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Hogan Patrick Colm
Duke University Press, 2001
177 pp.
Cover Price: $21.95 (paper)
ISBN: 08-2232-7163
In this monograph, Patrick Colm Hogan, a professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, examines the psychological and cultural determinants of social consent and conformity, with particular attention paid to economic inequities in contemporary America. One theme that Hogan emphasizes throughout his book is the underlying pervasiveness of subtle psychological coercion in America, while frequent lip-service is nevertheless paid to the importance of participatory democracy by its politicians.
Early in his book, Hogan takes up the important question of why more people, particularly those who (and they are in the majority) suffer economic and class inequities, do not rebel. As he attempts to demonstrate, using theory and data derived from social and cognitive psychology - and to a lesser extent, psychoanalysis - those who suffer the most from political, social and economic inequity often participate in the establishment and maintenance of their own suffering and humiliation, through the often unconscious absorption of largely unarticulated group norms.
In the first chapter, the author challenges the theory, often put forth by conservative groups, of "rational conformity" - that is, the idea that people will be motivated to do what benefits them. As Hogan repeatedly demonstrates, the masses, often in response to media manipulation, will acquiesce to policies that are clearly against their best interests, through a subtle process of identification with a ruling or leader class, and sometimes with an acceptance of a rather blatant distortion of facts. However, the author maintains that readers and viewers often will ignore their best interests as a result of an ongoing and subtle immersion in an ideological environment that "sets the terms of the debate so as to exclude certain sets of possible beliefs from consideration or discussion" (p 59). That is, the terms of debate limit the framework of what views are even considered imaginable. And once the terms of the debate are set, they tend...