Simon Sherratt‘s Propaganda and Power in the Age of Globalization critiques global corporate influence on democracy, exploring the intersection of finance, technology, and politics. The book’s interdisciplinarity and unconventional structure make it an original contribution, though a lack of breadth to its sources and an underdeveloped exploration of propaganda ultimately limit it, writes Ruth Garland .
Propaganda and Power in the Age of Globalization: The Myths We Live By. Simon Sherratt. Routledge. 2025.
When the White House becomes a Tesla car showroom and Big Tech owners take prominent positions at the Trump inauguration (albeit uncomfortably), this book by an independent academic Simon Sherratt is a timely examination of what he describes as the “hi-jacking” of democracy by globalised corporate interests. Bearing in mind Trump’s approach to foreign affairs, it’s notable that on page 26 he describes the “ever present danger” that a government could follow the demands of its citizens and “tear up trade agreements entered into by their predecessors,” as the kind of democracy that the global order tries to restrain.
It’s hard to find any information about the author, although the blurb for his first bookCredit and Power: The Paradox at the Heart of the British National Debt (2020) describes him as an “economic historian”. His LinkedIn profile says little apart from identifying him as being based in the US. In this, his second book, Propaganda and Power (2025), it is his critical, historicised approach to debt, finance and technology that provides one of its main strengths. The book is unorthodox both in its content and organisation. The three-part, seven-chapter structure is built on 460 numbered sections of 2-3 paragraphs in length that are cross-referenced. The narrative flows well since it is logically organised, but I felt little temptation to jump between sections since this disrupted the flow. I wonder whether the choice to include so many different sections serve the author’s purpose, since this is clearly not a reference book.
Normalising state support of banking
Simon SherrattThe central thesis positions itself at the heart of the immense technological and financial forces that have buffeted the world’s democracies from the neoliberal deregulation of the 1980s, to the spread of state and corporate surveillance after 9/11, and the steady rise in inequality and public resentment. Sherratt contends that this dynamic has continued through the global dominance of US Big Tech following the dot.com crash of 2004. He makes a persuasive case that the legislative, regulatory and narrative abuse of corporate and government power are fundamental causes of the fragmentation of Western societies that has undermined democracy and freedom over 50 years. Other recent books, such as Nick Couldry’s The Space of the World (2024), consider the global corporate domination of new media and the crisis of democracy arising from it. This book focuses on the economic dimension, examining how government support for the banking industry has been normalised through media and reputation management in a way that obstructs the workings of democracy.
Democracy and corporate imperialism
Sherratt’s interweaving of political and financial postwar histories and narratives presents a powerful dynamic that has precipitated today’s multiple crises. The binary moral tale of good and evil that drove the Allies in defeating Hitler and then rebuilding Europe after 1945 had a basis in reality. Less comfortably, the tale transmogrified into the Cold-War narrative that demonised collectivism before gleefully celebrating its fall. This, and the denigration of the so called “big state” continued after 9/11 as a full-blown myth that launched the War Against Terror. Freedom and democracy as founding principles of the post-war settlement became increasingly threadbare as they were deployed to justify US-led corporate imperialism, militarism and surveillance.
Shifts in financial regulation
Chapter Four, on Corporate Socialism and International Finance, is especially well grounded in its analysis of how the financial markets became increasingly detached from the real economy through a series of crises and governments’ responses to them. Examining the US case, it discusses the ending of a series of regulations such as the fact that gold underpinned the US$ until 1971, the ending in 1999 of the protections that separated commercial from investment banking, and governments’ reactions to the 2008 financial crisis. Promotional industries such as corporate PR and lobbying were key to maintaining the myth that the crash was “a blip in an otherwise well-functioning system” (97) and that the trillion-dollar taxpayer funded bailout for banks who were “too big to fail” was both natural and essential. To uphold the banking system, governments redirected expenditure to pay interest on public debt but hid this from voters, blaming political opponents for the ensuing austerity and further undermining public trust in politics.
An absence of propaganda
The concept of propaganda is underdeveloped in the book, taking its reference almost solely from 1920s theorists Edward Bernays (1928) and Walter Lippmann (1922). For example, Bernays is referred to seven times in the index while terms such as brands and branding, consumer culture, news and media are absent. Public Relations (PR) is cross-referenced back to propaganda. Given that the word propaganda appears in the book’s title and is assigned a major role in the undermining of democracy, some engagement in contemporary debates relating to promotion and branding would have given the approach more credibility, for example through the work of Adam Arvidsson’s Brands, Scott Cutlip’s The Unseen Power or the work of Jacqui L’Etang on the origins of modern PR or works by leading political communications scholars.
A questioning exploration of power and globalisation
There are two notably curious features that recur in the book. The first is the constant misspelling of Ronald Reagan as Regan. The second is its definition of socialism as “intervention by the government into the workings of the free market” (70). The author uses the term to argue that much of the American economy is not subject to the workings of either the free market or democracy but is “far closer to a government-managed (socialistic) system” (71). But “government-managed” is not the same thing as socialism. Given the dominance of big business as represented throughout the book, this definition is confusing if not misleading. It is hard to discern Sherratt’s ideological and intellectual background, which is one of the book’s strengths, perhaps, but to quote Stuart Hall (1960), anything that critically examines “the anatomy of power, the relationship of business to politics, the role of ideology,” has a home in the pantheon of socialist analysis.
In the light of this book’s interdisciplinary nature and historical engagement with major themes such as power, money and propaganda, it will be of general interest to those with little knowledge of economics and finance who are curious about globalisation. Its questioning approach and clear writing style make it suitable for students as a starting point for critiquing globalisation and the impact of technological and media development since the 1970s. It offers an original take on today’s crisis of democracy and could be a starting point for a deeper examination of the relationship between global PR and lobbying and the political and economic crisis that threatens the post-war world order.