to know where his victim is hiding out.

Moreover, Martin Sandbu urges us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He says that we need to rescue the best insights from Milton Friedman and stakeholder doctrine, not to mention conventionalism, consequentialism and utilitarianism. I agree.

Just Business: Arguments in Business Ethics

Martin Sandbu, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Pearson, 2011.
ISBN-10: 0205697755  ISBN-13:  9780205697755

Related posts:

1. Cant or Kant? PR-think gets heavy (part 1)

Yet how our clients juggle individual moral rights, social roles and social conventions cuts to the heart of what PRs communicate. As Martin Sandbu, economics leader writer at the FT, says in his new and accessible book, Just Business – Arguments in Business Ethics, philosophical thought can illuminate how these processes are managed.

Sandbu begins by ripping to pieces the two dominant, and conflicting, management mantras that guide business decision making today: Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy theory and stakeholder doctrine. He then uses Kant’s methodology to put forward what I consider to have the makings of a superior alternative.

First, he interrogates Milton Friedman’s managing-for-shareholders mantra and finds inconsistencies inherent in the theory, which casts doubt on its usefulness as a guide to action:

“Friedman himself admits to qualifications on shareholder primacy. He says that mangers’ responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with [shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. But this is as unhelpful as it is eloquent. What is a manager to do if shareholders do not particularly care for ‘conforming to the basic rules of society’ – whether those of the law or those of ethical custom? …..

“…if by ethical custom we mean the morality conventionally believed by a majority in society, it could conceivably be the case that conventional moral beliefs require society to be ‘socially responsible’, even against the desires of shareholders. If so, conforming to ethical custom would bind managers to pursing ‘socially responsibility’ to the detriment of shareholder profit, which is surely the opposite of what was intended.” Page 20

I have to agree with Sandbu. There is a contradiction, though we both agree there’s also much to admire at the heart of Friedman’s position, not least when it comes to property and shareholder rights.

However, while Sandbu is tough on Friedman, he reserves most of his wrath for the incoherencies inherent in stakeholder theory. He observes:

“The imperialist nature of the stakeholder concept – its tendency to include an ever wider range of groups within the orbit of ‘managing for stakeholders’ – is part of what is wrong with stakeholder theory. For the more groups count as stakeholders, the less plausible it becomes to claim that managers either can or should run their business in the interest of all of them. Even if we set aside the difficulty of identifying who is and who is not a stakeholder, without which the admonition to ‘manage for stakeholders’ is rather unhelpful, there remains the problem of what exactly it means to manage in their interest. For, obviously, different groups have different interests, and sometimes those interests conflict. If we think of stakeholder theory as saying that managers should maximize the benefits of stakeholder groups – much as shareholding primacy says they should maximize the return for shareholders – we are hampered by the inconvenient mathematical truth that it is impossible to maximize two or more objectives simultaneously. If, alternatively, we think of the theory as saying that managers are the agents of stakeholders – much as shareholder primacy make managers the agents of the shareholders – we shall quickly find managers stymied by duties that conflict with one another. Shareholder primacy does not suffer from those problems. Even though it is mistaken in claiming managers’ duty is to maximize profit, there is at least no incoherence in what that duty, if it is actually applied, would consist of.” Pages 25/26

The real problem with stakeholder theory, according to Sandbu, is that it lacks a coherent (logical) normative core that answers the question for whom business should be managed. Stakeholder doctrine cannot identify those stakeholders with an intrinsic moral importance (shareholders) from those with an instrumental moral value. Moreover, as R Edward Freeman, the guru of stakeholder theory, puts it, there are a number of stakeholder theories each with their very own normative cores. Sandbu remarks:

“If there is no one definitive stakeholder theory that specifies the moral status of stakeholder groups and the duties of management, all that stakeholder approach per se does is to underline that such a specification is necessary.” Page 28

Amusingly, Sandbu concludes that stakeholder theory is not a theory at all but merely an acknowledgement that business is a moralized activity:

“Since that is something we already knew, we do best by simply leaving the term ‘stakeholder theory’ behind.” Page 28

So, having shown how the existing “philosophical” and theoretical frameworks are deficient, let’s look at Martin Sandbu’s proposed alternative. He suggests, and I tend to concur, that a social contract approach, which draws heavily but not uncritically on the work of John Rawls, provides a more durable framework for corporate image-building. Here, in Martin Sandbu’s words, is why the social contract approach to business and reputation management is so compelling:

“Once we acknowledge that business behavior must be morally justified and that mere social convention about norms cannot provide that justification, we recognize the need for principles, external to socially defined norms, that can adjudicate the truth and falsity of the claims those norms imply about what business ought to do. The metaphor of contract, the archetypal form of human intercourse in the economic realm, should be particularly congenial to those seeking an appeal of offering a general method for thinking about specific problems by focusing on what rational persons in an appropriate contracting situation would endorse. This is also its moral appeal: Unlike utilitarianism, social contract theory formalizes the need to justify morality’s commands to all affected individuals.” Page 179

So, how realistic would it be to adopt a social contract approach based on Kantian morality? Sandbu says:

“…the reasoning must be done in the face of the concrete challenges one may face. The true test of the social contract approach, or any other theory of business ethics, is whether it can help business people move from denial or confusion that recognitions of moral dilemmas often trigger, toward a more stable reflective equilibrium.” Page 195

To give us a guide into how Kantian logic could be applied to real-life corporate dilemmas, he uses it forensically to examine some classic PR case studies. He pores over Texaco’s oil spills in Ecuador, Enron’s fraud, Guidant keeping quiet about its faulty defibrillators, Google’s support for state censorship in China, LeviStrauss’s child labour scandal, executive pay and remuneration, and sub-prime mortgages, to name a few among many.

Turning to the practicalities of his approach, he says that the normative conventions of corporate cultures of, say, Microsoft and Google, might well require different moral codes of behaviours for their internal and external communication (variety will remain powerful differentiators).

Indeed, it strikes me that my Ryanair case study – perhaps not as Sandbu might like – highlights a robust and social contract-type approach to a firm’s staff, customers and suppliers. Arguably, Ryanair has re-educated a whole industry in a whole new set of normative conventions, ones that have become accepted as the price of low-cost flights and commercial success. It also strikes me that the banks are in dire need right now of a social contract, though perhaps one that is nothing like Ryanair’s (though don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the airline).

But Sandbu reminds us – as perhaps Michael O’Leary never would – that profit is not everything:

“…there are a host of management theories that say that it is good for business to respect workers as rationally autonomous beings. In contrast, Kantian ethical theory argues that respecting autonomy is morally required, whether or not it helps the bottom line.” Page 153

Martin Sandbu is on to something. What he writes about is very much a PR’s concern; it addresses what PRs do and what value they add to business and modern institutions.

His work suggests (at any rate I infer from it) that firms (and our clients in general) need to apply quite tough and honest rules to the contract they are seeking to strike with the outside world. When the contract is more self-interested than obviously aspirational, the underpinning of their case can be both moral and pragmatic. PRs should be skilled in helping clients develop that contract, with its curious blend of the selfish and the virtuous. PRs, of course, need to become especially skilled at framing narratives that are not full of the flaws that Sandbu exposes.

At the very least, I hope that corporate ethics, conflict resolution and reputation management will increasingly be influenced by the ideas Martin Sandbu explores in Just Business.

Just Business: Arguments in Business Ethics
Martin Sandbu, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Pearson, 2011.
ISBN-10: 0205697755  ISBN-13:  9780205697755

No related pages.

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion, here is a review of Voices From Chernobyl, The Oral History Of A Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen) Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.

Alexievich’s book provides insight into the personal experience of victims of the world’s worst nuclear accident, arguably man’s greatest industrial accident. One cannot but be moved by the stories the voices tell. They make for morbid, yet compulsive reading.

In unrelenting monologues, “Voices from Chernobyl” relates the reminiscences of those caught up in events way beyond the bounds of normal experience. One city and 485 villages abandoned, more than 116,000 people forced to leave their homes. Millions more were told that they now lived on contaminated land – their own and their children’s lives at risk for generations to come. Only war or revolution can compare, but then most of the victims who survive those normally return home when it is all over.

There is something uplifting about the stoic acceptance and will to recover shown by many of these victims: “Our husbands died the same year, they were in Chernobyl together, but she’s already planning to get married. I’m not condemning her – that’s life. You need to survive. She has kids.” On the other hand, the book also exposes the pessimism that can afflict human nature, which produces a fatalism that paralyses people, when they lose faith in their ability to shape their own destiny: “We’re going to die, we’re going to die. By year 2000, there won’t be any Belarussians left.” This is a Jekyll and Hyde story.

Many of the locals heard and circulated myths. The authorities were said to have buried the dead from nearby villages in mass graves. Whole populations were supposed to be destined for transfer to Siberia. There were rumours of holding camps being prepared behind Chernobyl to contain and monitor victims before they died. New-born were said to have yellow fluid instead of blood. An apocryphal escaped prisoner hiding in the thirty-kilometre zone became so radioactive the prison would not take him back. Stolichnaya Vodka was believed to provide the best protection against strontium and cesium; two bottles being more effective than one.

Then there were the more credible myths. Hundreds of thousands of people were believed to have met an early death by 1995, millions more were said to be seriously ill. Official-looking reports claimed that children in large numbers were being born with deformities, immune deficiencies and leukaemia, all because of Chernobyl.

There are true tales too, of heroism and love. The voice of Lyudmilla Ignatenko is remarkable; her devotion to her husband unmistakable. He and his colleagues Titenok, Pravik and Tischura, “kicked the graphite with their feet” in a desperate attempt to douse the flames their fire brigade unit discovered on the scene soon after the reactor exploded. They all died seven or so days later in Moscow, and were buried in special leak-proof coffins. What happened to the millions of affected inhabitants living in the neighbourhood afterwards is also well tackled in this book.

“Voices of Chernobyl” tells of drunks asking big questions: “Gorbachev and Licachev [then Gorbachev’s rival], Stalin. Are we a great empire, or not; will we defeat the Americans, or not?” It was 1986: “whose airplanes are better, whose spaceships are more reliable? Well, okay, Chernobyl blew up, but we put the first man in space.”

They got their answer in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. There were now three republics handling their affairs, as opposed to one empire, and two of them were so new they barely existed. Chaos ensued. Most of the liquidators went home immediately.

Suddenly, taxi drivers in Kiev could earn a more reliable income than a nuclear power plant director.

It might have been one of the last “Soviet” experiences to befall the USSR, but it was also a typical one. It had its villains, including “comrade” Gorbachev whose first instinct was to cover it all up, only to abandon this approach when it became impossible to sustain. He went on to hasten the demise of his crumbling empire; today he is a born-again environmentalist. Chernobyl had its heroes in the fire fighters, liquidators and scientists who did a magnificent and unselfish job cleaning up the mess. Its victims also played their various parts, but never knew whether anything they were told was anything like the truth.

In “Voices”, “liquidator” Arkady Filin tells the story of his father’s memory of defending Moscow in World War II: “I sat in a trench. Shot my rifle. Got buried by an explosion. They dug me out half-alive. That’s it. And back then, my wife left me.” It was years before he learned from films and books that he had been part of a great historical event.

Filin’s point is pertinent. “Voices of Chernobyl” does not grapple objectively with its subject – or pretend that victims understand the wider picture.  The interviews merely record well the confused views of those who suffered. But to do those people justice we need to do more than rely on their impressions. We need to rely on science and study. Otherwise the debilitating angst that most observers confirm to be real and to afflict millions of people in the region will continue.

As with many other issues, scientific opinion regarding Chernobyl is counter-intuitive. There is a massive gap between the scale of the disaster and the official death toll. Anybody aged over 35 will remember the radioactive cloud over Europe and they will know something of the evacuees, abandoned cities and exclusion zones. When scientists say that they observed very few serious physical health problems directly attributable to Chernobyl – including no deformities, few, if any, leukaemia or solid cancers – accusations of a cover-up will be listened to.

Even a cursory look at the margins of the exclusion zone reveals thousands of real people who are sick and disabled, many of them children, most of them elderly, who live in the shadow of a major catastrophe. The region’s mental health has certainly been undermined by such visions, particularly in relation to children – but that does not mean radiation was responsible for their health problems. Neither does it make the case for abandoning science for superstition and intuition.

The so-called good news, because it is still awful, from scientists is promoted by the Chernobyl Forum and endorsed by eight UN agencies and the governments of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. They confirm that less than 50 people were killed and the worst that could happen in the future is that 4000 lives could be, but may not be, ended prematurely. In their view, much of the land that was evacuated can now be reused for farming and repopulated safely.

There are, however, respectable voices to suggest that the figure of 4000 may be a tenfold underestimate – depending on the parameters and methodology used to measure the accident’s impact on human health. There are wilder – much less credible – claims that 500,000 have already died in Ukraine alone. But whether the “real” number of fatalities over decades is 4000 or 40,000, scientists face the same problem communicating their facts to world fed on a diet of more macabre accounts by the media and anti-nuclear campaigners.

In the final analysis, Svetlana Alexievich uses her “Voices of Chernobyl” to suggest that the wilder claims have credibility. The dustcover and blurb promoting the book tell us to believe that there has been a conspiracy.  Svetlana’s own illness is attributed to Chernobyl as the price she paid for researching the book – yet immune deficiency is not a disease caused by radiation. Hers is a call for faith in ignorance. Her own voice does a disservice to the victims and reinforces the misinformation that has caused so much damage. But in years to come the voices she records will provide a haunting reminder of Chernobyl, and a valuable one at that.

No related pages.

No related pages.

Here’s the blurb for the book:

Self-loathing permeates our culture to such an extent that we no longer even see it for what it is. For many of us, it has come to be the natural way of looking at the world. We have become used to living in a permanent state of cultural cringe, of apology, of guilt for real or imagined acts; where our opinion formers appear to agree that western culture is an indefensible horror.

The aim of this collection of essays is to illustrate how self-denigration operates in both specific and general areas of contemporary life. So, along with Helen Szamuely’s essay on history teaching in schools, Emma French’s exploration of the effects of cultural self-laceration in higher education and Marc Sidwell’s analysis of the big state as an expression of self-distrust, we have Gulliver Ralston examining the effects of self-hatred on music education, Paul Seaman on corporate image-building, Juliet Samuel on the environmentalist movement and Douglas Murray on how our response to radical Islam is being compromised. Tony Wells describes the minefield of a simple dinner party among the middle-class intelligentsia, Guy Stagg makes an argument for religion as an expression of self-hate, and Richard D. North describes how so-called ‘anti-elitism’ is another facet of the same phenomenon.

We have aimed to be constructive in this collection, to offer up ways out of self-hatred. Leadership is not just about economics, and the sooner our own elected representatives acknowledge that the burning issues of our time are cultural ones, the better. In the words of countless demonstrators over the years, it is time to ‘Stop the Hate’.

Contents of A Sorry State

Table manners by Tony Wells
Over the rainbow: How radical environmentalists thwarted Copenhagen by Juliet Samuel
There’s no such thing as the state by Marc Sidwell
Cultural self-effacement in music education by Gulliver Ralston
How public relations sells western firms short by Paul Seaman
‘Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe’: Cultural self-laceration in British universities by Emma French
Mea maxima culpa: Religion and the sanctity of self-hatred by Guy Stagg
How do self-hatred and self-blame shape our response to radical Islam? by Douglas Murray
History came to a . by Helen Szamuely
The country that hates itself: Why curing anti-elitism can sort things out by Richard D. North

You are welcome to attend the launch event:

Thursday 25th November 2010 6.30pm-8.30pm
55 Tufton Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AY
RSVP to prwhittle@btinternet.com or 0207 340 6059

No related pages.

He writes about the sometimes bizarre personal behaviour of his colleagues, and asks:

“What is interesting is why politicians take the risk. … My theory is that it’s precisely because of the supreme self-control you have to exercise at the top … Your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control. Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control.

“Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue … and put on a desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree … It’s an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life.”

Alice Thomson in today’s The Times amusingly remarks that Tony stops just short of advocating adultery as a form of stress relief. But she notes how the white lie of former prime minister Stanley Baldwin that “we are a Cabinet of faithful husbands” ended under Blair. She quotes him saying:

“They [the public] now understand, they empathise, and to some extent they indulge.”

Former Thatcherite minister Cecil Parkinson was never forgiven for fathering a child with Sarah Keays in the 1980s. Fallen Tory minister and now sports commentator David Mellor will always be defined by Antonia de Sancha sucking his toe, says Thomson. But former New Labour ministers Robin Cook, John Prescott and David Blunkett are now more likely to be assessed on their political records or even their croquet playing than their off-side affairs with women, she adds.

I’d love it to be true. But the signs are not good. Foreign Secretary William Hague’s special adviser has just resigned over “untrue and malicious” allegations made against him. Supposedly the two shared a room on the election campaign trail more than once. Who cares what two men did in a hotel room? Their families, perhaps. But the rest of us don’t give a damn if the married shadow and then actual Foreign Secretary is gay or bisexual or not. It would be rather fun if he declared himself a modern metrosexual man in the style of David Beckham, and then still denied the charges.

Of course it doesn’t seem all that likely that a millionaire author would need to bunk up with a staffer as though he were a broke sportsman or musician on tour. But there you go. And one might conjecture why if the events were wholly innocent why WH didn’t just show the media the finger. Though it is plausible that WH felt his wife’s dignity was owed a full-on denunciation of the hacks and their innuendo. Mind you, if the accusations were true, it would still be proper for WH to lie his head off in the style of Hollywood’s “A Guide For The Married Man“, directed with a light touch by Gene Kelly, for the sake of anyone he cared about who cared.

Tony Blair is fluent in French and he has made French values (Swiss, Italian and German ones, too) almost acceptable in British public life. Surely, given that boost, now is the time for David Cameron to say in defence of Hague and his adviser – “move on, it is at worst a family matter. It is of no concern of ours. By all accounts the adviser is a star and good at his job. Both men deny ever having a relationship. Let’s call next business, please”.

I’ll come back to the meat of Tony’s memoirs when I’ve read them myself. But here’s a few first impressions. There’s something very confusing and masked in Tony Blair’s book. Sure, it is confessional: Princess Diana-style. But is it honest about the big issues? My first take is that Tony is all over-the-place and gushing in the book. That’s not helpful when one is interested in finding a rational core to what went on. But then again, his was a three-term emotional roller-coaster of a government from beginning to end. His memoirs, I suppose, were always going to be about him and how he feels and felt, rather than what really went on and why.

Available now: Blair’s memoir A Journey (Hutchinson) priced £25.

No related pages.

Tony Blair knew he might as well have kept the money he’s going to earn from his book for all the love giving it away would get him. But he also knew he didn’t need the money; that it was blood money; that he owed it to the soldiers. And, he knew that he needed to de-taint the book if it was going to be read, which is what mattered most to him. With a controversial gift, which in itself attracts readers and interest, he decontaminated the brand, not his, but the book’s.

No related pages.