Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation, by Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 288 pp, £22, ISBN 978 0674303102.

Though manipulation is as old as Adam and Eve and the serpent, it has taken on a new salience in our time. Social media has democratised manipulation, putting techniques of persuasion and deception, once monopolised by large corporations and states, into the hands of ordinary people. So powerful are these new digital technologies that authoritarian states and liberal democracies alike now rely on manipulation more than coercion to shape the wills of citizens. Vladimir Putin may authorise the assassination of political opponents, but he dominates his people mainly through manipulative messages on state-controlled media seeking, for example, to convince the public that his savage war in Ukraine is a ‘special military operation’ occurring far away and of no concern to the ordinary citizen, despite its appalling toll on Russian lives. Xi Jinping does not hesitate to jail and punish competitors to his throne, but his hold on the Chinese people relies mostly on the messaging of the party ideological apparatus.

In Europe, democratically elected illiberal authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban held power for sixteen years, until his recent defeat, without police terror or violence. Instead, he used state media and a constant social media stream to manipulate ordinary Hungarians into accepting his view of Hungary as the plucky little country standing up to the tyranny of liberal political correctness in Brussels.

Donald Trump is the master manipulator of the new e-technologies of our age, with a lifetime’s experience in massaging the facts gained in his career in real estate and reality TV. He uses terror and violence, in Iran and Venezuela, and also against migrants and citizens on the streets of Minneapolis, but as with Orban, manipulation remains his instrument of choice in imposing his version of reality – an America emerging from darkness into the light under his leadership.

Trump does not manipulate truth so much as seek to empty truth of any content or relevance. The goal of the performance – in daily media availabilities and an incontinent stream of Truth Social messages – is to establish an alternative reality in which he is the dominating presence who fills the entire space of human attention, both domestic and global. He has achieved this, interestingly, without succeeding in imposing his vision of reality on the American population as a whole. Unlike Orban, who was able to gerrymander the constitution and place Hungarian media under his sway, Trump’s attempt to impose an alternative reality is constantly contested by a free press and the federal judiciary.

All of these examples are taken from the bestiary of authoritarian and illiberal rulers. It would be a mistake to believe that they alone rely on manipulation. We want to think that persuasion is what ‘our side’ in politics does, while manipulation is the tactic of choice for the forces of darkness. Many liberals and progressives were persuaded by the soaring oratory of a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, but these presidents were acutely aware of what chords to strike, what bells to ring. When rhetoric is persuasive and pleasing, as it was in these instances, it is no contradiction to say we consent to our own manipulation. We allow ourselves, like lovers, to be seduced.

Our susceptibility to manipulation has been a theme of philosophical inquiry since the Greeks. It is the Greeks who introduced Western thought to the concept of the ‘sophist’, the artful rhetorician who uses words to reshape reality to make others do his will. Ever since the Greeks, sophistry has been understood as a threat to democracy itself.

Democracy, being rule by consent of the governed, makes the epistemological presumption that citizens are sovereign individuals capable of making up their own minds and able to resist propaganda, lies, inducements and manipulation. A democratic citizen should be both a believer – in the norms and procedures that make a democracy work – but also a sceptic towards the persuasive rhetoric of friend and foe alike. An essential element of our discontent with democracy is that we realise our own epistemological sovereignty is imperfect at best and we suspect this is true of everyone else. Regaining it would require us to free ourselves of manipulation’s hold upon our allegiances and opinions. We can only do this if we understand how manipulation works.

We need liberating guides to unshackle us. Harvard’s Belknap Press has just furnished us with two such guides, the Israeli philosophers, Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon. Margalit is a professor of philosophy emeritus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Sharon teaches in the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University. The senior figure in the duo, Margalit, has made a distinguished career applying his acute, ironic intelligence to topics such as when a compromise is honourable and when it is rotten (On Compromises and Rotten Compromises), when loyalty trips into betrayal (On Betrayal) and what duties attach to remembering (The Ethics of Memory). Sharon, the junior partner, has made a name for himself as an analyst of John Locke’s political thought and as a theorist of religious nationalism. The book Margalit and Sharon have produced together has the seamless, fluid feel of a happy collaboration.

If manipulation is like seduction, in which rhetoric works its magic on our souls, what is the problem with it? Is it just a form of lying or deception? Margalit and Sharon argue that it needn’t be. Lovers can seduce without deceiving or lying. If so, is the problem with seduction that we will be led astray? In moments of seduction, at least at the beginning, we’re only too willing to be led astray. Our authors follow the nineteenth century socialist critic, Alexander Herzen, whose cardinal accusation against religion was that it led to ‘the corruption of the will’. For Margalit and Sharon manipulation is a form of ‘soft subversive power’ aiming at ‘domination of the will’. Manipulation achieves what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called ‘the most absolute authority’, the kind that ‘penetrates to the inner man and is exerted no less on his will than on his actions’. Manipulation, as they define it, is ‘noncoercive compulsion’ and as such is a form of ‘domination’. In their analysis the problem with manipulation is that it subverts epistemological freedom, our very capacity to establish what is true.

This makes it an enemy of democracy. Since manipulation is a constant feature of democracy, used as a defensive weapon of the weak no less than an offensive weapon in the hands of the strong, democracies are never serene temples of rational deliberation. Someone is always attempting to manipulate someone else to subject them to their will. Sharon and Margalit are ‘decidedly pessimistic’ about whether, in these circumstances, democratic consent can retain its legitimacy. They question the faith placed in the ideal of ‘open society’ in which freedom enables good arguments to drive out bad ones. Open society is not ‘the bulwark against oppression’ that its defenders hope. It is, in fact, quicksand. ‘The conditions of open discourse and uninhibited expression might end up facilitating the manipulative threat to the free society.’ A society of free citizens can lose its freedom if its politics is deformed into a theatre of manipulation. The threat to democracy that concerns them most is manipulation as domination.

Margalit and Sharon are excellent historians of ideas, and they illustrate their thesis with a sure-footed tour of the Western tradition’s best thinking on this theme. Cicero, Hobbes, Hume and Machiavelli figure prominently. Machiavelli was a master theorist of manipulation, urging princes to simulate virtue, the better to impose their will on others, but also warning princes against being manipulated by their own courtiers. Men in power, he wrote, ‘take such pleasure in their own affairs and so deceive themselves there that they defend themselves with difficulty’ against the plague of manipulative whispering and manoeuvring around them. Here ‘the deception involved in manipulation is self-deception’.

Manipulators control others by preying on this self-deception. Margalit and Sharon devote most of a chapter to Shakespeare’s Othello and to that master manipulator Iago. Othello is vulnerable to self-deception because he is in love. Proust is cited to good effect: ‘It is the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials.’ Iago manipulates Othello’s trust as well as his love for Desdemona to render the Moor utterly dependent on Iago’s will.

Shakespeare’s Othello offers a dire confirmation of David Hume’s observation that the intellect is slave to the passions. Sharon and Margalit argue that we have a double vulnerability, our ‘epistemic dependence on others’ and ‘the cognitive and volitional impenetrability’ of our emotions. Iago cynically exploits both vulnerabilities to dominate and destroy another human being.

Given how easily we deceive ourselves, when we rationalise a bad judgment or justify bad conduct, aren’t we manipulating ourselves? Wasn’t this, for example, what Albert Speer was doing when he insisted that ‘he did not want to know’ what was happening in the death camps? Isn’t this a case where he let his conscience fall under the sway of his grandiose self-regard? Margalit and Sharon disagree. They argue that rationalisation and denial are not the same as manipulation. Our need to rationalise and justify, however, makes us susceptible to manipulation by others. The artful manipulator knows how to trigger a guilty conscience, but also how to make it disappear.

Since collective groups – nations, political parties, classes, ethnicities – can harbour guilty consciences, political manipulators know how to assuage the moral or political unease of their supporters. Manipulation of these collective ties – and the guilt that goes with them – is a royal road to power. As Margalit and Sharon write: ‘By enticing people to identify who they are and to tie the meaning of their lives to a leader, a symbol, or an issue, manipulative politics extract an investment that is perpetually more costly to retract, thereby intensifying the urge to rationalise. Shifting from a politics of interest, policies and ideas to a politics of identities is a surefire preparation for political manipulation.’

Unlike Max Weber who defined power as the capacity to use force to coerce people’s behaviour, Sharon and Margalit insist that domination can be achieved without force or coercion, but rather through manipulation of the will. In this they follow Kant, who wrote: ‘There can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another.’ Unlike Isaiah Berlin, whose Two Concepts of Liberty defined freedom in negative terms as the absence of external constraints and in positive terms as the creative potential to shape our own goals, Sharon and Margalit define freedom as independence, meaning freedom from domination of the will.

At this point, the question might be asked whether our wills can ever be as sovereign as this ideal of independence imagines. We are constantly influenced, positively, by those we love and admire, and negatively, by those whom we fear or who are in a position of authority over us. ‘At what point,’ Sharon and Margalit ask, ‘do we say that a person’s will has been overborn, that her will has come under the control of another?’ The line between acceptable social influence and manipulative domination turns out to be difficult to draw. They argue that there comes a point when we all can recognise that we are under the control of another. At that point, if we have any self-respect, we will have to decide whether to submit or resist. Independence is the ‘primary form of social freedom’, they write, and we achieve it through acts of will that refuse forms of ‘alien control’ and insist, as the poet WE Henley said: ‘I am captain of my soul.’

Questions about whether we can be captains of our souls in private life recur when we ask whether our consent in the public life of a democracy can ever be free of manipulation. A chapter is devoted to explicating Hume’s remark that the greatest puzzle in politics is ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few’. If force ‘is always on the side of the governed’, Hume continued, ‘the governors have nothing to support them but opinion’. Manipulating that tacit consent is essential for authoritarian and democratic government alike.

Indeed, they ask, can any form of politics be free of manipulation? Some philosophers, Joshua Cohen for example, have claimed that ‘deliberative democracy’ offers an escape from manipulation because, in his words, it ‘ties the authorisation to exercise public power to free discussion among equal citizens’. Margalit and Sharon are sceptical, arguing that free citizens are as likely as demagogues to manipulate the consent of their fellow citizens. Deliberation among citizens, they also argue, is possible only ‘on the basis of massive agreement and shared meanings’ and in societies as polarised as their native Israel and the United States, deliberation among strangers may be impossible. Even when societies are not polarised, citizens, like all human beings, have only a limited grasp of where their long-term interests lie. They agree with Hume that ‘men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul which makes them prefer the present to the remote’. Our present-mindedness, Sharon and Margalit maintain, does not prevent us from giving our assent to policies that do protect our long-term interests, but usually only after the fact, not before. This is why democratic politics is so dependent on good leadership, on those rare creatures with the talent to persuade us to foreswear short-term advantage for long-term collective gain.

Sharon and Margalit want to defend a politics based on rational consent, but they struggle to defend the claim that the epistemological sovereignty of the citizen can survive the omnipresent manipulation of the twenty-first century. While they want to defend a politics reliant on persuasion, they remain disciples of Hume’s claim that reason is a slave of the passions, and the passions are the enemy of rational persuasion.

What passes for consent, they admit, is mostly acquiescence. The best a democrat can hope for, they argue, is a populace whose acquiescence is active rather than passive, a consensual acquiescence rather than passive subjection.

They are too Humean and too sceptical to put much faith in free-speech regimes protecting democratic consent. In the digital era of unlicensed influencers, the happy assumption that a free market in speech is self-clearing and self-cleansing is hopelessly outdated. Manipulation in the digital age ‘does not abide by the logic of the invisible hand. It shares the logic of contamination rather than that of competition’. Contamination, to use Cory Doctorow’s term, means ‘enshittification’, and this rather than liberation seems to be where the new media has taken democracy.

In what they call ‘an unsatisfying conclusion’, Sharon and Margalit echo Walter Lippman’s question: ‘Whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise.’ Lippman made this remark in the 1920s when the chief manipulators were press barons such as Hearst and Rothermere. Now the chief manipulators are the owners of the media platforms on which nearly all public debate is conducted, plus the global army of influencers, some in the pay of foreign governments, some freelancers for extremisms of left and right. Billionaire owners have wrapped the defence of oligopoly in the First Amendment, enlisting the vast army of digital influencers to defend their unlimited freedom to manipulate public debate.

The best defence of democracy against manipulation, Sharon and Margalit argue, is to treat ‘public discourse as a fundamental public good, on a par with free and fair elections, an independent judicial system and a non-partisan police force’. This would require media regulation, sanctions for disinformation, forcing online platforms to accept the same legal obligations as publishers, state subsidy for public media and limits on advertising.

These are sensible measures, but Sharon and Margalit admit that even a regulated public sphere will never be free of manipulation. A cultural change that empowers militant scepticism and epistemological resilience is required if democratic freedom is to survive. Fortifying resilience means ‘nurturing epistemic authorities, respecting expertise and cultivating a public culture that rewards rigor and sanctions quacks and swindlers’. Above all, as Kant said so long ago, it means ‘daring to know’ – sapere aude – and daring to think for oneself. Cultivating that virtue in our children, our colleagues and friends, and in ourselves, may be the most important thing we can do to defend democracy and our personal lives against manipulation. Sharon and Margalit’s lucid, engaging and formidable display of philosophic insight will help all of us to achieve that goal.