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Screening the invisible hand: state-sponsored documentary media, (neo)liberalism, and the riddle of politics, 1918-1980

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Screening the invisible hand: state-sponsored documentary media, (neo)liberalism, and the riddle of politics, 1918-1980

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SCREENING THE INVISIBLE HAND:
STATE-SPONSORED DOCUMENTARY MEDIA, (NEO)LIBERALISM, AND
THE RIDDLE OF POLITICS, 1918-1980

by

Jelena B. Ćulibrk

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES)

December 2022

Copyright 2022 Jelena B. Ćulibrk
ii
Epigraph

Hell is truth seen too late.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

For the materialist historian,
every epoch with which she occupies herself
is only prehistory for the epoch she herself must live in.

- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1930s)

iii
Dedication

I dedicate this doctoral dissertation to the memory of my beloved grandparents.
They made my coming off age at the End of History truly historic.

iv
Acknowledgements

This was wild. When I landed at LAX in August 2016 to begin my doctoral program, my prefrontal
cortex had not yet developed, nor did I experience my first Saturn return. Similarly, the country I
landed in was about to undergo tectonic shifts. Even if these were and still are ridiculously
uncertain times, they were also the most exciting years of my life. In addition to completing this
extensive project, the period between 2016 and 2022 engendered what was desperately needed in
our neoliberal predicament—a break in history.
And yet, I could have not “survived” this gap in time and finished the dissertation had it
not been for an army of people and institutions. As Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek argued,
institutions are the bedrock of (neo)liberalism, so let me first recount their centrality to this project.
In all seriousness, archives are crucial to a historian and I would like to thank the archivists and
staff at the following institutions: The John F. Kennedy Library for providing not only a wonderful
research experience but for feeding weary and always hungry graduate students at their awesome
cafeteria with the nicest view of the Boston Bay; Jesus College Archives at the University of
Cambridge where I took my own archival boxes from the storage and enjoyed wonderful tea with
some Toblerone on the side; The BBC Written Archives located in a weird town called Reading—
Kate Winslet’s hometown—where the archivists welcomed me back from my long COVID-19
hiatus. Although I had to isolate ten days before arriving, I was thrilled to get my hands dirty again
with some amazing primary sources. I also thank the folks at the British National Archives for
keeping this gargantuan archive running. In London, I got to explore The Tate Archive, and I thank
the archivists for an exciting research visit amidst an exciting art collection. Back in the United
States, the Hoover Institution Archives welcomed me twice—in February 2020 and June 2022. I
especially want to thank Ognjen Kovačević and commend his enthusiasm for all things Yugo. I
hope to finally, one day, stay longer in Palo Alto and visit the Hoover Tower with you.
In a typical neoliberal gesture, my gratitude to institutions is followed by capital. As such,
I thank the University of Southern California for supporting my project with two generous
fellowships—the Annenberg Fellowship and the Final Year Fellowship. Perhaps most relevantly,
receiving USC’s completion fellowship made all the difference when COVID-19 disrupted my
archival research and international travel. Please, please continue to support graduate research by
expanding your fellowship programs; your endowment allows such investments crucial to USC’s
v
future. My gratitude also goes to Stanford University for supporting this project with an additional
research fellowship. Although it is always nice to have some extra cash for research, receiving this
fellowship was key to this project because it allowed me to get into the Mont Pèlerin Society—a
central neoliberal institution. As the Hoover Institution’s research fellow, I attended my first Mont
Pèlerin Society meeting in January 2020 and engaged with the contemporary neoliberal thought
collective. Since my project argues for the necessity of understanding and studying neoliberalism
as a set of ideas and institutions, spending time around the Mont Pèlerin Society’s members made
me appreciate their diversity of thought and experience. Indeed, my affiliation with the Hoover
Institution made a faceless neoliberal institution less abstract even if I have attended it as a person
from a starkly different ideological perspective. I also owe much gratitude to USC’s Visual Studies
Research Institute for supporting this project with two additional summer stipends. These generous
funds allowed me to travel to the United Kingdom and complete much of this research in 2021.
I finally arrive at the most important part of any intellectual endeavor—people. I thank
Mick Jackson, the director and producer of The Ascent of Man (BBC-2, 1973) and The Age of
Uncertainty (BBC-2, 1976), for talking to me about his time at the BBC. Likewise, Free to
Choose’s executive producer Robert Chitester was kind enough to share his stories of working
with Friedman and ex-BBC talent in the late-1970s. Many thanks to Eric Wakin and Annelise
Anderson for helping me attend the Mont Pèlerin Society’s 2020 meeting at the Hoover Institution.
Quinn Slobodian’s work has informed this project in several ways, but most importantly, I am
grateful for our brief email correspondence in which he urged me to study Michael Polanyi’s
groundbreaking documentary film Unemployment and Money (1938/1940). Special thanks to
Richard Jones from USC’s American Language Institute; he helped me edit my first academic
publication and parts of this doctoral project.
I thank my colleagues at the School of Cinematic Arts and the Visual Studies Research
Institute. I have benefitted greatly from attending seminars with you, reading your work, and
submitting my own for your close scrutiny. The comments and the support I have received along
the way are hopefully observable in this “final product.” Special thanks to Vanessa Schwartz and
Jennifer Miller for creating a wonderful intellectual home for us interdisciplinary misfits. While
attending the VSRI’s Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on visual history in 2017, I developed parts of this
dissertation. And while the project was largely apolitical in 2017, if not anti-political, it soon grew
to something I could had not envisioned before working with my advisor Anikó Imre. She
vi
interviewed me back in early 2016 before I had a chance to even visit USC and was by my side
throughout the program. Indeed, when I contemplated leaving the program in 2018, Anikó lent
much emotional and scholarly support. She is one of those rare academics who although
immensely accomplished continues to treat her graduate students as intellectual equals. Always
curious and, above all, highly intuitive, Anikó urged me to follow my impulses on neoliberalism
and public television—an unlikely methodological and historical entanglement—that materialized,
in no small part, through her faith in my abilities.
The USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Department of Cinema and Media Studies was my
intellectual home, and I was privileged to have been part of it. Certainly, my committee members
reflect the excellence of this Department. Our current chair Priya Jaikumar has been part of this
project since 2018, when I began working with her as a teaching assistant for a graduate class on
world cinema. Priya’s instructive and generous feedback made me into a better scholar and writer.
Michael Renov was one of my earliest and most vehement critics. Our meetings were always
insightful, albeit demanding especially since Michael urged me to take my historian’s “hat” off
and explore more theoretical writings on documentary cinema and society. It was not always easy
to leave the comfort of historical research, but Michael patiently supported my academic growth.
J.D. Connor joined our department in 2018—another crucial event in this project’s development.
I will forever cherish our weekly book discussions and J.D.’s early enthusiasm for the dissertation.
Although not part of CAMS or my dissertation committee, Jann Matlock has been my “shadow”
advisor ever since I started graduate school at University College London in 2013. There, I worked
on my first M.A. project under her guidance—an immensely challenging experience that turned a
clueless recent undergraduate into a young scholar. Indeed, Jann was my most enthusiastic
supporter and urged me to continue my career as a doctoral student in the United States.
My non-academic friends have been essential in this journey. Apart from receiving
emotional support and comfort, my international group of friends aided my research in various
pragmatic ways. I would first like to thank my friend Milan Skendžić for supporting my initial
archiving in March 2017. Milan passed away in June, but I will cherish the time and care he
extended to this project. My other friends in London, Mihaela Mitrović, Luka Katić, and Fia Lumi
allowed me to stay in their Chelsea apartment in June and July 2021. Perhaps my prefrontal cortex
developed by this time but researching in London while also reading Mary Shelley’s Matilda on
their Victorian— “mrtav muž”—terrace was so crucial to experiencing, for the first time in my
vii
life, enjoyment in real time! Certainly, Mihaela made this particularly fruitful with a few nice
bottles of champagne that she provided for the opportunity. Grazie mille, rode! There is another
couple from London that I would like to mention. Vicky and John Thornton were strangers to me
before June 25, 2022. I was traveling from Los Angeles and got stuck at Heathrow Airport amidst
global airline turmoil. At 9 pm, there were no hotels available in London or around the airport.
While I complained about this situation to the border agent, the Thorntons serendipitously
overheard this conversation and invited me to spend the night at their place. Risky? Absolutely,
but I was cognitively depleted from not sleeping for more than thirty hours at that point. Vicky
and John were completely sane, and we had a wonderful conversation over a bottle of Bordeaux.
I am telling you; life is awesome, especially if experienced in real time!
My partner Byanka Barajas was my most-trusted travel companion. She was my plus one
at the Mont Pèlerin Society’s meeting in 2020—where we internally screamed—and accompanied
me to London in 2021. Through the years, we camped all over California, ate great meals in France
and Italy, sunbathed across the Adriatic Coast, got poisoned in Mexico City, and relentlessly
explored her hometown, Los Angeles. When we are not traveling, one can find us eating shrimp
aquachile at Holbox (3655 S. Grand Ave, Los Angeles) while passionately discussing geopolitics.
Although activism connected us in late 2017, Byanka inspired me to mature and grow in ways I
did not think were possible.
Whenever I reflect on my childhood, I tend to describe it as bitter-sweet. To be sure, I was
unfortunate to be born in Yugoslavia right before the country disintegrated into a civil war. And
yet, I was cocooned by the most loving and supportive parents, grandparents, older sister, and
relatives. I thank my family for their continued support and love, especially during the last year
when I returned home to complete writing this doctoral project. Our home has always been an
intellectually stimulating environment, but it continues to be my safe harbor amidst unpredictable
political and economic currents.

Lake Palić,
August 2022

viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph .......................................................................................................................................... ii
Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... xi
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
What is Neoliberalism? ............................................................................................................... 6
Neoliberalism and Media Studies ............................................................................................. 14
Neoliberalism is dead…undead…undead ................................................................................. 22
The Road from Vienna to the Hoover Institution ..................................................................... 27
Chapter One: Out of Chaos, 1918-1938 ....................................................................................... 33
The Camera on the Empire ....................................................................................................... 48
Human Behavior and Politics ................................................................................................... 56
Neoliberal Realism, or How to Visualize Liberal Governance ................................................ 66
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 81
Chapter Two: Guarding the Frontiers of Freedom ....................................................................... 85
The Ministry of Information’s Films Division ......................................................................... 94
Planning a New Vision for Britain .......................................................................................... 106
The Outliers: Humphrey Jennings, Jill Craigie, and Friedrich Hayek .................................... 120
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 138
Chapter Three: Futures Past ........................................................................................................ 141
Television and Neoliberalism ................................................................................................. 153
Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969) and the docu-history form .......................................................... 168
The Sensory Order in color ..................................................................................................... 182
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 193
Chapter Four: The Image of Capital ........................................................................................... 195
(Re)production: The Galbraith—Friedman Controversy ........................................................ 207
In the Head of History: The Image of Capital and the Neoliberal Mental Landscape ........... 223
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 239
Epilogue ...................................................................................................................................... 241
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 254

ix
List of Figures

Fig. 1: Michel Foucault’s portrait at Palantir’s Silicon Valley headquarters ............................... 12
Fig. 2: Twitter meme created by @FCapitalism2020 ................................................................... 26
Fig. 3: Enough to Eat? (The Gas Light and Coke Company, 1936) ............................................. 41
Fig. 4: Walter Creighton’s fantasy film One Family (EMB, 1930) .............................................. 49
Fig. 5: The locomotive and human labor Night Mail (G.P.O. Unit,1936) .................................... 71
Fig. 6: Aerial shots of the moving train in Night Mail (G.P.O. Unit, 1936) ................................. 72
Fig. 7: Air Outpost (Strand Film, 1937) ........................................................................................ 75
Fig. 8: Michael Polanyi’s film Unemployment and Money (1940) .............................................. 78
Fig. 9: Picture Post issue commissioned by the MoI ................................................................. 111
Fig. 10: German workers (Picture Post) ..................................................................................... 113
Fig. 11: Inside a British pub (Picture Post) ................................................................................ 114
Fig. 12: German concentration camp (Picture Post) .................................................................. 115
Fig. 13: “The Statue of Liberty: A Guiding Light in a Dark World” ......................................... 117
Fig. 14: Listen to Britain (1941), the Queen and Kenneth Clark (right) .................................... 124
Fig. 15: The intertitle in Out of Chaos (1944) ............................................................................ 128
Fig. 16: The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square in Out of Chaos (1944) .............................. 129
Fig. 17: “What sort of people are these who like to spend their leisure looking at paintings?” . 129
Fig. 18: Kenneth Clark in his office at the National Gallery (Out of Chaos) ............................. 130
Fig. 19: Picture Post article on the two artists, Stanley Spencer, and Jill Craigie ..................... 135
Fig. 20: British art critic Eric Newton and British citizens (Out of Chaos) ................................ 137
Fig. 21: The BBC’s TV program One World (1967) .................................................................. 146
Fig. 22: BBC-2’s first Program Chief Michael Peacock (Radio Times) ..................................... 155
x
Fig. 23: Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, episode thirteen “Heroic Materialism” ......................... 172
Fig. 24: Civilisation, episode eleven “Fallacies of Hope” .......................................................... 177
Fig. 25: The neoliberal thought collective’s Russian Doll structure .......................................... 208
Fig. 26: Hayek in front of the Institute of Economic Affairs ...................................................... 208
Fig. 27: The Institute of Economic Affairs’ talking points ......................................................... 210
Fig. 28: Letter from Mick Jackson .............................................................................................. 219
Fig. 29: The outline of The Age of Uncertainty’s episode nine .................................................. 220
Fig. 30: Free to Choose, episode “The Power of the Market” ................................................... 226
Fig. 31: The image of capital in Civilisation’s episode eight “The Light of Experience” ......... 229
Fig. 32: J. Vermeer’s paintings The Geographer (1668) and The Astronomer (1668) .............. 230
Fig. 33: The Ascent of Man, episode six “The Starry Messenger” ............................................. 232
Fig. 34: Galileo’s telescope in The Ascent of Man, episode six “The Starry Messenger” .......... 233
Fig. 35: Cover image of The Ascent of Man’s promotional booklet ........................................... 234
Fig. 36: Galileo’s trial in The Ascent of Man, episode six “The Starry Messenger” .................. 236
Fig. 37: Niall Ferguson’s first docu-history Empire ................................................................... 247
Fig. 38: The Ascent of Money, episode “Blowing Bubbles” ....................................................... 248

xi
Abstract

“Screening the Invisible Hand: State-sponsored Documentary, (Neo)Liberalism, and the Riddle of
Politics, 1918-1980” examines the simultaneous rise of documentary media and neoliberalism. I
argue that British state-sponsored documentary media and the neoliberal thought collective
emerged at the end of World War One to fill the political vacuum of post-imperial Europe, mitigate
the rise of mass politics, and safeguard the global market from political instability. Historians of
neoliberalism have argued that neoliberalism was developed to inoculate capital from politics by
establishing supranational regulatory institutions, I show that these regulatory bodies also included
media organizations. The BBC and other media institutions have been left out of recent histories
of neoliberalism even though these state entities had a central role in defining and disseminating
neoliberalism.
Based on extensive archival research in The Hoover Institution Archives, The BBC Written
Archives, The John F. Kennedy Library, The Tate Archive, The British Film Institute, and The
British National Archive, this dissertation shows how state-sponsored documentaries produced
both a justification for and an experience of the world guided by neoliberalism. The dissertation
brings together three dominant modes of engagement with neoliberalism—intellectual history,
capitalism studies, and media studies—to illuminate the interconnectedness between financial
capitalism and popular modes of historical knowledge. I use archival research to uncover the
shared albeit lesser-known intellectual allegiances and impulses between leading neoliberal
thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Walter Lippmann, Michael Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, and
British documentarians and broadcasters such as John Grierson, Kenneth Clark, and David
Attenborough. The latter created media forms and practices that were not only influenced by
neoliberal ideas but also emerged from a shared need to preserve liberal capitalism by restricting
mass politics and direct democracy in both 1929 and 1968. Rather than simply being informational
and ideologically neutral, docu-series such as Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969), The Ascent of
Man (BBC-2, 1973), and Free to Choose (PBS, 1980) helped promote individualism through the
subjective experience of time akin to the seemingly effortless circulation of capital on the global
market.
1

Introduction

Mere months ahead of the 1980 U.S. Presidential Election, the Public Broadcasting Service
(PBS) televised an unusual production. The docu-history Free to Choose was a ten-part mini-series,
presented by the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, in which he detailed the history and future
of capitalism. Certainly, economics was a topic of great relevance in the 1970s, and economists
were, for the first time in history, lionized as public intellectuals.
1
Their arcane knowledge was
essential in a decade buffeted by the first substantial crumble of the postwar economic boom; oil
and energy shortages, high unemployment, and stagflation made economists indispensable to daily
political discourse.
2
But what made Free to Choose an uncommon presence on public television,
an institution funded by the taxpayers, was the series’ staggering anti-government vitriol. Through
a seductively simple explanation of the decade’s economic downturn, Friedman charged the
federal government’s uncontrolled spending for inflating the budget and straining future growth.
3

Western liberal states at this pivotal moment in 1980 needed to remember, Friedman argued, a
crucial lesson of early capitalism: prosperity depended on society’s submission to the free market
guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. If governments allowed the global market to operate in

1
Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France,
1890s to 1990s, Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
2
“One explanation for economists’ recurrent tendency not to trust democracy, for instance, is that they suspect the
man in the street is an epistemic shambles; in their estimation, economists therefore deserve to be respected as experts
in knowledge, because their training encourages them to approach the reasoning of the layperson with a cold jaundiced
eye.” Philip Mirowski and Edward M. Nik-Khah, The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of
Information in Modern Economics (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5.
3
The sentiment was further simplified by comparing the U.S. government’s budget to that of an ordinary American
household. This common neoliberal misconception, or perhaps, its most potent rhetorical gesture has been challenged
by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This form of Keynesian economics dismissed neoliberal comparisons since it’s
erroneous to think of government spending as equal to our household budget, especially when a country like the U.S.
produces its own currency. For a popular iteration of MMT see Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth : Modern Monetary
Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (New York: Public Affairs, 2020).
2
an unfettered manner by abolishing labor and trade restrictions, thus revitalizing capitalism,
economic prosperity would return to the proverbial West.
4

Without a doubt, such an appealing promise was made more plausible by the employment
of cinematic techniques; visual storytelling helped explicate abstract economic ideas and lend
credibility to “the power of the market” through exotic out-of-studio locations, montage, and
archival footage. Indeed, the program’s fans often praised the docu-history “format” as “classically
liberal.”
5
But most of all, Free to Choose illustrated the flow of market economy—the global
circulation of capital, information, and labor—through its extensive use of fast-paced editing that
connected disparate temporal and spatial settings under a single market order. Episode one, for
instance, took audiences from mid-eighteenth-century Scotland to modern-day Hong Kong.
6
To
be sure, such sweeping televisual voyages across human history and culture were the docu-
histories’ primary charm. Established in the mid-1960s by the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC), the docu-histories were produced to, on the one hand, showcase color broadcasting while,
on the other hand, expand educational television for adult audiences—and both were great for
business. Expansive on-screen voyages across time and space helped sell color television as well
as globalize BBC’s programming at a moment when the British economy reached its first postwar
slump. Although produced with public funds, the BBC sold docu-history programs to international
markets, especially the lucrative North American market. When in January 1977 PBS executive

4
Despite neoliberals’ naturalization of the market mechanism as an evolutionary product of liberal societies, its
development was tied to the Industrial era’s technological innovation: “once elaborate machines and plant were used
for production in a commercial society, the idea of a self-regulating market system was bound to take shape.” Karl
Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press,
2001), 43.
5
Letter from Sally L. Pruit (Dallas, TX) to Milton Friedman, February 8, 1980, 1, Box 225, Papers of Milton Friedman,
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.
6
President of the Heritage Foundation, a leading neoliberal think tank, Edwin Feulner underlined this special
international appeal of the series: “…it will come as no surprise to find Uncle Miltie popping up in Hong Kong, where
economic freedom is practiced in its purest form, and at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing,
where the machinery of inflation—the printing presses—crank out legal tender around the clock.” Edwin Feulner,
“TV’s New Miltie,” The Intelligencer, January 4, 1980.
3
Robert Chitester approached Friedman with the prospect of televising neoliberal arguments, the
docu-history form was already a well-respected, if not the most prestigious example of 1970s
educational programming.
And yet, if “the bloated welfare government” was behind the economic, political, and
social ills of the 1970s, why did neoliberal thinkers challenge it through public television, one of
the postwar state’s most emblematic apparatuses? How did public television and its newly
developed documentary programs help the neoliberal cause in this transitional period? To answer
these questions, I expand on our usual understanding of neoliberalism as a set of free-market
doctrines by exploring its entanglement with state-sponsored documentary media such as the
1930s and 1940s documentary cinema in Britain, and public television’s docu-series in the 1960s
and 1970s. By viewing neoliberalism in the context of state-sponsored documentaries, I want to
suggest that the term “neoliberalism” has been used in a totalizing way—as a political movement
always already antithetical to postwar liberal states. On the contrary, studying its relationship to
state-sponsored cinema and television can help us not only better define neoliberalism but also
expand our grasp of documentary media and politics in the long twentieth century.
As a media-making practice, documentary cinema has long been associated with left-
leaning political movements. From the Workers International Relief’s interwar documentary
campaigns to 1960s Newsreel films, documentary practitioners have used and developed the form
to document socialist movements, and further support manifold leftist causes.
7
In spite of this
historic allegiance between documentary cinema and left-wing politics, my dissertation traces
reactionary origins of the form within the interwar British Documentary Film Movement, and in

7
I intentionally refused to mention 1920s Soviet documentary cinema because it too was anti-political and reactionary
to the demands of the 1917 Revolution. Instead of helping develop a form of popular government, documentary
practitioners such as Dziga Vertov helped centralize the Soviet political apparatus by resolving the riddle of mass
politics through Lenin’s cult of personality. Alexei Yurchak, “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist
Sovereignty,” Representations 129, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 116–57.
4
postwar public television in Europe and elsewhere. Getting this history right matters because it
illuminates the role of documentary cinema and television in anti-political movements such as
neoliberalism. Despite Free to Choose turning forty in 2020, scholars rarely mention its formidable
influence over public policy and neoliberalism’s curious entanglement with educational television.
In part, this is because neoliberalism has been misunderstood to represent only a set of economic
measures that espouse market liberalization, global trade, the offshoring of labor and capital, and
decreased taxation.
8
According to this narrative, neoliberalism emerged as a dominant political
order when Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1980) ascended to power in Britain
and the United States, consequentially challenging the post-World War Two welfare state.
9

It is tempting to narrate neoliberal history in this manner. First, leading neoliberal
advocates, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, personally advised Thatcher and Reagan, thus
greatly influencing these politicians’ economic policies and political philosophies.
10
As a result,
for some historians, Free to Choose represents a simple propaganda piece in support of Reagan’s
1980 presidential campaign.
11
After all, Reagan’s television ads repeated Friedman’s points about
gargantuan government, rampant inflation, and large-scale damage induced by postwar Keynesian
economic policy.
12
Second, the Free to Choose contradiction might be explained as a yet another

8
“Neoliberalism has…become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought…
[neoliberalism was] incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world…
[neoliberalism] seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.” David Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
9
Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2022), 61. Ebook. Francis
Fukuyama recently dubbed this neoliberal coalition “The Reagan-Thatcher Neoliberal Revolution.” Here I am
thinking of two very influential books on neoliberal history.
10
Both men fostered close relationships with the two politicians. Perhaps, most importantly, Friedman and Hayek
advised politicians on the right since the 1964 U.S. presidential elections when they both advised the Republican
primary candidate Barry Goldwater.
11
Such readings of Free to Choose are dominant across both popular publications and academic research.
Undoubtedly, these books and papers continue to muddle our understanding of both neoliberalism and public
broadcasting. For a popular reading of Ronald Reagan’s ascendency see Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right
Turn, 1976-1980 (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 725-729.
12
Furthermore, Free to Choose’s sequel was supported by then ex-president Reagan when the introduced one of the
episodes explaining the significance of the project to world peace.
5
example of neoliberal appropriation of prestigious cultural forms such as TV docu-series; these
new educational TV programs were even lauded by leading Marxist scholars of culture such as
Raymond Williams.
13
To be sure, Free to Choose was not an isolated example; just a decade before
the series’ broadcast, free market economists with the help of Swedish bankers established the
(Ersatz) Nobel Prize for Economics which greatly assisted the public’s acceptance of neoliberal
ideas and policy proposals.
14

I do not intend to delegitimize the above-mentioned conclusions for they, certainly, have
historical veracity apparent to anyone sifting through the archival records of leading neoliberal
thinkers. However, I argue that remaining within the political and economic context of the late-
1970s and early-1980s does not adequately explain why Milton Friedman agreed to produce his
most public response to postwar Keynesianism via public broadcasting. Denouncing Free to
Choose as a central part of Reagan’s 1980 campaign threatens to obscure both neoliberalism’s
longue durée, and its relationship to popular culture. Perhaps, even worse, by not taking Free to
Choose earnestly—as a symptom of a historic entanglement between neoliberal ideas and
prestigious media forms such as documentary cinema—media scholars absolve cinema and
television of their complicity in propagating and sustaining the neoliberal world order.

13
Williams described precursors to Friedman’s series such as Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969) and The Ascent of Man
(BBC-2, 1973) as “the best television now being made.” Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural
Form, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 74. [1973]
14
Historian of neoliberalism, Philip Mirowski, argues that the Nobel Prize in Economics was established for the sole
purpose of giving prestige to neoliberal economists and their free-market policy prescriptions. For example, a group
of Swedish bankers and economists established the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1968, and in little over fifty years,
a whooping number of eight members of the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society became Nobel laureates. Philip Mirowski,
“The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize,” in Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski, eds. Nine Lives of
Neoliberalism, London and New York: Verso, 2020, 219-254.
6
What is Neoliberalism?
In “Screening the Invisible Hand,” I situate the emergence of neoliberalism as an
intellectual project in the 1920s rather than the 1980s. The nineteenth-century liberal world-system,
held together by classical liberal ideas and imperial trade networks, was challenged by the end of
World War One through universal suffrage, organized labor movements, and mass politics in
Europe and elsewhere. As a doctrine born out of the dissolution of imperialism, European legal
scholars, economists, and liberal philosophers established neoliberalism as a way of interrogating
the failures of classical liberalism. In the 1920s “Red” Vienna, neoliberal thinkers such as Ludwig
von Mises and Friedrich Hayek contemplated the future of liberalism amidst the city’s wide-scale
socialist projects, while in London, British politicians sought to protect imperial interests by
institutionalizing liberal values.
15
In the minds of neoliberals, new modes of governance would
safeguard capitalism from political instability when in 1918 the destruction of four European
empires severely destabilized nineteenth-century trade.
16

To be sure, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not a liberal bastion by any measure.
Although responsible for modernizing Vienna, the city’s long-time mayor Karl Lueger was an
outright antisemite and a German nationalist who discriminated against the Empire’s non-German
speaking population.
17
It was Lueger, known to his followers as “the King of Vienna,” who
influenced Hitler’s conception of politics.
18
But paradoxically for Mises, fin-de-siècle Vienna was

15
“In moments of uprising, crowds became symbols for the people as such, and those who were skeptical of
democracy often based their resistance to change on the sight of such manifestations. The city [Vienna] was not just
the backdrop for the emergence of a particular set of ideas. Neoliberal thinkers arrived at their ideas in response to the
world they saw around them.” Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018).
16
As I show in Chapter One, neoliberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Walter Lippmann argued that it was a mistake
for classical liberals to relegate governance to a seemingly evolutionary process.
17
For liberalism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, see Jonathan Kwan, Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1861–
1895 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013).
18
It was Lueger, the first among bourgeois politicians, to understand the centrality of the mass in politics. Robert S.
Wistrich, “Karl Lueger and the Ambiguities of Viennese Antisemitism,” Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 3/4 (1983):
251–62.
7
a simpler time.
19
Since nineteenth-century liberalism operated within a considerably smaller public
sphere consisting mostly of land-owning men, this provided the liberal world-system with
necessary political stability. But it also prevented classical liberals from anticipating and thus truly
comprehending the role of popular government in a market economy.
20
Even worse, as Carl
Schorske argued, Austro-Hungarian liberals “unwittingly summoned from the social deeps the
forces of a general disintegration” that they failed to understand and control.
21
To prevent a similar
dissolution, neoliberals formulated ways to limit mass politics through national and supra-national
organizations. Thus, neoliberalism began less as an economic system with a fixed set of policy
doctrines, but as an intellectual project committed to enacting an institutionalized social order.
22

One such institution, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), was established in 1926 to
promote British commercial interests. It was here that John Grierson, the most important originator
of documentary cinema in Britain, worked on creating a filmmaking practice amiable to British
imperial interests. Influenced by the ideas of the growing international neoliberal movement,
Grierson developed a form of documentary practice that downplayed mass politics by espousing
liberal citizenship.
23
Consider, for example, his best-known EMB film The Drifters (1929), which
followed the lives of British fishermen. Instead of representing these men as a social collective
battling the precarious labor conditions of pre-Depression Europe—a remarkable moment in
history when labor movements flourished from Tokyo to Budapest—Grierson chose to depict the

19
A fascinating revelation especially since Mises’ mother was Jewish.
20
Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.
21
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 118.
22
Here I am invoking Nancy Fraser’s recent definition of capitalism: “If capitalism is neither an economic system nor
a reified form of ethical life, then what is it? My answer is that it is best conceived as an institutionalized social order,
on par with, for example, feudalism. Understanding capitalism in this way underscores its structural divisions,
especially the institutional separations…” Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For An Expanded
Conception of Capitalism,” in Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic
Order, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 153.
23
Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), 261.
8
film as a Crusoean battle between men and nature.
24
Remaining silent on the 1920s social and
economic issues, Grierson helped bring about a form of documentary filmmaking that
delegitimized political action. Although Grierson’s films represented British workers in what was
a deeply classist society, their political demands were diffused through liberal practicality—better
living and working conditions. Not surprisingly, the Griersonian Documentary Film Movement
produced films that advertised improved housing conditions for the poor as well as varied state-
sponsored nutritional programs.
25
As such, both Grierson and the neoliberal thought collective
offered new ways of limiting political and social action by reinstating liberal values of hard-work
and “proper” conduct—a pedagogical project favorable to British industry and, ultimately,
capitalist expansion.
My definition of neoliberalism as a set of ideas, institutions, networks, and cultural
practices that came into existence after the defeat of the classical liberal world order in 1918 is
inspired by novel currents in intellectual and economic history. Scholars such as Philip Mirowski,
Jessica Whyte, Quinn Slobodian, and Melinda Cooper have recently argued that we should
understand neoliberalism less as a set of fixed principles and policy decisions, and more as a
dynamic intellectual project consisting of diverse actors and vested interests. In these narratives,
neoliberalism is not solely equated with a Thatcher and Reagan era, although neoliberal thinkers
influenced both politicians, but a plethora of twentieth-century conversations on governance,

24
Grierson’s protagonists are what Marx classified as “independent individuals”: “The individual and isolated hunter
and fisherman; with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-
century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a
misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally
independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the
semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse:
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Random House, 1973), 83.
25
“But the town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic
small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital.” Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Media and
Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, Revised Edition (Malden, MA and
Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 41.
9
politics, liberal thought, and democracy. For Philip Mirowski, neoliberalism was initiated within
the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international organization established at a Swiss mountain resort in
April 1947 with a desire to forge an official network of like-minded liberal thinkers.
26
This
member-only group functioned as a central neoliberal institution that established international
think tanks, enacted policy proposals, and influenced politicians. While not disputing the
importance of the Mont Pèlerin Society to the postwar era, Jessica Whyte and Quinn Slobodian
traced neoliberal beginnings to the ruins of empire—a temporal framework that greatly aided my
own understanding of neoliberalism. For our contemporary moment, Melinda Cooper’s work
uncovered historical and ideological similarities between neoliberalism and conservative politics
in the United States, not least through their shared insistence on nuclear families as proper
custodians of social security. And yet, a pressing inquiry on neoliberal influence over cultural
policy and media institutions is absent from these recent histories of neoliberalism. This is because
historians tend to disregard the role of culture in the neoliberal world order even though cultural
production serves as its “glue and conduit,” second only to military expansion.
27
As such, media
studies can contribute substantially to understanding our neoliberal predicament. But with a
caveat—media scholars need to depart from earlier, totalizing definitions of neoliberalism—as a
free-market offensive against the welfare state—by uncovering the diversity of neoliberal
knowledge with the assistance of original primary sources.
28

26
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought
Collective (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009). Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human
Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London and New York: Verso, 2019). Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of
Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social
Conservatism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017).
27
Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner, eds., Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist
Critique, 1. publ, Routledge Advances in Film Studies 9 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), 1.
28
Of course, media scholars also need to be intentional in their use of the term “neoliberalism.” It has been an
unfortunate practice to ignore capitalist structures by narrowly focusing on “neoliberalism” understood as a totalizing
economic project. Not only was this way of interacting with neoliberalism historically myopic, as I have suggested,
but it threatens to simplify neoliberal alternatives to simply “more democratic capitalism” of the welfare state.

10
Michel Foucault’s Collège de France (1978-79) seminars have had an enduring influence on
media scholars’ understanding of neoliberalism—almost to the point of disabling further
engagement with neoliberal thought. Despite some crucial omissions in Foucault’s study of
neoliberalism, TV scholars have been receptive to his definition of neoliberalism as an “exercise
of political power… modeled on the principles of market economy.”
29
Foucault’s project
developed from a desire to simultaneously interrogate liberal governance and a Marxist
understanding of ideology—the latter being the focus of much scholarly debate in the 1970s.
30
For
him, neoliberalism represented a radical separation of power from a centralized bureaucratic
apparatus. In this transition, Foucault argued, classical liberalism was reformed. Whereas Adam
Smith wanted to make the market economy part of already existing political and social structures,
neoliberalism was driven to replace politics with the widespread marketization of daily life. Under
neoliberalism, individuals are encouraged to see themselves as economic monades that possessed
what American neoliberal economist Gary Becker termed “human capital.”
31

This element of Foucault’s explication was particularly inspiring to scholars of television.
For some of them, the explosion of reality television in the late-1990s and the 2000s was a
symptom of the successful adoption and circulation of neoliberal logic in the public’s
consciousness.
32
By disseminating ideas of self-responsibility and entrepreneurship, reality
television contributed to neoliberalism’s radical reconfiguration of human beings as capital.
Foucault argued that this new rule of individuals that made people sovereigns of their own lives,

Christian Garland and Stephen Harper, “Did Somebody Say Neoliberalism? On the Uses and Limitations of a Critical
Concept in Media and Communication Studies,” TripleC 10, no. 2 (2012): 414.
29
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (Basingstoke [England] ;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 131.
30
Alexander J. Means, “Foucault, Biopolitics, and the Critique of State Reason,” Educational Philosophy and Theory,
February 2, 2021, 1–2.
31
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (Basingstoke [England] ;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
32
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship
(Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008).
11
shrank the liberal state.
33
This was one of the unspoken appeals of neoliberalism for Foucault who
welcomed the rise of individualism in ways that led some political theorists to criticize him as “a
Young Conservative.”
34
It was Foucault’s denunciation of the Enlightenment and its (unrealized)
political promise, or what Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Ben-Habib called “the project of modernity,”
that was central in this perilous entanglement of postmodern intellectuals and neoliberals.
35
In fact,
in the 2000s Gary Becker praised Foucault’s understanding of his theories while the Silicon Valley
surveillance company Palantir owned by Peter Thiel, libertarian venture capitalist and one of the
Republican Party’s largest financier, has a portrait of Foucault at the company’s headquarters.
36

(Fig. 1)

33
It comes as no surprise that 1990s venture capitalists in California’s tech industry such as Peter Thiel were inspired
by self-help books that espoused libertarianism following the demise of the welfare state. One of Thiel’s greatest
influences from this period was the following publication: James D. Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign
Individual: How to Survive the End of the Welfare State and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State (New
York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
34
Habermas charged Foucault as well as other postmodernists for rejecting modernity, a project whose promise was
never truly fulfilled and replacing it with an anti-political program that ultimately benefitted conservatives and capital.
However, Nancy Fraser rejected Habermas’ analysis since Foucault did not reject modernity per se, but only
“humanism.” And yet, Fraser acknowledged that Foucault’s conception of power does not offer a viable alternative
because it doesn’t entertain the question “why should we oppose a fully panopticized, autonomous society?” Jürgen
Habermas and Seyla Ben-Habib, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, no. 22 (1981): 3-14. ;
Nancy Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?,” Ethics 96, no. 1 (1985): 165–84.
35
Ibid., 8-9.
36
The Foucault-Neoliberalism controversy is still very much alive. Especially since Daniel Zamora’s and Michael C.
Behrent’s edited collection in which they charged Foucault with supporting neoliberalism. Daniel Zamora and Michael
C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016). For a good counterargument to
the book, see David Newheiser, “Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture & Society
33, no. 5 (September 1, 2016): 3–21. This photo was made by Antoine d’Agata/Magnum, published in Michael
Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?,” The New York Times, October 21, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/21/magazine/palantir-alex-karp.html, accessed on August 12, 2022.
12

Fig. 1: Michel Foucault’s portrait at Palantir’s Silicon Valley headquarters
(The New York Times)

Irrespective of Foucault’s personal (dis)enchantment, he provided a remarkably prescient
study of neoliberalism at a moment when it was becoming a hegemonic economic and political
system. And yet, his seminars should not limit our survey of neoliberal thought. If the perpetual
controversy over Foucault’s views on neoliberalism has taught us anything, it is the need to cease
regarding his Collège de France seminars as an “‘unsurpassable horizon’ of critical thought” but
rather as a prescient, albeit limited, analysis of neoliberalism’s political and cultural
ramifications.
37
After all, Foucault focused almost exclusively on the German ordoliberals and
American neoliberals, thus ignoring the Austrian school of neoliberalism, or worse,
misinterpreting Viennese neoliberals as anti-statist.
38
Perhaps, most importantly, by downplaying

37
Mitchell Dean, “Foucault Must Not Be Defended,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015): 389–403.
38
“I would like to talk above all about the first, about, to put it very roughly, German neo-liberalism, both because it
seems to me to be more important theoretically than the others for the problem of governmentality…” Michel Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 79.; “Michel Foucault’s attribution of “state-phobia” to Austrian neoliberals is a misunderstanding,
especially considering Mises’s career as an advocate for the use of government taxes to fund business interests. Mises
would become a patron saint to American libertarians, but he not only worked professionally as a state-funded advisor
to the government but also saw a strong role for the state in the protection of property and keeping of the peace. In a

13
the role of Friedrich Hayek, the founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Foucault’s seminars have
obscured our understanding of neoliberal history and the extent to which it was related to
twentieth-century culture.
39
Unlike Friedman and the American neoliberals, Hayek had dispensed
with economic theory already by the late 1930s and embarked on an astoundingly interdisciplinary
research trajectory.
40
Since Hayek was associated with a variety of disciplines—from psychology
to mid-century cybernetics—his conception of neoliberalism is far easier to integrate into cultural
and media studies. Not least because some of Hayek’s central concerns in the immediate post-
World War Two period were modern communication and nascent computer science; the latter is
an area of particular relevance to contemporary media and art historians as well as scholars of
digital cultures. But this is not the Hayek in Foucault’s iteration. By only reading Hayek’s well-
known book The Road to Serfdom (1945), Foucault failed to properly present Hayek’s central role
in the neoliberal thought collective. Hence, focusing on Foucault’s late-1970s definitions of
neoliberalism can reduce our understanding of “neoliberal” to common misconceptions—as a
world-system predominantly concerned with diffusing free market and anti-statist doctrines.

telling phrase from 1922, he called the state “a producer of security.” For Mises, the assessment of state action
depended on the field of engagement. The imperial state itself did not concern him. His fear was of interventionist
government that appealed to “the people” for its legitimacy. His state could find its legitimacy only in its defense of
the sanctity of private property and the forces of competition.” Slobodian (2018), 33.
39
Indeed, Foucault seems to have only read Hayek’s most public book The Road to Serfdom (1945).
40
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2012).
14
Neoliberalism and Media Studies
Undoubtedly, seeing neoliberalism as a set of diverse ideas, institutions, and cultural
practices benefits critical media studies in several ways. First, expanding neoliberalism beyond the
commonplace definition allows us to study the cultural ramifications of neoliberal thought as well
as the mass media’s support of neoliberal expansionism. As media historian Lee Grieveson rightly
noted, the development of media networks in the early twentieth century, primarily cinema and
radio, was fashioned on and conducive to nineteenth-century imperial trade networks.
41
In
Grieveson’s analysis, liberal states have employed cinema and popular media to promote capitalist
production, thus revitalizing the liberal world-system and nineteenth-century imperialism.
Although Grieveson did not recognize the centrality of 1918 to the neoliberal movement, he
provided a compelling argument on the relationship between documentary cinema and the
strengthening of British post-imperial trade.
42

But documentary cinema was not a mere bystander in the neoliberal capture of politics in
the interwar period; cinema contributed much to the neoliberal movement—both in its theoretical
orientation and through its pragmatic goals as the twentieth century’s greatest educator. Consider,
for example, John Grierson’s collaboration with Hungarian chemist-turned-neoliberal philosopher
Michael Polanyi in the early stages of Polanyi’s first economics film Unemployment and Money
(1938/1940). Polanyi took from Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement the
conviction that cinematic vision can illuminate and educate laymen on the benefits of liberalism.
This was because, Grierson and Polanyi argued, the camera’s eye surpassed the inherent human
cognitive limitations by uncovering a variety of invisible economic, political, and social processes

41
“…film was privileged in this significant transformation of global economic strategies because of its purported
semiotic power, which political elites on both sides of the Atlantic began to read as either a supplement or impediment
to the fostering of economic growth taken as integral to the remit of the liberal state.” Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the
Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (University of California Press, 2017), 7.
42
Particularly through Chapter Eight “Highways of Empire” in Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations (2017).
15
that liberal states depended on. Even in theory, cinematic vision was instrumental to neoliberal
economists in devising new theoretical approaches. For instance, Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of
methodological individualism (1909) was influenced by cinema’s ability to dissect individual
movement across a short period of time.
43
Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments compelled
Schumpeter to batter the then dominant German Historical School of Economics and shrink the
scale of economic research from its macro-historical level to an individual’s economic actions.
44

This allowed Schumpeter to discredit historically determinist (i.e., Marxist) analysis of capitalism
and favor the consumer’s price-creating signals. Therefore, my dissertation’s first goal is to
illustrate documentary media’s pivotal role in the neoliberal political order.
Second, recognizing neoliberalism and documentary media as kindred intellectual and
(anti)political projects, inspired by the need to protect liberal values (and capital), allows me to
contribute to some enduring debates in media studies. Namely, my second goal is to clarify the so-
called matter vs. culture debate, or a theoretical conundrum between two dominant approaches in
media studies—cultural studies and the political economy of culture.
45
What initiated this debate
in the 1960s was an urgent need to rethink ideology and the nature of power. Indeed, members of
the New Left in Britain and elsewhere contended that classical Marxist theories of the state were
insufficient for meeting the decade’s challenges. The cultural studies approach became
institutionalized at the University of Birmingham in part through an effort to overcome what Stuart

43
Quinn Slobodian, “How to See the World Economy: Statistics, Maps, and Schumpeter’s Camera in the First Age of
Globalization,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 2 (2015): 307–32.
44
“By revealing aspects of movement hitherto undetectable by the unaided eye, they helped to denaturalize
conventional visual experience and uncouple vision from its association with static form. As Aaron Scharf notes, ‘Not
only did the Muybridge photographs contradict many of the most accurate and up-to-date observations of artists, but
phases of locomotion were revealed which lay beyond the visual threshold. The meaning of the term “truth to nature”
lost its force: what was true could not always be seen, and what could be seen was not always true.’” Martin Jay,
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1994), 134-135.
45
Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with This Debate?,” Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 1 (March 1995): 72–81.
16
Hall termed “Marxist functionalism.”
46
For instance, Hall’s criticism of Louis Althusser’s work
on ideology was, perhaps, the first substantial argument against a strictly materialist approach to
culture. In the classical Marxist sense, large political and economic orders such as capitalism
function as “a base” that engenders all other social, political, and cultural forms—referred to as
“superstructures”—which are responsible for reflecting, supporting, and perpetuating the
economic base. Perhaps, most famously, Althusser adopted this hierarchical model in his theory
of ideology to argue for the inextricable link between capital and culture through what he called
“state-ideological apparatuses,” which include a wide variety of state institutions, not the least the
public education system and mass media. However, state-sponsored documentary cinema’s origin
was not only simultaneous to the neoliberal thought collective; cinematographic vision influenced
the neoliberal project in theory and practice. As such, I assign documentary media larger
independence from economic structures by showing its historical and intellectual entanglements
with neoliberal capitalism.
“Is anyone else bored with this debate?” queried Lawrence Grossberg, an American
follower of cultural studies. In his 1995 essay written to criticize political economists’ (e.g.,
Nicholas Garnham’s) “assault” on cultural studies—its methods and practices—Grossberg
attacked political economists’ reductionist understanding of culture and power. Political
economists of culture, Grossberg asserted, berate cultural studies for focusing on popular culture
and its reception at the expense of institutional histories of media and capitalism. Certainly,
delegitimizing “Marxist functionalism” was part of the 1990s zeitgeist—Fukuyama’s “end of
history” was one of neoliberalism’s most enduring legacies—but our contemporary crises-ridden

46
Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies
in Mass Communication 2, no. 2 (June 1985): 91–114.
17
environment has made media scholars more attentive to institutional analysis.
47
Moreover, the
global market’s meltdown in 2008 underscored the urgent need to transgress the debate. As
scholars noted, the strict division between matter and culture was not ontological but a product of
Cartesian philosophy.
48
Likewise, instead of falling into the false dichotomy between matter and
culture, I point to an earlier, pre-Kapital Marx who, in Grundrisse, defended historical research as
a way of discerning new societal forms before “one can speak of it [bourgeois society] as such.”
49

Indeed, my focus on early neoliberal theory before it was seen as or called “neoliberal,” has
allowed me to uncover neoliberalism’s and state-sponsored documentary media’s shared historical
origins and ideological commitments.
My final aim is to initiate a conversation between media scholars and intellectual historians
of neoliberalism by showing the centrality of documentary cinema as mass media to the neoliberal
project. I accomplish this goal through my interdisciplinary methodology based on rigorous
historical research, critical textual analysis of documentary films, and the institutional history of
state-sponsored media organizations. Through extensive archival research in Britain and the
United States, I juxtapose neoliberal primary sources with archives of leading (neo)liberal
institutions such as the Ministry of Information and the BBC. This allows me to show, for instance,
how Friedrich Hayek’s early correspondence with the MoI reflected on the Ministry’s efforts to
refashion liberalism during wartime assault from authoritarian regimes. And while Hayek failed
to secure a position within the Ministry, in part due to his Austrian background, I trace the wartime
careers of his fellow liberal travelers such as Kenneth Clark whose MoI post, and subsequent

47
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18.
“This tendency to leave Marx behind intensified considerably after 1989. While it was politically liberating to break
with patronising, self-declared vanguards (a break that occurred somewhat earlier in the West than in the East), the
abandonment of Marxism also left a theoretical gap.” Christoph Henning, Philosophy after Marx: 100 Years of
Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy, (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 482.
48
Janice Peck, “Why We Shouldn’t Be Bored with the Political Economy versus Cultural Studies Debate,” Cultural
Critique 64, no. 1 (2006): 92–125.
49
Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy.
18
television career were formative to neoliberalism not least by presenting the inaugural docu-history
show Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969). Despite giving more attention to British liberal institutions, I
show how the Ministry and the BBC transcended the Anglophone context. Not only did the BBC
fashion docu-history programs for lucrative international markets, but the Anglo-American
cooperation in preserving liberalism was a cornerstone behind the success of the British
Documentary Film Movement and the Mont Pèlerin Society. Even to this day, the Society’s
Anglo-American axis exudes the greatest influence, not least by inviting younger British members
to diversify its overwhelmingly senior body.
I simultaneously employ and expand close textual analysis to suggest that mass media were
always already conceived and functioned as neoliberal. Here, I return to the question of ideology.
If neoliberalism depended on a strong institutional framework to spread its ideas on liberal
citizenship, then as historians of silent cinema have shown, cinema was involved in the neoliberal
project from the beginning. Consider, for example, one of the earliest narrative films, entitled A
Drunkard’s Reformation (Biograph, 1909), in which an ardent alcoholic attends a film screening
with his young daughter. Horrified by the on-screen diegesis on the dangers of drinking, the father
exits the cinema as a reformed subject—useful to his family and society. Above all, the film
persuaded censors in the United States and elsewhere to embrace cinema for projects of individual
self-betterment, thus taming the anxieties over early cinema’s deleterious influence.
50

And yet, there are more subtle ways by which mass media were constructed to have
neoliberal tendencies. In contrast to a strictly ideological influence via its educational apparatus or
as a “cultural technology,” visual media’s success was based on providing a new experience of the
world, or novel modes of being compatible with the liberal world-system.
51
As Jonathan Crary

50
Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 79-81.
51
Ouellette and Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship.
19
described, the Industrial Age and emergent capitalism with its astounding mobility of goods,
people, and information, altered the Scientific Revolution’s conceptions of vision and perception.
52

Emblematic of this earlier model of vision was its dominant instrument—the camera obscura—
which retained the observer’s autonomy and, most importantly, the division between objective
reality and the human body. Once this model of perception was shattered, “abstracted from any
founding site or referent,” vision became subjectivized and located within a body.
53
Because
reality was no longer thought to be a product of human cognition, it is not surprising that the
nineteenth-century theories on subjective vision paved the way for a variety of instruments that
enhanced human vision. Certainly, photography and cinema were two of the century’s most
emblematic visual tools because they promised to objectivize vision and minimize the
observer’s—scientist’s or camera operator’s—meddling in truth.
54

The nineteenth century’s loss of faith in human objectivity was easily integrated within the
neoliberal thought collective through their theories of the market as a form of supra-human
cognition. Decades before Crary’s history of modernity, Friedrich Hayek naturalized the market
mechanism in his tract on psychology, The Sensory Order (1952). Because our sensory apparatus
is determined by prior experience, Hayek contended, human vision is a biased way of observing
reality: “every sensation, even the ‘purest,’ must therefore be regarded as an interpretation of an
event.”
55
Undoubtedly, Hayek’s main insight was that modern society needed the market
mechanism to address this central epistemic problem. Of course, we need the market mechanism
to effortlessly allocate goods from Chinese factories to our Amazon.com shopping carts, in ways

52
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.
and London, England: MIT Press, 1992).
53
Ibid., 14.
54
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, no. 40 (1992): 81–128.
55
F. A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1952), 166.
20
that make us neglect this circulation’s material ramifications—its labor and environmental perils—
but perhaps, more importantly, we need unfettered markets, neoliberals professed, to fathom
reality.
56

Historians of modernity have shown how mechanically reproduced media have not only
enhanced our knowledge of the world, but they also altered our conception of reality. As Jeannene
Przyblyski long argued, nineteenth-century photography made reality “inconceivable and
unimaginable without the photograph’s verifying presence.”
57
Moreover, subjective vision
depended on mechanically produced representations to perceive reality and excavate knowledge.
This was how John Grierson vindicated documentary cinema in his most well-known essay “First
Principles of Documentary” (1931). Documentary cinema’s “capacity for getting around, for
observing and selecting from life itself” creates tacit knowledge of the world, an inarticulate form
of knowledge, that would otherwise remain hidden without the cinematic vision.
58
I use the term
“potential” to signal to a condition elucidated by Grierson in his defense of documentary cinema
vis-à-vis interwar newsreel films. Akin to the neoliberal thought collective, Grierson extolled
documentary practitioners, members of his Documentary Film Movement, as able to use film
technology in a way that was most useful to society. This was, no doubt, a prudent move because
it helped the Movement’s members enjoy substantial creative control within British civil service
and industry.
Compare this rhetorical gesture to Hayek’s defense of financial capitalism and its chief
agents. In an additional effort to undermine knowledge, Hayek argued that those in the market

56
“There is a crypto-theology at work in Hayek’s economic and social theory. Ultimately Hayek replaces “God” as
the master signifier of the cosmos with ‘the market,’ but he maintains humanity’s submission to an order that would
supposedly transcend human understanding.” Tim Christiaens, “The Crypto-Theology of Friedrich Hayek,” in The
Routledge Handbook of Theology, ed. Stefan Schwarzkopf (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 367-368.
57
Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1995), 7.
58
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism,
ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 218.
21
system’s proximity (i.e., businesspeople then, and venture capitalists now) see the nature of truth
better than scientists and academics who were, Hayek argued, often obstinately anti-capitalist.
Indeed, scholars’ belief in attaining truth through knowledge production in institutional settings at
laboratories and in classrooms was what Hayek called “the fallacy of science” that gave rise to
anti-market sentiment. Neoliberal attacks on academia have continued to this day. For instance,
venture capitalist Peter Thiel established a fellowship to incite college students to drop out and
become tech entrepreneurs: “The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to
build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”
59
But as the neoliberal thought collective
worked on delegitimizing academia, neoliberal economists benefited from the security of tenured
positions at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. Hence, we can regard Free to Choose as the
prime example of both this dislocation of academic knowledge as well as their simultaneous desire
to inhabit the ranks of public intellectuals.
Neoliberals’ epistemic revolution—the uncoupling of knowledge from people to the
market mechanism—translated well into 1960s educational television such as the BBC’s docu-
histories. First, color broadcasting was specifically advertised by the Radio Corporation of
America, and the BBC as enhancing human vision and allowing people to see what otherwise they
would have missed from the real world; color television retained part of mechanically reproduced
media’s early promise of sensory enhancement. Second, cinema and television, as twentieth-
century pillars of communication, were embroiled in the post-1918 refashioning of neoliberalism
that surpassed a purely ideological influence; mass media provided an experience of a capitalist
economy that was based on motion and movement akin to the effortless circulation of the free
market. My dissertation’s focus on state-sponsored educational television shows how docu-

59
http://thielfellowship.org/, Accessed on July 19, 2022.
22
histories’ main charm, their sweeping mobility of vision across the world in color, provided an
experience of fluid motion so central to capitalist economies. Despite the ideological differences
of these docu-histories, they furnished an experience of the world and mobility of vision that
normalized the market mechanism.
60
Moreover, the docu-history programs naturalized the market
order as a superior information processor able to connect disparate spatio-temporal settings under
one order. As individual monades in the neoliberal system, people internalized the movement of
market-based economies at home and across the globe.

Neoliberalism is dead…undead…undead
But why revive the historical entanglement between neoliberalism and state-sponsored
media in 2022 when the rise of right-wing authoritarianism seems to have obliterated this
twentieth-century political order? Indeed, scholars and political commentators—on both sides of
the political spectrum—were quick to proclaim the death of neoliberalism following the 2016
Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.
61
“The neoliberal era in the United States ended
with a neofascist bang,” wrote Cornel West in November 2016, days after the election of Trump
as the country’s next president.
62
This was not a domestic issue—right-wing “revolutionaries”
were winning elections across the world, a geopolitical situation that only seemed to underscore
neoliberalism’s end. The global rise of authoritarian governments, from India to Hungary, openly
challenged three central neoliberal tenets—freedom of movement, information, and capital—

60
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen
Heath (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1980), 121–42.
61
Manuel Castells, Rupture: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019);
Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents; Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America
and the World in the Free Market Era, 1st ed. (Oxford University Press, 2022).; Martin Jacques, “The death of
neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics,” The Guardian, August 21, 2016. Online edition.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/21/death-of-neoliberalism-crisis-in-western-politics
62
Cornel West, “Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Era Is Here,” The Guardian, November 17, 2016.
23
through a nationalist attack on leading internationalist institutions such as the World Trade
Organization, and the European Union. To make matters worse, the refugee crisis (2015) inspired
right-wing governments to enact wide-scale restrictions on the movement of people through
enhanced border-protection policies. But it was not only the workings of the international right
that dealt a blow to the neoliberal paradigm. As political scientist Gary Gerstle most recently
argued, Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns (2016 and 2020) reinvigorated leftist critique
of neoliberal capitalism and offered a left-populist alternative to neoliberalism.
63

And yet, I want to suggest that proclaiming the end of neoliberalism once again totalizes
the history of this political order. Instead of faltering under the threat of right-wing
authoritarianism, the neoliberal movement was revitalized with the election of Trump. Having had
the good fortune of attending the 2020 Meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society at the Hoover
Institution, I perceived how much this central neoliberal institution agreed with the Trump
Administration’s right-wing, if not fascist policies. During this three-day conference right before
COVID-19 lockdowns, the attendees had an opportunity to mingle with Trump’s economic advisor
Tyler Goodspeed as well as Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s largest financiers. In fact, Thiel was the
Meeting’s most distinguished guest who spoke on the needs to limit the Chinese economy over
our farewell dinner reception, thus validating both Trump’s and Joe Biden’s recent economic
tariffs on Chinese trade. Even among the attendees, central right-wing issues such as climate
change denial and the restriction of movement were repeated through informal conversations.
Although I write more about this encounter with the neoliberal thought collective, now almost

63
Consider, for example, the book cover of Gary Gerstle’s latest history of neoliberalism that features on the top the
Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the photograph of Trump overlooking the construction of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico
border. In Gerstle’s view, the neoliberal political order was a supreme system from 1989 to 2016 when it was
challenged by the rise of right- and left-wing populism after the unraveling of the most recent Financial Crisis (2008).
Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, (Oxford
University Press, 2022).
24
exclusively made of think tank directors and businessmen, it is necessary to point out the historical
and contemporary entanglements between conservative politics and neoliberal institutions.
Neoliberalism did not die in 2016. Instead, it has become reinvigorated through a new Anglo-
American axis, where most young members come from, and MPS’ relationship with right-wing
governments across the world. The danger in proclaiming neoliberalism dead is the fact that we
miss a variety of ways it has remained relevant or, worse, entangled from the start with right-wing
nationalism.
64

But one does not need to infiltrate the Mont Pèlerin Society or other neoliberal institutions
to perceive this thought collective’s influence over contemporary authoritarianism. Certainly,
archival research at the Hoover Institution, where official neoliberal papers are deposited, is
sufficient to observe the plethora and diversity of neoliberal thought and the ways in which
neoliberals supported conservative and fascist policies. Even scholars that totalize our
understanding of neoliberalism such as David Harvey and Naomi Klein have underlined
Friedman’s and Hayek’s support of Augusto Pinochet’s military junta and his right-wing
dictatorship in Chile. In September 1973, Pinochet’s forces assassinated Salvador Allende, Chile’s
democratically elected socialist president, in a coup d’état that imprisoned and killed thousands of
Chileans. What followed, as Klein and Harvey explained, was a wide-scale economic assault on
social security, trade unions, and other economic protections. And while Friedman and his
“Chicago boys” were criticized in the 1970s over their involvement with Pinochet’s illegitimate
regime, I was surprised by the extent to which neoliberals celebrated their entanglement with the
Chilean junta. Moreover, they continued to prescribe it as a policy for countries across the world

64
Although there are a plethora of writers, critics, and scholars that have proclaimed the death of neoliberalism, I am
here engaging with Gary Gerstle’s new book on the neoliberal world order. Even by the cover of the book, Gerstle
makes the argument that Trump’s border wall policy severely challenged the neoliberal order that was triumphing and
remaining unchallenged ever since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. There are several things wrong with this perspective
not least the fact that Eastern Europe had its own form of neoliberal politics even during socialism. Gerstle.
25
in the 1980s and 1990s. Frustrated by the British economy’s protracted reform in the early 1980s,
Hayek urged Margaret Thatcher to enact a Pinochet-style assault. Although Thatcher was Hayek’s
“keenest supporter,” she had to remind him about the rule of law, supposedly a central liberal tenet:
I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy… from which we can learn
many lessons. However, I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions
and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite
unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our tradition and our Constitution. At time the
process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our way and in
our own time. Then they will endure.
65

Thatcher was right. Neoliberalism, indeed, endured. When asked in 2002 what her greatest
achievement was, Thatcher was equally blunt. “Tony Blair and New Labour,” she replied, “We
forced our opponents to change their minds.”
66
Indeed, there were stark differences between
Thatcher’s Labour opponent in 1979, Michael Foot, and Blair as the New Labour’s leader in the
1990s. Whereas Foot was supportive of trade unions and nationalized social security, Blair adopted
neoliberal ideas in modernizing politics and decoupling leftist politics from its socialist “baggage.”
A similar process happened in the U.S. under Bill Clinton’s Administration, “the first people to
self-describe as neoliberals,” who propagated global microenterprise in impoverished regions, at
home and abroad, based on neoliberal ideas of entrepreneurship.
67
Indeed, wide-scale adoption of
neoliberal ideas, scholars argued, constituted the essence of any hegemonic political order.
68
The
capitulation of a leftist alternative to neoliberalism was a staggering political loss, probably best
illustrated by this popular internet meme from 2021. (Fig. 2)

65
Letter from Margaret Thatcher to Friedrich Hayek, February 17, 1982, Box 127, Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers,
Hoover Institution Archives.
66
Oleg Komlik, “Thatcherism’s Greatest Achievement,” Economic Sociology and Political Economy (blog), March
19, 2018, https://economicsociology.org/2018/03/19/thatcherisms-greatest-achievement/.
67
Lily Geismer, “Agents of Change: Microenterprise, Welfare Reform, the Clintons, and Liberal Forms of
Neoliberalism,” Journal of American History 107, no. 1 (June 1, 2020): 107–31,
68
Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.
26

Fig. 2: Twitter meme created by @FCapitalism2020

What I could observe at the Mont Pèlerin Society’s 2020 meeting was that only organized
labor movements and left-wing populism were seen as threatening the neoliberal hegemony.
Indeed, right-wing authoritarianism is no foe to the neoliberals since the neoliberal world system
operates quite successfully under authoritarianism. As Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, there is an inextricable link between capitalist accumulation and unchecked power:
“Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of
capital.”
69
After all, fascism is not really a political movement if we follow Arendt’s conception.
For her, politics is an active relation between individuals in the public sphere where power never
transgresses its communal character. To be sure, authoritarianism must dispense with this classical
conception of politics to become an unchallenged system of rule. Indeed, Bernie Sanders’ two
presidential campaigns, precisely because they were able to build coalitions across communities,
were the most troublesome to those I dined with at the Hoover Institution. Moreover, it was
Sanders’ popularity with young voters that proved most damaging. Even worse, for some of the

69
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 137.
27
Society’s aging members, their grandchildren seemed to have been enamored with these socialist
ideas and, to their horror, even volunteered their human capital (i.e., free time and skills) to the
Bernie Sanders campaign. Although I will devote more attention to these interactions from 2020
in this dissertation’s epilogue, it is pertinent to remember that right-wing authoritarianism has
never been antithetical to the neoliberal political order. In contrast, tackling neoliberal hegemony
will include building widescale coalitions across society. I have used Bernie Sanders as an example
of my conversations with the neoliberal thought collective rather than as an argument to suggest
that only elected officials could lead the way out of our neoliberal predicament.

The Road from Vienna to the Hoover Institution
This dissertation runs chronologically from the end of World War One (1918) to the
election of Ronald Reagan as the President of the United States (1980) and encompasses several
geographical settings. My dissertation begins in post-imperial Vienna and London following the
aftermath of World War One where neoliberal thinkers and British legislators debated the future
of the liberal world order. In Chapter One, I narrate the simultaneous rise of the neoliberal thought
collective and the British Documentary Film Movement. I follow the lives of leading neoliberal
men—Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Walter Lippmann, and Michael Polanyi—and
documentary practitioner John Grierson to show historical and ideological similarities between
state-sponsored media-making, and the international neoliberal movement. In comparing British
to post-Austro-Hungarian liberals, I extrapolate similar ways in which they have reacted to the
surprisingly violent overthrow of four European regimes and the destruction of the liberal world-
order. Classical liberalism kept the continent locked in a global network of military and trade
system controlled by a handful of European powers. Once this system was delegitimized in 1918,
interwar neoliberals sought to refashion liberalism for an era of mass politics and universal
28
suffrage. This was accomplished, I argue, by instituting domestic and international economic, legal,
and media institutions. My narrative centers around one such institution, the Empire Marketing
Board—an interwar British agency that sought to promote British trade through visual means. It
was here that John Grierson devised a potent visual tool in the interests of the neoliberal world
order. Indeed, interwar neoliberals believed that by showing the benefits of liberalism via mass
media, people would consent to liberal governance and help protect its economic and political
interests. The chapter ends with a study of one of the Movement’s leading films, Night Mail, which
I read as an example of “neoliberal realism,” a crucial component of the interwar neoliberal
movement. As a film produced to showcase the British postal service, it was committed to
uncovering an essential process in communicating information that connected London to British
outposts in Scotland. Based on interwar theories on cinematic vision, Grierson and Polanyi both
regarded filmmaking as a desirable way of safeguarding liberalism from totalitarian ruin. Still
pedagogically minded, neoliberals believed educating people on the benefits of liberalism would
be enough to help them rationally understand why it was a system worth preserving. This
pedagogical commitment to uncovering liberalism’s invisible processes is what distinguished
interwar neoliberals from their latter descendants, who did away with such “positive” propaganda.
But world politics rocked the neoliberal movement again in 1939 when a new world
conflict tore Europe apart. Only a year before, in 1938, the neoliberal thought collective cemented
its internationalist position after their first conference in Paris entitled the Walter Lippmann
Colloquium. Some neoliberals joined the war effort while others went into civil service to help
Western liberal states overcome the totalitarian menace. But liberal adversaries, Nazi Germany,
and Soviet Russia challenged the system’s global dominance in ways that surpassed military
capabilities. By employing mass media, most predominantly documentary cinema, totalitarian
states were threatening to spellbind the audiences in Britain and the United States. This was what
29
interwar liberals were most anxious about when, in the wartime period, they were devising wartime
propaganda at institutions such as the British Ministry of Information. It was here that the British
Documentary Film Movement became integrated within a larger film policy that sought to create
non-totalitarian forms of media experience that would produce subjects more receptive to the
liberal project. The point was to expand highly centralized visual propaganda by affording, on the
one hand, a wide-scale collaboration across visual culture while, on the other hand, providing a
mobile, thus less centralized media production. The point was to create an experience of liberalism
rather than continue to expound on its benefits in a straightforward manner. I follow the transition
from interwar neoliberalism, largely supportive of a large-scale pedagogical project on the benefits
of liberal governance, to wartime liberalism which actively fostered new forms of liberal
propaganda.
In Chapter Two, I narrate this history through archival analysis of the wartime Ministry
from 1939 to 1945. Although the Ministry was affected by the uncertainty of early wartime—an
atmosphere detrimental to a cohesive film policy—the appointment of art historian Kenneth Clark
to head the Ministry’s Films Division helped reform liberal propaganda. Indeed, Clark was the
first among British civil servants to understand the validity of newsreel cinema for the war effort
while also supporting collaboration between British visual artists and documentary practitioners.
The fact that Clark was a trained art historian and an interwar director of the British National
Gallery, helped the Ministry with incorporating a variety of visual approaches to enlightened
liberal propaganda. Indeed, I end this chapter with an analysis of Jill Craigie’s film Out of Chaos,
the first British documentary film on art, almost entirely made possible by Clark’s art network.
Indeed, I show how it became logical, by the end of the war, to extoll museum-going and modern
art as a quintessential liberal experience not least because Clark organized a variety of art shows
at the National Gallery during the Blitz. The point was to provide an experience of liberalism rather
30
than try to sell its benefits. This transformation of liberal propaganda coincided with Friedrich
Hayek’s wartime work on communication. To be sure, it was in Britain that the neoliberal
movement continued to evolve with Hayek’s manifold research interests. While researching for
his magnum opus work The Road to Serfdom (1945), Hayek was involved with rethinking Allied
communication at a moment when it was seriously undermined by the Axis powers.
Consequentially, Hayek offered his service to the British Ministry of Information, the country’s
main propaganda body established in September 1939, only days after the conflict broke out in
Europe.
Chapter Three breaks with a strictly linear history of documentary cinema and
neoliberalism by focusing on new conceptions of history and temporality that emerged in the
aftermath of World War Two. I begin the Chapter with Fernand Braudel’s plea for a non-linear
historiographical practice to underline the changed circumstances within history as a field and to
illustrate a dominant postwar “structure of feeling” that docu-histories were ultimately built on.
Indeed, I argue that a common, atemporal conception of time in the postwar period engendered
television as the era’s new visual tool. While this was emblematic of postwar television as a whole,
the BBC had been the model for much of European public broadcasting and I pay special attention
to it by looking at the ways in which its second channel BBC-2 developed new visual forms that,
I argue, served as visual iterations of a globalized market economy. Specifically, I focus on the
production of Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969), a program that inaugurated the docu-history series.
Presented by art historian Kenneth Clark, whose wartime career I analyze in Chapter Two,
Civilisation was animated by the neoliberal thought collective’s crucial historical concern—how
to protect and reinvigorate Western civilization at the moment when widescale decolonization
projects threatened to undermine its historical relevance? I read this central question of the series,
conveniently produced around 1968, to illustrate the program’s reactionary politics. Most
31
importantly, these shows provided an argument for the necessity of guarding the liberal world-
system against the political forces that had been unleashed around 1968. Whereas the first part of
this chapter is devoted to uncovering Civilisation’s ideological underpinnings, I devote the final
section to thinking beyond the ideological and towards the series’ experiential mode.
In Chapter Four, I provide several examples of “the neoliberal mental landscape” in docu-
histories through close textual analysis of the docu-histories produced after Clark’s inaugural
program—The Ascent of Man (BBC-2, 1973), The Age of Uncertainty (BBC-2, 1976), and Free
to Choose (PBS, 1980). In contrast to the series’ marketing campaigns and ideological differences,
I argue that we need to study how these series complemented each other. Indeed, I refute
Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s famous charge against the culture industry for producing “sameness”
by showing how these docu-histories’ were involved in self-reflexively creating difference. In the
first part of the chapter, I illustrate this argument on the infamous controversy between the
neoliberal thought collective and John Kenneth Galbraith. Milton Friedman’s 1976 lecture at the
Institute of Economic Affairs, the leading neoliberal think tank, was the beginning of an
orchestrated attack on Galbraith’s docu-history The Age of Uncertainty. And although their feud
dated back to the mid-1950s, Galbraith never truly criticized capitalism nor its corporate structure.
To be sure, his ambivalence was well represented through two dominant cinematic images on
television—the highly fluid and erratic image of commercials, and Robert Drew’s direct cinema.
In the second part of the chapter, I define the docu-histories dominant image—“the image of
capital.” Influenced by Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, I describe the image of capital as a
form of thought about neoliberal capitalism. Although the time-image represented for Deleuze a
non-dogmatic image of thought, the docu-histories produced this image, in a typical cybernetic
gesture, as a way of limiting chance and uncertainty.
32
Although my project examined the period between 1918, or the end of World War One
when neoliberalism as an intellectual project began, and 1980 when neoliberalism was
institutionalized as a world-system, the docu-histories’ innovative image-making endured. As I
have indicated in Chapter Three, neoliberalism’s merger with cybernetics in Hayek’s work
constitutes much of our contemporary experience of the Internet. What is our digital space if not a
decentralized system of communication which brings localized knowledge within a single market
order? It is not a coincidence that Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” was
inspirational to the creators of Wikipedia. But I also want to emphasize something else. The docu-
histories produced a revolutionary engagement with the world through color broadcasting and the
historical process. Their impulse was to visualize the totality of human experience—in art, science,
philosophy, and social sciences—and build a large visual archive. Hence, I am tempted to suggest
that these experiences were precursors to our digital predicament where knowledge and images of
the world are always already fully available for our consumption. And yet, our engagement with
the Internet demands a particular form of labor that perhaps The Ascent of Man’s team made most
noticeable through their depictions of invisible historical recreations. As I complete this
dissertation, the question of our contemporary neoliberal and digital predicament is at stake. To
explore alternatives, I conclude this dissertation through an epilogue that describes the modern-
day Mont Pèlerin Society. Attending the 2020 MPS meeting is relevant to narrate not only because
it gives us a glimpse into a semi-secretive, member-only organization but also because seeing the
neoliberal thought collective “in flesh” illuminated some potential alternatives to this hegemonic
world-system.

33
Chapter One: Out of Chaos, 1918-1938

Freedom of choice is a pretty thought,
but civilisation consists in keeping it in relative order.
70

- John Grierson

In our time the liberal philosophy is engaged
in a struggle to survive and to be reborn.
71

- Walter Lippmann

“Liberalism was never permitted to come to full fruition,” lamented Ludwig von Mises.
72

Writing from the vantage point of 1920s Vienna, one of the originators of neoliberalism witnessed
the vast and multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire reduced to a landlocked nation-state.
73

Having lost its agricultural hinterland as well as access to the Adriatic Sea, post-World War One
Austria was isolated from the global markets it had enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century.
This geographical state of affairs, the numerous socialist projects across Vienna, and an almost
successful revolution in Budapest signaled for Mises the end of nineteenth-century liberalism. The
conflict which began in Sarajevo, a periphery of liberal Europe, resulted in a surprisingly violent
overthrow of European imperial regimes that kept the continent locked in an international system
of economic and political dominance scholars like Lee Grieveson termed “the liberal world-
system.”
74
Although Mises was a self-proclaimed anti-imperialist, he was, nevertheless, uneasy

70
John Grierson, “The B.B.C. and All That,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1954):
47.
71
Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 238.
72
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (New York, and San Francisco: The Foundation for
Economic Education and Cobden Press, 2002), 1.
73
“One day, as Mises looked out of the window of his chamber offices onto Vienna’s opulent grand boulevard
(Ringstrasse), he told Machlup, ‘Maybe the grass will grow there, because our civilization will end.’” Jessica Whyte,
The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London, and New York: Verso, 2019), 55.
74
Certainly, the term was influenced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory; I adopt the term “liberal world-
system” from Lee Grieveson (2018). It describes nineteenth-century’s hegemonic order based on nineteenth-century
liberalism and capitalist production depended on a robust media network.
34
over the political vacuum of interwar Europe.
75
Indeed, the fall of four European empires
represented for Mises global political and economic instability. If classical liberalism was defeated
in the conflict, Mises contemplated, what other system would emerge to take its place?
This chapter examines the simultaneous rise of neoliberal economic and political theory
and state-sponsored documentary media in Britain. Throughout the interwar period, in the 1920s
and 1930s, neoliberal thinkers and British political elites were reacting to what they perceived as
an attack on the nineteenth-century world-system. The post-World War One redrawing of national
borders curtailed the unrestricted circulation of capital. In interwar Vienna, Mises gathered liberal
thinkers and students for weekly seminars at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce to debate the
future of the liberal world-system, while in Britain, one of the few empires to survive the effects
of the wartime backlash, British politicians questioned the Empire’s continued economic and
political dominance. Certainly, the United States emerged from the War as an enviable competitor
to British industrial and cultural primacy, a situation that many British officials had trouble
comprehending well into the later interwar years.
76
Even worse, U.S. foreign policy made things
difficult for European liberals; Woodrow Wilson’s policy of national self-determination prompted
smaller nations—once under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire
such as the Southern Slavs, Poles, Slovaks, and Czechs—to form their independent states, thus

75
Mises criticized imperialism not because it devastated foreign lands and communities. Rather, Mises saw imperial
countries misusing technological innovations for destruction rather than wealth accumulation. The fact that the two
are often connected did not seem to trouble Mises. While capitalism is sometimes destructive, he argued, in the end,
it creates a free society. Mises’ views on imperialism continue to be debated. Most recently, the Mises Institute’s
Fellow David Gordon rebutted Quinn Slobodian’s recent accusations. David Gordon, “The Anti-Imperialist Ludwig
von Mises,” Mises Institute, March 12, 2021, https://mises.org/library/anti-imperialist-ludwig-von-mises.
76
Some historians would even say that British legislators failed to notice the decay well into the post-World War Two
years when in 1956, Britain was internationally embarrassed and reprimanded for infringing on Egypt’s sovereignty.
And yet, Britain’s decline was already apparent by 1945 when the U.S. emerged as a new hegemon and would remain
there for the next twenty-five years. Immanuel Wallerstein, “U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony,” Monthly
Review (November 2019): 54.
35
destabilizing the European financial market.
77
For instance, Czech coal producers refused to
supply Austria with raw material needed for industrial production which, in turn, severely strained
the Austrian economy.
78
While the U.S. emergence as an economic and political superpower was
tied to its corporate and military interests, the restructuring of global politics nevertheless
complicated the future of European liberalism.
79
Most importantly, it eclipsed Britain’s influence
in foreign affairs. Neoliberal thinkers and British legislators understood that the nineteenth-century
world-system had to be reformed to meet the demands of mass politics now emboldened by
national self-determination. As media historian Priya Jaikumar noted, “for the British State of the
twentieth century, a specter of unpoliced masses and spaces merged the ‘nightmares of empire’
with ‘the fears of democracy.’”
80

In part, classical liberals failed to address a crucial question of early capitalism—the role
of popular government in a market economy.
81
The abolishment of illiteracy through the
introduction of compulsory education enabled the creation of a genuinely mass public sphere,
while universal suffrage extended the public sphere in the West to all adult citizens, including
women, the working class, and peasants. New legal definitions of adults as equal citizens in the
political process were starkly different from that of the nineteenth century when stability came

77
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass. and London,
England: Harvard University Press, 2018), 28.
78
“But the inability to acquire coal and other essential raw materials resulted in Austrian, and especially Viennese,
industry grinding to a halt, with no way to produce the goods necessary to pay for the resources required for production.
Throughout 1919 and 1922, Vienna was one the verge of mass starvation, with food and milk rations almost
nonexistent except for the very young.” Richard M. Ebeling, “The Economist as the Historian of Decline: Ludwig von
Mises and Austria Between the Two World Wars,” in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Globalization: Will Freedom or World
Government Dominate the International Marketplace (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 2002), 10.
79
British industrial and scientific influence was already steadily declining from the middle of the nineteenth century.
Germany and, most importantly, the U.S. led the way in developing modern industrial processes, technology, and
scientific know-how. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Penguin Books,
1999), 144.
80
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2006), 26.
81
“When in the 1920s the international system failed, the almost forgotten issues of early capitalism reappeared. First
and foremost, among them stood that of popular government.” Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political
and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2001), 231.
36
from a comparably smaller public sphere consisting of mostly land-owning men. For Mises, fin-
de-siècle Vienna was a simpler time. At the turn of the century, only four percent of Viennese
citizens were able to vote, a number that slightly increased in 1907, until it exploded in 1918 under
universal suffrage.
82
Mises believed that mass political movements, enabled by universal suffrage,
were troubling because people were incapable of rational decision-making. Nineteenth-century
liberalism partly failed because it misunderstood this crucial insight:
They [classical liberals] never grasped two facts: first, that the masses lack the capacity to
think logically and secondly, that in the eyes of most people, even when they are able to recognize
the truth, a momentary, special advantage that may be enjoyed immediately appears more
important than a lasting greater gain that must be deferred.
83

In today’s terms, neoliberals understood people as wired to fail mainstream psychology’s
“marshmallow test” for their inability to postpone immediate gain. Mises used the example of
popular political programs in the 1920s “Red” Vienna; social housing, while attractive and
desirable to those unhoused, should be, nevertheless, rejected for society’s long-term benefit. In
the long run, Mises argued, people would gain more from free markets even if it produced
inequality: “For the sacrifice that it imposes is only a provisional one: the renunciation of an
immediate and relatively minor advantage in exchange for a much greater ultimate benefit.”
84

What a post-imperial world-system needed, neoliberal thinkers argued, was a stronger legal
and institutional framework to limit people’s proclivity for erratic behavior. Although most of
these institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund
developed after World War Two, media institutions were crucial to the early years of neoliberalism.
Consider, for example, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) which was established in 1926 to

82
Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London and New York:
Verso, 2019), 55.
83
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (New York and San Francisco: The Foundation for
Economic Education and Cobden Press, 2002), 157. The emphasis is mine.
84
Ibid., 34.
37
strengthen and promote British trade. It was here that John Grierson—one of the originators of
documentary cinema—made his first film The Drifters (1929). No doubt, Grierson’s time at the
EMB was devoted to reimaging the British Empire in a post-imperial era. In this chapter’s epigraph,
Grierson compared the abundance of individual choice to the needs of the modern state. Like
Mises, Grierson argued that people’s individual needs and desires ought to be restrained for the
liberal society’s greater good. If the liberal state failed to do so, Grierson prophesized, Western
“civilization” will fail to survive the wild currents of modern politics. As legal historians have
shown, calls to preserve civilization were often used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a
way of propagating capitalist production and, ultimately, the expansion of the liberal world-system
across the globe.
85
Civilization was and still is the code word for economic liberalism.
But what Grierson was also getting at was that people were unable to understand the
complexity of the modern world. As a result, citizens need to be educated (and restrained) through
large-scale pedagogical projects that included nascent documentary cinema. This was a common
idea supported by neoliberal thinkers that insisted on using the state apparatus to restrict people’s
“unreasonable” demands for direct democracy. In contrast to our usual understanding of
neoliberalism as anti-statist, neoliberal theoreticians never planned to abolish the state. Rather,
they wanted to use the state’s disciplinary and educational apparatuses to inoculate capital from
political instability.
86

Mises’ weekly seminars in Vienna led to the establishment of a robust neoliberal thought
collective that expanded its influence through allegiance with like-minded thinkers across Western

85
Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: History of International Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2020).
86
“Liberalism is therefore far from disputing the necessity of a machinery of state, a system of law, and a government.
It is a grave misunderstanding to associate it in any way with the idea of anarchism. For the liberal, the state is an
absolute necessity, since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it: the protection not only of private property,
but also of peace, for in the absence of the latter the full benefits of private property cannot be reaped.” Ludwig von
Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, 39.
38
Europe and the United States. These intellectual collaborations peaked in 1938 when twenty-four
liberals from Austria, Britain, the U.S., and France met in Paris to discuss Lippmann’s new book
The Good Society. The Walter Lippmann Colloquium, as the five days in 1938 came to be known,
represents for some historians of neoliberalism the official beginning of the neoliberal doctrine.
However, intellectual doctrines are not formed during a single event; rather the beginnings should
be located within the international network of neoliberal thinkers across Europe and the United
States. By focusing on a single event theory, earlier historians of neoliberalism failed to account
for ways in which classical liberalism was discussed outside traditional academic circles.
87

Consider, for example, Grierson’s Documentary Film Movement which in creating a new media
form—the state-sponsored documentary—greatly contributed to rethinking and developing new
forms of liberal governance.
88
As we shall see, Mises in Austria and Grierson in Britain were two
pillars of European interwar liberalism. They both understood the need to preserve nineteenth-
century trade networks by developing intellectual and artistic collectives dedicated to reforming
classical liberalism from its imperfect nineteenth-century form.
89

Grierson’s first contact with neoliberal internationalism came through his 1920s travels in
the United States.
90
It was there that Grierson shifted his interests from studying modern

87
Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier, The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neo-Liberalism (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
88
The Griersonians were not the only media-makers responsible for redefining liberal governance on film. Consider
the example of the League of Nations and its educational programs which greatly contributed to the implementation
of cinema in politics and the economy. Zoë Druick, “‘Reaching the Multimillions’: Liberal Internationalism and the
Establishment of Documentary Film,” in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds. Inventing Film Studies (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 66-92.
89
It is important to note that interwar (neo)liberalism was not a moralist project; this was in stark contrast to liberal
projects of post-revolutionary France or Germany in the latter half of the century. Inspired by the need to expand
liberal capitalism, British and American liberals developed their own form of liberalism which seldomly intersected
with German or French variants of liberalism. In the Anglo-American sense, liberalism often meant the freedom of
trade and capital rather than social justice and equality. Helen Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From
Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3-4.
90
“Many of us after 1918 (and particularly in the United States) were impressed by the pessimism that had settled on
Liberal theory.” John Grierson, “The Course of Realism,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), 169.
39
immigration to visual education after a meeting with Lippmann.
91
Grierson later remembered this
meeting as crucial for establishing the British Documentary Movement:
The idea of documentary in its present form came originally not from the film people at all,
but from the Political Science school in Chicago University round about the early 'twenties. It
came because some of us noted Mr. Lippmann's argument closely and set ourselves to study what,
constructively, we could do to fill the gap in educational practice which he demonstrated… It was
Mr. Lippmann himself who turned this educational research in the direction of film.
92

Media scholar Ian Aitken, a popularizer of Grierson’s work and perhaps his greatest
apologist, distanced Grierson from Lippmann’s “anti-democratic sentiment” and minimized
Lippmann’s influence over the British Documentary Film Movement. In Film and Reform, Aitken
argued that, while Grierson was influenced by U.S. concerns over migration and the expansion of
the public sphere, he was nevertheless uneasy over Lippmann’s anti-democratic ideas, which were
common within a group of 1920s American social scientists Aitken classified as “scientific
naturalists.” Ultimately, as Aitken explained, Grierson rejected Lippmann’s suggestion for elite,
technocratic rulership, and instead advocated for the establishment of “mature citizenry.”
93

But Grierson’s view of democracy was not so different from Lippmann and interwar
neoliberals. Democracy, argued Grierson, should “be brought down to the realm of practical
consideration and achievement.”
94
In other words, democracy needs to be reformed to produce
such social relations that allow the liberal state to achieve concrete goals and programs. By
reducing politics to technocratic solutions, or what Grierson dubbed “practical consideration,” the

91
“When he left Britain, cinema for him had been merely one aspect of a fascinating subject; when he returned in
1927 he was deeply absorbed in the possibility of its use as a medium of education and persuasion.” Forsyth Hardy,
Grierson on Documentary, 8.
92
John Grierson, “Propaganda and Education,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, 261.
93
“Despite his involvement with Lippmann, Lasswell, and the Rockefeller Institute, Grierson did not identify with the
anti-democratic ideas promoted by many American academics at the time. He rejected the argument for an elite
leadership as a replacement for universal franchise… He also rejected ideas which he described as ‘the intellectuals
case against the people,’ because they failed to address the central problem of the age: that of creating a ‘mature
citizenry.’” Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990), 57.
94
John Grierson, “Education and Total Effort,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, 205.
40
concept of the political retreats from the public realm; the political becomes bounded by the expert
class. Here I follow Hannah Arendt’s concept of the political which she defines as a relation
between people. For Arendt, the public realm is a space for debate where solutions of any kind are
not needed nor sought for.
95
And although persuasion is a crucial part of any public discourse,
Arendt wrote, politics must arise from an exchange rather than from top-down instruction. Hence
Lippmann’s definition of persuasion is not a political act but a form of subjugation, even violence
which is always already anti-political.
96
The bureaucratization of politics through liberal
practicality is dangerous, Arendt said, because it destroys politics.
To be sure, the Griersonian project helped develop a form of liberal pedagogy that, while
uncovering knowledge and practices of liberal states, filtered politics through a bureaucratized
institutional framework. It is not surprising that the British Documentary Film Movement’s films
were almost exclusively produced to promote the British state’s achievements—improved housing
conditions, better nutrition, and other popular welfare programs—and to appease organized labor
following Great Depression’s economic fallout. Although the British Documentary Movement’s
films often represented ordinary people like in the films Housing Problems (1935) and Enough to
Eat? (1936), both sponsored by the British Commercial Gas Association, their role was symbolic
and often subjugated to expert knowledge or the films’ discursive logic. Experts—the documentary
practitioners producing the films and the intellectuals explaining social or political problems on-
screen—were the ones controlling public discourse. Certainly, the working class represented on-

95
“but the public realm itself, the polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to
distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all. The
public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they
really and inexchangeably were.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2018), 41.
96
“To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through
force and violence.” Ibid., 26.
41
screen served to illustrate and further support expert knowledge that was almost always white,
male, and affluent. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3: Enough to Eat? (The Gas Light and Coke Company, 1936)
Working class interviewee and British biologist Julian Huxley

Grierson’s project was not all that different from the one proposed by Lippmann in his
book Public Opinion (1922). In it, Lippmann argued that direct democracy should be limited and
controlled by an educated expert class.
97
This class, he wrote, holds the necessary policy know-
how and intellectual prowess needed to govern in an inherently complex world-system;
governance cannot be left to the whims of ordinary people who lack knowledge of world affairs.
As products of the modern university system, educational institutions developed to serve the liberal
state’s interests, the experts’ task was to explain and offer suggestions on popular governance. Not
surprisingly, their rise in society was simultaneous to universal suffrage which seemingly
expanded the public sphere to include those previously denied participation in the political process.
Perhaps most importantly, the liberal state required expert knowledge to lead its institutions and
provide knowledge able to be translated into policy.
98

And yet, this modern division of power depended on public consent; for the state’s experts
to govern in a mass democratic system, they needed to gain consent. While neoliberal thinkers

97
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, (London: Routledge, 1998).
98
Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World-System, (Oakland, CA:
University of California Press, 2018), 225.
42
represented people as incapable of understanding the modern world, they fully understood the
essence of consent to the liberal world-system’s stability. Where this stability was lacking, where
the majority disapproved of the state, liberalism would fail, as it happened later in the Weimar
Republic.
99
To prevent this collapse, modern liberal states, for the first time in history, rested their
future on developing modern communication channels. In addition to the popular press, cinema
and radio were paramount to this process, especially since their ubiquity and mobility allowed
information to be easily disseminated. This was why Lippmann recommended the establishment
of state agencies and institutions for directing consent through public opinion; these state-
sponsored would form a link between policymakers and people. To Lippmann’s mind, consent and
public opinion should not be left in the hands of private media companies such as William
Randolph Hearst’s media empire.
However, two decades after Film and Reform, Aitken continued to distance Grierson from
Lippmann’s ideas because, unlike conservative economic liberals in the U.S., Grierson was a
strong supporter of the state. Indeed, Grierson espoused the liberal state as “the machinery by
which the best interests of the people are secured.”
100
He wrote that Grierson’s supposed adherence
to neo-Hegelianism, or the central place state has in governing over individuals, was starkly
different from liberalism’s unrestricted individualism. In Aitken’s mind, Grierson was no
supporter of unfettered capitalism since he was an ardent believer in the modern state’s power and
its institutions.
101
But neither were the interwar neoliberal thinkers blind believers in what is

99
To those gathered in Paris, one of the central issues was how to find ways to bridge the gap between people and
liberal ideology. Jürgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier, The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neo-Liberalism,
39.
100
John Grierson, “Education and Total Effort,” 209.
101
“…his overall position is most clearly associated with a neo-Hegelian belief in the importance of totality and,
within this, of the superiority of the state (as a mediated category of ‘concrete universal’) over the individual citizen
and the intricate, disordered (and therefore worrying) flux of civil society.” Ian Aitken, Realist Film Theory and
Cinema: The Nineteenth-century Lukácsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions, (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2006), 142.
43
colloquially referred to as laissez-faire.
102
This has been a common misreading of the neoliberal
project that continues to obscure our understanding of it. Neoliberalism was not anti-statist, nor
did it naïvely believe in unfettered individualism.
103
On the contrary, if people were truly left alone
to pursue their political and economic interests, Mises and Lippmann argued, they would destroy
the liberal world-system. To be sure, the way neoliberals defined their new strand of liberalism
was by criticizing classical liberalism’s misunderstanding and lack of affiliation with the modern
state’s apparatuses. It was through classical liberalism’s association with nineteenth-century
natural sciences, Lippmann explained, that classical liberals easily relegated governance to an
almost natural, evolutionary process.
104
This was a mistake, Lippmann wrote, because the state
and its experts are crucial to properly informing citizens through robust media institutions.
Neoliberalism and British documentary media both rested their success on the mediation
of the world through expert knowledge. Such expertise, either on or off-screen, was envisioned by
interwar neoliberals as part of an effort to solve the issue of direct democracy engendered by
universal suffrage. And while neoliberals knew that classical liberalism failed for a reason, they
were not ready to cede power to “totalitarian” political movements emerging across the globe.
Indeed, neoliberals often flattened diverse political movements of the 1920s and 1930s, describing
them as consisting of “masses,” driven by irrational impulses that threaten to decimate an
otherwise orderly system. Neoliberalism and state-sponsored media were based on the idea that
people were ultimately incapable of understanding the benefits of the liberal economic and

102
The term neoliberalism surfaced during the Walter Lippmann Colloquium: “To be ‘neoliberal’ was supposed to
imply the recognition that ‘laissez-faire’ economics was not enough and that, in the name of liberalism, a modern
economic policy was needed.” François Denord, “French Neoliberalism and Its Divisions,” in Philip Mirowski and
Dietre Plehwe, eds. The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge,
Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009, 48.
103
Joao Rodrigues, “The Political and Moral Economies of Neoliberalism: Mises and Hayek,” Cambridge Journal of
Economics 37, no. 5 (2013): 1007.
104
“I am proceeding on the assumption that liberalism is a true but imperfectly developed insight into the real nature
of the industrial revolution. I do not identify liberalism with the writings of Herbert Spencer or with the rulings of the
Supreme Court under the due-process clause.” Walter Lippmann, The Good Society, 239.
44
political order.
105
As such, people need to be persuaded of the benefits of relinquishing their
political aspirations and securely depositing them in the hands of the expert class, including
politicians, economists, and filmmakers.
Grierson took these lessons and intellectual allegiances with him to Britain. Upon his return
from the United States in 1927, he began working at Britain’s newly established Empire Marketing
Board on what he described as “bringing the Empire alive.”
106
Modernizing the British Empire,
once an economic and political hegemon, required active persuasion on the benefits of colonial
trade of bygone times. What motivated Grierson wasn’t bridging the temporal distance; it was
finding a way for people to comprehend the ever-expanding reality under modernity. Faced with
these issues, Grierson turned to cinema. The medium’s visualization techniques such as montage
and close-up shots were able to dissect material reality and make visible those social and political
processes that remain hidden without mediated vision. At the EMB under Grierson, cinema
became central to liberal governance.
This is not to say that all interwar documentary films were politically and socially uniform.
Unquestionably, the era brought diverse forms of documentary practices such as Willi
Münzenberg’s radical documentaries produced for the Communist International Workers Aid,
avant-garde cinema in France and elsewhere, as well as the famous Soviet school of montage
whose assemblage sought to uncover hidden social and political relations.
107
And yet, this chapter
focuses on the idea of documentary media as it was developed by Grierson within the British
Documentary Film Movement. While the above-mentioned socialist filmmaking movements

105
“What we are trying to arrive at is the point where we abandon that purely mystical concept of Democracy which
encourages the illusion that ten million amateur thinkers talking themselves incompetently to death sound like the
music of the spheres.” “Education and Total Effort,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, 205.
106
Basil Wright, “Ten Years of Documentary,” World Film News 2, no. 3, June 1937, 14.
107
On interwar British filmmaking and the Left, see Bert Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain,
1929-1939, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986). For WIR’s filmmaking: Jane Gaines, “Documentary Radicalism
and the Communist International,” Visible Evidence conference, Los Angeles, CA, 2019.
45
produced relevant contributions to documentary cinema, it was under the protection and
sponsorship of the weaning British Empire that documentary filmmaking developed into the liberal
state’s potent rhetorical tool. Akin to Mises and the neoliberal thought collective, the interwar
crisis of political legitimacy made British legislators particularly conscious of the need to reinvent
the British Empire for the new era of mass politics. As such, Britain’s “imperial agenda” was
communicated successfully through documentary films such as West Africa Calling, one of the
EMB’s first productions. By visualizing the often “unseen” imperial networks that connect British
industry with the African continent, the film extolled liberal political economy as crucial to
Britain’s and, by extension, the world’s prosperity.
108

Media historian Brian Winston challenged Grierson’s influence in British filmmaking
because, after all, the British Documentary Film Movement’s films had a consistently poor
audience turnout; people only saw these films if they were forced to sit through them while
patiently waiting for the main feature.
109
This is a fair point. As Stuart Hall famously argued, power
works in multiple directions; audience reception, their decoding, is crucial to any ideological
project. More recently, media scholar Martin Stollery urged historians to cease regarding the
British Documentary Film Movement as dominating non-feature British filmmaking because such
narrow histories greatly obstruct our understanding of the cinematic diversity of interwar British
cinema.
110
Even though Stollery was inviting a study of non-Griersonian types of filmmaking
which Grierson conveniently referred to as “low forms” (i.e., newsreels and actualities), the

108
Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital and the Liberal World-System, 166.
109
“Nearly all the films continued to bask in critical acclaim, yet, frustratingly, such support could not be converted
into a regular mass audience.” Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revised, (London: British
Film Institute, 1995), 63.
110
Martin Stollery, “John Grierson’s ‘First Principles’ as Origin and Beginning: The Emergence of the Documentary
Tradition in the Field of Nonfiction Film,” Screen 58, no. 3 (Autumn 2017): 328.
46
Movement itself had sometimes conflicting approaches to filmmaking.
111
As I will show in
Chapter Two, the British Documentary Film Movement, as any social group, was beyond uniform.
Why, then, write yet another piece on John Grierson and the British Documentary Film
Movement? The answer lies in the new way this chapter approaches the history of documentary
cinema. While media scholars such as Winston and Stollery used audience reception and film-
going habits to rightly undermine the widely held perception of Grierson’s mythic career, decoding
media texts and closely analyzing them is not crucial to my argument. Indeed, this chapter’s goal
is to uncover historical and ideological entanglements between Grierson’s theory of documentary
filmmaking and early neoliberal theories of governance. Such a historiographical focus
necessitates a method that is more concerned with the production of knowledge rather than its
dissemination. The fact that the British Empire and neoliberals sought to offer a similar
pedagogical agenda aimed at safeguarding liberal capital warrants further examination of their
curious interconnectedness. Neither Grierson nor the neoliberal thinkers could base their success
solely on popular metrics such as box-office numbers or book sales; they understood that reaching
the public was a difficult task and that they also needed to influence those that had “real” legislative
power—politicians and intellectuals. In such a way, neoliberals and British documentary
practitioners gathered around Grierson created an international network of like-minded thinkers
who reinstated the logic of liberal capitalism for a new era. As Mises argued, defending liberalism
as a political and economic system depends on preserving its idea because “durable peace can only
be the outgrowth of a change in ideologies.”
112
To be sure, neoliberals around Mises such as
Friedrich Hayek would go on to form the Mont Pèlerin Society, an influential think tank

111
For instance, the British documentary practitioner Humphrey Jennings often clashed with Grierson over his
approach to filmmaking. Keith Beattie, Humphrey Jennings, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
112
Mises’ quote in Richard M. Ebeling, “Introduction,” in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Globalization: Will Freedom or
World Government Dominate the International Marketplace (Hillsdale, Michigan: Hillsdale College Press, 2002),
xxii.
47
constituting the center of what economic historians termed “the neoliberal thought collective.”
113

In documentary cinema, Grierson’s influence over the British Documentary Film Movement and
the British Government transcended the interwar years and comfortably aligned documentary
media with the immediate needs of legislators and liberal bureaucrats across the world.
114
Perhaps
most importantly, the neoliberal thought collective and British documentary practitioners
established a new way of seeing the world. To understand these interwar entanglements, we have
to expand our understanding of the cinematic apparatus as conceived by Grierson, and neoliberal
thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter and Michael Polanyi, as a crucial liberal tool for expanding
people’s imperfect knowledge of economic, social, and political processes.

113
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds. The Road From Mont Pèlerin: Making of the Neoliberal Thought
Collective (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009).
114
For Grierson’s influence across the globe, see Zoë Druick and Deane Williams, eds. The Grierson Effect: Tracing
Documentary’s International Movement (London: British Film Institute, 2014).
48
The Camera on the Empire
In 1932, John Grierson recapitulated the first five years of his appointment at the Empire
Marketing Board. In the two articles written for the BBC’s magazine The Listener, Grierson
credited the EMB with modernizing and reviving the British Empire. In his mind, cinema played
a crucial role in this modernization. But, as he argues, it wasn’t enough to translate the Empire’s
policy and some of the EMB’s verbal campaigns. Grierson makes this point by describing Walter
Creighton’s unsuccessful EMB production One Family (1930). In this fantasy film, a British boy
slumbers during an unimaginative school lecture and dreams of journeying through Buckingham
Palace and the Empire. (Fig. 4) To be sure, centering the film around a dream sequence subtly
condemned older educational practices (i.e., schools) which cinema sought to modernize.
115
The
film’s plot is simple—this young British subject’s journey is motivated by the need to assemble
ingredients for the King’s Christmas Pudding from different parts of the Empire. As the boy travels
to remote parts of the Empire such as India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa,
the film metaphorically united British imperial industries and the Empire’s peripheries under one
economic regime.
116
Although the EMB used a similar campaign and the slogan “One Family” to
humanize the Empire by representing the imperial core and its periphery as one large family,
Creighton’s film was a flop.
117
Through this setback, Grierson wrote, the EMB understood how

115
Indeed, film educators such as Grierson would often criticize traditional education for its passive way of
transmitting knowledge. For the first time in history, Grierson argued, visual media have the opportunity to
complement traditional schooling and offer a more complete picture of the world. John Grierson, “The Challenge of
Peace,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947).
116
In his defense of nineteenth-century liberalism, Mises evoked British imperial propaganda to illustrate the efficacy
and cooperation of international economies: “In order to provide the family of an English worker with all it consumes
and desires, every nation of the five continents cooperates. Tea for the breakfast table is provided by Japan or Ceylon,
coffee by Brazil or Java, sugar by the West Indies, meat by Australia or Argentina, cotton from America or Egypt,
hides for leather from India or Russia, and so on. And in exchange for these things, English goods go to all parts of
the world, to the most remote and out-of-the-way villages and farmsteads.” Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the
Classical Tradition, 27.
117
To be sure, One Family was invoked by British legislators as an example of a film not desirable or conducive to
the needs of the state. One of the reviews was cited by Paul Rotha in his history of the Movement: “We have waited
for a march-past of the British Empire on the screen and now we get it we find it allied to a Christmas shopping tour

49
difficult it was to translate its verbal campaign to a visual medium such as cinema. Grierson offered
British legislators, disappointed by One Family, a new approach to visualization. Rather than focus
on fantasy and fiction, Grierson recommended, that the British Empire should be shown in a realist
manner; his film The Drifters (EMB, 1929) was to serve as an example. Because, as Grierson
explained, One Family and The Drifters were the EMB’s first film projects produced in two starkly
different manners, comparing them was essential to civil servants and filmmakers.

Fig. 4: Walter Creighton’s fantasy film One Family (EMB, 1930)

Media historian Tom Rice rightly historicized the two films as pivotal to British
documentary media. And yet, Rice’s focus tended to be limited to the films’ content and form.
118

Consider, for example, how Rice explained One Family’s debacle. The film was a disappointment,
Rice argued because it failed to represent interwar Britain as a modern state. By contrast, Grierson
employed a variety of innovative storytelling techniques; his appropriation of avant-garde cinema
in The Drifters effectively projected the British Empire as an advanced twentieth-century power.
119

conducted by a little boy with ungracious manners and a squeaky voice.” Paul Rotha, Documentary Diary: An Informal
History of the British Documentary Film, 1928-1939 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 22.
118
Tom Rice, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire (Oakland, California:
University of California Press, 2019), 25.
119
“Without the capacity to disrupt and make new, documentary filmmaking would not have been possible as a
discrete rhetorical practice.” Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27,
no. 4 (Summer 2001): 592.
50
However, primary sources tell a slightly different tale. In the Listener articles, Grierson said that
One Family was unsuccessful because the producers misunderstood people. Specifically,
Creighton and his team misjudged the audiences’ ability to understand metaphor. As Grierson
suggested, Creighton’s film was too complex—the human mind struggles to understand metaphor
which a fantasy film undoubtedly has to rely on. Instead of seeing One Family as a failure for its
simplistic propaganda at a time when people were increasingly more informed and involved in
politics, Grierson blamed people’s intellect. To his mind, Creighton’s piece was a useful lesson
because it provided caution to filmmakers that they “may be profound but never difficult.”
120

Debates create careers. As an astute self-promoter, Grierson used One Family’s flop to
advocate for his own brand of state-sponsored documentary filmmaking. The Listener articles
should be seen in this light, as an additional opportunity for Grierson to cement documentary
cinema’s centrality to Britain’s imperial project. The British government established the Empire
Marketing Board in 1926 to promote British products across the Empire. Indeed, the topical press
described the organization as “a semi-government set up to pacify the colonies and dominions.”
121

This was, no doubt, an agency established to modernize British trade and strengthen its imperial
industries. But in the minds of EMB employees, they were also part of something greater—the
EMB’s film propaganda not only established a stable and long-lasting bond between cinema and
industry, but it also sought to tackle American economic and cultural dominance.
122
Hollywood

120
John Grierson, “Making Films for the Empire-I,” The Listener 7, no. 170, April 13, 1932, 535.
121
Frank Tilley, “Empire Board Makes One,” Variety, November 27, 1929, 4.
122
“Apart from the work being done by the Empire Marketing Board film unit, very few contacts have been established
between industry and cinema. The root of the trouble would seem to lie in the conflicting opinions as to what should
be publicized and how it may best be done, whilst no great aid to the problem is afforded by this country’s general
ignorance of all matters relating to the better uses of the film. Industrial films are shy of the cinema and the latter,
dominated by vulgarians and cheap showmen, does not go out of its way to invite confidence.” Paul Rotha,
“Propaganda and the Cinema” in Celluloid: The Film To-day (London and New York: Longmans, Green and co,
1931), 59.
Between the end of World War One and Britain’s 1927 Film Act, the British cinema market was Hollywood’s largest
and most lucrative, often at the expense of domestic British film productions. The British Government alleviated this

51
cinema eclipsed European filmmaking after World War One. This was, in part, due to the
destruction of European film industries during the war, but also through the U.S. banking sector’s
heavy investment in filmmaking. Furthermore, the U.S. government even based its foreign policy
on visual propaganda; whereas the British Empire still used its old nineteenth-century motto,
“Trade Follows the Flag,” the U.S. reworked this liberal axiom into “Film Follows the Flag.”
123

Even though British industry lagged behind American and German industries before the war, the
need to tackle America’s political and economic ascendancy did not materialize before the mid-
1920s. To be sure, the EMB supported British trade, but what really seemed to matter to the British
government was creating a new (cinematic) image of the country.
124
Undoubtedly, Britain was not
the only European country that sought to challenge American cultural and economic ascendency
through cinema, Weimar Germany created its unique Expressionist style of filmmaking to support
its domestic film industry.
But German Expressionism was not a viable model for British filmmaking. Grierson
criticized German films’ obsession with cinematic formalism and “their preoccupation with the
slums, their harping on poverty… their preoccupation with weakness and failure in general.”
125

What British cinema needed, he suggested, was a realist vision of its present that could instill hope
and confidence in national progress.
126
For the British Empire, One Family and The Drifters were,

imbalance through the 1927 Film Act, granting British film producers guaranteed presence in British theatres via the
quota system. Jonathan Stubbs, “Film Follows the Flag: Cultural and Economic Relations Between the British Film
Industry and Hollywood,” in Robert M. Hendershot and Steve Marsh, eds. Culture Matters: Anglo-American Relations
and the Intangibles of ‘Specialness,’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 70.
123
Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital and the Liberal World-System, 8.
124
“In fact, both imperial and documentary films can be understood as responses to a crisis in national identity
demonstrable in representations of masculine heroism, with the difference that commercial imperial cinema’s use of
naturalism to resolve the underlying crisis in (national, masculine) identity varied from the GPO and EMB films’
deployment of images to do the same.” Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in
Britain and India, 127.
125
John Grierson, “Better Popular Pictures,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, August 1927,
230.
126
Still, no social group is entirely uniform or monolithic. There were documentary practitioners in Grierson’s inner
circle such as Paul Rotha that admired German cinema and its Expressionist movement. Paul Rotha, Documentary
Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928-1939, 9.
52
in a way, an experiment; the EMB produced two films in starkly different styles to gauge what
kind of filmmaking would be more favorable to audiences and more suitable to propaganda. One
Family’s flop provided an opportunity for Grierson to champion nonfiction cinema as conducive
to British Empire’s colonial and geopolitical interests. What aided this acceptance of documentary
cinema were their fairly modest budgets, but economic constraints were never central. They would
become more relevant when the Great Depression’s economic fallout forced the British
government to discontinue the EMB. Documentary’s unique claim to the real—produced without
the mediation of film studios, professional actors, and extensive post-production—gave
documentary films a particular ideological currency.
127

And yet, for Grierson documentary cinema’s realism was unlike topical newsreel films. In
his most well-known essay, “First Principles of Documentary,” Grierson popularized the term
documentary cinema by distinguishing it from cinematic actualities and their naïve realism: “The
peacetime newsreel is just a speedy snip-snap of some utterly unimportant ceremony…The skill
they represent is a purely journalistic skill.”
128
But that was not the point of documentary
filmmaking; for him, documentary proper was not a record of reality. As a social instrument,
documentary cinema’s goal is to uncover those aspects of reality that remain hidden from everyday
experience. By focusing their camera lens on the outside, Grierson asserted, documentary
practitioners depicted social and political processes that have thus far remained veiled from the
audience; this allowed them to create a new image of reality. As Grierson wrote, documentary
cinema’s “capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself” allows it to

127
“Being freed from the requirement of commercial success within the protected space of the E.M.B., the filmmakers
enjoyed total freedom as far as aesthetics were concerned… Their form of documentary did not just seek to depict and
aestheticize everyday life, but also to form opinion.” Christine Rüffert, “Film as Instrument of Social Enquiry: The
British Documentary Film Movement of the 1930s,” Research in Film and History 2 (2019): 4.
128
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Jonathan Kahana, ed. The Documentary Film Reader: History,
Theory, Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 217.
53
uncover what neoliberals such as Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, or an inarticulate form
of knowledge that escapes older forms of communication such as speech and writing. To be sure,
educational films already went beyond their indexicality to explain how different filmed
phenomena constitute our reality. However, documentary cinema was not purely pedagogical. This
was a crucial point because educational films, Grierson wrote, fail to dramatize, and thus “reveal”
those hidden forces which escape the human mind: “Here we pass from the plain (or fancy)
descriptions of natural material to arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of it.”
129

What Grierson termed “the creative treatment of reality” was made possible only through
this new symbiosis between the documentary practitioner and the camera, thus creating
documentary proper.
130
In such a definition, cinema represented a technological apparatus, that
although operated by the human hand, overcame human perceptual limitations. Documentary
media, by entirely using the cinematic apparatus, can show reality otherwise inconceivable to the
human mind. That is why documentary cinema, Grierson argued, was better equipped at serving
society. He finishes the paragraph by extolling cinema’s independence from artificiality: “Add to
this that documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and effect impossible to the shim-
sham mechanics of the studio, and the lily-fingered interpretations of the metropolitan actor.”
131

In a continued effort to undermine other European filmic styles and thus extoll British
cinematic uniqueness, Grierson criticized Weimar documentary practitioners such as Walter
Ruttman for providing a highly formalist and, thus, incomplete image of reality. Although
audiences could mistake Berlin or the Symphony of a City (1927) for a documentary film because

129
Ibid., 218.
130
Brian Winston argues that in 1929, Grierson was not really certain what he even meant by the description of
documentary cinema as a “creative treatment of actuality” but allowed the description to develop through practice:
“The lack of clarity meant that Grierson gave no guidance to his followers as to what the ‘creative treatment of actuality’
meant but rather allowed them to contradict him and each other in their attempts to explain the phrase.” Brian Winston,
Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revised, 12.
131
Ibid., 218.
54
it was shot outside film studios, as Grierson noted, the film nevertheless failed to present tacit
knowledge; Ruttman’s symphony was a visual impression but a fleeting one. In following a single
day in the life of the Weimar metropolis through a highly stylized presentation, the film failed to
provide, Grierson argued, a more significant message or insight. In Berlin “no other issue of God
or man emerged than that sudden besmattering spilling of wet on people and pavements.”
132

Documentary films through their depiction of real life, Grierson insisted, should not chase visual
pleasure but virtue. Above all, they should be “a means to heighten awareness of the real, no
matter how cruel, how unjust, how objectionable that reality might be.”
133

It is tempting to engage with Grierson’s early writings on documentary cinema, especially
“First Principles of Documentary,” as if they provide a complete historical overview of interwar
British cinema. Recent scholarly projects such as the Colonial Film Database made apparent the
entanglements between what Grierson called “high” (i.e., films produced within the British
Documentary Movement) and “low” forms (e.g., newsreels, educational films) of documentary
cinema; both forms were useful to reconstructing the British Empire and interwar liberalism.
Through its extensive archive and scholarly criticism, the Colonial Film Database project testified
that these different forms of British cinema were produced and functioned in a complementary
way, and not against each other, as Grierson suggested.
134
Since the 2010s, media historians
interrogated documentary media’s relationship to various political projects not least the British

132
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 221.
133
Robert Babe, Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2000), 103.
134
Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire, colonialfilm.org.uk, June 25, 2021. Martin Stollery, “John
Grierson’s ‘First Principles’ as Origin and Beginning: The Emergence of the Documentary Tradition in the Field of
Nonfiction Film,” 321. For recent work on the importance of educational filmmaking in interwar Britain, see Tom
Rice, “One Family: The Movement of Educational Film in Britain and Its Empire,” in Marina Dahlquist and Joel
Frykholm, eds. The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indian University Press, 2019).
55
Empire’s nation-building projects after the dissolution of imperialism in Europe.
135
Certainly, my
own work demonstrated the relevance of newsreel cinema to both interwar and post-World War
Two geopolitics.
136
Hence, Grierson’s writings cannot be taken as historical proof of documentary
cinema’s influence or relevance to interwar liberalism. Nevertheless, it is still pertinent to engage
with the British Documentary Film Movement’s primary sources because they uncover certain
ideological commitments that have thus far been neglected by historians of documentary
cinema.
137
I argue that by reading Grierson’s early film criticism through the lens of the emerging
neoliberal project, one finds several overlapping features not least the ways in which Grierson and
neoliberal thinkers reimagined the relationship between knowledge and liberal governance. Indeed,
we tend to forget that neoliberalism began as an epistemic project before it became a mode of
governance or a set of economic doctrines. As I have shown, the British Documentary Film
Movement was also an epistemological project based on finding ways to uncover and
communicate knowledge that had thus far escaped human comprehension. The Movement’s
entanglement to neoliberalism was twofold—on the one hand, documentary practitioners sought
to promote British industry and liberal capitalism at the EMB, but on the other hand, Grierson’s
theory of documentary cinema was committed to reforming classical liberalism through
epistemology. In what follows, I explore these theoretical similarities between British
documentary cinema and interwar neoliberal theory.

135
I have already cited much of this work, such as Lee Grieveson (2018) and Tom Rice (2019). For an analysis of
American nonfiction cinema, see Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds. Useful Cinema (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2011).
136
Jelena B. Ćulibrk, “Moulding and Mutilating: Newsreels, the British State, and Yugoslav ‘Exceptional’ Socialism,
1946-1961,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 41, no. 3 (September 2021): 477-494.
137
Although a proper intellectual history of documentary criticism is yet to be written, we can confidently date Brian
Winston’s book Claiming the Real (1995) as the first scholarly refutation of John Grierson’s Documentary Film
Movement.
56
Human Behavior and Politics
But a human mind is not a film
which registers once and for all each impression
that comes through its shutters and lenses.
138

- Walter Lippmann

Although Grierson joined the EMB in 1927, it would take almost a decade for him to
develop an epistemology of documentary cinema.
139
But an indication that his documentary
project was more about exploring the ways by which people learn and behave rather than an
investigation in cinema’s formal and aesthetic qualities was already apparent through a curious
phrase in “First Principles of Documentary”—“documentary can achieve an intimacy of
knowledge.”
140
What Grierson meant was that, in contrast to traditional education, cinema can
teach about the world in an informal way that engaged the senses. However, he criticized
educational cinema which he saw as dull and uncinematic since the films’ visual content was often
subjugated to narrators’ words. This was unfortunate because, as Grierson argued, cinema’s
capabilities surpassed older forms of communication—cinema can select, blow up, and mediate
reality, thus providing audiences with knowledge of the world that cannot be experienced nor
described in any other way. Intimate knowledge, Grierson claimed, is that which arises within an
individual during a film’s screening. It is a form of knowledge that cannot be separated from
experience, and thus, it cannot be contained within books or other forms of discourse. Since this

138
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (London: Routledge, 1998), 159.
139
Grierson managed to fully explain his understanding of tacit knowledge when, in the post-World War Two
environment, his Documentary Film Movement no longer operated within a single government agency such as the
EMB and the G.P.O. Unit. The experience of the war, and his time in setting up the Canadian documentary filmmaking,
made him appreciate and see at a distance what he had been creating during the interwar years in Britain. He fully
formulated this epistemology during World War Two in writings such as “Education and Propaganda” and “Challenge
of Peace.” Both can be found in Forsyth Hardy’s collection of Grierson’s writings on film entitled Grierson on
Documentary, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947.
140
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” 218.
57
form of knowledge arises from experience, it represents a deeper form of knowing and relating to
the world.
Sensory stimuli are not benign. As early twentieth-century British social scientists
postulated, stimuli constitute and influence behavior. In no small way, this insight reformed early
twentieth-century political science because it showed how political action is not entirely rational
or divorced from human behavior. And yet, this seemingly objective scientific discovery was
influenced by mass political movements. Once universal suffrage became a political reality, social
scientists and liberal legislators were compelled to respond to this new political reality. As
Immanuel Wallerstein argued, social sciences are products of the liberal world-system; disciplines
such as history, sociology, political science, psychology, and economy were invented in the
nineteenth century to offer a “systematized, organized, and bureaucratized research on how our
social systems operate.”
141
But in the twentieth century, social sciences became more
interdisciplinary because debates over popular government made older theories defunct. British
political scientist Graham Wallas, the co-founder of the London School of Economics and a former
leading member of the Fabian Society, was one of the first to engage in an interdisciplinary merger
between political science and psychology.
142
In the introduction to his most well-known work
Human Nature in Politics (1919), Graham argued that “political impulses are not mere intellectual
interferences from calculations of means and ends; but tendencies prior to, though modified by,
the thought and experience of individual human beings.”
143

In no small way, Wallas reformed a common conception of political action under classical
liberalism that was based on evolutionary theories of historical linearity and progress. He showed

141
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberal Triumphant, 1789-1914 (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2011), 220.
142
Wallas left this gradualist socialist society as a reaction to the Fabian Society’s anti-liberalism.
143
Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1919), x.
58
how various interest groups influence this seemingly natural sphere. This insight destabilized the
way politics was understood to be hierarchical and top-down. Rather, as Wallas showed, political
motivation and action largely depended on how individuals understand the world. In other words,
politics rested on how people are influenced and persuaded. Perhaps more than anyone, Walter
Lippmann was indebted to Wallas’ research which he acknowledged in Public Opinion. Lippmann
accepted Wallas’ insight that propaganda, or persuasion and guidance of people, was the modern
world’s most potent political instrument.
144
In Lippmann’s theory of communication, we can see
the desire of early twentieth-century social scientists to reform classical liberalism from its passive
outlook on human nature to one that is highly invested in studying and guiding behavior. Whereas
classical liberalism, as Lippmann noted, understood human behavior from a naturalist perspective
and left it more or less unexamined, the neoliberals understood human behavior as the key in the
political process and, by definition, crucial to preserving the liberal world-system.
145

It is not by chance that the British Documentary Film Movement’s productions focus on
individuals rather than on social collectives. Even when Grierson presented a group of fishermen
in The Drifters, individual struggle toppled class consciousness, and emerged in the film as an on-
screen battle between men and nature.
146
Although the Movement later represented people in less
poetic situations like in films such as Housing Problems (1935) or Enough to Eat? (1936) these
individuals were mostly represented through, what Bill Nichols described, a “stable position of
correspondent with the state.”
147
They were never truly allowed to exist outside the films’

144
Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World-System, 224.
145
Walter Lippmann, The Good Society, 243 and 181.
146
Ralph Bond, a member of Grierson’s circle, argued that Grierson subtly condemned capitalism’s exploitation of
the working class when, in the film’s final scenes, the fishermen’s daily catch becomes subjected to market
speculations. Although I am sympathetic to this view of labor, I have yet to fully experience this argument through
Grierson’s The Drifters. Ralph Bond, “Cinema in the Thirties: Documentary Film and the Labour Movement,” in Jon
Clark, ed., Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979).
147
Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland, CA: University of
California Press, 2016), 33.
59
discursive logic. Even in those rare moments when they spoke, their remarks were edited to
illustrate the on-screen experts’ points rather than to produce new meaning. Certainly, the British
Documentary Film Movement represented individuals never-before-seen on screen, but their lives
were heavily mediated through expert knowledge.
Wallas’ reform of political science was almost simultaneous to the introduction of
individualism in economics. As Wallas was theorizing political action around individual behavior,
economist Joseph Schumpeter sought to reposition the world economy on the level of the
individual. This marginalist economist was part of the Austrian School of Economics which
remained an intellectual home to many neoliberal theorists not least Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich Hayek. Undoubtedly, Schumpeter contributed to neoliberal economics when in 1909 he
proposed a new image of the world economy. In contrast to the German Historical School which
visualized the world economy and its networks through maps and other panoramic media, thus
establishing the economy’s spatial relationship, Schumpeter was preoccupied with economic
knowledge at a more intimate level. What Schumpeter termed “methodological individualism”
included shifting the world economy to the individual level of the consumer or “to the price-
creating actions of individuals.”
148
His bold methodological move was based on epistemology. No
concrete or objective knowledge of the world, Schumpeter argued, could be assembled through an
optic too wide, as proposed by the German Historical School of Economy and, by extension,
Marxist political economy.
149
Rather, Schumpeter recommended that economists focus on
individual economic behavior. Similar to his neoliberal colleagues, Schumpeter understood society
as abstract—a phenomenon that can only be studied through individual behavior. Decades later,

148
Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine, From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and Historical in the
Evolution of Economic Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 107 and 200.
149
Quinn Slobodian, “How to see the world economy: statistics, maps, and Schumpeter’s camera in the first age of
globalization,” Journal of Global History 10 (2015): 324.
60
Mises echoed this view when in Human Action, he insisted that “it is always the individual who
thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks.”
150
This was an important insight
for neoliberal thinkers who continued to envision the world economy as bounded by individual
economic activity—a view that constituted Milton Friedman’s documentary series Free to Choose.
Perhaps surprisingly, Grierson would have agreed with Schumpeter’s and Mises’ view that
individual motivation and behavior is far more helpful in understanding reality than any abstract
theories of collective action. Consider Grierson’s 1925 lecture attended by New York City’s
cinema managers. In it, he warned them not to book films based on the imperfect and all-too
subjective knowledge of professional critics because “when they judge a moving picture they are
only too often judging it as highbrows.”
151
Instead, data obtained from studying human behavior,
Grierson insisted, would always trump knowledge produced by the self-important critics. As such,
cinema managers should follow data such as box-office numbers that better represent what cinema
audiences desire. And what are box-office numbers, if not a visualization of the market through
signals of consumer behavior? This box-office knowledge of the cinema-going audience would
result in a very practical tool; the market analysis would create what Grierson called a
“psychological map.”
Whereas Grierson combined economic knowledge with film production and distribution,
Schumpeter’s shift towards economic individualism was influenced by the cinematographic
apparatus’ new ways of seeing. As historian Quinn Slobodian presciently noticed, cinema had a
profound and lasting influence on the imagination of early neoliberal thinkers. Slobodian reads
Schumpeter’s individualistic turn as emanating from a particular cinematographic imagination

150
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treaties on Economics (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1996), 177.
151
Grierson described professional critics as “bringing into play the criteria of a small leisure class—a supercritical
superconscious class—when your pictures and your theatres have very little to do with that class.” John Grierson,
“Briton Addresses Paramount Theatre Managers School,” Exhibitors Herald, September 26, 1925, 32 and 86.
61
that Schumpeter developed while studying and working in Vienna and Berlin, two cities with
bustling turn-of-the-century film cultures. Price-formation and cinema create, as Slobodian said,
“an impression of fluid movement by distributing data evenly across discrete but connected
moments.”
152
This entanglement between cinema and neoliberal economic theories illustrates a
change in knowing and seeing the world. Rather than present an abstract image of the world
through the high formalism of German Expressionism, the British Documentary Film Movement
and neoliberalism sought to position the individual experience at the crux of knowledge production.
There are ramifications for seeing the world through an individualized lens. By
representing reality through an individual’s thoughts and experiences, British documentary films
and market data obstruct a vision of the whole; they prevent a notion of the social. In the minds of
Grierson and the neoliberal thought collective, it became urgent in the interwar years to disengage
a collectivist vision of the world economy and to inoculate capital from mass politics. Adding to
the period’s political instability was the largest bust in economic history thus far—the Wall Street
Crash of 1929. Although Austrian economists developed the famous business cycle theory which
capitalism as going through almost natural cycles of expansion and retraction, the 1929 Crash
shattered their views. Indeed, the market crash seemed to have originated from the system itself;
it was manmade rather than natural and cyclical in nature.
153
The Wall Street Crash strongly
suggested that there was something wrong in the capitalist system. For Mises, Hayek, and other
early neoliberal thinkers, the Crash influenced the shift in their academic interests from economics
to politics and philosophy of knowledge. This is because, Slobodian noted, “the shock of the 1930s
brought with it the realization that the world economy was basically unknowable.”
154
Concretely

152
Quinn Slobodian, “How to see the world economy: statistics, maps, and Schumpeter’s camera in the first age of
globalization,” Journal of Global History 10 (2015): 330.
153
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), 87.
154
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, 18.
62
this meant that the neoliberal project’s focus on purely economic questions over production and
allocation morphed into to a project invested in defending liberalism through epistemology.
155

British-Hungarian chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s contribution to neoliberal
epistemology and liberalism had a lasting influence. Akin to interwar neoliberal economists,
Polanyi abruptly terminated his interest in chemistry to study the nature of scientific knowledge.
Is scientific knowledge always already applied and formed through scientific collectives and state-
sponsored projects, or is pure scientific knowledge—one that is theoretical and arises from within
the individual—also relevant to scientific discoveries? In short, is scientific knowledge a product
of social mechanisms or does it emanate from experience? As a staunch supporter of liberalism
and one of the presenters at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, Polanyi defended the existence of
theoretical knowledge at a time when it was undermined by Marxist scientists in Britain like J.D.
Bernal.
156
The crux of these debates was whether scientific inquiry should be planned and
controlled by the state through making science necessarily applied, or whether scientific
knowledge needs to be divided between applied and pure. These investigations on the nature of
knowledge led Polanyi to develop a theory of tacit knowledge or what he would later call “personal
knowledge” that arose from experience. Although it would take Polanyi twenty-three years to fully
develop this project in his famous work Personal Knowledge (1958), he undertook much of the
research in the interwar period. Having returned from the Soviet Union, Polanyi felt a particular
need to communicate ways by which liberal states should reform education and instill a sense of

155
Historians of science and economics argue that there was no single debate, but two parallel ones that included
Mises, Hayek, and Oskar Lange but also socialist economists such as Otto von Neurath whose ideas on knowledge
and epistemology influenced Hayek’s later scholarship. While the debate over planning under socialism reaches back
to the early twentieth century in Max Weber’s writings, it became central in the 1920s and 1930s. John O’Neill, “Who
Won the Socialist Calculation Debate?,” History of Political Thought 17, no. 3 (1996): 431.; Ola Innset, “Markets,
Knowledge and Human Nature: Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi and Twentieth-century Debates on Modern Social
Order,” European History Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2017): 689.
156
Anna-K. Mayer, “Setting up a discipline, II: British history of science and ̳the end of ideology, 1931 – 1948,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004): 41-72.
63
determination to defend liberal principles. Polanyi’s insistence on the importance of experiential
knowledge to liberalism was perhaps his greatest contribution to the early neoliberal project. By
refuting the overwhelming dominance of objective, scientific knowledge that can only be verified
through impersonal mathematical means, Polanyi insisted that tacit knowledge provides a better
understanding of reality. However, it was important to distinguish that tacit knowledge is not
personalized knowledge because it does not belong to a single person.
157
As Polanyi wrote:
Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality;
a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown
(and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of
the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge.
158

As I have shown above, the Griersonian documentary project was highly invested in a
similar form of tacit knowledge which remained inarticulate prior to cinema’s intervention.
Certainly, personal knowledge of the world represented on screen was part and parcel of this
documentary tradition. Similar to Polanyi, Grierson’s definition of reality included those processes
which cannot be easily comprehended in everyday life; society needed cinematic vision in order
to grasp reality itself. But the reality in the 1930s was bleak, and documentary films could not
solely depict what was outside the proverbial window. Direct realism, Grierson argued, would not
tell people anything about the political and economic currents rocking the decade.
These views were direct products of a battered economic system following the Great
Depression. Forced to adopt austerity measures, the British government had to close agencies such
as the Empire Marketing Board. Grierson and his EMB colleagues Stephen Tallents, Paul Rotha,
Basil Wright, and others moved to the newly established G.P.O. Unit. Here Grierson would stay

157
“Such is the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. But this does not make our
understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act
claiming universal validity.” Michael Polanyi, “Preface,” Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
(London: Routledge, 2005).
158
Ibid.
64
for the next three years when in 1938, he moved to Canada. But what the Great Depression brought
to British filmmaking, as documentary practitioner Ralph Bond remembered, was that “it drove
out many of the questionable characters who had infiltrated it [the British film industry].”
159
Those
that remained, and they were almost exclusively part of Grierson’s inner circle, had committed
themselves to producing films that extolled social value and modern citizenship.
But this shift in the Movement’s film production emanated from the era’s crisis in vision
and meaning. As art historian John Tagg argued, documentary movements of the 1930s have one
thing in common—they were all developed to address the crises of meaning and politics unleashed
through the Great Depression: “Documentary realism is thus more than a system of coding. It is a
concerted attempt to forestall a crisis in the field of meaning and the field of the subject.”
160
In this
way, the Griersonian documentary intervened in the crises of liberal governance by resolving the
invisibility of its processes. Just as Michael Polanyi envisioned his film Unemployment and Money
(1940) as educating “laymen” on modern economic processes, so too have films produced by
Grierson’s circle relentlessly uncovered the hidden mechanisms of liberal governance.
161
Cinema
was understood by Polanyi and Grierson as able to build a particular realist vision of the world to
serve liberal society’s interests at a moment when old political and economic structures were being
challenged.
162
Through their 1935 correspondence, Grierson and Polanyi agreed that cinema
should support what Polanyi referred to in the letter as “democracy by enlightenment through the

159
Ralph Bond, “Cinema in the Thirties: Documentary Film and the Labour Movement,” in Jon Clark, ed., Culture
and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 244.
160
John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 57.
161
“For Polanyi, his film project was only the first step in a much grander scheme which aimed to visualize the
complexity of economics for the masses.” Gábor Bíró, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi (London and New
York: Routledge, 2019), 92.
162
Unlike his socialist brother and economic historian Karl Polanyi, Michael was an ardent defender of liberalism and
a crucial member of the interwar neoliberal thought collective. In contrast, Karl in his study of nineteenth-century
capitalism described the free market economy as extremely harmful to society. Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2001.
65
film.”
163
In short, documentary media needed to mend the crisis of knowledge and vision in order
to save liberalism from imploding under the pressure of its own making.

163
“A letter of 13 December 1935 from Michael Polanyi to John Grierson, Michael Polanyi Papers, Box 3, Folder 5,
Special Collections, University of Chicago Library,” in Gábor Bíró, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi, 166.
66
Neoliberal Realism, or How to Visualize Liberal Governance
We have become citizens of a community
which we do not adequately see.
164

- John Grierson

In this section’s epigraph, Grierson lamented the fact that many of our society’s institutions
were ungraspable and, thus, unknowable to people.
165
In part, this was due to the nature of liberal
power. As a highly bureaucratized system of dispersed power, liberal states operate with this
necessary drawback; its dependence on institutions, liberalism struggles with clearly representing
its social project. In contrast, the top-down structure of power in authoritarian states such as Soviet
Communism and National Socialism allowed them to visualize power on the dictator’s body.
166

However, interwar years made these illiberal political movements too dangerous for they
threatened to erode people’s support of liberalism. As neoliberals postulated, people were drawn
to these totalitarian regimes because they did not fully comprehend the benefits of liberal
governance. To be sure, because people did not understand liberal institutions, they were unable
to provide consent that would support liberalism and provide stability to global trade. Grierson
invoked this neoliberal sentiment when he described the liberal state’s invisible society:
Under our feet go wires and pipes leading to complicated supply systems we blindly take
for granted. Behind each counter of our modern buying lies a world-system of manufacture, choice,
and conveyance… We do not see it…This is the fact of modern society, yet we are slow to adopt
the habits of thought which must necessarily go with interdependency if we are to control the
forces which we ourselves have released. We operate in a new world, but are not yet possessed of
it. We have given ourselves a new kind of society, but have not yet given ourselves the new
conception of citizenship which makes it tolerable.
167

But as modern technology annihilates human connection to a familiar albeit smaller world,
cinema emerges to redeem reality. This was a fairly common understanding of cinema by classical

164
John Grierson, “The Challenge of Peace,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, 245.
165
Ibid.
166
Perhaps the most well-known critique of liberal power was penned by German jurist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt.
167
John Grierson, “The Challenge of Peace,” in Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary, 245.
67
film theorists such as Grierson and Siegfried Kracauer. To be sure, they both extolled cinematic
realism as able to pierce through the surface of things and uncover elements that are otherwise
obscured. It would take twenty years for Kracauer to develop his theory of film, but even during
his Weimar writings, he saw cinematic vision as able to transcend corporeal limitations:
Films render visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent. It
effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical correspondences.
We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual non-existence, by
endeavoring to experience it through the camera.
168

Unlike Grierson, Kracauer was not committed to the liberal capitalist project but saw in
modern phenomenon like the Tiller Girls the imbrication between capitalist modes of production
and modern mass culture that, in turn, enabled him to study modern capitalism.
169
As an offspring
of the Frankfurt School, Kracauer criticized Grierson’s view of cinema as “an educational
instrument, a means of promoting responsible citizenship” because everyday experience cannot be
reduced to the needs of any collective or ideology.
170
But like Grierson, Kracauer understood
modern mass media as able to show a reality that is otherwise withheld from direct sensory
experience.
But to make documentary cinema central to new forms of liberal citizenship, British
legislators needed to be persuaded of the benefits of this cinematic approach to government. In
part, this also meant altering the 1927 Cinematograph Act so that documentary films could be
recognized and treated as British feature films that were protected by the quota system. In June
1936, Grierson defended his strand of documentary filmmaking in front of the Committee for
Cinematograph Films set up by the Board of Trade:

168
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 300.
169
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard
University Press, 1995).
170
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 309-310.
68
The documentary film is a relatively new type of film… Describing the affairs and issues
of ordinary citizenship, it must help to bring alive the life of the country to audiences both at home
and abroad… The case I wish to make is, briefly, that the documentary film shout not have special
treatment but that it should have equal treatment with other films.
171

Indeed, British shorts were excluded from the quota system which severely undermined their
presence on the film market; the quota system also denied them what documentary filmmakers
perceived as substantial financial profit, but most importantly, it prevented documentary films
from ever garnering a mass audience. Although this situation would not drastically change until
the introduction of documentary filmmaking on British television in the post-World War Two
years, the arguments made by Grierson and other documentary practitioners point to their forceful
commitment to securing careers in British civil service and industry. The main task was to further
distinguish documentary films by presenting them as opportunities to better film’s representational
techniques, and, in turn, innovate modern communication that liberal states depended on. Grierson
continued to defend his position: “The shorts field, apart from trying out and developing new
directors and new writers, provides for the trying out of new ideas… It is probable that the
documentary film will one day emerge into the full-feature field as a new and powerful type of
realistic film.”
172
Documentary films could resolve the issue of politics and visibility that
threatened the existence of liberal governance.
From the mid-1930s, as the British Documentary Film Movement moved on from the now
defunct Empire Marketing Board, where they enjoyed creative freedom with almost no budgetary
constraints, Grierson and his inner circle migrated to the G.P.O. Film Unit where financial
limitations were alleviated through a more intensive partnership with British industry. Night Mail
(G.P.O Film Unit, 1936) directed by Basil Wright and Henry Watt, and produced by Grierson

171
Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Departmental Committee on Cinematograph Films, Fifth to Eight Days,
Board of Trade, London, 1936, 133.
172
Ibid.
69
presents perhaps the best-known example of this Depression-induced merger between the British
Documentary Film Movement and the industry. Although aligned from the start with the needs of
the British economy, only after the Great Depression did the British Documentary Film Movement
directly depend on corporate sponsorship. As the Movement’s most commercially successful film,
Night Mail became a classic that, I argue, best represents the interwar relationship between
documentary cinema and industry.
173
Night Mail also best represents what I call “neoliberal
realism” or the visualization of the liberal world-system’s hidden processes. The film was based
on a simple story—the journey of a post-express train from London to its territorial outskirts in
Scotland’s most northern city Aberdeen. The film’s task was to represent and make known the
inner workings of the British post office, a crucial public service institution that facilitates the
timely circulation of information and goods. But in choosing to focus on the post office’s railway
route across the British Empire, the film presented a larger argument on capitalism and liberal
power.
Night Mail begins as a common industrial short; it is pedagogical and informative,
especially through the opening narration during which this crucial train service is explained:
8:30 pm, weekdays and Sundays, the Euston special leaves Euston for Glasgow, Edinburgh,
and Aberdeen. The postal special is a fast express, but it carries no passengers. It is manned by
forty post office workers. Half a million letters are sorted, picked up, and dropped at full speed
during the night, or carried on through the morning delivery in Scotland.

The narrator’s God-like voice dissolves into the telephone conversations between different
post workers managing the train service and coordinating its travel with stations along the route.

173
Night Mail was also one of the Movement’s most well-received film. Unlike prior films which rarely had a mass
audience, Night Mail managed to book four times better than other short films at the time. Yet despite its popularity,
the film failed to provide a substantial profit because of the unfavorable legislation not protecting short films enough
within the British quota system. Indeed, Grierson would invoke the example of this film to argue before the 1936
Committee on Cinematograph Films to include short British films in the quota system and expand their domestic
market. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Departmental Committee on Cinematograph Films, Fifth to Eight Days,
Board of Trade, London, 1936, 135.
70
Coordinating trains and coordinating time, in no small part enabled the global circulation of goods,
and in turn, capital on the free market. Railways reformed the way capitalism developed its
industrial production and consumption by connecting disparate geographical parts of the world
and bringing them closer together.
174
Although the British Documentary Film Movement became
renowned for representing individuals such as British workers, Night Mail’s main character is not
a person but a piece of technology—the train’s locomotive. And even if the film depicted various
postal workers, especially through the now memorable scene in which large quantities of mail are
being sorted on-board the train, the train operator was not granted similar visibility. (Fig. 5) Human
labor was, in this way, subsumed by the machine in its relentless movement towards the Scottish
Highlands. In his study of railways and the change they brought to perceptions of time and space,
historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch described their coal-powered combustion as nothing short of
revolutionary: “Machinery, in its ever more powerful intervention, destroyed that ‘live’ connection
between the producer or consumer of the product and the production process.”
175

Developed in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, the railways accelerated the Industrial
Revolution; it connected British cities to its ports and dominions but also displaced people from
country-sides through an impulse to commodify their labor in factories across Britain’s industrial
centers such as Manchester and Glasgow. Indeed, the railway system allowed the liberal world-
system to conquer and alter even the most remote parts of Britain and the world, thus constituting
a central place in the creation of the common financial market. Night mail like many industrial
films of the interwar era established a connection with the natural world and often juxtaposed
images of nature to the artificial, constructed environment of modern cities and technology.

174
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century
(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 33-34.
175
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century,
121-122.
71
Through such a comparison, human artificiality, the train, was presented as something almost
organic and natural—as a modern-day technological miracle that changed societies and natural
environments for the benefit of liberal capitalism.
176

Fig. 5: The locomotive and human labor Night Mail (G.P.O. Unit,1936)

Although the locomotive absorbed human labor within the logic of its operations—the need
to swiftly distribute information and postal goods to its consumers—the railway system also made
possible a new form of vision. What Schivelbusch referred to as panoramic vision was a change
in human perception, brought on by the railway system, where people became increasingly unable
to discriminate between foreground and background. In this way “the train, a mode of transport,
also worked as a form of media.”
177
Night Mail recognized this historical role played by the
railways in reforming human perception while adding an additional twist. In the scene following
the sophisticated coordination of time and space, Night Mail departs from a strictly pedagogical
impetus of industrial films by chartering the train’s movement through space. The narrator’s voice
from Night Mail’s establishing shots is suddenly in discord with shots that now represent an aerial
view of the postal service train. (Fig. 6) Although of low quality, these aerial shots signaled that

176
Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)” in Michael Renov, ed. Theorizing Documentary,
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 116.
177
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamor of Media in Motion, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2020, 14.
72
the film would provide a total vision of an industrial process rather than focus on detail as many
industrial films did. Certainly, Night Mail reformed the period’s industrial films by adopting an
optic that caters to an impression of a totality usually absent from the everyday experience. This
totality of vision promised a totality of knowledge. As scholars have argued, modernity fragmented
perception and experience. To be sure, its scientific and technological innovations like the railway
system contributed to this process of fragmentation; the railway’s panoramic vision only
accelerated this alienation in people’s relationship with the natural world. But Night Mail sought
to mend this estrangement by visualizing the liberal state’s networks. Although the film begins as
a common industry piece in which a narrator extolls the train service for delivering millions of
letters and packages, it soon dissolves into a modernist vision of the British Empire. By presenting
a journey of mail from London to the most remote areas of Great Britain, the film extolled the
state’s industrial processes and their importance to liberal prosperity.
178

Fig. 6: Aerial shots of the moving train in Night Mail (G.P.O. Unit, 1936)

As Carl Schmitt argued, the liberal state’s faith in technology represents the crucial
‘domain’ in liberalism, or perhaps its greatest ideological commitment. Schmitt described liberal

178
Despite the film’s tremendous success, some members of the British Documentary Film Movement charged the
film with ignoring its social function by privileging the depiction of machine labor at the expense of human labor.
This is how Paul Rotha described the film: “Night Mail has no social purpose… It’s beautifully made, superbly made,
but what does it do in the end? It merely tells you how the postal special gets from Kings Cross to Edinburgh. It cannot
possibly tell you about the conditions of postal workers of anything of that sort.” James Chapman, A New History of
British Documentary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 73. However, this was how Rotha remembered the film
in the mid-1970s, forty years after the film’s British premiere. At such distance, using Rotha’s memory of the film in
does not lend adequately explain what the Movement sought to accomplish as it was producing the film.
73
ideology as “a religion of technical progress which promised all other problems would be solved
by technological progress.”
179
For liberals, technology is a value-neutral process that promises to
fulfill concrete goals and provide solutions to everyday life. As an ideology born out of the post-
Napoleonic era, liberalism sought to abolish politics and political questions in society, and in turn,
create a system of rulership that depended on purely technocratic solutions. From the Age of
Reason to the Enlightenment, liberalism found its anchor in technological and scientific progress
that further inspired the establishment of scientific disciplines such as history, economics,
psychology, and political science. These aimed to capture the complexity behind the human
condition and attach meaning that would be amiable to the liberal projects of government; cinema
and mechanically reproduced media emerged from this desire to capture meaning. Moreover, the
postal service, Schmitt explained, was one of those ideal technological achievements that consisted
of sorting objects, mail and packages, without interrogating their inner value or contents; this
dispassionate view was a metaphor for political life under liberalism.
180
As such, I want to suggest
that Night Mail also functioned as a metaphor if not an advertisement for what cinema, as a new
form of liberal vision and liberal governance, can bring to the modern state.
But apart from being a pure technological depiction of a liberal process, Night Mail
employed neoliberal realism as a new way of humanizing and elucidating invisible economic and
social processes central to liberalism. This realism was established with a desire to overcome
liberal power’s main disadvantage—the overwhelming invisibility of its political process as the
result of bureaucratized governance that, unlike in totalitarian regimes, is dispersed horizontally

179
Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Naturalizations and Depoliticizations,” in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 85.
180
“The evidence of the widespread contemporary belief in technology is based only on the proposition that the
absolute and ultimate neutral ground has been found in technology, since apparently there is nothing more neutral.
Technology serves everyone, just as radio is utilized for news of all kinds or as the postal service delivers packages
regardless of their contents, since its technology can provide no criterion for evaluating them.” Ibid., 90.
74
across institutions rather than hierarchies. Night Mail aims to portray human relations that are
bettered through this technological achievement without making an overtly political statement. In
this way, the film intervenes in the crisis of liberal power of the interwar era. Indeed, Schmitt
accused the modern liberal states of not only depoliticizing society through their translation of
political questions into purely technological solutions, but liberalism obscured contrary political
impulses that remain obstinately present yet hidden, only to emerge at times of constitutional crises.
It is no surprise, Schmitt argued, that liberal states often inevitably retreat into fascism. By
proclaiming political neutrality, liberal governance hides and obscures the source of power from
people as a way of preventing dissent and upheaval. But in doing so, the liberal system opens itself
to grave danger because in not being able to see the source of power, there-by locating it in the
visual realm, people fail to provide full consent to the liberal system. This failure might not be an
issue during times of what Schmitt called the status quo, but they are perilous for liberalism during
times of great social and political crises. The Great Depression was certainly one such crisis that,
as art historian John Tagg rightly noted, sought to be solved through the proliferation of
documentary image-making—photography and cinema. The liberal state’s implementation of
documentary filmmaking through the British Documentary Film Movement aimed to resolve
economic and political pressures across the Empire and the world. By visualizing a crucial liberal
institution such as the modern postal system, people were given knowledge of how the system
functioned. As a result, filmmakers and legislators hoped that this would provide universal
acceptance of the liberal world-system.
75

Fig. 7: Air Outpost (Strand Film, 1937)

Night Mail was not the only example of neoliberal realism in the 1930s. A year after it
screened to much critical and audience acclaim, Paul Rotha directed Air Outpost (Strand Film,
1937) sponsored by Imperial Airways. Motivated by the same impulse to document the British
Empire’s transportation network, Rotha’s documentary film showed an operation of the Imperial
Airway’s route to today’s the United Arab Emirates. Akin to Night Mail, the film sought to
legitimize the British Empire by visualizing its transportation networks that provided the backbone
of its imperial power and trade. (Fig. 7) Both films served a greater purpose of presenting the
liberal state’s invisible networks of trade and industry that have thus far remained hidden from the
audience.
For Grierson, cinema was a social institution. Cinema practitioners had to be conscious of
their role, which Grierson called “service to community,” that balanced between the liberal state’s
needs and those of its citizens.
181
However, media scholars such as Andrew Higson and Elizabeth
Cowie have noticed a paradox in the Griersonian project—while audiences were expected to gain

181
“You have to realize that you are there do a service to your community, and above everything an actual service. If
you give the people what they actually need, if you give them the simple water they are thirsting for with a grace and
a fullness beyond their expectations, the box office returns will look after themselves. You will have become an
intimate part of the community’s life that the community will gladly pay for, and pay for with the liberality which one
reserves for one’s friends.” John Grierson, “Briton Addresses Paramount Theatre Managers School,” Exhibitors
Herald, September 26, 1925, 86.
76
tacit knowledge through on-screen mediations, they must, nevertheless, remain passive
observers.
182
But that is because liberalism sees a necessary limit in its educating mission. I want
to suggest that this is not a paradox but a historical necessity of state-sponsored documentary media
and the neoliberal project to, ultimately, safeguard capitalism from political and social instability.
While giving agency to the individual, both projects still depended on the liberal subject’s final
subjugation to matters more urgent than equality or social justice. As Mises argued in response to
“Red” Vienna’s housing projects, people need to understand that the liberal world-system’s
economic and political interests sometimes depend on limiting society’s prosperity.
As it developed within the British Documentary Film Movement and in interwar neoliberal
writings, cinematic vision provided a tool for liberal states to tackle the perceived onslaught of
illiberal forces within mass political movements in the 1930s. Cinema provided, what scholars
have described as “a new theoretical basis to shore it up against the fearsome tides of organic or
group theories that threatened to subsume individuals and their aspirations for freedom.”
183
Central
to this new democratic rationalism was an informed and self-regulating individual. British
documentary cinema of the 1930s already introduced this figure as a central character in its
narratives. By participating in filmic rituals, and through their individual experience of on-screen
diegesis, the audience members were envisioned as understanding the structures and power
relations within the liberal system. Ultimately, through this intimate form of comprehension,
neoliberals hoped that people would naturally come to support the existence of economic
liberalism. They would give their consent and relinquish most of their political power by entrusting
the expert class with governing. Most importantly, individuals were to understand the necessary
need to preserve the liberal system from the onslaught of “unrestrained” mass political movements

182
Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 70.
183
S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3.
77
such as Soviet Communism and National Socialism. Liberalism, as it was defined by Mises and
interwar neoliberal thinkers, is above all a realization that society and human life can be controlled
and developed.
184
The British Documentary Film Movement’s goal was to animate this insight.
And this was the main connecting point between interwar neoliberal ideas and British state-
sponsored documentary cinema. Lippmann understood modern media as key to popularizing free
trade, limiting democracy, and safeguarding liberalism. Similarly, Michael Polanyi long argued
for the need to show the hidden social and political processes that constitute liberalism. Cinema,
he argued, provided a visual totality that has thus far remained solely abstract in the minds of most
people. Although Polanyi sought to popularize liberalism through writings and lectures, he was
also determined to further reach the minds of “laymen.” For this, Polanyi argued, he needed to
adopt cinematic communication at explaining liberal processes, not least the function of liberal
economy and capitalist production. As Carl Schmitt argued in 1929, liberal legislators were keen
on solving “the problem of the production and distribution of goods in order to make superfluous
all moral and social questions.”
185
Amidst the Great Depression’s devastating aftermath, Polanyi
explained that people more than ever needed to be educated on the way economy functioned. What
would later be known as Unemployment and Money (1940) was the first realization of this idea,
and, at the same time, the first cinematic visualization of the liberal world economy.
186
In this film,
Polanyi used animation to visualize money, that abstract and most misunderstood aspect of the
capitalist economy which commodified and attached value to human labor. (Fig. 8) Without

184
“In Liberalism humanity becomes conscious of the powers which guide its development. The darkness which lay
over the paths of history recedes. Man begins to understand social life and allows it to develop consciously.” Ludwig
von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962, 49.
185
Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 86.
186
Gábor Bíró, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 36-55.
78
grasping the hidden mechanisms of the free market, people were left ignorant or, even worse,
disenchanted by the promise of liberal prosperity.

Fig. 8: Michael Polanyi’s film Unemployment and Money (1940)

Polanyi premiered the first version of the film at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium to a
somewhat reserved reaction.
187
While visualizing the economy was not objected to, the film’s
support of social security was. As a film that was inspired by Keynesian economics, based on the
contract between the state and industry, it might seem that welfarism was the most contentious
issue. But it was not, at least not in the interwar years. Neoliberals like Hayek would not argue
against the welfare state per se but only socialist central planning of the economy.
188
Apart from
the film’s historical curiosity as the first neoliberal depiction of the economy, its most relevant
aspect was Polanyi’s sophisticated understanding of cinema as an agent of social change. This he
shared with Grierson who he communicated with during the film’s pre-production. Both Grierson
and Polanyi were inspired by the need to elucidate liberalism as a social project. Visualizing hidden
social processes behind everyday reality enabled liberal systems to legitimize themselves, garner
consent, and inoculate themselves from future political upheaval. As historian Gábor Bíró writes:
“Better understanding was, in Polanyi’s view, necessary to save liberalism, democracy, and

187
Gábor Bíró, “Michael Polanyi’s Neutral Keynesianism and the First Economics Film, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of
the History of Economic Thought 42, no. 3 (September 2020): 337.
188
Ola Innset, “Markets, Knowledge and Human Nature: Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi and Twentieth-century
Debates on Modern Social Order,” 682.
79
Western civilization, which were under assault in the West by both internal and external forces.”
189

Grierson and Polanyi hoped that after watching a socially committed film, audiences would be
able to part-take in the constitution of the modern world-system which they lived in, but according
to interwar neoliberals, failed to understand. Grierson stressed this point in various writings,
especially through his early film criticism. And in doing so, he supported Graham Wallas’ insight
that it was more urgent for liberal institutions such as the EMB to persuade rather than teach.
190
A
large part of that persuasion rested on bridging the gap between liberal doctrines and “the masses”
world so as to inoculate liberal politics from collectivism. Not surprisingly, the British
Documentary Film Movement’s journal Documentary News Letter favorably reviewed Polanyi’s
and echoed the above-mentioned sentiment on liberal power’s invisibility:
Its main theme is precisely that grand circle of commercial exchanges, too vast to be seen
by any single observer, which guides all individual economic activities in a system of highly
divided labour. Just as the island nature of Britain is made visible symbolically on a map by a
closed curve representing its coast line—which no other explanation, no amount of photography
or of verbal description can represent with equal clarity—so does the motion symbol of monetary
circulation, consisting of rotating belt of definite width and rate gyration which is the principal of
this film, unambiguously establish the concept of this circulation, which no verbal explanation
(and certainly no photography) can clearly impart to the popular mind.
191

Beyond neoliberalism’s interest in human behavior, political action, and the role played
by state-sponsored institutions, interwar neoliberals, and documentary practitioners, confronted by
the urgency of the Great Depression, developed their arguments for a new liberal world order
increasingly in relation to visual epistemology. In no small part, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and
the ensuing Great Depression reformed both interwar neoliberalism and Grierson’s Documentary
Film Movement. The popularization of liberalism amidst the first truly global economic downturn
became even more urgent. At this time, neoliberals shifted their interest from economics to politics

189
Gábor Bíró, “Michael Polanyi’s Neutral Keynesianism and the First Economics Film, 1933 to 1945,” 338.
190
Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary, 27.
191
Anon., “Economics on the Screen,” Documentary News Letter, June 1940, 5-6.
80
and philosophy, while the Griersonians had to adjust to Depression-era filmmaking and seek
sponsorship within British industry.
192
In an effort to maintain the level of creative freedom and
they got accustomed to while at the EMB, Grierson and documentary practitioners embarked on a
somewhat aggressive campaign of promoting documentary filmmaking for liberal governance and
capitalist industries.

192
Neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek wrote their last “purely” economics book in 1938. Pressed by the era’s political
and economic instability, Hayek turned to epistemology, cybernetics, law, and psychology. I devote more attention to
Hayek’s post-World War Two writings in Chapter Three.
81
Conclusion
In 1918, the future of the nineteenth-century world-system seemed bleak. The fall of four
European empires and the rise of nation-states across Europe destabilized the circulation of capital
on the global market. Tariffs and economic restrictions were particularly devastating in once great
imperial capitals like Vienna where food and energy shortages shattered any resemblance of the
city’s opulent life before the War. This is the world in which neoliberalism began to form as a
political and economic solution to post-World War One instability. Mises and his fellow seminar
participants spent a decade rethinking classical liberalism and devising answers to its imperfect
view of human nature. These intellectual formations culminated in 1938 at a meeting in Paris, now
remembered as the Walter Lippmann Colloquium. But, as I argued in this chapter, the future of
liberalism was also discussed outside academic circles. British legislators examined the future of
the British Empire once its trade and foreign policy were eclipsed by the United States ascendency.
British state agencies such as the Empire Marketing Board were set up by the British Empire to
propagate its industry and its legal and cultural institutions. It was here that young liberals like
John Grierson, recently acquainted with international neoliberalism, helped establish cinema as a
technique of visual persuasion.
Neoliberals and the British Documentary Film Movement grew out of political and
economic chaos of the interwar era, influenced each other in the early formative years, and directly
collaborated, evident through Grierson’s and Polanyi’s correspondence during the pre-production
of the first economics film Unemployment and Money (1940). In a classical liberal manner,
Grierson and Polanyi sought to develop cinema as an educational tool for extolling the
technological, cultural, and political benefits of the liberal world-system. By visualizing the
invisible processes of liberal economy, neoliberals sought to gain consent for their newly revived
version of liberalism. Although at this time, neoliberalism did not fully develop to the form that
82
we are currently more accustomed to, it would not until 1980, but the interwar period set the
necessary foundations for this new political and economic order. The entanglements between
neoliberalism and state-sponsored documentary filmmaking point to their shared origin, the
concerns that animated their respective projects, and the solutions they found for protecting the
liberal world-system. Apart from these shared ideas, these men were personally influenced and
displaced by the wild currents of politics. Indeed, Hayek and Mises were exiled from Austria while
Grierson left Britain in 1938 to work on setting up the Canadian National Film Board. It is telling
that documentary cinema and neoliberalism were developed out of displacement, exile, and
personal turbulence for these circumstances constituted a particularly volatile experience of the
world, and perhaps, cemented neoliberal thinkers’ desire to build stability outside of politics.
But assessing the period’s sometimes unpredictable social, political, and economic currents
through Grierson’s writings is not an easy task. Indeed, media scholars such as Ian Aitken were
too quick to believe Grierson’s writings without filtering them through the era’s intellectual
currents. That missing context was the interwar neoliberalism which Grierson felt particularly
compelled to support. Indeed, focusing on famous primary sources such as Grierson’s essay “First
Principles of Documentary” can sometimes obscure the origin of his ideas. As a materialist
historian, I analyzed Grierson’s writings through their social, economic, and political context. As
such, I suggested that his legacy is ambiguous. Although it’s common for thinkers (and people) to
alter their prior convictions, Grierson’s legacy is complicated for his change of opinion occurred
in ways that were almost antithetical to what he previously represented. Consider, for example,
Grierson’s allegiance to the Soviet School of montage at the time when he exhibited his first film
The Drifters. In 1929, this film was shown to a small London-based audience alongside Sergei
Eisenstein’s well-known film Battleship Potemkin, thus allowing Grierson to align his
documentary filmmaking to European documentary cinema which tended to be left-leaning if not
83
socialist.
193
Adding to the confusion, Grierson’s own rhetorical gestures at self-promotion
obscured the way by which his intellectual allegiance emanated from neoliberal internationalism
rather than socialist politics.
194
As the geopolitical tide changed during the Cold War when the
world once again became firmly locked into imperial blocs, Grierson sought almost frantically to
distance himself from his earlier “socialist” image and present himself as the defender of Western
capitalist values.
195

From a socialist reformer to a staunch defender of the liberal world-system, Grierson’s
legacy remains paradoxical. But as I have mentioned earlier, debates and rhetorical gestures create
careers and historians need to be aware of how knowledge is produced and for what purposes it is
communicated. Indeed, just as scientist-turned-poet C.P. Snow proclaimed the existence of The
Two Cultures (1958) once Britain needed to upgrade its technical education following the
successful launch of the first Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, so did Grierson shift political sides
and allegiances. But as any true liberal, Grierson was a pragmatist. For him, democracy was
envisioned as a highly technocratic project for it successfully allocated goods and produced
solutions to real problems in the world. He was not interested in the public sphere that is always
already, as Hannah Arendt argued, complex. Grierson’s goal was to simplify reality. While he
might have sought to position himself in the annals of European filmmaking as a champion of
social reform through the Movement’s depiction of the British working class, his films still
provided a claustrophobic depiction of the political process, thus contributing to liberalism’s
depoliticization of society.

193
Ralph Bond, “Cinema in the Thirties: Documentary Film and the Labour Movement,” in Jon Clark, ed., Culture
and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, 247.
194
Aitken reformed his 1990 portrayal of Grierson as a left-leaning even socialist reformer by arguing two decades
later that he was “not anti-capitalist… and certainly not a socialist. As has been argued elsewhere, he is best defined
as a progressive corporatist, who believed in the importance of state and cultural regulation of capitalism.” Ian Aitken,
Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth-century Lukácsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions, 138.
195
Letter from John Grierson, 1949, FO 924/876, Foreign Office, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
84
Defending interwar neoliberalism and the nineteenth-century financial system from apathy
and “disillusionment” was paramount to the Griersonian project as he explained in the “First
Principles of Documentary” essay: “The post-1918 generation, in which all cinema intelligence
resides, is apt to veil a particularly violent sense of disillusionment, and a very natural first reaction
of impotence, in any smart manner of avoidance which comes to hand.”
196
Such lethargic,
depressed cinema threatened to destabilize liberal politics by failing to rally people for liberal
causes. If the interwar period showed anything, neoliberals insisted, it is that when people were
left alone to organize, across unions and suffrage movements, they would create political forces
that could easily topple the liberal world-system necessary for the stability of global capital.
Politics and mass democracy, neoliberals argued, were a problem that needed to be curbed. But in
a typical liberal gesture, this taming down was not accomplished by force, but through cinema’s
visualization. The British Documentary Film Movement, although in no way uniform, was perhaps
only remarkably consistent in its allegiance to bettering liberal governance and the security of the
liberal world-system.

196
John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary (1932-1934),” in Jonathan Kahana (ed.), The Documentary Film
Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, 222.
85
Chapter Two: Guarding the Frontiers of Freedom
The British Ministry of Information and the Institutionalization of Neoliberal Humanism

We are dealing with a great explosive force
about which our scientists,
the psychologists, can tell us nothing,
and our experiences can only tell us that
the explosions take place when we least expect them.
197

- Kenneth Clark

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, John Grierson was touring North
America with hopes of setting up an international distribution network for documentary cinema.
Ever since the British Government failed to adjust the quota system to include short films, an
interwar euphemism for documentary cinema, Grierson and his inner circle were finding ways to
solidify their position.
198
A year before the war, Grierson left Britain for Canada and would remain
there throughout the conflict, ultimately helping establish the National Film Board of Canada. As
media historian Paul Swann argued, Grierson’s complicated relationship with the British civil
service influenced his decision to relocate.
199
Although Grierson’s departure from Britain remains
controversial, his letters to the newly reestablished Ministry of Information (MoI) attest to his
strained relationship with civil service. While touring Hollywood during that faithful September
in 1939, Grierson saw an opportunity to establish British wartime propaganda in the United States.
He wrote telegrams and letters to Stephen Tallents—an old associate from the Empire Marketing

197
“The Film as a Means of Propaganda,” November 26, 1940, 1, TGA 8812/2/2/309, Papers of Kenneth Clark, Tate
Archive, London, UK.
198
Grierson and his associates (Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, and Arthur Elton) managed to remain relevant in part by
setting up specialized film magazines such as the Documentary News Letter, in circulation from January 1940 until
1949. To access Documentary News Letter’s archive visit the Media Lantern History Project at
https://lantern.mediahist.org/, February 2, 2022.
199
Joseph Ball, the first director of the Ministry of Information’s Films Division was decidedly against Grierson and
his Movement. He was especially against basing the Ministry’s propaganda on documentary cinema. Paul Swann, The
British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 145-149.
86
Board who was involved with setting up the Ministry from 1936.
200
However, Grierson’s letters
from Hollywood reached the desks of civil servants working on the newly formed Films Division,
an MoI department dedicated to centralizing British film propaganda. Heading the Films Division
was Joseph Ball, a Tory politician, and a crypto-fascist, who dismissed Grierson’s proposal to base
war propaganda around documentary cinema. In Ball’s mind, ignoring feature films would
undermine their well-developed distributional network and antagonize commercial film
producers.
201
Furthermore, Ball was rattled by Grierson’s lobbying with the British Ambassador
to the U.S. because Grierson disrupted the hierarchical division of power. Perhaps, most
importantly, Ball and his associates rejected Grierson’s suggestion because they did not see fit that
the Ministry’s film policy be run by a handful of Grierson’s hand-picked agents that the Films
Division’s employees mockingly referred to as Grierson’s “documentary boys.”
Yet it would be erroneous to reconstruct early wartime communication between Grierson
and the MoI as purely a matter of differing personalities and political allegiances; those were, no
doubt, relevant. But Grierson’s feeble behavior or his status as a “persona non grata,” a
classification repeated amongst MoI civil servants in 1939, was not the only reason behind the
MoI’s refusal to center its visual propaganda around the British Documentary Film Movement. As
this chapter will show, the MoI sought to reform liberal propaganda from its interwar iterations.
Although Grierson managed to remain relevant in British cinema during wartime and at the MoI,
especially once Ball was replaced by Kenneth Clark, the Ministry sought to devise a more holistic
approach to visual propaganda.
202
Certainly, the Ministry was a large governmental organization

200
Tallents was also, undoubtedly, a member of the British Documentary Film Movement’s inner circle. Anthony
Scott, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media
Profession (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012).
201
For Ball’s diplomatic career and his role in subverting British policy towards Fascist Italy see William C. Mills,
“Sir Joseph Ball, Adrian Dingli, and Neville Chamberlain's ‘Secret Channel’ to Italy, 1937–1940,” The International
History Review 24, no. 2 (2002): 278-317.
202
Jo Fox, “John Grierson, his ‘documentary boys’ and the British Ministry of Information, 1939–1942,” Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television 25, no. 3 (2005): 345-369.
87
that transcended any particular individual; it was a bureaucratized body organized across several
large departments headed in the early days by civil servants with little connection to professional
media organizations. Even its physical location at the new Senate House in Bloomsbury, one of
the oldest skyscrapers in London, represented a form of expansive power that some contemporaries
described as “totalitarian.”
203

But despite such architectural intimidation, the Ministry never truly held a monopoly over
information and was, in fact, under real pressure to reform.
204
While most British film companies
gladly cooperated with the Ministry, British newspapers were highly critical of this new form of
centralized power.
205
To be sure, liberal criticism of the centralized government was one of the
reasons why Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was reluctant to establish the Ministry even
when the new world conflict seemed inevitable.
206
To British politicians, centralized
communication was incompatible with some of the main tenets of liberalism even though it was
obvious by 1939 that Europe was becoming seriously disrupted by the force of Nazi propaganda.
What made this situation worse was the reluctance among some members of the Conservative
Party to devise concrete action against Nazi Germany after the 1938 appeasement. Hence, we
should view the early wartime traction between Grierson and the MoI not as a sign of personal
animosity, but as a mark of a much greater conundrum within the British government over the

203
Simon Goulding, “Senate House: Utopia, Dystopia in Charles Holden’s Architecture and its Place as London
Literary and Visual Landmark,” The Literary London Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 3-20.
204
“…the ministry never had a monopoly on wartime information… its work needs to be viewed within an ecology
of communication… the ministry’s relative success after 1941 formed a bridge between the prewar world of
commercial advertising and a postwar acceptance of government public relations.” Henry Irving, “The Ministry of
Information on the British Home Front,” in Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World War:
National and Transnational Networks, ed. Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020),
22-23.
205
Alexander Korda, the founder of London Films, and Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios, maintained a
close relationship with the British Conservative Party. Both studios produced propaganda films even before the war
officially broke out.
206
What gave rise to this reluctance was not so much the failure of the British government to act under the volatile
geopolitics of the interwar era, but a recent memory of World War I and a desire to avoid a similar world conflict.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991: The Short Twentieth Century (London: Abacus, 1995), 152.
88
future of liberal propaganda.
207
During the first three years of the MoI’s existence, from 1939 to
1942, the key question was how to create a form of propaganda that would not work against liberal
values such as economic freedom and personal liberty. And this was not an easy task.
This chapter examines the shift in British liberal propaganda which, I argue, took place at
the Ministry of Information. As such, the chapter explores MoI’s wartime efforts to envision a
form of centralized albeit non-totalitarian propaganda. By rejecting the predominance of state-
sponsored documentary cinema, the Ministry sought to expand its understanding of propaganda
beyond non-feature cinema. Indeed, what kind of bastion of economic liberalism was Britain if it
preferred state-sponsored documentary media at the expense of Britain’s commercial film industry?
But providing an alternative was not straightforward or uncomplicated. Interwar examples of
liberal education espoused by Grierson were seen as insufficient to win the war and persuade
people of liberalism’s benefits. Interwar documentary cinema’s behavioralist theories of political
action—based on studying and adjusting human behavior—were seen as inadequate; people had
to internalize the benefits of living under a liberal form of government. This sentiment was perhaps
best expressed by the BBC Controller of Program Lindsay Wellington when in a letter to the MoI’s
Films Division he urged them to develop a film strategy that would not only educate people on
liberalism but show them concrete benefits that they enjoy under liberal governance.
208
What
Wellington presciently noticed was that Britons needed to experience the advantage of liberal
freedom on-screen; they must not be simply told to trust their liberal leadership. But above all what
made behavioralists less appealing for future propaganda was the fear that Nazi Germany was
abusing these modern psychological theories and mass media to turn people into servile stewards

207
“The Films division with its highly intelligent personnel, in its very high building, tends to be easily out of touch
with the rather simpler reactions of industrial Lancashire and rural Somerset.” Tom Harrison, “Social Research and
the Film,” Documentary News Letter, November 1940, 10.
208
Letter from Lindsay Wellington to Films Division, March 6, 1940, INF 1/196, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
89
of its totalitarian regime. For British liberals, it was necessary to cease regarding people
collectively but to find new ways to integrate their complex individualities within the
government’s war effort.
The desire to build new media experiences for the benefit of liberal governance was not a
strictly British phenomenon. As media historian Fred Turner argued, American intellectuals and
policymakers were increasingly worried that former styles of communication would turn citizens
into passive subjects that authoritarian regimes could exploit.
209
Similar to the British context, Nazi
German propaganda was invoked by these U.S. scientists to illustrate how centralized mass media
communication obliterates individualism. The figure of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of
Propaganda, exemplified for soon-to-be wartime Allies—the U.S. and Britain—mass media’s
entanglement with political illiberalism.
210
Like the MoI, American wartime intellectuals sought
to devise a new form of wartime communication supported by a new understanding of human
personality. As Turner argued, this new liberal subject was envisioned as “highly individuated,
rational, and empathetic… committed to racial and religious diversity… able to collaborate with
others.”
211
To build such a subject, liberal states had to rely on wartime experiments in
communication which resulted in the creation of a multimedia form Turner termed “the democratic
surround,” or a multimodal environment that allowed citizens to experience multiple perspectives.
To be sure, the MoI’s decision to expand film propaganda beyond documentary cinema was

209
“Some argued that mediated images and sounds slipped into the psyche through the senses, stirred the newly
discovered depths of the Freudian unconscious, and left audiences unable to reason. Others claimed that the one-to-
many broadcasting structure that defined mass media required audiences to turn their collective attention towards a
single source of communication and so to partake of authoritarian mass psychology. In the late 1930s, if anyone
doubted the power of mass media to remake society, they only needed to turn to Germany.” Fred Turner, The
Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2.
210
The British newspapers described Nazi propaganda as “Goebbels’ cacophony and barkerian methods of a
regimented Totalitarian machine.” “Ministry of Information Sponsors British Production Scheme,” Kinematograph
Weekly, January 11, 1940, 4.
211
Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic
Sixties, 3.
90
accomplished through a merger with British visual artists and media-makers. As we shall see, the
MoI sought to promote liberal values through painting, plastic arts, photojournalism, and cinema.
As I have shown in Chapter One, interwar neoliberal’s understanding of human behavior,
as irrational and erratic, constituted much of the period’s educational media. The films I classified
as “neoliberal realist” such as Night Mail (1936) and Unemployment and Money (1940) educated
people on hidden mechanisms of liberal governance. Indeed, interwar neoliberal thinkers and
documentary practitioners hoped that these films would legitimize the system by uncovering its
invisible processes. By watching these films, audiences were expected to engage rationally with
the on-screen discourse rather than imagine or internalize themselves as constitutive elements of
liberal plurality. And yet, with the rise of authoritarian regimes in interwar Europe, these
approaches to visualizing the liberal world-system were reassessed. In Britain, this transition
occurred within the MoI among its eclectic group of civil servants, industry professionals, and
outside collaborators. In a way, the MoI functioned as an early example of a liberal think tank that
combined research and practice. The period between 1939 and 1942 was most consequential to the
success of the MoI. During these three years, Britain endured most political instability that was
particularly evident within the Conservative Party after PM Chamberlain signed the Munich
Agreement. This uncertainty translated was reflected in the MoI’s organization and personnel, a
situation that only improved when Winston Churchill replaced Chamberlain in May 1940. To be
sure, Churchill reformed the MoI by bringing experts who were indisputably liberal and with
strong ties to British industry.
212
Solely on the example of the Films Division, we can see this

212
American scholar of public opinion Cedric Larson in his study of the British Ministry of Information, greeted
Churchill’s appointment as a pivotal moment in the war: “…younger and more liberal men coming to the front in the
Ministry of Information, would bring the Ministry much closer to the press. Brendan Brecken’s close personal
friendship with Prime Minister Winston Churchill should mean a more harmonious relationship between the War
administration, the people, and the world.” Cedric Larson, “The British Ministry of Information,” Public Opinion
Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Fall 1941): 431.
91
change in personnel. Chamberlain’s government appointed Joseph Ball, a fascist sympathizer, to
lead the Films Division while Churchill brought in Jack Beddington, a progressive marketing
executive once part of the Shell Company. Somewhere in-between these two polarities were
classical liberals such as Kenneth Clark who managed the Films Division and the MoI successfully
in these early years of World War Two. While I return to Clark’s work in postwar British television
in the following chapter, his three years at the MoI were crucial in developing a new type of liberal
propaganda that some scholars called “liberal humanist internationalism.”
213

What Fred Turner failed to connect in his brilliant study of wartime U.S. communication
was the role of this liberal internationalism that was first reiterated by the neoliberal thought
collective in the 1930s.
214
Perhaps this is because Turner was specifically focused on the U.S.
context, rather than on the international neoliberal collective. These collaborations and the new
international neoliberalism influenced economists to shift their attention from purely technical
questions over distribution and allocation to more interdisciplinary investigations on human
behavior under liberalism. As such, communication and propaganda became crucial issues within
the neoliberal thought collective because the war was seen as, in essence, a battle between
competing ideas on governance. Consider, for example, the wartime career of Friedrich Hayek. As
Ludwig von Mises’ protégé, Hayek attended Mises’ seminars from 1924 and he took part in the
Walter Lippmann Colloquium (1938). When the War began in 1939, Hayek worked as an
economics professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) established by Graham Wallas

213
“UNESCO, PEN, the US intellectual establishment, and Kawabata were thus all united in the overarching
ideological project of enshrining liberal humanist internationalism as the official culture of the US-based development
era—a fitting prop for the idealization of liberal capitalist democracy as the only conduit to genuine progress and
liberty, as the best means of securing those human rights that the United Nations had just encoded.” Sarah Brouillette,
UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 42.
214
To be fair, Turner recently made the connection between the 1960s counterculture movements and the neoliberal
thought collective such as Friedrich Hayek’s post-1945 writings. Daniel Denvir, host, “Counterculture to Cyberculture
with Fred Turner,” The Dig (podcast), March 26, 2021, accessed February 2, 2022,
https://thedigradio.com/podcast/counterculture-to-cyberculture-with-fred-turner.
92
and other liberal political scientists. While at the LSE, Hayek published his last economic work
The Pure Theory of Capital never to return to the subject of theoretical economics. Rather, when
Britain declared war, Hayek began to focus on an interdisciplinary defense of liberalism through
history, philosophy of knowledge, and psychology.
Merely a week after the MoI was established, Hayek wrote to Lord Macmillan, the first
Minister of Information, to share his views on Nazi propaganda and offer his service. As one of
the leading participants in interwar neoliberal internationalism, Hayek was concerned over the
threat of totalitarianism over the future of liberal governance in Europe and elsewhere. In the letter
to Macmillan, Hayek described his unique position as an ex-Austrian but “in no sense a refugee”
with close ties to German intellectuals:
Having lived as a rather isolated liberal but right in the middle of that German intelligentsia
which is still so largely deluded by Nazi ideas the problem of these differences of view has been a
dominating question during many years of my life and in innumerable discussion I have learnt
where the Nazi convictions are vulnerable.
215

In order to win this war, Hayek contended, the MoI had to focus on first winning the war of
ideas. I have not found any evidence to suggest that Hayek’s proposal for service to the MoI
materialized, but his proposals to the MoI and the BBC as well as his new ideas on how to counter
Nazi propaganda coincided with a general shift in policy within the Ministry.
216
In the first few
paragraphs of his memorandum on propaganda, Hayek asserted that for propaganda “to be
effective, it must be based on the most intimate knowledge of German psychology and

215
Letter from Friedrich Hayek to Lord Macmillan, September 12, 1939, 1, Box 61, Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers,
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.
216
Hayek’s liaison with the Ministry of Information was encouraged and facilitated by Frederick Ogilvie, the BBC’s
Director General who succeeded John Reith in 1938. Although Ogilvie was not a successful manager of such a large
corporation as the BBC, he managed to develop a robust and popular German service during the war. Indeed, Hayek’s
letter to him is mostly concerned with this part of propaganda for German speakers. In addition to correcting numerous
mistranslations in German, Hayek was unusually forceful in his commitment to educating German people on the inner
mechanisms of Nazi Germany. As such, the project he proposed for liberal propaganda in Germany was enlightenment
propaganda but with the purpose of changing German citizens with the help of history and psychology.
93
conditions.”
217
Unlike topical depictions of Germans in the British press as a subjugated mass that
“loves to be ruled,” Hayek rejected these views while arguing that Germans should be educated
on the distortions of history perpetuated by the regime. And in a classical humanist manner, Hayek
asserted that Germans were, like all people, able to understand the benefits of personal and
economic freedom afforded by liberalism.
218
As such, Hayek contributed to the development of
what scholars called “liberal humanist internationalism” or a dominant Cold War ideology
espoused by Britain and the U.S. in their fight against totalitarian regimes. He understood that
reforming classical liberalism was based on winning the ideological battle of ideas. Underpinning
this liberal ideology was a conviction that all human beings, despite their class, race, and gender
would prosper more under liberal governance than in any other system.
219
While Hayek completed
his study on the relationship between human psychology and liberalism in the postwar years with
the publication of The Sensory Order (1952), these wartime years provided Hayek with an
opportunity to form arguments that would be crucial to liberal propaganda at war and in peace.
What follows is a story of how the Ministry of Information transformed liberal propaganda.
Although the Ministry never managed to monopolize information and communication in Britain,
its diverse personnel expand liberal propaganda from pure didacticism to liberal humanism,
making the Ministry into an early example of a liberal think tank. But reforming propaganda rested
on abandoning interwar behavioralist theories. Indeed, human action was no longer the main

217
“Some Notes on Propaganda in Germany,” September 7, 1939, 1, Box 61, Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers, Hoover
Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.
218
“The German People: Psychology of the Wolf Pack,” The Manchester Guardian, June 16, 1943, 6.
However, the readers of leading British newspapers sought to dispel this common perception of Germans in Britain
ever since the war began: “Some of your correspondents still write as though the German people were responsible for
the existence of the Nazi Government. Let me reiterate that they never put it in power… I think we should most strictly
avoid any feelings of superiority towards the members of that struggling democracy that was thus destroyed.” Maurice
Harrison, “Letters to the Editor: The Position of the German People,” September 20, 1939, 12.
219
This crucial Hayekian argument remained relevant in current discourse over race and liberal capitalism. Senior
Fellows at the Hoover Institution such as Thomas Sowell and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are particularly vocal in their defense
of free enterprise and limited government as crucial to uncoupling deep-rooted racial injustices in the United States
and the world.
94
interest of liberal states in their fight against totalitarianism. Rather, they developed a new form of
propaganda that would be based on supporting the complexity and diversity of social life. To those
at the MoI, Nazi Germany often served as a stark example of what happens when people were
reduced to their behavioral functionalism. Indeed, British, and American intellectuals postulated,
that totalitarian propaganda utilized such theories to turn people into masses. In this way, the
British Ministry of Information sought to create a new liberal subject that would internalize the
benefits of liberal governance and help maintain the dominance of the liberal world-system.

The Ministry of Information’s Films Division
The Ministry of Information was officially established on September 4, 1939, a day after
Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. Although the Ministry prepared for a European conflict
since 1935, it failed to devise a tangible propaganda policy due to the reluctance of Chamberlain’s
government to form a centralized body for communication. To make matters worse, the 1938
Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany gave false hope to British politicians that Hitler’s
territorial pretensions in Europe were settled with the annexation of several Czechoslovak
provinces. Although applauded across Europe as a gesture of peace and prudent statesmanship,
Chamberlain’s appeasement with Nazi Germany divided the British Conservative Party and
consolidated a strong anti-Nazi opposition led by Winston Churchill and Duff Cooper. In such a
divisive political environment, Chamberlain’s government and, indeed, the Ministry of
Information were confronted with a difficult task. On the one hand, the MoI had to strengthen and
unify its propaganda policy to deter Nazi propaganda while, on the other hand, the MoI needed to
persuade the press and the House of Commons that its centralization was no threat to the freedom
of expression guaranteed under Britain’s liberal constitution. Despite these efforts, and merely a
week after the MoI was established, the National Union of Journalists expressed concern over the
95
suppression of news which, British journalists argued, led to more gossip and misinformation
resulting in confusion amidst the British public.
220
These concerns were also echoed throughout
the House of Commons where leaders of the opposition forcefully criticized the MoI’s censorial
overreach and their inconsistent approach to information. Perhaps most famously in these first
months of the war, Arthur Greenwood, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition led by Clement Attlee,
mockingly referred to the Ministry as the “Mystery of Information.”
221
Contributing to this
instability was, Greenwood argued, the predominance of civil servants at the MoI who had little
experience in mass media. Such a central governmental body, Greenwood and British journalists
argued, should be led by professionals from the news, film, and radio industries.
222

Undoubtedly, the Ministry was in a difficult position at the start of the war. This early
wartime conundrum over propaganda was especially evident on the example of the Ministry’s
Films Division. Two months after the Division’s inception, the British Foreign Office (FO) took a
staggeringly critical stance towards the Division’s lack of concrete accomplishments. Indeed, FO’s
Head of the News Department Charles Peake reminded the Films Division that Nazi Germany’s
propaganda department aggressively exploited its high-quality feature film productions and
newsreels that gained considerable influence across Europe: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say
that at the present moment German film propaganda on the continent and in the Far East is
unchallenged; and every passing day that leaves them in this unchallenged position makes it more
difficult to dislodge it.”
223
Archival evidence of the MoI’s early days seems to support British
journalists’ criticism of civil servants in charge of wartime propaganda; the archival documents

220
Anon., “Journalists and Ministry of Information,” Western Daily Press, 12 Sept. 1939, 5.
221
Anon., “Mr Greenwood Attacks the Ministry of Information,” Aberdeen Journal, October 12, 1939, 6.
222
Anon., “Huge Staff of Ministry of Information,” Western Daily Press, 27 Sept. 1939, 4.
223
Memorandum written by Charles Drake, 1939, p. 5, INF 1/196, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
96
suggest, perhaps most shockingly, that those leading the MoI department often misunderstood
mass media.
When the war began in September 1939, cinema-going in Britain reached an all-time high
with weekly ticket sales at around 19 million, only to be broken by the end of the war when over
30 million tickets were sold on a weekly basis.
224
Despite such large attendance, civil servants
leading the Films Division in its earliest days like Joseph Ball, were astonishingly clueless over
the function and properties of this popular medium.
225
To be sure, nothing supported the arguments
for professional media leadership than the shamble at the MoI’s Films Division in Fall 1939. In a
series of a memorandum written by Edward Villiers, the Films Division’s Deputy Director, one
can see how those leading the Division lacked any clear policy towards cinema during wartime.
To make matters worse, Ball misunderstood the basics of film production. This paradoxical
situation can be reconstructed through archival records. To illustrate the extent to which those
leading the Division misunderstood the medium, it is necessary to revisit the correspondence
between Villiers and Ball in the first few months of the war. The first memorandum was penned
in September where in an almost frustrated tone, Villiers concluded that the British film industry
was “dead.” The only way out, it seemed, was to foster a close relationship with American
distributors and hope that they would be open to collaborating with the Ministry. While the
subsequent meetings among the Films Division were not deposited in the archive, Villiars’
memorandum from October suggests that the Division’s leadership was ignorant of basic
filmmaking.
226
In his letters, Villiers explained to Ball the most basic properties of the medium;

224
Richard Farmer, Cinemas and Cinemagoing in Wartime Britain, 1939-45 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2016), 11.
225
This reminds one of a similar moment in history when the proliferation of television broadcasting in Europe left
most political figures and bureaucrats puzzled over the medium’s function. The situation was particularly evident in
Eastern Europe on its tightly controlled state broadcasting. As Anikó Imre argued, Eastern European politicians and
bureaucrats failed to understand television which, in turn, allowed broadcasters to create media practices that often
managed to bypass control. Anikó Imre, TV Socialism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
226
Ball was also notorious for destroying his personal records.
97
Villiers described different types of films in existence, from feature-length films, documentaries,
and newsreels. He continued to describe their particular function and utility to film propaganda
but failed to suggest a way forward apart from concluding that film production was, indeed,
expensive.
The striking thing about the MoI’s early days was how much the Chamberlain’s
government was receptive to the criticism voiced in the House of Commons and the press. Already
by January 1940, Lord Macmillan, the first Minister of Information, was replaced by John Reith,
a well-known Director General of the BBC who helped establish the Corporation in 1927. Reith’s
appointment as well as his commitment to “truth” and objectivity, the Chamberlain government’s
officials hoped would help appease critics that argued for the employment of media professionals
at the MoI. Yet, Reith’s inflexible and, by now, old-fashioned approach to broadcasting was out
of touch. Contrary to new theories on democratic liberalism, Reith maintained the conviction that
modern communication should give people what they need rather than what they, perhaps, wanted.
Moreover, Reith’s uneasy relationship with Churchill made his stay at the Ministry unlikely once
Churchill took the premiership from Chamberlain in May 1940. At this time, Reith was replaced
by Duff Cooper.
Individual MoI departments were also affected by frequent changes in leadership. In
December 1939, Joseph Ball resigned from the Films Division and the position was quickly offered
to Kenneth Clark, the interwar director of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.
227
Like Reith,
Clark was a well-known liberal with an established record of leading a cultural institution of
immense national importance.
228
Although to his own recollection, Clark did not fully understand

227
Anon., “New Films Chief for Ministry of Information,” Dundee Courier, December 20, 1939, 4.
228
The Documentary News Letter welcomed Clark’s appointment for his role in both the Empire Marketing Board
and the G.P.O. Unit: “…has an excellent background of experience in Public Relations. There is every hope that he
will take immediate steps to end the inertia which has till now more or less immobilized the personnel of (among other

98
why he was put into the role because he personally knew so little about cinema, there is no archival
evidence to suggest why Kenneth Clark was hired for this post.
229
But unlike Reith, Clark was
fairly young and flexible in his approach to liberal propaganda. Indeed, I see the decision to hire
someone who was well-versed in visual arts to lead the Films Division and not a Conservative
political figure such as Ball, as yet another example of the Ministry’s desire to expand the meaning
and function of visual propaganda. Indeed, if the Ministry solely wanted to appoint someone
directly from the film industry, well-versed in modern filmmaking trends, the MoI could have
hired Alexander Korda, the founder of London Films Productions, who was close to the
Conservative Party and Churchill.
230
But the point of Clark’s appointment was to transcend the
filmmaking business and to rethink, more broadly, how visual propaganda could be reformed from
its mass media form to one better suited to liberal democracies.
231

Despite Clark’s inexperience with cinema, he succeeded in re-establishing connections
with the British film industry, especially those in the non-feature business. In the first weeks of his
new position, Clark unified the British newsreel producers who were long ignored by the British
government and the MoI. As I have written elsewhere, the newsreel companies fought throughout

branches of cinema) documentary…We hope that, by now, the responsible persons at the Ministry have realized that
the Documentary Movement as a whole is less interested in petty financial rackets than its assured ability to assist in
the national effort. What is needed from the Ministry is approval, goodwill, cooperation, and initiative—especially
initiative. Sir Kenneth is most likely to supply them.” Anon., “Notes of the Month,” Documentary News Letter,
January 1940, 4.
229
Clark’s biographer Meryle Secrest offered a similar explanation: “When he was suddenly offered a position as
head of the films division in the chaotic Ministry of Information, he accepted at once, even though he knew absolutely
nothing about films and suspected he had been appointed because he was supposed to know about ‘pictures.’” Meryle
Secrest, Kenneth Clark: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 153.
230
Perhaps Korda was considered for the role, but he relocated to California in 1940. According to some, Korda
worked for British intelligence during this time. James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British
Historical Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 43.
231
“If the Film Trade is still wondering why Sir Kenneth Clark was appointed to be director of the Films Division of
the Ministry of Information… it will be futile to ask Sir Kenneth himself. He admits, quite frankly, that he still does
not know. It is, I suspect, a cause for wonderment to this tall, quietly spoken, cultured man of art, that he should
suddenly be uprooted from the colorful warmth of the National Gallery and translated to the cold cloisters and austere
dignity of the Senate House of London University to direct Britain’s film effort.” Anon., “Ministry of Information
Sponsors British Production Scheme,” Kinematograph Weekly, January 11, 1940, 4.
99
the interwar years to be recognized as indispensable producers of public opinion and thus enjoy
full protection as the British press. By setting up weekly screenings of all British newsreels in the
Ministry’s theatre, Clark became the first British official to recognize the seminal importance of
newsreel producers to the British war effort.
232
Before Clark’s directorship of the Films Division,
Ball and his associates failed to recognize the centrality of newsreels during wartime. Indeed,
Edward Villiers and the Films Division dismissed the work of British newsreels and instead relied
on the army footage provided by the War Office that turned out to be too “amateurish to be
shown.”
233
In April 1940, Clark’s leadership of the Films Division was recognized and he was
promoted “to undertake new and greater responsibilities.”
234
Indeed, Clark became head of the
Home Planning Committee to oversee MoI’s policy proposals, and align them across all
departments.
But the appointment of Jack Beddington to head the Films Division in May 1940, a long-
time advertising executive and Shell oil company’s publicity director, truly stabilized the MoI’s
relationship with the British film industry. We should not assume that this change in leadership
discredited Clark’s inclusion of cinema within a broader visual culture at the Films Division;
Beddington was equally receptive to visual arts and their utility in the war effort. Although
Beddington was not an art historian, he had a working relationship with numerous British visual
artists such as Paul Nash, John Piper, and James Gardner when in the 1930s they produced posters
for Shell.
235
Moreover, Beddington’s high regard for the British Documentary Film Movement

232
“So far from complaining about censorship, the news-reel companies welcome the co-operation with the Ministry.”
Anon., “A Pre-view of News Reels, But No Censorship,” The Manchester Guardian, January 24, 1940, 8.
233
Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War, London and New York: Continuum, 2005, 60-61.
234
“Film Trade Advisory Committee to the Ministry of Information,” April 13, 1940, 1, TGA 8812/1/4/274, Papers
of Kenneth Clark, Tate Archive, London, UK.
235
Both Clark and Beddington were praised in the Documentary News Letter, the British Documentary Film
Movement’s official journal, while the MoI’s civil servants were harshly criticized: “It would appear that one of the
troubles in the Films Division of the Ministry of Information is one which has been only too common in other
Government Departments during the War—a deficiency in the quality of certain members of the Civil Service

100
increased their influence within the MoI. Consider, for example, a letter written by Harry Watt to
Beddington in August 1940; Watt was the co-director of the Movement’s most famous film Night
Mail, and a close associate of Grierson. In the 1940 letter, Watt asked Beddington to lobby within
the War Office for better film footage of the military:
I’m afraid I am not very enthusiastic about the War Office film material… It is pretty scrappy
and discursive and lacking the breadth of feeling… There isn’t a really good long shot… and many
of the close-ups are spoilt by people looking at the Camera.
236
[sic]

As a director employed at the G.P.O. Unit now under MoI’s control, Watt urged the Ministry
to employ film directors to accompany War Office’s cameramen. Beddington’s letter to the War
Office represents not only the trust he had in Watt but also the high regard he held for the
documentary directors.
237
In Beddington’s letter to the War Office he even used Grierson’s
interwar classification of non-feature cinema as high (i.e., documentary proper) and low (i.e.,
newsreels and actualities):
It is really essential to have a director in control of a cameraman because however excellent
the cameraman may be, indiscriminate shooting is not enough… Apart from ineffective camera
positioning, people photographed nearly always smirk or are camera conscious so that the material
differs little from that of the ordinary newsreel.
238

By providing this comparison between documentary films and newsreels, Beddington was
reestablishing the artistic and social superiority of documentary cinema first voiced by Grierson in
the “First Principles of Documentary” essay. For Beddington, “documentary proper” as an art form

personnel…The barricades of procedure and precedent must be blown up without delay… The law of libel naturally
prevents us from amplifying further. In the meantime, the entire British Film Industry is waiting and willing to be
mobilised…We hope that by the time this appears in print both Sir Kenneth Clark and J.L. Beddington will have been
freed from the shackles which have been for too long allowed to impede their progress.” “Notes of the Month,”
Documentary News Letter, July 1940, 1-2.
236
Letter from Harry Watt to Jack Beddington, August 3, 1940, 1, INF 1/208, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
Coincidentally, Watt’s postwar memoir was called Don’t Look At The Camera, published in 1974.
237
This is where my reading of archival documents on the Films Division greatly differs from some secondary sources.
238
Letter from Jack Beddington to R.E. Tritton (The War Office), August 5, 1940, 1, INF 1/208, The National
Archives, Kew, UK.
101
and a social instrument differed greatly from newsreel productions not least through its prestige
and high quality.
Here is where my reading of archival documents on the Films Division differs from several
secondary sources that claim Beddington preferred feature films, full-length documentaries, and
newsreel films to the British Documentary Film Movement. Indeed, scholars argued that
Beddington even made efforts to marginalize the Movement’s filmmakers that remained in Britain
during the war. This confusion dates back to Elizabeth Sussex’s 1975 book The Rise and Fall of
British Documentary which is not a work of historiography but an oral history of the Movement.
239

By the time the book was published, wartime records were just becoming declassified, and the
recollections in Sussex’s work should be taken with a grain of salt because official records were
never consulted nor contrasted with the interviews. Surprisingly, and despite the archival records
I uncovered, Harry Watt gave an unfavorable representation of Beddington and his supposed
disregard for the British Documentary Film Movement:
When the newsreels were having their stuff censored at the same time as ours (we were
sitting there with Jack Beddington), they [newsreel producers] saw this shot and they said, “Jesus
Christ, what a shot! Can we have it? Can we have it?” And he [Beddington] gave it away. He gave
it away to the newsreels. He wanted to be in with the newsreels. Oh, he gave great explanations:
the newsreels were very important for propaganda and so on. But this was the climax of my film.
I put it in the film, but it had been seen in all the newsreels, and everybody thought it was a newsreel
shot. It’s been used again and again. It’s one of the great shots of the war.
240

239
“These issues —the subjectivity of all knowledge, time consciousness, openness to experience, intersubjectivity,
and memory, as well as other issues not discussed here—permeate phenomenological writing, and the implications
for oral history are clear. Because any knowledge of a historical subject is limited by human subjectivity, the historian
should search for the perspectives that result from that very subjectivity. A historian who plans the interview and
interprets the data with the goal of constructing the life-world of this place and time might be able to separate fact
from fable, but more importantly he or she might be more likely to identify the meaning in fable. And the historian
should search for and then present the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the past in such a way that leaves the topic or era open for
further discussion and evaluation by future generations.” R. Kenneth Kirby, “Phenomenology and the Problems of
Oral History,” Oral History Review 35, no. 1 (2008): 32.
240
Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John
Grierson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), 122.
102
This passage from Watt’s recollection continues to be reproduced in scholarship on the
British Documentary Movement even though it was very common for newsreel producers and
documentary practitioners to share their filmed material during the war. Indeed, the exceptional
conditions of war and a greater need for information made Allied forces anxious to get a hold of
as much filmed material as they could. Consider, for example, Stuart Legg’s film Churchill’s
Island (1941) which won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary.
241
Although this
Award finally recognized British documentary filmmaking as an integral part of film culture,
Churchill’s Island was compiled almost exclusively from newsreel material in its effort to bring
direct experiences from the Battle of Britain, a decisive moment for the country because it managed
to halt a much-anticipated Nazi invasion. As such, the film was far-removed from the interwar
ideals espoused by Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement that included an
intentional dramatization of reality. Moreover, the film was also made from shots that were already
screened in MoI documentaries such as London Can Take It (G.P.O. Unit, 1940) directed by
Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt. Furthermore, sharing material among the Movement was
famously encouraged by Grierson in his praise of collaboration in filmmaking and against
auteurism:
I am not interested in single films as such… Film cannot of its nature be a purely personal
art… The nature of cinema demands collaboration and collusion with others… and its significance
derives from those who can operate and command purposively within these conditions.
242

241
In fact, the film was the first to win the Award since it was established by the Academy in 1942. “People over here
will be especially gratified to learn that John Grierson himself presented the awards. In the short documentary class,
the award went to Churchill's Island, produced in Canada by Stuart Legg and incidentally one of the films debarred
from renter's quota by the Board of Trade. These two examples once more prove the success and influence of the
British documentary movement and must be a special source of gratification to Grierson himself as the founder,
inspirer and still the chief exponent of the documentary school of film making.” “Notes of the Month: Merit Rewarded,”
Documentary News Letter, March 1942, 34.
242
John Grierson’s quote from Keith Beattie, Humphrey Jennings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010),
10.
103
But such generosity was reserved solely for those working within Grierson’s network. As Jill
Craigie—one of the few female filmmakers in wartime Britain—remembered: “women didn’t get
help from any of these people; except from ones that made passes.”
243

Even in the 1990s, Watt’s claims to authorship were repeated in books such as Britain Can
Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War.
244
But despite the book’s extensive archival
research, it reproduced Watt’s memory verbatim without interrogating it through historical
documents.
245
Even recently, Watt’s critique of Beddington and the MoI continues to be
reproduced so as to mark a tension between civil service and the creatives working under
exceptional wartime conditions.
246
And although my reading of the Films Division vis-à-vis the
British Documentary Film Movement might be charged as relying too much on official narratives
produced by the British government, it is possible to make the case that the G.P.O. Film Unit,
which was under the MoI’s control since the earliest days of the war, became particularly relevant
under Beddington; the archival records seem to suggest and illustrate his support of Grierson’s
associates in the Film Unit.
247
But this is not to say that the Griersonians were in any way dominant
within the MoI and in its film policy. Indeed, I argue that the Movement’s interwar documentary

243
The British Entertainment History Project, Jill Craigie Interview, Side 2, April 27, 1995, 4’35’’.
https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/jill-craigie
244
Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War (London: I.B.
Tauris, 1994), 8.
245
Aldgate and Richards used Watt’s recollection to argue, once again, that Beddington preferred feature-length
documentaries such as Target for Tonight (directed by Harry Watt) and newsreels. This contributed to the
marginalization of the British Documentary Film Movement within the Films Division even though they produced a
large number of films for the MoI. But although they used documents deposited at the National Archives throughout
their book, they failed to notice documents that point to Beddington’s favorable treatment of Watt such as evident, for
example, in the August 1940 correspondence with the War Office. Letter from Jack Beddington to R.E. Tritton (The
War Office), August 5, 1940, INF 1/208, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
246
Watt’s remarks were here not directly transcribed from Sussex’s oral history, but from Aldgate and Richards’ 1994
book. Keith Beattie, Humphrey Jennings, 47.
247
“Although [Paul] Swann’s work [The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946] has contributed towards
a better understanding of the documentary film movement, it suffers from a belief that only primary source material—
usually held at the Public Records Office—constitutes the basis for an adequate understanding of a historical
phenomenon. The bulk of the evidence that Swann investigated consisted of documents that were written by civil
servants and politicians. These documents reflected the points of view of those who wrote them: they were ideological
constructions, not objective records.” Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film
Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 13.
104
films were not sufficient for the MoI and in its transformation of new liberal propaganda. They
were, like many other forms of films such as newsreels and feature films, involved in redefining
what it meant to be a liberal subject and how wartime propaganda could best suit this goal.
Apart from the Films Division’s close relationship with the British Documentary Film
Movement, Beddington maintained a fruitful relationship with commercial British film producers
such as Ealing Studios. Alongside Korda’s London Films, Ealing was one of the first British
studios to produce wartime propaganda before the war even started. In July 1939, the studio
distributed a short family comedy entitled Happy Family that showed how an upper-middle class
family’s comfortable life was disrupted by the war. Although at first cynical towards European
geopolitics, when the war broke out in Britain, the family showed admirable determination to help
the war effort by mobilizing its members. However, the MoI’s relationship with Ealing would only
strengthen under Beddington, especially through his friendship with Michael Balcon, Ealing’s
head. In 1938, Balcon—a British film producer with extensive experience in Hollywood cinema—
argued that to compete with American films, British films will “become international by being
national.”
248
Balcon would echo this sentiment during his 1943 lecture in Brighton. To be sure, the
talk underlined the importance of John Grierson and his documentary tradition in creating a
particular form of realism that wartime productions were able to mimic and elevate even in their
feature films. But this lecture also marks the moment when documentary practitioners such as
Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti moved to Ealing in 1942 from the G.P.O. Film Unit and Crown
Film Unit to make well-known wartime films such as Nine Men (1943, Harry Watt) and Went the
Day Well? (1942, Alberto Cavalcanti).
249
Indeed, those leading the Films Division continued to

248
Geoff Brown, “A Knight and His Castle,” in Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema, Geoff Brown and
Laurence Kardish (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 27.
249
Balcon would remain head of Ealing studios until 1955 and would see the studio grow to be one of the most
successful in British history. He was charged by members of the Movement for commercializing their documentary

105
support documentary films and would even pass the opportunity to invite Charlie Chaplin to
produce a film for the MoI.
250

Perhaps the greatest irony of Beddington’s support of the Griersonian documentary was
how much this media form changed during the war. Apart from documentary practitioners’
implementation of newsreel footage provided by the War Office, which violated Grierson’s
“principles” of documentary proper, they were also producing films more concerned with the
collective in British life.
251
But most importantly, the documentary form had abandoned its prior
fascination with British industry and liberal processes and diverted towards unifying Britain and
the world in its fight against Nazism. Even those that began their filmmaking careers within the
Movement such as Humphrey Jennings reformed documentary films by visualizing the MoI’s
international humanism. What happened to the Movement and why did it abandon its interwar
commitment to “higher forms” of documentary cinema which precluded voice-over narration and
newsreel footage? Certainly, the circumstances of wartime film production and the general
economy necessitated more collaboration. As I have argued, wartime filmmaking depended on a
large-scale exchange of film material across the MoI and the British film industry. Because of the
conflict, documentary practitioners felt an urgency to depict battles usually filmed by the War
Office and international sources. Despite Beddington’s regard for Grierson’s circle, the MoI’s film
policy never abandoned its insistence on diverse filmmaking and its entanglement with British
visual culture. Kenneth Clark’s position within the MoI strengthened this turn to visual arts.

filmmaking, and, in a way, contributing to its demise after the war; Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British
Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson.
250
“On reflection, I think a request by the Minister would be a mistake and might eventually be embarrassing to both
sides. Chaplin is an eccentric and works under conditions which would be impossible in any commercial studio in
peace time, and would certainly be impossible in this country in wartime.” Letter from Sidney Bernstein to Jack
Beddington, May 30, 1941, INF 1/583, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
251
One could argue that Grierson transgressed his interwar principles of filmmaking first by establishing the docu-
series project The World in Action which was based on and inspired by the wildly successful American docu-series
The March of Time.
106

Planning a New Vision for Britain
By 1943, the MoI films greatly improved in quality, and the Division was busy producing
and sponsoring around a hundred films per year. As such, it had to ask the Minister of Information
to expand the Films Division’s personnel several times during the war. Even though Beddington
and the filmmakers employed by the government made, at times, exceptional films, the work of
the Films Division was largely informed by the MoI’s Home Planning Committee. Established in
June 1940, the Planning Committee’s main task was to unify all departments and create a uniform
policy that would be in alignment with the government’s other ministries.
252
In part provoked by
the criticism of the British press, the MoI was eager to represent itself as a uniform and well-
functioning body. As such, the Committee represented a sort of an umbrella organization for the
MoI that besides creating policy was responsible for facilitating relationships within the Ministry,
the British press, and the general public. A central figure in the appeasement with the British press
was, once again, Kenneth Clark who was promoted to chair the Committee in late-Spring 1940.
Archival evidence of the meetings illustrates Clark’s dominant position within this body, and
indeed, within the MoI’s propaganda policy. Clark maintained contacts with the War Office and
the Prime Minister as well as editors of leading British newspapers and magazines. Indeed, during
a meeting on June 24, 1940, Clark suggested regular meetings with editors of leading British
newspapers so that the MoI could offer soft guidance.
253
Although this proposal was deferred until

252
The archival documents described the Home Planning Committee as “a Co-ordinating Committee for all aspects
of publicity at home so that: 1. the work of all the Divisions concerned in the Ministry is in alignment, 2. the proposals
for publicity put forward by other ministries are considered in all relevant aspects and are in alignment, 3. the Policy
Committee of the Ministry is presented with proposals that have been properly initiated and planned, 4. the decision
of the Policy Committee are quickly translated into effective and concerted action.” Home Planning Committee, June
1940, INF 1/249, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
253
Meeting Notes from June 24, 1940, 1, INF 1/249, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
107
further notice on June 28, the MoI instituted weekly 150-word press releases to make sure they
maintain regular communication with the British press.
254

Nothing illustrates better the change in MoI’s understanding of propaganda as their
relationship to the Picture Post magazine. This British equivalent to the Life magazine was
established in 1938 by Edward Hulton, a British media mogul who inherited and expanded his
family’s modest newspaper empire. In months leading up to the war, Hulton was highly critical of
the Chamberlain government for its reluctance to establish a propaganda ministry. Indeed, in July
1939, Hulton penned a plea published in the Picture Post magazine for the British government to
adopt a more forceful anti-Nazi stance.
255
In part, according to Hulton, the government’s
ambivalence resulted in a lack of unequivocal communication between the press and the British
government. However, Hulton disputed common liberal arguments against the Ministry and its
centralization of power on grounds that large democracies require extensive media institutions to
successfully communicate their governments’ positions:
The lack of imagination of Ministries is well illustrated by their long failure to set up a
Ministry of Propaganda. Some people still imagine that a Propaganda Ministry is incompatible
with democracy. But it does not mean that other people’s views would be suppressed. It means
that a government states its case. Some say that anything labelled propaganda would be
discontinued. This is nonsense. The Propaganda Ministry can stick to the truth. We have no reason
to be afraid of that. What Propaganda really means is advocacy.
256

Hulton adopted Walter Lippmann’s support of journalism in large democratic societies.
Hulton argued that journalists’ work should go hand-in-hand with the government’s geopolitical
aims; journalists and liberal governments should educate people on world events and make a clear

254
Meeting Notes from June 28, 1940, 3, INF 1/249, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
255
It is important to clarify why the Picture Post was unsympathetic to the 1938 appeasement. The magazine’s
establishing editor was Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian émigré and documentary filmmaker, who fled the Nazi regime and
wrote a best-selling book I Was Hitler’s Prisoner in 1935. Lorant was replaced by Tom Hopkinson in July 1940 when
Lorant abruptly left Britain having been denied citizenship and fearing a German invasion of Britain at the height of
the Blitz.
256
Edward Hulton, “Co-operate with the Press!” Picture Post, July 1, 1939, 60.
108
claim about why certain policies need to be enacted. But we could also view Hulton’s presciently
critical stance in 1939 as a signal for future wartime collaboration between Picture Post and the
MoI. And yet before a substantial change in the MoI’s leadership, the Ministry failed to forge a
close collaboration with the British press along the lines of Hulton’s suggestion. It would take
months before the MoI improved its relationship with the British press. The first significant step
in this improvement was Clark’s collaboration with Hulton on a special issue in the Picture Post
on the theme “What Britain Means.”
257

The idea behind the issue was fairly simple—compare the benefits of living in Britain by
comparing its history, culture, and way of life to people in totalitarian regimes such as Nazi
Germany. However, an early iteration of this idea motivated the docu-drama film The Lion Has
Wings (1939). Produced by Alexander Korda and his London Films Productions, the film was
overwhelmingly supportive of the British government and the Conservative Party. Indeed, even
the film companies’ logo of Big Ben, a well-known symbol of the House of Commons, represents
Korda’s close relationship to the Conservative Party. However, the film was endorsed although
not sponsored by the MoI.
258
Against the background of the new world conflict, the film
amalgamated educational cinema, historical drama, and docu-drama to show the necessity of
Britain’s conflict with Nazi Germany. The narrator opens the film by exclaiming “This is Britain
where we believe in freedom,” a powerful opening line that was followed by serene panoramic
shots of the British countryside, its old towns, and Medieval abbeys.
For over 800 years we have kept our shores safe from invaders. And for 800 years we have
opposed every dictator who arose and tried to enslave Europe. For this is Britain where we believe

257
Hulton greeted Winston Churchill’s government and anticipated a better organization of all ministries not least the
MoI. “This is not the time to recapitulate the story of the failure to institute a Ministry of Propaganda long before the
war, and the story of the dismal failure of the Ministry of Information in its early days. To-day we have the benefit of
the leadership of Mr. Winston Churchill, and Mr. Duff Cooper is at the Ministry of Information. Newspaper men only
ask of them that they will let them know what their policy is in clear terms. Editors are only too willing to co-operate.”
Edward Hulton, “Watch the Home Front,” Picture Post, October 29, 1940, 33.
258
Richard Farmer, “‘The Dominions Will Love It’: The Lion Has Wings (1939) and British Film Propaganda in
Wartime Australia,” Studies in Australasian Cinema 7:1 (2013): 38.
109
in freedom. We also believe in peace; peace to develop our inheritance. This was the Britain we
inherited from the Industrial Revolution.

Undoubtedly, connecting Britishness to its capitalist economy was a crucial part of
establishing the logic of economic freedom and the need to preserve peace in Britain. But almost
self-consciously after this celebration of British capitalism, the film tries to appease the working
class from revolting against the capitalist systems. By displaying shots of improved living and
working conditions, the film sought to de-couple the relationship between economic progress and
the human destitution. Indeed, the film argues that government-sponsored projects developed
Britain into a country “in which everyone of us might have a home of which he was proud. A
gigantic task we undertook to rehouse the urban population in well-built, well lighted, well-
ventilated flats to replace the tumbledown slums of the past. New settlements of nice houses with
gardens pleasant to look at, delightful to live in, easy to work.” But where the film failed to make
a larger case for the working classes was the film’s predominant focus on upper class domesticity.
Likewise, the short films produced by the MoI throughout 1940 were equally focused on upper
and middle-class Britons with little regard for the ordinary lives of British workers.
259
As expected,
the social groups represented on the screen in the MoI’s 1940 shorts favorably received these early
propaganda films while those that weren’t felt unrepresented and tended to dismiss these films as
propaganda.
The Lion Has Wings was extensively promoted during the first months of the war in 1939,
and even the Royal Family went to a public screening for the first time since the 1936 Coronation
of King George VI.
260
In part, perhaps, they also came to see themselves performing the 1939
British dance craze “the Chestnut Tree” in the film. But despite the reported delight and giggles

259
Popular MoI shorts made in 1940 such as Goofer Trouble and Miss Grant Goes to the Door.
260
King George VI asked for a Disney cartoon to be shown before the feature for his young children. Richard Farmer,
“‘The Dominions Will Love It’: The Lion Has Wings (1939) and British Film Propaganda in Wartime Australia,” 38.
110
from audience over this intimate portrayal of the British Royal family, the working-class reactions
to the film were far less jovial. According to a Mass Observation report, the British workers widely
disapproved of the film:
People, especially the working classes, conservatively resented the “lack of story”, felt more
strongly it was propaganda. Some were content to dismiss the film with the one word:
“propaganda”; others were more explicit: “I think it un-British to shove propaganda down your
throat like that; they should regard us as more intelligent than that.” (Man, 20, worker)
261

Contrary to its criticism of the MoI and British propaganda, the British press overwhelmingly
approved of the film. As the MO report argued, this represented a staggering misunderstanding
between the working classes and the elites in control of wartime propaganda and media.
262
Indeed,
the film failed to depict and connect Britishness across society; the film seemed to only deepen
class divisions at a time when unity was direly needed. This would prove to be the greatest hurdle
in conceiving a unified conception of liberal internationalism that depended on the idea of human
universality. If the working classes were misrepresented or even worse, rattled by British
propaganda films, they would weaken the British government at a time of great political instability.
To be sure, the British working class was the most powerful political force in the country’s interwar
years. The rise of universal suffrage and the Great Depression made liberal governments especially
sensitive to the plight of workers. Indeed, classical liberal economic theory, and what is
colloquially known as laissez-faire, was reformed through John Maynard Keynes’ 1936 General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes’ book revolutionized economic thought by
arguing that free markets were unable to provide adequate employment and welfare. Instead, the
government’s spending had a central role to play in times of economic contraction such as the
Great Depression.

261
Tom Harrison, “Public Reaction,” Documentary News Letter, February 1940, 5.
262
In part, the report was reproduced in the Documentary News Letter to signal the need for more careful audience
research in British film industry and the MoI.
111
Uniting all Britons, despite their class affiliation, was the key to adjusting early wartime
propaganda to a more humanist vision of Britain; it meant transitioning from a deeply classist
understanding of British society, as represented by films such as Happy Family (Ealing Studios,
1939), to an image of Britain where class divisions become meaningless in the collective struggle
against Nazism. Indeed, these were the recommendations repeated by the Mass Observation
Project in pamphlets and book publications such as the 1940 monograph War Begins at Home.
263

And while The Lion Has Wings strongly depicted what it meant to be British through its contrasting
montage with imagined life under the Nazi regime, the MoI’s shift in propaganda policy truly
began with sponsored magazine publications such as Picture Post.

Fig. 9: Picture Post issue commissioned by the MoI

263
The MO article did, however, end on a positive note suggesting that the audiences mostly enjoyed “the humour of
everyday life” in The Lion Has Wings (1939). Tom Harrison, “Public Reaction,” 5.
112
In June 1940, Hulton was commissioned to produce this special issue on life under British
liberalism; he was paid 1500 pounds, a hefty sum that surpassed the Films Division Director’s
annual salary of 1250 pounds.
264
Although the Picture Post issue contracted by the MoI followed
some of the general themes developed in The Lion Has Wings, it also departed from the film’s
classist depiction of British domestic life. (Fig. 9) Indeed, the magazine sought to dispel class
division present in Britain by depicting British children, farmers, workers, and the military in a
common fight for the future of liberalism.
265
The issue begins by promising to represent the
experience of all Britons by distancing the issue’s aims from those of the politicians:
Politicians have told us what they are fighting for. To many their aims sound unreal and
far-away. Here, in the simplest possible terms, are the things the British people—you and I and
the man next door—are fighting for. Here, too, are the things we are fighting against.
266

But the issue further underscored domesticity by placing the war effort in people’s most
intimate space—their homes. Indeed, the issue’s introduction illustrated this argument by
exclaiming that the fight against Nazi Germany was relevant to preserving British culture:
This is a war for everything that we can see from our own window… We are fighting for
the very soil and stuff of Britain. Intact for a thousand years, it is not to be tampered with now.
267

These words resembled the opening narration in The Lion Has Wings, especially through the
issue’s photographs of the British countryside and its historical towns. This was, of course,
widespread use of British history and culture to depict an almost organic and benevolent life in
Britain. But where the film and the Picture Post issue differed was in their desire to transgress
class division in British society. Indeed, many of the photographs accompanying the main text

264
For more information on salaries of those working at the Films Division see INF 1/30, The National Archives,
Kew, UK.
265
“What We Are Fighting For,” Picture Post, July 13, 1940.
266
Ibid., 9.
267
Ibid., 9.
113
specifically focused on those strata of society that were marginalized and unrepresented in British
visual culture:
…each class in this country has something particular to fight for now—apart from the land
and the way of life which are common to us all. Each class severally has much to lose. The workers
of Britain have much to lose. The navy and the farm labourer, the craftsman and the engineer—
their life is not perfect now… In a free Britain their future is in their own hands.
268

To further prove the point, the issue compared the conditions of British workers and those in Nazi
Germany by citing its unfavorable economic situation and its disregard for the workers’ well-being.
Perhaps most powerfully, the issue provided a photograph of a German worker, as a symbol of all
German workers, punished and imprisoned “for the slightest offence.”
269
(Fig. 10)

Fig. 10: German workers (Picture Post)
The issue was also sensitive to underlining the leisure afforded to the workers of Britain.
Indeed, it depicted various scenes from British public life and the manifold ways in which Britons
spend their free time. Attending sporting events, frolicking in British parks, fishing, or having a
glass of beer with friends at a pub were all signifiers of the freedom afforded to those that lived in
liberal societies.
270
(Fig. 11) Invoking these differences in workers’ conditions makes the bulk of
the argument on why the workers and ordinary Britons need to unite and fight against Nazi

268
Ibid., 10-11.
269
Ibid., 20.
270
Ibid., 13.
114
Germany. Viewed in this way, the Picture Post issue sought to explain to the workers why it was
necessary to endure challenging working and living conditions during wartime. If they did not, if
Britain ended up invaded and defeated by Nazi Germany, all the rights that the workers fought for
in interwar Britain would be terminated under this totalitarian regime. Indeed, the photographs of
British life such as those depicting leisure were contrasted with scenes from Nazi concentration
camps.
271
(Fig. 12)

Fig. 11: Inside a British pub (Picture Post)

271
Ibid., 35.
115

Fig. 12: German concentration camp (Picture Post)
The Ministry was pleased with the Picture Post issue, and right around the time the issue
came out, the MoI commissioned a short documentary on the British working class. What turned
out to be called Welfare of the Workers (1941) was the government’s plea for working-class
understanding and acceptance of their temporarily suspended rights for the benefit of winning the
war. The film was directed by Humphrey Jennings who began his career as somewhat of an outlier
to the British Documentary Film Movement despite spending the 1930s working alongside
Grierson and his inner circle. What made Jennings different from the Griersonians was his hardline
socialism and his interest in the British working class. Indeed, Jennings was one of the founders
of the Mass Observation Project which sought to create a psychological and social record of Britain
across its class division. Previously, Jennings also directed Spare Time (1939), a film made for the
G.P.O. Unit that depicted workers from three large British industries (steel, cotton, and coal)
enjoying their leisure time. And although critics charged the Mass Observation Project as a group
of upper-middle class intellectuals who only viewed the workers as a sort of curiosity without a
genuine desire to better their lives, Jennings maintained a life-long interest in depicting ordinary
116
Britons. Whether this was a sign of the Mass Observation’s voyeurism, or Jennings’ socialism is
less relevant to my argument. What matters was that Jennings produced the films at a moment
when the working classes needed to be persuaded to wholeheartedly support the war effort despite
their deteriorating living circumstances exacerbated by the war’s total economy. But, most
importantly, it represented an understanding within the Ministry that to expand liberal propaganda
aimed at safe-guarding liberalism, they had to expand its influence across all levels of society.
272

And yet the Picture Post issue should be analyzed in a broader light and in relation to its
other publications during that faithful summer when, for many, the Nazi invasion of Britain
seemed imminent. For example, on June 28, Picture Post published an extensive special issue on
the United States. This photojournalistic portrait of the U.S. ran across 172 pages, a whooping
number given that an ordinary Picture Post issue would run rarely beyond 40 pages. Undoubtedly,
the issue was paid for by the U.S. government, although, as in the case of the MoI issue, this
sponsorship was never made known to the magazine’s readers. However, even by looking at the
front cover of this special issue, the readers were given an idea about a future Anglo-American
coalition in preserving the liberal world-system. A nighttime shot of the Statue of Liberty and a
title that reads “A guiding light in a dark world,” symbolizes the Allies’ international fight for a
liberal, humane world.
273
(Fig. 13) Indeed, for the magazine’s editor Stefan Lorant, the U.S. quite
literally provided refuge from Nazism in July 1940 when he abruptly left Britain fearing that the
Nazi invasion was imminent. Such depictions of the U.S. and Britain constituted a clear shift in
wartime propaganda towards international liberalism.

272
The class divide would only get worse with the Blitz or during German bombing raids over Britain from September
7, 1940, to May 11, 1941. The working classes were disproportionately more affected by the bombings, especially in
Britain where the East End suffered extensive damage. The MoI was aware of these issues, and Kenneth Clark wrote
to his wife Jane that he was “trying to think of ways of preventing class bitterness which is the natural reflex of the
East End being bombed.” James Stourton, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation (London: William Collins, 2016),
Ebook, 447.
273
Picture Post special issue on the United States. “The United States,” Picture Post, June 28, 1940.

117

Fig. 13: “The Statue of Liberty: A Guiding Light in a Dark World”
The reception of these two special issues on liberal democracies, depicted as bastions of
the free world, was mostly favorable. The U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy thanked
the Picture Post for the accurate portrayal of the United States while insisting that “real
understanding must be based on knowledge.”
274
A British reader from London echoed Kennedy’s
words in stating how glad he was that the magazine showed a true picture of American life unlike
the one presented by Hollywood studios.
275
As for the other issue on Britain, the plight of all
workers resonated with the Picture Post readers such Alastair Crockett from Giffnock, a working
class town near Glasgow, as he specifically criticized the Nazi regime as one that “simply exploited
[the workers] for the upkeep and feeding of these huge beasts—the Nazi Leaders who make sure
that they live on the fat of the land.”
276
Crockett ended his letter with a plea for similar pictorial

274
Anon., “What Our Readers Say,” Letter from Joseph Kennedy, Picture Post, July 13, 1940, 5.
275
Anon., “What Our Readers Say,” Letter from Clement Hargreaves, Picture Post, July 13, 1940, 5.
276
Anon., “What Our Readers Say,” Letter from Alaistar C. Crockatt (Giffnock), Picture Post, July 27, 1940, 3.
118
disillusionment of “life under Hitler.” Another reader fully understood the difference between
liberal and totalitarian governance that the MoI hoped to communicate:
How clearly and comprehensively do these living pictures and articles set forth the rule
and methods of Democracy and Dictatorship. It is self-will and goodwill, moral law and brute law,
love and fear, joy and terror, honour and humiliation, freedom and slavery, peace and war, life and
death, blessing and curse. May God grant us the victory, freedom, honour and joy of British
Democracy.
277

But among an overwhelming number of readers that applauded the MoI’s issue, there were some
that were insulted by the simplicity of propaganda. For example, a reader from London insinuated
the inability of British propaganda to overcome the work done by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda:
Has Picture Post become intimidated by Hitler and joined his Fifth Column? What a gift a
very large part of last week’s issue is for Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda. Whilst the pictures of life
under Nazi rule show people who are active and alert…those of life under a democracy give the
impression that Britain is a land of natural beauty inhabited by a people who are nothing but a
crowd of lazy loafers. If I took my idea of British democracy from Picture Post and did not know
that there is another… I should have extreme doubts as to whether it is worth defending.
278

Nevertheless, Picture Post continued to promote what historian Claire Gorrarra described
as “the value of intercultural understanding and tolerance.”
279
Throughout the war, the magazine
carried stories that represented the war against Nazi Germany and other Axis powers as a fight for
the well-being of all humanity. This was a common trope across liberal democracies; a practice
that was particularly evident in wartime photojournalism. Consider the work of international
photographers that established the Magnum photo agency in the early post-World War Two years.
These renowned war photographers such as Robert Capa, David Seymour, and Henri Cartier-
Bresson began their careers in the interwar period by photographing political crises such as the
Spanish Civil War. However, upon being recruited by liberal regimes to document the war effort,

277
Anon., “What Our Readers Say,” Letter from Phil Wilson (Glasgow), Picture Post, July 27, 1940, 3.
278
Anon., “What Our Readers Say,” Letter from Christopher T. Candler (Kingston-on-Thames), Picture Post, July 27,
1940, 3.
279
Claire Gorrarra, “What the Liberator Saw: British War Photography, Picture Post and the Normandy Campaign,”
Journal of War & Culture Studies 9, no.4 (2016): 304.
119
their staunch interwar socialism, as historian Nadya Bair argued, meshed into a depoliticized
photographic form based on communicating international humanism.
280
Indeed, wartime
photojournalism in the U.S. and elsewhere helped established a particular humanist ideology well
suited to Western countries’ Cold War policy and their fight against totalitarianism represented by
the Soviet Union. Although both Bair and Gorrarra suggest that international liberalism became
the central ideology of Western states in the Cold War period, I argue that its origin can be situated
within the wartime work of the MoI. Indeed, figures like Capa such as Humphrey Jennings and
Jill Craigie, both outliers to the British Documentary Film Movement and staunch socialists,
helped promote a new form of liberal propaganda in their documentary films. As such, it is
necessary to examine how the nascent idea of liberal propaganda under the theme “What Britain
Means” developed to include a form of poetic documentary cinema that represented liberal society
as a harmonious collection of diverse individuals.

280
Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Oakland, CA: University of
California Press, 2020).
120
The Outliers: Humphrey Jennings, Jill Craigie, and Friedrich Hayek
At the height of the Blitz in November 1940, Kenneth Clark spoke on the subject of wartime
film propaganda at the Royal Institution. As a place that historically facilitated the popularization
of science, the Royal Institution was a peculiar place for Clark’s lecture on cinema. Indeed, upper-
class male attendance was consistently lower in cinemas than that of the working classes or women.
These trends were guided, no doubt, by their disdainful view of modern mass media. Yet, Clark’s
position within the echelons of British high society rendered an air of authority even over
“pedestrian” subjects such as film. Reflecting on the Institution’s commitment to science and “the
scientific method,” Clark argued that film propaganda, as a novel phenomenon in communication,
was not adequately studied by social scientists. As he remarked, the Ministry’s work in cinema
was experimental but resulted in great discoveries. Surprisingly, Clark exclaimed, the Ministry
found that feature films were not at all suited to wartime propaganda that depended on uplifting
democratic societies in times of great trepidation. Feature films, especially those produced in
Hollywood, were not conducive to liberal propaganda. As he explained, Hollywood films tended
to create heightened emotions that could very easily turn into despair and defeatism. Films such
as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Grapes of Wrath, Clark argued, “showed the individual
utterly and exactly crushed by great forces. In these cases, corruption, and economic conditions
over which he could have no control.”
281
Even worse, the residual impression left on the
spectator’s mind after a feature film was often not the impression that the filmmakers intended. To
illustrate this point stronger, Clark repeated a common liberal conception of Nazi propaganda as
dangerous and cunning:
The long film is not only uncertain in its effect. But tends to be a destructive rather than a
constructive agent. And no doubt the Germans were right in making their long propaganda film an
instrument of fear rather than encouragement or persuasion.
282

281
“The Film As A Means of Propaganda,” November 26, 1940, 3, TGA 8812/2/2/309, Tate Archive, London, UK.
282
Ibid., 4.
121

Viewing Nazi propaganda as manipulative and ill-suited to human reasoning was a common
trope repeated throughout the U.S. and Britain. Nothing illustrates better the argument against Nazi
propaganda than Siegfried Kracauer’s wartime work on German cinema. What would become
Kracauer’s best-known book From Caligari to Hitler (1947) was guided by the sentiment that
Nazism thrived on the abuse of montage and other filmmaking “tricks” to spellbind its audiences.
Above all, Nazi propaganda, Kracauer argued, intentionally omitted information and facts to create
visual impressions which easily manipulated people’s emotions.
283

What the Ministry did, in fact, find most conducive to their aims were short documentary
films. As a form based on claiming the real, Clark contended, documentary films communicated
information from the government particularly well. Despite the above-mentioned examples of
various tractions between the British Documentary Film Movement and civil service, documentary
films were, as Clark’s lecture showed, exceptionally well-regarded within the Ministry. Indeed,
Clark invoked short documentary films like London Can Take It! (1940) as particularly successful
pieces of propaganda both at home and abroad.
284
Directed by Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt,
the film depicted the lives of Londoners during the Blitz. Furthermore, the film was effective in
showing its American audience the plight of the British people during the war. Nominated the
Academy for the Best Live Action Short Film, the film received wide distribution in the U.S.
through Warner Bros.
285
But the film also introduced a novelty in its depiction of British life at

283
“They were bound to do so, for their propaganda could not proceed like the propaganda of the democracies and
appeal to the understanding of its audiences; it had to attempt, on the contrary, to suppress the faculty of understanding
which might have undermined the basis of the whole system. Rather than suggesting through information, Nazi
propaganda withheld in formation or degraded it to a further means of propagandistic suggestion. This propaganda
aimed at psychological retrogression to manipulate people at will.” Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A
Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 278.
284
“The Film As A Means of Propaganda,” November 26, 1940, TGA 8812/2/2/309, Tate Archive, London, UK.
285
Clark maintained a close and fruitful working relationship with Jack Warner, Head of the Warner Bros studios:
“Sir Kenneth Clark announced that he had seen Jack Warner, who was very ready to co-operate. The BBC had agreed
to give him time twice a week, for which the Ministry would provide directives.” Meeting Notes, July 1, 1940, 2, INF
1/249, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
122
war. Unlike The Lion Has Wings (1939) and the Picture Post issue, the film was decidedly modern
and made no appeals to Britain’s past glory. By refusing to mention the British Empire, which
many in the U.S. viewed as a failed and old-fashioned superpower, enabled the film to
communicate Britain’s plight against Nazism and its special role in protecting world peace.
Moreover, Quentin Reynolds, an American correspondent from London, narrated the film in an
informal way and replaced the omniscient narrator usually present in documentary shorts.
Reynolds, a friend of Sidney Bernstein—the media mogul who worked at the Films Division—
appeared in several MoI films such as Christmas Under Fire (1941). His appearances not only
helped the British case with American audiences but also signaled a more amicable relationship
between the MoI and the press.
286

Although Humphrey Jennings began his filmmaking career within the British
Documentary Film Movement during the interwar period, he distanced himself from the
Movement through his subsequent films for the G.P.O. Unit and the MoI. It is tempting to suggest
that Jennings’ departure from the British Documentary Film Movement was the product of his
radical politics and his fascination with the working class. However, his filmic depictions of British
workers differed very little from the MoI visual propaganda which sought to depoliticize them by
assuring that their welfare benefits will return once the war was over.
287
To be sure, Jennings’
difference from the Movement became evident in films produced for the MoI in which he sought
to unite Britons such as Words for Battle (1941) and Listen to Britain (1941).
288

286
“London Can Take It! made screen history—and illustrated real history. The film, including Quentin Reynolds,
was easily understood by the New World citizenry.” “Britain’s Film Role in America,” Documentary News Letter,
February 1943, 1.
287
“Jennings’s films were very personal but for all his belief in the potential and beauty of the working class his filmic
vision of it was not really very different from that of the general run of Government films in which happy people went
about their tasks with perhaps only the occasional grumble as they worked for the good of all and for an eventual
victory.” Peter Stead, Film and The Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society (London and
New York: Routledge, 2014), 125.
288
Indeed, Documentary News Letter dismissed Words for Battle and characterized it as a “lantern” lecture over the
quotations of well-known historical figures.
123
Listen to Britain (1941) was produced as an experimental film that explored the limits of
sound in documentary filmmaking. Imagined as an audial register of the war, the film depicted
Britain through various familiar and unfamiliar sounds—air-raid sirens, laughter, music, church
bells, whistles, and chatter—to show a country withstanding the threat of Nazism through its unity.
In part, the MoI sponsored British artists, predominantly painters, to record the war effort and
Britain’s historic battle against Nazi Germany. Indeed, Kenneth Clark established the War Artists’
Advisory Committee in 1939 for the purpose of employing Britain’s visual artists. Their artistic
renderings of the war would not only produce a visual archive but, as Clark argued, the artists
would depict “the feeling” of war. Listen to Britain joined Clark’s newly formed army of visual
artists in creating such a poetic vision of Britain at war. In such a way, Jennings broke away from
the accepted function of British wartime documentary cinema as a recorder of events. Jennings
accomplished this by getting rid of chronology and strict periodization of British life during war.
Although the film could easily be classified as depicting life during the Blitz, as his earlier film
London Can Take It!, its preoccupation was with a purely visual impression rather than with
providing an unequivocal argument.
And yet, Jennings still retained, in his auditory study of Britain, a temporal limit.
Reminiscent of avant-garde cinema’s “city-symphonies” such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin,
Jennings’ piece was edited around a single day in Britain. But unlike Ruttmann, sound, and not
visual formalism, was the organizing principle in his cinematic study. As I have argued in Chapter
One, Grierson based his principles of documentary filmmaking partly on refuting the city-
symphonies because, through their visual impressionism, they failed to show social. However, I
do not agree with scholars of Listen to Britain in their insistence that Jennings by-passed this
124
impressionism through his focus on the individual.
289
Although, the film presents a clear departure
from the Griersonian conceptions of citizenship, the film’s focus on societal diversity offered a
more humanist and universal depiction of citizenship; Jennings’ extensive use of close-up shots
prioritized humanism over pragmatic citizenship and its utility in industry and labor. And even
when Jennings offered scenes representing labor, like the scenes of female workers at the Gillette
Factory, their labor is not depicted through industrial cinema’s fascination with what scholars have
called “processual representation.”
290
Rather, it is subjugated to the music of the factory’s speakers
that transform the sight of a factory from arduous work to one that is made pleasurable through
the rhythm and sound of music. Sound, as the main organizing principle of the film, finds its place
across British life and transforms it into a symphonic spectacle of humanism.

Fig. 14: Listen to Britain (1941), the Queen and Kenneth Clark (right)

289
“In his criticism of… Berlin (1927)—Grierson argued that the film was an exercise in formalist experimentation
that lacks the aim of ‘fulfill[ing] the best ends of citizenship.’ In addressing this task Grierson proposed that films
should exploit the figure of the individual at (industrial) work. Reduced to a cipher for labour, Grierson denies the
‘figure’ humanity. Jennings’ ‘symphony’ avoids such a depiction within its emphasis on individuality.” Keith Beattie,
Humphrey Jennings, 10.
290
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2020).
125
The film culminates and unites diverse sounds of wartime Britain in lunchtime concerts
organized at the National Gallery. As the Gallery’s interwar director, Kenneth Clark organized
various cultural events during wartime that included war artists’ exhibits and concerts of which
the most well-known were those given by the British pianist Myra Hess. Jennings centered the
film around Hess’ performance, juxtaposing her performance with the audience composed of well-
known figures such as the Queen and Clark as well as ordinary Britons. (Fig. 14) This was, no
doubt, a gesture towards unifying British society despite its hardline class division. To further
support this point, Jennings juxtaposes Hess’ piano performance with the immediate surroundings
of the Gallery. By refusing to present the concert through its diegetic space of the National
Gallery’s concert hall, Jennings shifts between the Gallery’s exhibition spaces, its wartime artists’
exhibit, and that of the outside, focusing on the Trafalgar Square and the everyday circulation of
people in it. This creative decision resonated with the new view of museums and art galleries as
quintessentially democratic spaces through which people from all walks of life could move and
experience exhibits at their own pace. Indeed, by breaking the lunchtime concerts’ diegetic unity,
Listen to Britain imagines a new role for museums and cultural institutions as bastions of the
modern liberal citizenry. Unlike mass media that were “sealed” from start to finish through a single
expository logic, museum exhibitions liberated the observer to explore the world in a seemingly
unregulated way. As Fred Turner argued, American social scientists such as anthropologist
Margaret Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson theorized modern art museums as antidotes to
mass media’s deleterious effects. The mobility provided by museums, Mead explained, constituted
an example of new democratic citizenship:
They go out from the doors of the Museum believing in one of the foundations of
democracy, that it is possible, by slow, honest, exact study to find out more about man and the
world in which he lives. For an hour or so they have been able to trust their eyes and let their minds
126
rove over materials which have not been arranged to impress, to convert, to push them around, but
merely to tell them as much of the truth as is now known, and that quietly.
291

It is tempting to read Mead’s depiction of museums as spaces of individual liberation from
totalitarianism as products of World War Two. To be sure, hundred years before Mead’s
observations, liberal states established museums as social instruments tasked with leveling the
political and economic upheavals of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Around this time, the liberal
state constructed new museums and made older ones such as the British Museum open to the public.

292
Moreover, museums’ function as new social instruments coincided with the dominance of
classical liberalism in Europe and elsewhere. As products of classical liberalism, museums were
imagined as instrumental in uplifting people by depicting them as self-regulating subjects. Indeed,
Michel Foucault described liberal “soft power” as biopolitical, or a form of liberal governance
based on various techniques of self-improvement. But in World War Two, it was not a secret that
museums served this purpose; Theodore Low, the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New
York, published a pamphlet on the subject in 1942.
293

This is what Jennings sought to depict through his filmic exploration of the National
Gallery. By constantly vacillating in his depiction of the inside of the National Gallery and its
immediate surroundings on Trafalgar Square, Jennings depicted the interaction of individuals
brought together by war and British cultural life. British director Jill Craigie was one of those
individuals depicted in Listen to Britain. Inspired by what she experienced in London’s cultural
scene during the Blitz, and most predominantly around the crowd at the National Gallery, Craigie

291
Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic
Sixties, 75.
292
This argument was best presented in Carl Schorske’s work on the nineteenth-century reconstruction of imperial
Vienna. Inspired by bourgeois ascendency, their impulses became integrated into the fabric of the city that guided its
reconstruction most famously through abolishing the medieval walls around Vienna’s historical center and the
construction of the Ringstrasse boulevard—home to two leading museums in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the
parliament, and relevant cultural institutions such as the Opera. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and
Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
293
Theodore Low, The Museum As A Social Instrument (New York: American Association of Museums, 1942).
127
approached Kenneth Clark and asked for his help in producing the first British film on modernist
art Out of Chaos (1944). Produced by Two Cities Films, owned by J. Arthur Rank and Filippo del
Giudice, the film never managed to gain wide distribution but was favorably received by film
critics. However, the film’s success allowed Craigie to direct her second documentary film on
postwar housing reconstruction entitled The Way We Live (1946) and join the British Academy of
Film and Television.
294

Whereas Jennings experimented with sound in his documentary films, Craigie was
interested in exploring the role of perception in building democratic citizenship. This was, as Fred
Turner argued, a central question to those that worked on liberal wartime propaganda. Indeed, the
individual perception was seen as crucial in their scholarly analysis of mass media with its uniform,
top-down communication, vis-à-vis a mobile and hence more democratic engagement through a
variety of visual stimuli. Craigie’s film was produced around an insight that modern art incited the
senses; it arose questions buried deep within everyone that could be resolved within an individual’s
exchange and participation in a democratic community. Craigie’s insistence on the benefit of art
to everyday life was, ultimately, the backbone of democratic liberalism. But the film also sought
to strike a universalist, humanist cord with its audience by insisting that human relationship to
visual arts constituted a primordial experience in ancient communities. Indeed, the film begins
with a simulation of an early cave painting through an intertitle that explains how when these first
drawings were made, perhaps in the caves of Altamira, they were followed by a communal
discussion on their utility and effect. (Fig. 15) This intertitle stands as the film’s leitmotif—the
film uses visual arts to underscore the necessity of communal discussion in liberal democracies.

294
Yvonne Tasker, “Jill Craigie, Post-war British Film Culture and the British Film Academy.” Journal of British
Cinema and Television 18, no. 4 (2021): 404–422.
128

Fig. 15: The intertitle in Out of Chaos (1944)
Following the intertitle, Out of Chaos opens as any interwar documentary film with its
strong interest in understanding modern British society; the film positions itself between British
institutions and people to examine how well they function in their service to citizens. Similar to
the British Documentary Movement’s films such as Enough to Eat?, Craigie’s piece establishes
itself as a neutral on-screen investigation consisting of experts and institutions. Indeed, the film’s
establishing shot of the National Gallery, where Jennings filmed Listen to Britain’s crescendo, was
represented as an enduring British institution of particular national importance in wartime. (Fig.
16) The female narrator asks: “What sort of people are these who like to spend their leisure looking
at paintings?” The question signals an older tradition of British documentary cinema with its
impetus to understand and uncover useful lessons by visually dissecting modern society. The
question also points to an idea inspired by the Mass Observation Project that regarded people’s
leisure time as a crucial entry point into their lives and, by extension, that of modern society.
Undoubtedly, this notion was inspired by the idea that leisure time represented a brief slice of daily
time during which people were allowed to be themselves through the pursuit of their own
individual interests. (Fig. 17)
129

Fig. 16: The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square in Out of Chaos (1944)

Fig. 17: “What sort of people are these who like to spend their leisure looking at
paintings?”

The film continued its informative, almost didactic mode by interviewing Kenneth Clark,
the originator of these wartime exhibits. Although the camera first films Clark sitting behind his
desk, in the usual manner of how interwar documentary films depicted British experts, Clark
130
quickly transgresses the stiff interview set-up by, mid-way through his expose, standing up and
comfortably sitting on the top of his desk. (Fig. 18)

Fig. 18: Kenneth Clark in his office at the National Gallery (Out of Chaos)
To anyone acquainted with Clark’s well-known docu-series Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969),
his leisurely demeanor in Out of Chaos strikingly resembled his later work in British television.
But this would not constitute the only transgression in the established way of documenting the war
effort through non-fiction cinema. Following Clark’s remarks, Out of Chaos briefly introduced
chronology to represent the break that war brought to daily life in Britain. Indeed, while the female
narrator exclaimed “September 1940, when many of us were jolted out of our old way of living
and thinking,” her words were juxtaposed to shots of air battles during the Battle of Britain. These
striking shots suit the narrator’s explanation of the war, but also point to the film’s overall
transformation from an informational documentary to one that is invested in using art to underscore
the need for interactive, participatory citizenship. While there are numerous ways through which
Craigie conceptualized interactivity in her film, especially in the latter part of the film when she
depicted members of the audience discussing their views of modern British art, her utilization of
visual arts sought to train audiences on a new way of seeing the world. Indeed, Out of Chaos blows
131
up several relevant paintings while also training the viewers to see the subtle changes brought on
by distinct modernist depictions of landscape and people. Undoubtedly, the film shifts its attention
from an institutional and pedantic presentation of art to a more experimental which, as the film
illustrated, makes modernist art particularly suited to Britain during wartime. By blowing up thirty-
two paintings, the film sought to underscore the importance of modernist expression in the art for
British society under war.
To be sure, modern art served an important role in wartime liberal propaganda. In part, this
was because Nazi Germany specifically signaled out modernist art as degenerate and detrimental
to society. The Nazi regime confiscated modernist paintings and other artwork for special exhibits
that mocked these artists’ degradation of life. But perhaps more importantly, the liberal states saw
in modernist and abstract art an opportunity to create a form of visual propaganda that would extoll
the benefits of liberalism in a divided Cold War environment. Much has been written about the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City and its central place in U.S. Cold War propaganda, but
what is missing from those narratives was how much wartime experiences in propaganda agencies
across the U.S. and Britain inspired Cold War propaganda for decades to come.
295
For one,
modernist art promised to revolutionize public’s appreciation of art by inciting a fuller integration
of visual art in everyday life. Indeed, advertising agencies were the first to adopt a starkly
modernist vision of the liberal future through modernist forms. Indeed, mid-century advertising
agencies adopted this depoliticized form of modernism because it best represented the experience
of Cold War modernity, its speed, progress, and universality. But for the British wartime context,

295
“As an institution MOMA appears to be a refuge from a materialist society: a cultural haven, an ideal world apart.
Yet, it exalts precisely the values and experiences it apparently rejects by elevating them to the universal and timeless
realm of spirit. MOMA's ritual is a walk through a hall of mirrors in which isolation, fear, and numbness appear as
exciting and desirable states of being. Thus MOMA would reconcile you to the world, as it is, outside.” Carol Duncan
and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Donald
Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (London and New York: Routledge,
2018), 496.
132
modernist art sought to help in leveling a deeply classist society and extolling the benefits of living
under liberal freedom. As an art form that was highly invested in individualism, it perfectly
recapitulated liberal values of personal freedom.
There is much that connects British visual arts and neoliberalism as a novel economic and
political project. Consider, for example, the career of British art historian Ernst Gombrich. As a
close friend of Friedrich Hayek and a fellow Austrian émigré to Britain, Gombrich’s writings on
art were one of the most influential in popularizing art history for the Anglo-American audience.
In his well-known book The Story of Art, Gombrich described art in a way that was undeniably
influenced by neoliberal theories of society. For example, Gombrich echoed Ludwig von Mises’
and Joseph Schumpeter’s insistence on studying society through an individualist lens. In fact,
Gombrich, in the first chapter of his wildly successful book, insisted that there is no such thing as
art, only the collection of individual artists.
296
This view of art and visual styles, decoupled from
social movements, complemented Mises’ view on human action vis-à-vis society as always already
individualist. Whether society is studied through economics or art, its main drive comes not from
social collectives, as Gombrich and neoliberal thinkers argued, but through an individual’s desires
and behavior. To support his argument, Gombrich invokes a common neoliberal understanding of
knowledge as irredeemably individualist. For example, in Gombrich’s defense of modernist artists
and their abstract portrayal of familiar scenes from daily life, he protects an artist’s claim to
expressionism on the grounds that there is no singular reality or impression of life:
We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children
sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who
insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these
children… They [modernist artists] want to see the world afresh, and to discard all the accepted
notions and prejudices about flesh being pink and apples yellow or red. It is not easy to get rid of
these preconceived ideas, but the artists who succeed best in doing so often produce the most
exciting works. It is they who teach us to see new beauties in nature of whose existence we had

296
In the introduction of his most well-known book, Gombrich exclaimed: “There really is no such thing as Art. There
are only artists.” E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York: Phaidon Publishers, 1951), 5.
133
never dreamt. If we follow them and learn from them, even a glance out of our own window may
become a thrilling adventure.
297

What Gombrich was actually pointing toward was Hayek’s wartime work on knowledge,
particularly his critique of modern social science with its insistence on “consistent behaviorism.”
298

In a paper Hayek wrote in wartime Britain, he delegitimized social science as an epistemological
project because the knowledge they produce about people and society was simplistic through its
generalization. Take, for example, the Mass Observation Project that I have touched upon
throughout this chapter. It might represent a social science project that Hayek would undeniably
criticize because it sought to understand the working class and other parts of British society
through their investigation of people’s behavior and their writings in regular diary reports. Yet
such knowledge of people, centralized through the expertise of social scientists, undermined the
complexity of individual lives and misunderstood that, what Hayek argued, no mind is the same:
“… it is not only impossible to recognize, but meaningless to speak of, a mind different from our
own.”
299
These wartime insights led Hayek to write “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945)
that expanded his 1942 critique of modern social science into a well-known neoliberal defense of
markets as sophisticated information-processing mechanisms that supplemented people’s
imperfect cognitive capabilities.
300

Gombrich’s reform of art history was inspired by Hayek’s criticism of social science.
Instead of narrating the history of art as a collection of styles and competing ideologies, Gombrich

297
Ibid., 10.
298
Friedrich Hayek, “The Facts of the Social Sciences,” in Bruce Caldwell, ed. The Collected Works of Friedrich
Hayek: The Market and Other Orders, Volume XV (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 84.
299
Ibid., 85.
300
Historian of neoliberalism Philip Mirowski classified the essay as “the ur-text” of Hayek’s postwar society the
Mont Pelerin Society: “…no individual is capable of understanding social processes as a whole; and that individual
beliefs are frequently wonky beyond repair but given appropriate (market-like) aggregation mechanisms for
information, the system ends up arriving at the truth through “free” entry and exit.” Philip Mirowski, “Defining
Neoliberalism,” in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road From Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal
Thought Collective (London, England and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 423.
134
re-focused the discipline on the individual level, insisting on the study of artists’ motivation,
opportunities, and experimentation.
301
In other words, art history should be based on the study of
individual artists whose techniques were developed through interaction with her immediate
surrounding and not through claims of larger ideological or social structures. Such a depoliticized
view of art suited liberal propaganda’s employment of modernist art forms once its interwar
political affiliations (e.g., socialism) became decoupled from art. This was the fate of most visual
arts during wartime. As Nadya Bair showed, socialist-leaning interwar photographers such as
Robert Capa began producing “apolitical” pieces that extolled liberal universalism, while Fred
Turner traced the work of Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy from his radical Weimar days to
the “New Bauhaus” in wartime Chicago.
302
Indeed, decoupling modernism from its earliest
connections to political movements of the interwar era was one of the main accomplishments of
liberal propaganda. Innovative representational techniques and the artists’ strong claim to
auteurism, once liberated from their past socialist inclinations, suited neoliberal understanding of
individually motivated reality. Yet the adoption of modernism was not an entirely uncontroversial
process, particularly in the United States where certain conservative factions rebelled against
modernism by criticizing it as a foreign element in American art.
303
In Britain, modernism was
less disparaged based on its origin but more on its anti-traditionalism by contradicting the British

301
“Gombrich’s alternative to the Hegelian style was thus to bring the work of the artist down from ideological
utopianism and ground it in a practical realm of ‘concrete demands’, ‘trial and error’, and ‘opportunities’.” Vardan
Azatyan, “Ernst Gombrich’s Politics of Art History: Exile, Cold War and The Story of Art,” Oxford Art Journal 33:2
(2010): 134.
302
“Reporters celebrated Chicago’s embrace of the forward-thinking Bauhaus modernists whom Hitler had rejected.
Few Americans, however, quite grasped the socialist inclinations of the original Bauhaus. Nor did they have to. Even
as he reinstituted much of the original Bauhaus curriculum, Moholy reframed its mission in American terms…
As he established the New Bauhaus, Moholy dropped the socialist rhetoric of his youth but preserved its techniques:
the New Bauhaus, like the old, would be a place for personal transformation. Once again, craftsmen would integrate
skills, work to become whole people, and develop a community of shared labor. But this time, they would become
part of a long American tradition.” Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from
World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, 93.
303
Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, 1946-1959 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015), 10.
135
class system. Yet, the British government and advertising business embraced modernist forms
even before the war, especially through advertising; Shell’s head of publicity, Jack Beddington,
employed modernist British artists to advertise the new world created by oil and the combustion
engines it powered. Some of Beddington’s collaborators such as Paul Nash would re-appear in
Craigie’s film Out of Chaos as one of its leading protagonists. Although the themes of Out of
Chaos were undeniably British, what became increasingly important was to connect British
suffering to a collective, international struggle for freedom against the onslaught of totalitarianism.

Fig. 19: Picture Post article on the two artists, Stanley Spencer, and Jill Craigie

Out of Chaos inaugurated many of the postwar adoptions of modernism in Cold War
propaganda. Indeed, the film shared Gombrich’s understanding of art as consisting of individual
artists whose immediate surroundings influence what ends up on their canvas or in their
136
sculptures.
304
(Fig. 19) Although Craigie was a self-proclaimed socialist and would later recall not
getting a job for The March of Time because of her political affiliations, Out of Chaos was
remarkably apolitical.
305
The film’s main purpose was to show the ability of visual artists, all white
and male, in their depiction of wartime Britain. It did, however, support a well-established liberal
creed of individualism through its insistence on the dialogue between the on-screen British
audience and the art critic Eric Newton. After following the wartime work of artists Stanley
Spencer, Leslie Collins, Paul Nash, and Henry Moore, the film culminates in its argument for the
relevance of the art world to British society through this dramatized exchange with Newton. (Fig.
20) The intellectual exchange was preceded by scenes of British citizens walking through the
gallery rooms’ and remarking on what they feel art should look like. Indeed, the on-screen
museum-goers invoked common readings of modernist art; they disparaged modernist art for either
being too simplistic in its technique—one person exclaimed “Well if this is painting, my small son
is a genius!”—or, by modernist art’s technique being so utterly complex and removed from “reality”
that it fails to hold an indexical relationship to life as experienced by most people.
306
But as the
film showed, these individuals changed their minds once they were engaged in lively public
discussion. Modernist art and liberal propaganda merged in Out of Chaos to suggest that the future
of the world rested on free-thinking individuals that fully participate in the public sphere. However,

304
The Picture Post magazine widely covered the shooting of Out of Chaos and its release. In 1943, it presented the
work of Stanley Spencer shooting his scenes for the film at the Clyde River surrounded by British workers who, as
the film argued, “seem to enjoy seeing themselves from a different point of view.” As in the Mass Observation Project
and in Jennings’ film Spare Time, the working class was represented as an almost passive backdrop in British cultural
life. Anon., “A War Artist on the Clyde,” Picture Post 21:1, October 2, 1943, 7-11.
305
“I wanted to get in on those series like The March of Time but my socialism didn’t help me.” The British
Entertainment History Project, Jill Craigie Interview, Side 2, April 27, 1995, 4’03’’.
https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/jill-craigie
Jill Craigie married Michael Foot in 1949, the Leader of the British Labour Party in the 1970s who lost to Margaret
Thatcher in the faithful 1979 elections.
306
Newspapers reported contemporary reactions to modern art, and artists starring in Jill Craigie’s film. For example,
in 1940, Manchester’s Art Gallery purchased Henry Moore’s statue “Mother and Child,” a controversial move that
was criticized by some of Manchester’s council members. Anon., “Surrealism and Art,” The Manchester Guardian,
March 7, 1940, 12.
137
this notion held a caveat. These public discussions were to be relegated to the cultural sphere
without ever intersecting with economic or political issues that, undeniably, made museums
pleasurable to begin with.

Fig. 20: British art critic Eric Newton and British citizens (Out of Chaos)

138
Conclusion
Out of Chaos ends through a montage of various paintings, slowly zooming on their details,
and further inviting the audience to learn to “read” these visual traces of life so as to fully immerse
themselves in “the art of living.” Self-improvement was and still is at the heart of the neoliberal
project. Indeed, individual action, and not government support, should constitute the quality of
one’s life. Craigie’s film gave practical tools for understanding modernist art but also for becoming
a fully integrated subject in modern British society. Whereas interwar documentary films extolled
the importance of institutions for bettering people’s lives, Out of Chaos and MoI’s liberal
propaganda reformed liberal citizenry as based on self-improvement; a trend which would gain
full adoption once the BBC resumed its television programming in the late-1940s.
Both Craigie and Jennings reformed the documentary form from its interwar iteration under
the British Documentary Film Movement. Jennings experimented with sound while Craigie re-
thought the importance of visual arts and perception in building liberal citizenship. Indeed, Listen
to Britain and Out of Chaos accomplished a leveling of British society, while managing to remain
politically uncommitted. To be sure, Jennings and Craigie produced what Turner called “the
democratic surround” through their interactive and multimodal experiences of a democratic society.
As outliers to the British Documentary Film Movement, their films were concerned with studying
social dynamics and individual lives under liberalism rather than uncovering hidden liberal
governments’ processes as interwar Griersonian film projects did. And while the Griersonians
became more respected by the MoI and the British government under Clark’s and Beddington’s
leadership of the Films Division, they produced individual filmmakers that greatly contributed to
the development and meaning of new liberal propaganda.
The logic behind MoI’s propaganda and its insistence on broadening its terrain onto visual
culture were observable on, at times, chaotic change in personnel. Here, Kenneth Clark proved a
139
decisive figure in consolidating the Films Division after the shamble of its early months under
Joseph Ball, by establishing a working relationship with the British Documentary Film Movement,
newsreel producers, and the British press. And even though Clark officially left the MoI in late
1941, he continued to support filmmakers and civil servants in their propaganda efforts. Indeed,
he helped Jill Craigie contact eminent British artists such as Paul Nash and Henry Moore to
participate in the filming of Out of Chaos, while also directly contributing to British cultural life
during wartime by establishing numerous art exhibits and lunchtime concerts at the National
Gallery. It is not by chance that his presence was recorded in several British documentary films of
the period.
The MoI was dissolved in 1946 but its influence transcended World War Two and
influenced postwar visual communication.
307
Indeed, MoI’s personnel such as Mary Adams, head
of the Home Intelligence, continued her career at the BBC as the first female TV producer in
Britain; Adams produced many relevant shows in educational broadcasting. Additionally, MoI’s
documentary practitioners also joined the BBC; Paul Rotha and Duncan Ross helped set up the
BBC’s Documentary Department in 1946. Indeed, the transition of documentary cinema to
television finally resulted in a large distributional network for documentaries. And although
members of the British Documentary Film Movement tended to narrate the postwar period as one
of decline in the government’s support of documentary filmmaking, the archival records tell a
different story.
308
While the original British Documentary Film Movement did decline with
Grierson’s departure to Canada in 1938, many of its practitioners continued to have successful
wartime and postwar careers. Perhaps most importantly, new documentary film units and

307
Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam, eds. Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World War: National
and Transnational Networks, 17.
308
“The Orthodox view of British documentary after the Second World War is that it was a period of stagnation and
decline.” James Chapman, A New History of British Documentary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 123.
140
collectives began to form outside the Movement. As I show in the following chapter, television
broadcasting reformed British documentary cinema and managed to create new forms of popular
documentary content that finally reached the much-desired global audience.

141
Chapter Three: Futures Past
Television as a Cybernetic Machine of History

Globalization is a transformation of time, not space.
309

- Susan Buck-Morss

For nothing is more important,
nothing comes closer to the crux of social reality
than this living, infinitely repeated opposition between
the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly.
310

- Fernand Braudel

When Fernand Braudel, the leader of the Annales school of history, concluded his 1950
lecture with a call for new ways of writing history, he invoked a pervasive sense of dislocation in
the aftermath of World War Two. Having spent the war as a prisoner in several German camps,
Braudel’s feelings of disruption surely came from these traumatic wartime experiences.
311
To
many in 1945, liberal society’s faith in linear historical progress reached a dead-end.
312
For
Braudel, the wartime atrocities interrupted this progressive unfolding of world history epitomized
in the nineteenth century through the Hegelian concept of “world spirit.” This fact, Braudel
asserted, necessitated a new historiographical method that could account for the instability of daily
life, before concluding that social reality “has been revealed to us in an entirely new light.”
313

The immediate postwar years were marked by economic destitution, made worse when in
1946 a particularly harsh winter produced staggering hunger and suffering across continental

309
Susan Buck-Morss, “Democracy: An Unfinished Project,” Boundary 2 41, no. 2 (May 2014): 71.
310
Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1982), 26.
311
“At a certain historical point, the subject is excessively overwhelmed by the shock of the Real; this intrusion of the
Real disturbs the unity of action/reaction, the subject’s direct insertion into a reality in which he can simply (re)act as
an engaged agent. Overwhelmed by the Real, the subject is transformed into a powerless spectator of himself and his
world.” Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London and New York: Routledge,
2012), 134-35.
312
Hegelian philosophy of history was famously adopted by nineteenth-century historians such as Leopold von Ranke
in their conception of universal history.
313
Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1982), 7.
142
Europe. But material conditions were only part of the disruption; the deployment of nuclear
weapons in Japan and their destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left an enduring sense of
uncertainty. This was because a single nuclear bomb such as the 15 kilotons “Little Boy”
threatened to accomplish the previously unimaginable—annihilate whole cities and even destroy
nature, previously considered a stable environment. Philosopher Hannah Arendt echoed this
sentiment when in 1960 she wrote that nuclear scientists’ newly discovered control over natural
forces altered the primordial division between people and nature resulting in unprecedented “world
alienation.”
314
In no small way, Arendt contended, the first employment of nuclear weapons
revolutionized what it meant to be human. Indeed, wartime scientists simultaneously produced
new weapons of destruction and new understandings of human psychology. This remarkable shift,
which historians of science have recently termed “Cold War rationality,” surfaced in response to
the threats of nuclear annihilation, “summoned into being in order to tame the terrors of decisions
too consequential to be left to human reason alone.”
315
For scientists at Los Alamos, future
contingencies such as total nuclear war could not be left to human deliberation.
But this lack of confidence in human rationality was not entirely novel to the international
neoliberal movement. As I have argued in Chapter One, neoliberal thinkers such as Ludwig von
Mises, Walter Lippmann, and Michael Polanyi were troubled by human irrationality since the
1920s when the introduction of universal suffrage in Europe and elsewhere (i.e., mass society)

314
“The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters
only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as
potentially man-made… This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In
the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the
world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice… has left behind it a society of men who, without a common
world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together
into a mass. For a mass society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes
itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.”
Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” in Between Past and Future (New York and London:
Penguin Books, 2006), 89-90.
315
Paul Erickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (University
of Chicago Press, 2013), 2.
143
threatened to destabilize the liberal world-system. Although neoliberal thinkers advocated for the
creation of national and supranational legal, economic, and media institutions to curb mass politics,
they also sought to mitigate radical demands through educational means. And yet, the wartime
period brought a radical split in their enthusiasm for didactic measures; the world needed to be
governed by ways that could surpass any direct human control or what neoliberals called
“planning.” Traditional mass media—radio and cinema—were no longer seen as benign stewards
of enlightenment. Certainly, totalitarian regimes’ misuse of these technologies, and their
centralized structure necessitated the creation of individualized channels of communication and
cognition. By 1945, wartime scientists and neoliberals independently asserted that liberal societies
should enact supra-human systems of cognition, communication, and reason that would limit our
supposed proclivity to recklessness and irrationality.
The wartime dreams of cyberneticians and neoliberals were made a reality by television.
Consider, for example, how nuclear physicists described television’s liberation of space and time
as a successful prototype for a decentralized communication system. French nuclear physicist Lew
Korawski invoked television as the model for imagining the future of nuclear science “when links
as comprehensive as those used in television become available at long distance, there will be even
less reason for the user [no longer called a “scientist”] to spend a lot of his time on the site where
his physical events are being produced.”
316
While Korawski was referring to the potential of
decentralized science outsides laboratories, television’s appeal came from this revolutionary
engagement with the outside environment; not least by connecting 1950s suburban America to the

316
Quoted in Peter Galison, “Computer Simulations and the Trading Zone,” in Peter Galison and David J. Stump, eds.
The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 141.
144
ever-expanding globe, or as neoliberal economist Kenneth E. Boulding described, “an individual
may be almost literally present in all the living rooms of the nation.”
317

Nuclear scientists were, perhaps, the first to inaugurate new models of human rationality
in response to challenges when producing scientific knowledge on matters “too complex for theory
and too remote from laboratory materials for experiment.”
318
By perfecting early “calculating
machines,” or the wartime prototypes of modern computers, these physicists fashioned a new mode
of inquiry based on simulations and alternative realities. Although these epistemic inquiries began
in wartime laboratories at Los Alamos, among physicists developing nuclear weapons, the theories
spread across natural and social sciences. What connected neoliberals to nuclear physicists were
their desire to dissolve the complex world through supra-human processes and to elevate artificial
intelligence, the market economy’s price system and computers, from mere tools to natural
“organisms.” The point was to build extensive systems of communication and control “in which
material reality could be imagined as an information system.”
319

Mathematician Norbert Wiener and psychologist Walter McCulloch called this new
approach “cybernetics,” a transdisciplinary post-World War Two science that studied how
machine intelligence could be integrated with the human psychological apparatus.
320
Furthermore,
cyberneticians focused on explicating how control and communication could exist in complex

317
Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dream House: Television and Cultural Power (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2001), 3; Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of
Michigan Press, 1956), 56.
318
“During and shortly after World War II, nuclear-weapons builders created a mode of inquiry to address problems
too complex for theory and too remote from laboratory materials for experiment… Experiment could not probe the
critical mass with sufficient detail; theory led rapidly to unsolvable integrodifferential equations… the artificial reality
of the Monte Carlo was the only solution.” Peter Galison, “Computer Simulations and the Trading Zone,” in The
Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996), 119-20.
319
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5.
320
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (London: Free Association Books,
1989), 16.
145
systems such as modern society. Its influence as, perhaps, the period’s leading transdisciplinary
science was massive; economics, communication studies, and historiography benefited from
cyberneticians’ focus on data, circulation, and feedback. But most relevantly, cybernetics promised
to unite scholarly disciplines and incite intradisciplinary collaboration that Braudel presciently
noted: “The historian for the moment should concern himself with gathering the human sciences
together (could data processing help them to build up a common language?) rather than only with
perfecting his own line. The historian of tomorrow will build up this language—or will be nothing
at all.”
321
Akin to our contemporary fascination with digital humanities, Braudel saw in cybernetics
an opportunity to revive the historical discipline not least because historians, much like the
cyberneticians, use “the past to generate the future.”
322
But little did he know that color
broadcasting would provide these new forms of historiography and complement the post-World
War Two’s vistas.
323

This chapter historicizes the introduction of color broadcasting on BBC-2 through the
development of docu-history programs such as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969). I do
so to underline the entanglements between Cold War epistemic regimes, governed by new notions
of knowledge and reason, and television as the period’s most emblematic medium. Cyberneticians’
desire to construct large information systems influenced the development of television

321
Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), ix.
322
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2014), 133.
323
Braudel had little to say for the role of mechanically reproduced media, photography, and film, for historiography.
Indeed, his 1950 lecture tends to be seen as displaying a dislike for cinematic representations of historical events. For
example, when talking about the film that showed WWI, Braudel found the film’s focus on “great” personalities in
the war, generals and kings, as an old nineteenth-century understanding of history espoused by Leopold von Ranke
and his narrative historians. “Twenty years or so go, in America, a much-heralded film caused an unparalleled
sensation. It was claimed to be neither more nor less than the first authentic film on the Great War… For over an hour
we were privileged to witness the official hours of the conflict, to attend fifty military reviews… As for the real war,
it was depicted by three or four special effects and a few sham explosions: background… it often is just such meager
images that chronicles, traditional history, the narrative history so dear to the heart of Ranke offer us of the past and
of the sweat of men. A gleam but no illumination; facts but no humanity.” Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History
in 1950,” in Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 11.
146
broadcasting—a fact that histories of television often fail to mention. Since the origins of television
are often told from national perspectives, we sometimes forget that the medium was always already
planned to connect the globe, even if in the mid-1950s it was still unable to transcend its
“liveliness.” Consider, for example, the BBC’s televised spectacle One World (1967) which
employed live television to connect British viewers to audiences across the world.
324
(Fig. 21) By
using new satellite links, the BBC produced an hour and a half long television program in
collaboration with fourteen countries in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia.

Fig. 21: The BBC’s TV program One World (1967)

I begin with the premise that television became central to the postwar world because it was
modeled on cybernetic ideals of global communication. No doubt a product of economic and
political reconstruction, television was introduced to provide a more complete representation of a
geopolitical environment under duress. And yet, crises beget new modes of being.
325
Cold war
liberalism’s turn to automation, as Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck argued, resembled the
late-eighteenth century’s invention of historiography that “not only coincided with but was
powerfully stimulated by the modern age’s doubt of the reality of an outer world ‘objectively’

324
The program was conceived by Aubrey Singer who became the Controller of BBC-2 in the 1970s.
325
“The semantic struggle for the definition of political or social position, defending or occupying these positions by
deploying a given definition, is a struggle that belongs to all those times of crisis of which we have learned through
written sources. Since the French Revolution, this struggle has become more acute and has undergone a structural
shift; concepts no longer serve merely to define given states of affairs, but reach into the future.” Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 80.
147
given to human perception as an unchanged and unchangeable object.”
326
Mechanically-
reproduced media—photography and cinema—were direct outcomes of this distrust of human
reason; their premise was based on enhancing and supplementing our imperfect sensory
apparatus.
327
Although interwar film theorists and practitioners such as Siegfried Kracauer and
John Grierson extolled cinema for its ability to uncover a world that was otherwise inaccessible to
the human mind, television promised even more—a world made completely and instantaneously
visible.
But this is not to say that mass media develop alongside an unconscious evolutionary path
until they find their proper place in “maturity.”
328
On the contrary, technological, and
programmatic change occurs when the capitalist system reaches a tension or, more dramatically, a
crisis that necessitates new ways of communication.
329
Consider, for example, how the BBC-2
docu-histories were developed in response to the welfare state’s multiple social, economic, and
political crises of the 1960s. A period that is usually historicized as “the Golden Age of television”
was, in fact, a product of its tumultuous circumstances. Geopolitical crises, from the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and the Vietnam War to the 1968 protests, necessitated a constant stream of information

326
Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” 53.
327
As art historians have long argued, perception is not a stable category but changes depending on material, social,
and political conditions. A significant shift in vision occurred during the Industrial Revolution—the origin of both
capitalism and classical liberalism. As Jonathan Crary argued, the Industrial Age decoupled the Scientific Revolution’s
distinction between the observer and the outside world. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: MIT Press, 1992).
328
This is a jab at Marshall McLuhan’s evolutionary theory of media. “To him, media technologies develop
ideologically, finally becoming ‘themselves’ like biological species reaching adulthood. Even when he acknowledges
the institutional contrast between home TV and public film viewing, for example, he presents the contrast as the
inevitable outcome of technological difference. When he sees the ‘cool,’ participatory medium of TV being filled with
content that doesn't fit his definition of TV, he dismisses historical fact as untelevisual…” Paul Young, The Cinema
Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films From Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006), xix.
329
“Because the ideological conditions of production—consumption of the initial impression of reality… were
changing (if only in function of the very dissemination of photo and film), it was necessary to tinker with its technical
modalities in order that the act of disavowal renewing the deception could continue to be accomplished ‘automatically’,
in a reflex manner, without any disturbance of the spectacle…” Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in
Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath, The Cinematic Apparatus (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 133.
148
from all corners of the globe. As Fred Turner remarked: “To a generation that had grown up in a
world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the
globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play
of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.”
330

At the heart of all this is the historical process—“a mere time-sequence”—that now held
central explanatory power.
331
Indeed, the BBC-2 docu-history programs were developed in the
mid-1960s to extrapolate the complicated and multilayered experience of the modern world. As
Richard Dienst argued, television is ruled by a temporal order in which “all actually existing
television, is constructed by combining forces of stilling and extending time.”
332
Akin to Braudel’s
description of a new social reality, docu-history programs provided their audience with this new
experience of time. Television visualized Braudel’s observation about time from this chapter’s
epigraph—as simultaneously slow and instantaneous—a social reality for audiences across the
world. They need not become historians of the Annales tradition, because television and the BBC
docu-histories provided that temporal multiplicity at the turn of the knob.
Indeed, historical processes “give meaning to where there is none”—resolving political,
economic, and existential crises—by constructing an impression of the whole. Undoubtedly,
seeing the world as interconnected and united by information systems was cybernetics most
appealing promise. And yet, how was this Cold War ideal of perpetual global communication
different from radio broadcasting so crucial in the wartime period? Especially since interwar
theoreticians such as Rudolf Arnheim described radio as a precursor to television when, in 1936,

330
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 5.
331
Ibid., 65.
332
Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1994), 163.
149
the BBC began its first experimental television broadcast.
333
But while radio connected the globe
through its metropolitan centers, it still lacked the visual component necessary for providing a
“total” vision of the world that the liberal world-system ideologically depended on.
334
Comparable
to Night Mail (1936), television would provide not only a testimony to its widely developed
network but a glimpse to the workings of its system. In part, this came from the self-consciousness
of television programming, marked by a constant preoccupation over its place in the media
landscape then dominated by cinema and radio. Disparaged by public intellectuals and
misunderstood by politicians across the Cold War divide, TV executives constantly had to react to
feedback, almost through a cybernetic loop, and refashion TV programming to meet market
demand. Maybe this is why political economists of culture, such as Eileen Meehan, have long
considered television contradictory for its “complex combination of industry and artistry.”
335
In
program terms, early television was self-consciously aware on the need to comment on ways it
produced its images, often by transgressing the fourth wall that separated audiences from on-screen
diegesis. In technological terms, television advertised its continued improvement in developing a
more complete view of the world through better resolution and, most dramatically, color
broadcasting. And nowhere was this self-conscious programming and technological achievement
more pronounced than on British television when in 1962, the British government granted the BBC
an additional channel.

333
“…he [Arnheim] listens to the radio with an eye on the prospect of television and hears a new Gestalt: a single
voice sweeps up all the others into a placeless ubiquity, a circulatory transcendence from “anywhere” into
“everywhere.”... Stilled by the sight of television, we are supposed to say: let images and voices travel in our place
and the whole world will be one.” Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1994), 5.
334
I have first introduced this view of liberalism in Chapter One when I read the British Documentary Film
Movement’s film Night Mail (1936) through Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism.
335
Eileen R. Meehan, “Conceptualizing Culture as Commodity: The Problem of Television,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, Volume 3 (1986): 448.
150
Consider, for example, the 1967 pitch for a new type of documentary program on the BBC
written by Peter Montagnon, MI6 intelligence officer-turned-TV director. Influenced by criticism
of television as a machine of daily banalities, Montagnon described the work of producing
Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969), a thirteen-part series on Western intellectual history, as an agitating
experience dominated by “the anxiety of feeding pure ideas into a machine that by its size and
complexity must tend to vitiate them.”
336
I take Montagnon’s metaphor of postwar television to
suggest that public broadcasting was not conceived as a bureaucratic instrument of the Cold War.
Instead, television was developed as a revolutionary communication system that with ever-
increasing broadcast time, could slowly reach the cybernetic ideal of perpetual and non-stop
communication, thus liberating and interconnecting individuals. Here, I am reminded of Dienst’s
definition of television as “the perfect end point, more perfect and complex than either the Bomb
or cinema, a pure will-to-vision that everywhere leaves things ready but unseen. It worlds the
world as an englobing, endless series of images.”
337

I began the third chapter with Braudel’s lecture and the epistemology of the Cold War to
create a break in my dissertation’s progressive (and linear) history of neoliberalism. In other words,
I internalized Braudel’s lessons. The previous two chapters have illustrated interwar impulses
between the rise of documentary cinema and neoliberalism in post-imperial Britain as well as the
documentary form’s evolution within larger projects of wartime communication. Both
neoliberalism and wartime liberal propaganda came out of the war with a desire to create a form
of liberal logic through their insistence on the international and humanist qualities of liberal
capitalism vis-à-vis totalitarian regimes at home and abroad. This liberalization, as media scholars
suggested, did not disappear in the postwar environment but became central to the establishment

336
“Civilisation,” 2, Civilisation: Correspondence and General, 1967, T53/177/1, The BBC Written Archives, Reading,
UK.
337
Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television, 123.
151
of the United Nations and UNESCO.
338
Yet, disrupting my dissertation’s historical linearity
emanates from a desire to illustrate the more “unstable” and ephemeral qualities of postwar history.
Although I will not entirely abandon my archival impulse, the one that has formed the logic of
prior chapters, I will focus on what cultural historian Raymond Williams famously called “the
structure of feeling” that gave rise to postwar television. Williams developed the concept to
complement the more materialist (i.e., Marxist) study of society and culture by complicating it
through an affective study of history.
339
The threat of nuclear annihilation was the dominant
experience of Cold War geopolitics that produced and distributed various forms of affective
responses. If anything, the threat of nuclear conflict provided a strong emotional impulse that
influenced how people saw and responded to historical events. This is not to say that earlier periods
did not provide such an emotional reaction. As I have described in Chapter One, Ludwig von Mises’
lament over the supposed end of Western civilization at the hands of socialist planners provided
yet another example of how affectivity can provide an impetus to institutionalize classical
liberalism and inoculate global capital from mass political instability.
What my adoption of Williams’ key concept seeks to accomplish is a change in this
dissertation’s focus from (anti)political goals of neoliberal thinkers to the construction of what I
call “the neoliberal mental landscape.” The Cold War entanglement between cybernetics,
television, and the docu-history form engendered an experience of the world as dominated by the
incessant flow of information, people, and labor. Indeed, globalization is, as Susan Buck-Morss
argued, primarily “a transformation of time, and not space.” Neoliberalism radically altered our

338
Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
339
“In the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, the material life, the general
social organization, and, to a large extent the dominant ideas… But while we may, in the study of a past period,
separate out particular aspects of life, and treat them as if they were self-contained, it is obvious that this is only how
they may be studied, not how they were experienced.” Raymond Williams, “From Preface to Film,” in Scott
MacKenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 2014), 611.
152
conceptions of subjectivity and knowledge. But we are unable to recognize these changes if we
remain on the level of economic discourse. It is through the study of successful cultural form, the
BBC-2 docu-history, that we can better understand postwar liberalism. As Williams argued, film
and visual culture are good, if not dominant, means for uncovering those “structural feelings”
behind cultural, political, and economic change: “…it is in art, primarily, that the effect of the
totality, the dominant structure of feeling, is expressed and embodied.”
340
This insight was
particularly inspiring for film historians who saw in Cold War filmmaking a rich trove on which
to study the period’s supposedly dominant feelings of alienation, anxiety, and fear of everything
from crypto-Communists to the Pill.
341
I am, however, less interested in reading any particular text
to uncover the dominant feelings of postwar British or American society; I want to think about the
BBC-2 docu-histories as vehicles for experiencing the new physical and mental vistas of the post-
Hiroshima world.
This is not, in any way, an ontological project. I am not interested in theorizing television
as a stable medium with a universal set of techniques and practices that arose from technological
progress in production and distribution. Rather, I historicize the ways in which the BBC-2 docu-
history programs were imagined as a new form of historical thought and temporal orientation in a
world that seemed bereft of any such certainty. The goal of this chapter is to show how television
functioned as a sophisticated machine of and for neoliberalism; it was an ideological machine that
educated people on neoliberal tenets of self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship. But, most
importantly, postwar television provided an experience of fluid motion akin to the seemingly

340
He even introduced the concept in his lesser-known work Preface to Film (1954). “To relate a work of art to any
part of that observed totality may, in varying degrees, be useful; but it is a common experience, in analysis, to realize
that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is
no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling of a period, and it is
only realizable through experience of the work of art itself, as a whole.” Ibid., 611.
341
Peter Biskind’s book Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the 50s (1983)
inaugurated the rich scholarly output of lesser-known, “everyday” Cold War films in the United States and Britain.
153
effortless circulation of goods on the global market. Its objective was to solve the problems of
knowledge and knowing in a complex nuclear environment and to provide that which Martin
Heidegger termed “the world picture,” or a sense that reality is only graspable as a mechanically
reproduced representation.
342

Television and Neoliberalism
There are several historical examples to refute my claim that television facilitated and
developed neoliberal logic. After all, postwar television was still a highly centralized producer and
distributor of information. Especially in its earliest days, television technology was expensive and
depended on large corporate and state interests to sustain its production. Even on the level of
dissemination, neoliberals were quick to criticize television’s monopoly over broadcasting in
postwar Europe where television developed under strict government purview.
343
Naturally, such
an institutional architecture was in stark conflict with Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 description of the
market mechanism as a dispersed supra-human mode of communication and cognition. To be sure,
Hayek’s sentiment was echoed by George Gilder, a libertarian venture capitalist, when in his 1990
book Life After Television, he anticipated the death of television—“a totalitarian medium”—at the
hands of the personal computer. Unlike TV programming, produced in corporate and state centers

342
Alongside Carl Schmitt, Heidegger was perhaps the most consistent critic of liberalism, its culture and science.
Heidegger’s main insight, from the well-known lecture The Age of the World Picture (1938), was that with the
development of modern science and technology, human experience of the world and the self that he classified as “the
Being,” became stifled through machine’s propensity to automate human praxis. For Heidegger, scientific research
with its modern methodology can also serve as a machine for it alters and objectifies them “in research.” This happens
when “truth has transformed itself into the certainty of representation.” In other words, representations of the world
rather than direct, lived experiences of it, are left as the only ways through which people can understand the world
around them. This is what Heidegger meant by the term “world picture,” or a representation of the world in its totality
through mechanistic means that absolve contemplation and thought from revealing truth outside the pictorial constraint:
“world picture does not mean ‘picture of the world’ but, rather, the world grasped as picture.” Martin Heidegger, “The
Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57-87.
343
These were some of the earliest rebuttals of the BBC and European broadcasting by neoliberal economists.
Consider, for example, economist Ronald Coase’s critique of the BBC model of broadcasting in the early 1950s when
he attacked the Corporation for stifling competition. Coase’s and similar criticism finally resulted in the introduction
of commercial broadcasting in 1955 when ITV began broadcasting as Britain’s second TV channel.
154
by a handful of experts, Gilder asserted that the personal computer would liberate individuals and
their consciousness for the global good.
344
All of this begs the question: How could television act
as a cybernetic machine when neoliberalism’s obvious offspring is the Internet Age and the
personal computer? And yet, after almost three decades of the internet, we are confronted with a
striking and paradoxical fact. Our daily experience of the digital world—one highly
commercialized and centralized by a handful of Silicon Valley corporations—is akin to the
structure and operation of network television in the U.S. and European public broadcasting during
their prime 1960s days. Today, the internet retains very little of its 1990s liberatory promise
because it operates precisely like any other mass medium—a fact that Gilder acknowledged in his
recent book Life After Google (2018)—although still without a large regulatory framework.
I have invoked this short historical overview of debates within neoliberal circles to argue
that our ontological view of television vis-à-vis the internet can, in fact, tell us very little about
how these communication technologies function. Both have been heavily influenced by strong
corporate interests, and have, thus far, been helpful to the international neoliberal movement. It
isn’t by accident that the Mont Pèlerin Society, the central neoliberal institution established by
Hayek in 1947, devised its most public argument against welfarism through the docu-history form.
Indeed, Milton Friedman presented the ten-part docu-history Free to Choose (PBS, 1980) with the
help of both private and public funds as well as former BBC-2 talent.
345
For example, Friedman’s
show was produced by Michael Peacock, the former BBC-2’s program chief, who was responsible
for devising the channel as “a new, exciting, different, adventurous, flexible approach to

344
“The top-down television system is an alien and corrosive force in democratic capitalism. Contrary to the rich and
variegated promise of new technology proliferating options on every hand, TV squeezes the consciousness of an entire
nation through a few score channels.” George Gilder, Life After Television (New York: Whittle Direct Books, 1990),
18.
345
Michael Peacock formed his own production company Video Arts in the 1970s with several of his BBC colleagues.
His production company would partner with PBS in producing Friedman’s neoliberal TV series.
155
television.”
346
(Fig. 22) Free to Choose was also produced by additional former BBC-2 talent such
as Robert Reid, the Head of Science and Feature Department, and Anthony Jay, a BBC director,
and writer.

Fig. 22: BBC-2’s first Program Chief Michael Peacock (Radio Times)

Irrespective of the Free to Choose’s production team, the question remains—why would
Friedman and the neoliberal thought collective produce a program on public television? And how
was the BBC, perhaps, the world’s greatest public broadcasting company instrumental in
disseminating neoliberal ideas? Although historians of neoliberalism tend to view the production
of Free to Choose as a story of appropriation, especially through the series’ ersatz populism, I am
reluctant to accept this view.
347
First, as I have shown in Chapter One, neoliberalism, and interwar

346
“BBC 2: Programme Plans,” Radio Times, R44/1, 219/1, The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
347
I understand where this argument came from because appropriating prestigious cultural forms and practices was
not foreign to the neoliberal thought collective. Indeed, historian of neoliberalism Philip Mirowski gives an interesting
account of how a group of Swedish bankers helped institute the Nobel Prize in Economics in the late-1960s. This
award has almost no connection to the original Alfred Nobel Prize because when the award was instituted, economists
were not considered worthy producers of knowledge. Nevertheless, the ersatz Nobel prize helped legitimize the ideas

156
documentary cinema both originated in the ruins of European empires and acted to safeguard
capitalism from mass political movements. Moreover, neoliberals were interested in using cinema
for liberal propaganda, hoping that the medium’s visualization techniques would help explicate
invisible liberal processes, thus legitimizing liberal governance. Once documentary cinema
successfully migrated to television in 1946 with the establishment of the BBC’s Documentary
Department which employed both Grierson’s “documentary boys” such as Paul Rotha, Duncan
Ross as well as Kenneth Clark’s protégé Jill Craigie, neoliberal relationship to visual media only
intensified. Indeed, the British Documentary Film Movement finally garnered a larger
international audience once it became adopted by British television resulting in a much-desired
distributional network for British documentaries.
348
Second, the experience BBC-2 docu-histories
provided complemented the postwar liberalism’s normalization of internationalism and global
interconnectedness. As we shall see, docu-histories functioned as a proto-digital experience not
least through their strong cybernetic ideals and extensive use of early computer animation. This
was not an entirely exceptional occurrence. As Fred Turner argued in his pre-history of the Internet
Age, the 1960s counterculture movement provided a printed edition of the early internet.
349
I will
return to this part of my larger argument in Chapter Four when I read several different docu-
histories.
And yet, describing postwar television as a machine of and for neoliberalism would not
surprise media scholars. As Anna McCarthy suggests in The Citizen Machine: Governing by
Television in 1950s America, Cold War bureaucrats developed television as a machine of

of several neoliberal economists including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Theodore Schultz, George Stigler,
Roland Coase, James Buchanan, and Gary Becker. Philip Mirowski, “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize,” in Dieter
Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski, eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (London and New York: Verso,
2020), 219-254.
348
Duncan Ross, an offspring of the British Documentary Film Movement, worked alongside Paul Rotha on setting
up the BBC’s Documentary Department once television broadcasting resumed in Britain after the war.
349
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole World Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), Chapter 3.
157
(neo)liberal governance. From the vantage point of Cold War politicians, intellectuals, and
policymakers, television was a politically neutral technology that complemented postwar liberal
governance.
350
Although Cold War bureaucrats and intellectuals disliked the medium, and were
like Hannah Arendt highly suspicious of mass society, they trusted that the merger between
television and governing would not only help extoll the benefits of liberal democracy, such as
racial equality and international liberal humanism but also support the expansion of U.S. corporate
and military interests at home and abroad.
351
In McCarthy’s history, television emerged to
complement liberalism’s governance through its techniques of self-conduct and self-restraint.
Undeniably influenced by Michel Foucault’s understanding of liberalism as a political philosophy
committed to new ways of self-governance, McCarthy’s history also displayed the inextricable
link between liberal television and commerce. The Cold War liberals one encounters in The Citizen
Machine held a common liberal belief, first voiced by Adam Smith in 1776, that international trade
modified people’s behavior by teaching them to become more social and worldly, thus allowing
them to abandon their local customs and immediate surroundings for a chance to participate in
national and global economies.
352
Influenced by Smith’s description of capitalist economies’
benefit, Cold War liberals accepted as true that television would help propagate self-restrain
needed to maintain “law and order.”
Similar ideas were in circulation among the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting,
established in July 1960 to analyze the state of British broadcasting. Undoubtedly, the Committee’s

350
“Television broadcasting came into existence at the moment when this neoliberal paradigm first began to cohere,
so it is worth paying close attention to the moments when the powerful and privileged, bent on reinventing government
and redefining citizenship, turned to the medium as a tool for reaching those people they thought of as the masses.”
Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (New York and London: The New
Press, 2010), 3.
351
McCarthy quotes William L. Bird’s argument that it was important to create “a cultural climate conducive to the
autonomous expansion of enterprise.” Ibid., 40.
352
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151-155.
158
most significant outcome was Britain’s third TV channel BBC-2. Faced with a choice between
public and commercial broadcasting, the Committee granted the BBC an additional channel for it
promised to expand educational television to adult audiences. Moreover, certain Committee
members such as Richard Hoggart argued that television should make more use of the
documentary form in a way that would resemble, what he dubbed, “the free essay.”
353
Not
surprisingly, Hoggart’s defense of television and its abilities was deeply influenced by Adam
Smith’s moral theories. Television, according to Hoggart, can serve as “an educator in manners, a
way of transmitting—by implication and suggestion—attitudes and assumptions different from
those many in its audience have previously held.”
354
Instead of simply operating within a
commercialized sphere, television could heighten a sense of sympathy in mass society. Compare
Hoggart’s explanation of television to Smith’s definition of the market and commercial society as
forcing people to appease and lessen the selfish, at times, asocial impulses for the benefit of
communal, if not, global well-being.
355
Smith developed this idea first in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759), only to perfect it further through what is widely seen as the first economics
book, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Certainly, the market and television do not simply provide
knowledge of the world; they also make society irrefutably more open to ideas and positions people
are unable to experience from their immediate, intimate surroundings.
Relating public television to market society’s benefits further materialized in the Pilkington
Committee’s decision to grant the BBC an additional television channel. Undoubtedly, this
government act was a recognition of the Corporation’s past efforts in developing broadcasting.

353
Richard Hoggart, “The Uses of Television,” Encounter 14, no. 1 (January 1960): 40.
354
Ibid., 41.
355
“… those social situations that give the greatest stimulus to developing self-command are those where individuals
are regularly put into contact with strangers, or with others who do not or cannot be expected to share one’s own
feelings… the same spread of commercial relations, seen in terms of the conditions for developing self-command…
encouraged moral improvement by replacing feudal domesticity with situations where people were put into connection
with a larger and less familiar population of spectators.” Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience
in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century, 152-153.
159
Around the same time, the BBC commissioned historian Asa Briggs to produce the first history of
British broadcasting with the Corporation centrally positioned within Briggs’ narrative; the first
volume was published in 1961 at the height of the Committee’s proceedings. Under this moment
of heightened self-consciousness, the BBC developed its second channel with a strong sense of
branding.
356
Indeed, the channel was supposed to complement the Corporation’s history of
broadcasting and its values of public service while also producing programs that could not be
found on the BBC’s main service or on Britain’s commercial television. By taking the middle
ground between BBC-1 and ITV, Britain’s third channel blossomed in an atmosphere somewhat
liberated from debates over commercial broadcasting in the 1950s.
357

Television’s entanglement with (neo)liberal governance outlived the Cold War. Similar to
McCarthy, James Hay and Laurie Ouellette were inspired by Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism.
As Hay and Ouellette argued, television in general, and reality TV in specific, function through
what Foucault described as dispersed power: “These are not abstract ideologies imposed from
above, but highly dispersed and practical techniques for reflecting on, managing, and improving
the multiple dimensions of our personal lives with the resources available to us.”
358
In contrast to
earlier forms of educational television that sought to train viewers through the expert lens, the
corporatization of media in the 1980s and the 1990s invited ordinary people—“individuals”—to
participate in their makeover. As such, for Hay and Ouellette, reality television functions as a
proxy for neoliberal ideology because it teaches the logic and techniques espoused by neoliberal

356
Not surprisingly, the Committee requested Kenneth Clark’s testimony at the start of their deliberations for he had
been part of commercial broadcasting in his capacity as part of the ITV Programming Board that was seen as keeping
tabs on commercial broadcasting in Britain; an institution that was supposed to prevent the development of American-
style commercialism on British television. HO 244/82, July 1961, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
357
In fact, BBC-2 recruited much of ITV’s talent especially for producing documentary shows. “The BBC is offering
big salaries and new programmes in a bid to win ITV’s backroom stars and producers…” Anon., “BBC Woos ITV
Men for Channel 2,” Daily Express, August 26, 1963.
358
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-welfare Citizenship
(Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 2.
160
thinkers such as human capital and entrepreneurship. And yet, the authors’ insightful analysis of
reality television would have benefitted from a larger historical framework since neoliberal logic
was present across early television broadcasting.
359

Perhaps most surprisingly, the Cold War merger between television and governance was
not only relegated to TV systems and cultures of the United States and Western Europe. As Anikó
Imre argued, neoliberal broadcasting proliferated across the Cold War divide. Socialist television,
from its more liberal forms in Hungary and Yugoslavia to totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union
and Romania, developed TV broadcasting with a pronounced educational impetus for building an
ideal socialist society.
360
Akin to Western bureaucrats, socialist politicians also displayed a
common disparaging view of mass media that prevented them from fully controlling programming
decisions.
361
Imre’s history was a bold and original effort to uncover not only the diversity of TV
cultures within regions that get easily lumped together as “Soviet,” but also the proliferation of
early “reality” television within socialist countries. Getting this history right matters because it
disrupts the common view that neoliberalism ascended in the 1970s to replace the ailing welfare
state.
362
As Imre has shown, neoliberal impulses were part of early television culture and did not
emanate, as Hay and Ouellette seem to suggest, from the demise of the welfare state in the 1980s
and 1990s.

359
This is a common criticism of the book, frequently voiced in book reviews.
360
“The aesthetic of socialist realism they adopted was supposed to support an overarching educational intention to
teach viewers how to be good socialist citizens. This pairing of realist aesthetic with pedagogical intent is not unlike
the self-professed profile of contemporary reality programs. It was anything but cheap in its intentions. It was driven
by noble initiatives to democratize access to education, to create a level playing field among people of different class
and educational back- grounds, and to socialize the individual as always primarily a community member. In this regard
it was the opposite of contemporary reality shows, which isolate the individual and teach the virtues of self-help.
Socialist television’s contribution to the prehistory of reality-based programming is not only significant in itself but
also offers a critical counter-discourse to reality tv’s ideological presumptions and academic assessments.” Anikó
Imre, TV Socialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 29.
361
“Rather than an instrument of propaganda, television was a profoundly ambivalent medium in the hands of party
authorities.” Ibid., 7.
362
A similar argument was provided through Johanna Bockman’s history of socialist economics and its relationship
to neoliberalism. Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
161
It is tempting to identify neoliberalism as a set of economic doctrines precisely because
Thatcher and Reagan were influenced by the neoliberal thought collective. However, to understand
neoliberalism, we must spend less time on the 1970s when the welfare state reached a permanent
state of crisis. As I have argued in Chapter One, we need to focus on how neoliberalism developed
since 1918. Indeed, neoliberalism has never been uniform; it went through several different phases
that were marked by various historical and political actors. Consider, for example, my previous
chapter’s focus on Jill Craigie, an undeniably socialist filmmaker, whose work with the Ministry
of Information and Kenneth Clark resulted in her groundbreaking art documentary Out of Chaos
(1944). Despite being written and directed by a self-described socialist, the film best represented
the wartime transition of (neo)liberal propaganda from didacticism to experience; it offered a
compelling alternative to totalitarian regimes through the promise of international liberal
humanism.
In his critique of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology, Stuart Hall asserted that the real
challenge behind understanding ideology in non-hierarchical societies such as Western
democracies is tracing the moment when certain ideological positions are created and disseminated:
“The function of the State is, in part, precisely to bring together or articulate into a complexly
structured instance, a range of political discourses and social practices which are concerned at
different sites with the transmission and transformation of power.”
363
When writing a media
history of neoliberalism, one has to remain particularly attuned to the ways it was articulated and
not on how it functioned as an unchanged mechanism of self-governance. To see neoliberalism as
a set of pre-determined techniques of governance, or what Hay and Ouellette termed “cultural
technology,” flattens the diversity of neoliberal practice in mass media and elsewhere. Even worse,

363
Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 2, no. 2 (June 1985): 93.
162
it deprives media of their cultural and political autonomy not least their potential to produce
alternative, perhaps, even radical readings of texts that counter and undermine dominant ideology.
Similar to Hall’s charge of Althusser’s “state ideological apparatuses” as always already locked in
“creeping Marxist functionalism,” I argue that we need to study and understand neoliberalism vis-
à-vis television as collaborative.
364
The neoliberal ascendency cannot be explained through its
supposed domination of television programming when Milton Friedman presented the docu-series
Free to Choose (PBS, 1980) by “appropriating” an otherwise prestigious TV format developed on
British public television. Nor can one find neoliberal logic in Friedman’s efforts to “hoodwink”
the American audience by presenting neoliberalism as a populist alternative to the government’s
mismanagement of public funds through inflation and unfair taxation. This kind of argumentation
would, indeed, point to a crude way of understanding ideology as “false consciousness” or a
deliberate misrepresentation of social reality by those that hold capital power.
365
In this view,
television acts not as a “machine for thought,” as I have suggested, but as a mindless mechanism
of capital that reproduces the social and psychological conditions needed to disarm potential
discontent.
And yet, I do not want to undermine the real change to planetary well-being brought on by
Thatcher’s and Reagan’s assault on organized labor, the neoliberal downsizing of social programs
such as Section 8 which resulted in the explosion of unhoused people across the United States, and

364
“There is a problem with this position. Ideology in this essay seems to be… that of the dominant class… Ideology
seems to perform the function required of it… to perform it effectively, and to go on performing it, without
encountering any counter-tendencies… concept always to be found in Marx wherever he discusses reproduction and
precisely the concept which distinguishes the analysis in Capital from functionalism…” Stuart Hall, “Signification,
Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication,
Volume 2, No. 2 (June 1985): 99.
Although Hall noticed that in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels ascribed dominant ideology to all classes
365
“Ako se ljudi i njihovi stvarni odnosi javljaju u svekolikoj ideologiji kao u nekoj Camera obscura na glavu
postavljeni, ovaj fenomen izvire iz njihovog istorijskog životnog procesa isto tako kao što izvrtanje predmeta na
mrežnjači izvire iz njihovog neposredno fizičkog.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Nemačka Ideologija I (Beograd:
Kultura, 1964), 22. [Die Deutsche Ideologie]
163
the outsourcing of labor to countries with low, even meager, employment costs. These were all
real economic consequences of “the neoliberal turn” in the 1980s and 1990s. But as Marx
presciently observed, the real historical challenge lies in detecting systemic transition before the
new political and economic order can be named; before it is blatantly obvious. When speaking of
bourgeois society, as the most complex social formation, Marx concluded the 1857 Introduction
to Grundrisse in the following way: “…modern bourgeois society—is always what is given, in the
head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the
characteristics of existence… this society by no means begins only at the point where one can
speak of it as such.”
366
Inspired by this pre-Capital Marx, my dissertation has traced historical and
political impulses that informed the nascent neoliberal movement; I focused on the ruins of post-
imperial Vienna and interwar London rather than Reagan’s Administration in the 1980s when
neoliberalism, undoubtedly, gained geopolitical currency and wide-scale application.
367

Media scholars tend to take for granted that the neoliberal ascendency of the late-1970s
emerged as an answer to the decade’s political and economic crises.
368
To be sure, economic
stagflation and the crises of liberal hegemony were already apparent by the first truly global
protests in 1968. But we are often too quick to accept common misconceptions of neoliberalism
as a fixed set of economic policies because media studies often engage with identical secondary

366
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Random House, 1973), 106.
367
For example, Frederic Jameson’s critique of post-modernity from 1989 was already succinctly described in 1958
when Hannah Arendt, without naming the period’s dominant “structure of feeling” as neoliberalism or post-
modernism, charged the push for depoliticization and economization of public life on surprisingly similar terms as
Jameson. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future.
368
Indeed, one of Cultural Studies’ formative books Policing the Crisis was published in 1978 to address these
manifold crises of postwar hegemony that were, consequentially, simultaneous to neoliberal ascendency in Britain
and the United States. In these narratives, the welfare state emerged as a historical solution to the devastating crises
produced by unfettered capitalism in the 1930s; but by the late-1960s, it encountered worldwide challenge most clearly
elucidated through the first truly global protests of 1968. If one follows this line of argument then it becomes very
“clear” why the BBC, undoubtedly part of the welfare “establishment,” produced a reactionary plea for the primacy
of Western civilization (and liberal capitalism) in its first docu-history Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969). Stuart Hall, Chas
Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order
(London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1978).
164
sources, thus reproducing this historical myopia. For history, media scholars turn to David
Harvey’s very brief history of neoliberalism, while their theoretical concepts are influenced by
Michel Foucault’s prescient 1979 lectures.
369
However compelling Foucault’s conception of
neoliberalism was, his focus was only on German ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism.
This is an unfortunate fact because von Mises’ and Hayek’s writings were highly diverse and
interdisciplinary which makes their neoliberalism less imbued in pure economic theory. If only
media scholars read Hayek’s work, they would see how his central mid-century concerns were not
economic, but they targeted communication and cybernetics. As such, Hayekian neoliberalism is
easier to integrate with historical and political questions of interest to media scholars. It is also
worth mentioning, as I did in the introduction, that Foucault’s investment in neoliberalism is murky
at best. For him, neoliberalism sometimes offered a compelling alternative to a centralized and
bureaucratized state apparatus which continues to inspire readings of his work as reactionary. For
Jürgen Habermas, Foucault was “a Young Conservative.”
370

There is more to neoliberalism than narratives told by either Harvey and Foucault.
371

Indeed, relying too much on these external enunciations of the neoliberal project threatens to
obscure the dynamism and diversity of the neoliberal project that was often most eclectic in its

369
“Neoliberalism has… become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to
the point… incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interrupt, live in, and understand the world… it seeks
to bring all human action into the domain of the market.” Harvey describes the neoliberal ascendency as using the
1970s crises of the abolishment of fixed exchange rates in 1971 with Nixon’s shock, worldwide fiscal crises, and
failure of the left to help and offer alternative to these crises. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
370
Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Ben-Habib, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, No. 2, Special
Issue on Modernism (Winter 1981): 13.
371
Media scholars that approach the field through political economy of culture are more critical of Foucault. Consider,
for example, Janice Peck’s work. In her 2006 article, she quoted Peter Daws’ criticism of Foucault’s theory of power:
“a kind of a priori, producing discourses, knowledges, pleasures, but not itself reducible to any other kind of relation.
His assertation that we are never ‘outside’ power, that’s points of resistance are internally related to the operation of
power, begins to look remarkably like the Lacanian notion, which he opposes, of a Law which desires may ruse with,
but which it can never transgress… it is never a question of whose power or for what purpose, since the ‘purpose’ of
any power can now only be its own expansion.” Janice Peck, “Why We Shouldn’t Be Bored with the Political
Economy versus Cultural Studies Debate,” Cultural Critique 64 (Fall 2006): 102-103.
165
entanglement with media institutions. Perhaps even worse, media scholars abolish the political
economic question in culture by safely depositing it in the taken-for-granted neoliberal ascendency
as a natural antidote to welfarism. The historical context behind this “rise” gets lost and
neoliberalism is solely understood as offering market solutions to issues once under the purveyor
of the once strong welfare state. In contrast, if we take my argument from Chapter One that the
neoliberal thought collective sought to rethink and reform classical liberalism for a post-imperial
era of nation-states and mass politics, then neoliberal ascendency takes manifold expressions and
includes much of the twentieth century. In such a historical account, neoliberalism becomes less
of a finished project but a dynamic one that went through several stages. But, most relevantly, it
was part of a longer liberal project against politics and for the expansion of the liberal world-
system through both private and public institutions. The point was not to bend society under the
rule of the market, although that was certainly part of the project, the main goal was to restrict
mass politics and democracy through supranational regulatory institutions. In such an expanded
historical narrative, media institutions, particularly state institutions join international legal and
financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund
in regulating and stifling political action.
372
It ceases to be a binary opposition between the (welfare)
state and neoliberalism but becomes a collective enterprise on inoculating capital from political
and social instability.
It is tempting to view the relationship between neoliberalism and television purely on
didactic grounds through its techniques of self-betterment. Undoubtedly, studying reality TV
provides a compelling example of how neoliberalism infused its logic in modern society. But this
is only part of the picture that, if focused too blindly on, threatens to miss the context in which

372
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass. and London,
England: Harvard University Press, 2018).
166
neoliberalism and television developed. Most importantly, these studies absolve complex
methodological questions central to debates between the political economy of culture, and cultural
studies. Although neoliberalism cannot be studied through television or other mass media without
interrogating ways in which television remains entangled with financial capitalism, such an
institutional methodology does not have to include a choice between matter (i.e., the economy)
and culture (i.e., media texts). The methodology must consider ways in which the two are
inextricably linked. To focus only on reality television means to absolve the difficulty in merging
cultural studies with political economy; it threatens to displace the economic question in reality
TV’s impulse to reproduce cheap content, dictated by media corporations, and the infusion of
neoliberal tenets in their representational form or what Richard Dienst called “microscopic
mimesis.”
373
The mimetic quality is relevant to the ways capitalism functions in mass media; it
does show that by teaching the right mindset and the necessary skills to remain “competitive” on
the market, neoliberalism becomes ingrained in the everyday experience. And yet, these were not
solely properties of television as a medium.
374
Neither was television, and color television
specifically, only interested in representing knowledge. Those involved in the production were in
the business of revealing knowledge that they thought would otherwise remain hidden from human
scrutiny. In many respects, color television promised a complete vision of the world that was
unable to be grasped in any other way. If we choose to forget the historical, economic, and political
context that gave rise to these ideas about what television could do to help promote the liberal
world-system, we dangerously flatten the dynamism and diversity of neoliberal thought and

373
Richard Deinst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television, 36.
374
Indeed, one only needs to remember the prolific VoD and VHS career of Brian Tracy, the neoliberal guru, who
promoted free market values in forms of self-branding and development for over thirty years. Tracy “outed” himself
as a fellow neoliberal traveler in an online speech for The Students for Liberty group where he praised Ludwig von
Mises, his book Human Action, and the Mont Pelerin Society as central to his understanding of economic freedom
and personal liberty. For the full speech “Brian Tracy on the Future of Freedom,” visit the YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/9z8mZHibyVU.
167
practice—all properties behind neoliberal capitalism’s unusual longevity within the crises-ridden
environments produced by its own unfolding and expansion.

168
Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969) and the docu-history form
It is a new world, so why not a new history?
375

- Fernand Braudel

BBC-2 began its broadcast in 1964. At the time, it was still broadcasting in black and white
but with an improved resolution that allowed for more international program exchange.
376

Although color television was introduced during the Wimbledon tournament in 1967, the BBC’s
second channel developed high-quality programs in anticipation of color broadcasting. For
example, its first large production was the history of World War One entitled The Great War
(BBC-2, 1964). From the start, BBC-2 was involved with expanding adult education through
historical programming. Series such as The Great War as expensive high-quality programs were
imagined as able to distinguish British broadcasting on the international market as well as
showcase the medium’s technological innovations. Indeed, the channel’s 1964 exhibition entitled
“Magic by Design” as well as the promotion film that followed the BBC-2 launch indicated the
desire on part of its executives to brand the channel as revolutionizing broadcasting.
377
As such,
the idea behind docu-history programs emerged from this dual desire to expand TV technology—
higher definition 625-line and color—as well as employ a more expansive application of these new
technologies than present in U.S. commercial broadcasting. This is how BBC-2’s Controller,
David Attenborough, explained the rise of the docu-history form on television.
378
However,
Attenborough’s assessment of U.S. color programming is surprisingly myopic if not outright
misleading; U.S. color television experimented with a variety of successful productions from art
documentaries such as A Visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1954) to NBC’s longest-running

375
Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” 8.
376
“Notes on BBC-2” by Perry Guinness (BBC’s Publicity Organizer), August 20, 1963, 1, Television—BBC2,
Publicity R44/1, 278/1, The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
377
Ibid.
378
Interview with David Attenborough on Civilisation’s 2006 DVD release.
169
Western TV series Bonanza (1959-1973).
379
But what connected American color television to
British plans was an understanding that this new technology ought to be promoted and used for
“high-brow” programming, outside the “usual” realm of broadcasting. This was not a surprise
given the high cost of color TV sets and the regular fine-tuning necessary for their proper
functioning.
380
Documentary television, in specific, was seen by TV executives as well-suited to
represent the new experiences promised by color technology because, as media historian Susan
Murray argued, TV documentaries allowed U.S. networks to sell “an idea about color vision and
its connection to expanding cultural, visual, and political horizons, while also emphasizing the
sensual pleasures of travel, design, and consumption.”
381
Certainly, TV documentaries were
understood as merging various forms of Cold War visual culture, from photojournalistic magazines,
documentary cinema, and the explosion of international travel made possible by the jet.
There was another, no less important, context behind the introduction of color television
motivated by a general view of the British economy in the 1960s. Newspaper articles from the
period often invoked a pronounced British lag in developing and adopting color broadcasting as a
sign and symptom of its economic decline. By the time Britain finally developed color
broadcasting in 1967, color television was already present in the United States (1953), Japan
(1960), Canada (1966), and West Germany (1967) which adopted color simultaneously on both of
its state channels. Once a world leader in industry and commerce, post-imperial Britain seemed
painfully irrelevant on the global market, lacking the creative edge demanded by modern capitalist

379
The programs chosen for color broadcasting had to be high ranking so that their popularity could justify the high
cost of production demanded by color technology. Susan Murray, Bright Signals: A History of Color Television
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 122.
We can read Attenborough’s assessment of U.S. color television as a rhetorical gesture to underline the vitality and
high-cultural value of British public broadcasting because, after all, color came to Britain once the Pilkington
Committee granted the Corporation with additional TV channel in recognition of its work in uplifting the cultural and
intellectual capacities of television as a mass medium.
380
Ibid., 113.
381
Ibid., 195.
170
production. To make matters worse, British consumers often intentionally avoided purchasing
British goods and commodities due to their lack of reliability.
382
Such attitudes complemented a
growing sense in Britain of its widescale “culture of decline” that influenced much of its economic
and, indeed, cultural policy in the 1960s and 1970s.
383
Undoubtedly, the devaluation of the British
pound in 1967 was done in part to stimulate export to overseas markets, further supported by
campaigns back home that urged Britons to “Buy British.”
384
It is not surprising that the
development of docu-histories at the BBC-2 were influenced by these economic trends, especially
through their desire to serve the lucrative North American market in an effort to gain foreign
currency.
385
Because the production of these shows for the international market was so large and
commonplace, by 197, the BBC had to defend the existence of these shows as inherently “British,”
made to serve primarily the domestic public even if they were successfully exported.
386
A situation
made worse by the fact that color broadcasting with its expensive production costs resulted in the
rise of the TV license to 6 pounds for B&W television, and 11 pounds for color.
387
This made color
TV sets a difficult thing to sell. In the minds of BBC executives, only a manufactured cultural
event, or what American sociologist Daniel Boorstin called “pseudo-event,” could help change

382
Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm argued that the British lag behind both Germany and the United States was already
felt in the late nineteenth century.
383
Jim Tomlinson, “The Decline of the Empire and the Economic ‘Decline’ of Britain,” Twentieth Century British
History 14, no. 3 (2003): 201-221.
384
Large trade deficits reached a negative percentage of the GDP when, between 1967 Q3 and 1968 Q1, they dropped
to almost -3%.
385
By 1966, BBC was faced with serious financial difficulties that were perceived by people in the industry as capable
of stifling the development of good-quality color programs. Radio Rentals Limited’s Chairman J.W.C. Robinson
expressed this view in the company’s annual meeting: “The real danger is that the present crisis in the finances of the
B.B.C. could be the menace to first-class colour programmes.” J.W.C. Robinson, “Radio Rentals Limited: The Future
and Colour Television,” The Guardian, September 8, 1966, 15.
386
“With little money available for developments the task of arranging priorities has been unusually difficult, but in
spite of financial restraint the BBC has been able to develop new programmes and establish new programme styles.”
(p. 13) and “The leading BBC-2 programme of the year was undoubtedly Dr Jacob Bronowski’s series The Ascent of
Man, the story of how man shaped his own past. This was immediately made into a best-selling book in time for the
Christmas trade, and as such it became a worthy successor to Civilisation and America.” (p. 20) Anon., BBC Handbook
of 1975: Incorporating the Annual Report and Accounts 1973-1974 (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1975).
387
The BBC was granted full access to these funds for developing its programming.
171
public opinion. And yet, a central question needed to be tackled: why would public broadcasters
use taxpayers’ funds to produce programs for lucrative international markets?
Part of this question sought to be answered through the supposedly high-cultural values of
public broadcasting, aimed at defeating the cultural malaise of post-imperial Britain. Indeed, the
first docu-history series Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969) was motivated by the decade’s prevalent
feeling of cultural decline and defeatism. This was explicitly invoked in the series’ first episode.
Consider, for example, Kenneth Clark’s opening scene on the banks of the Seine:
Looking at those great works of Western man and remembering all that he has achieved in
philosophy, poetry, science, lawmaking, it does seem hard to believe that the European civilization
can ever vanish. And yet, you know, it has happened once. All the lifegiving human activities that
we lumped together under the word civilization have been obliterated once in Western Europe
when the Barbarians ran over the Roman Empire. For two centuries, the heart of European
civilization almost stopped beating. We got through by the skin of our teeth. In the last few years,
we developed an uneasy feeling that this could happen again.

The proclaimed goal of the series, in this pessimistic opening, was to explore what made
Western civilization “the greatest force in recent history” and how it might be preserved from the
crises that challenged its global primacy. Without specifically addressing them, to viewers in 1969,
it was clear that Clark was referring to scientific and technological progress such as nuclear
weapons, political crises, the loss of legitimacy in liberal democracies, and the British “culture of
decline” that became the period’s dominant “structure of feeling.” Indeed, Civilisation was filmed
during 1967 and 1968, the two most consequential periods that invoked a sense of instability and
distrust in Western liberal democracies across the world. The political crisis took its most visible
form in the largest protests of organized labor, resulting in a complete strike in countries such as
France in May 1968, or against the bureaucratization of politics from Prague to Mexico City. To
speak of Civilisation as a reactionary program amidst widespread distrust and renunciation of the
liberal world-system in 1968 would not seem surprising. After all, the series was written and
presented by Clark who was at the time seventy years old and often absurdly out of touch with the
172
New Left’s demands. Indeed, his demeanor, the multiple tweed coats, and the stiffness of his body
presented an older image of Britishness that seemed to be under threat ever since the 1948 docking
of HMT Empire Windrush—the ship that brought the first wave of immigrants from the West
Indies.
388
(Fig. 23) To a deeply classist and white society, the presence of immigrant bodies in the
imperial center invoked an ambivalence of, on the one hand, the yearning for past British imperial
glory, while on the other hand, uneasiness over the ways in which these “aliens” undermined
traditional conceptions of Britishness.
389

Fig. 23: Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, episode thirteen “Heroic Materialism”

This was the paradox of Clark and Hayek. To be sure, both were indisputably conservative
for insisting on the need to obey tradition, regulations, and institutions that support “civilized”
society even if we do not consciously understand these social obligations. But Clark and Hayek
were also futurists for their interest in modern communication and information.
390
Hence, the

388
His production team’s first impression of Clark was described in official communication as “stiff but cordial.”
Letter from Peter Montagnon to BBC-2 Executives, May 16, 1967, 1, Civilisation: Correspondence and General, T
53/177/1, The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
389
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
390
“Hayek’s thought represents a paradoxical combination of future-orientation and reaction, manifesting the
paradoxes of preemptive temporality. Even as he insisted that he was not a conservative because he was not opposed
to change (see the postscript in Hayek [1960]), large parts of his oeuvre are devoted to the importance of tradition and

173
didacticism of Clark’s appearance on television simultaneously signified and reformed educational
broadcasting. Indeed, he appears before the camera and lectures on the relevance of certain artistic
episodes inherently relevant to Western civilization, but he also transgresses the stable lecturer
position through the series’ diverse mobility across multiple out-of-studio settings. As the series’
director and producer Peter Montagnon asserted, Civilisation’s greatest achievement was its
transformation of television’s “anchor man” through the series’ extensive use of montage that
animated Clark’s ideas across different temporal and spatial settings.
391
Prior to Civilisation,
educational television was constrained to a TV studio where scientists and other experts lectured
directly to the audience, aided perhaps only by a blackboard or other traditional learning devices.
Through the on-screen journey, Clark disrupted this stable lecturer position and became a fellow
traveler in this impressive televisual exhibition of Western cultural heritage. Although Clark is
represented as an expert on the subject of art and history which he, undoubtedly was, there was a
sense of comradeship that the producers wanted to invoke within the audience. And yet, the
educational apparatus, as Althusser argued, became the principle, and favored approach for
disciplining people to accept the primacy of capitalism.
392
This “dominant ideological State
apparatus” is used by the State to reinstate ideas necessary for capital’s reproduction.
393
For
Althusser, educational apparatuses serve to reinforce dominant ideologies, thus creating an
obedient society. To be sure, the documentary form was always already developed to solicit
consent and acceptance of global capitalism through the form’s indexical claims to the real. As I

customs, rules and pressures handed down from the past.” Martijn Konings, Capital and Time: For a New Critique of
Neoliberal Reason, Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2018), 105.
391
“…carrying ideas from one location to the other.” The British Entertainment History Project, Interview with Peter
Montagnon, October 31, 1995, 2 of 4, 25 minutes.
392
“…what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e., as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the
educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its function the previously dominant ideological State apparatus,
the Church.” Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 27-28.
393
“…reproduction of labour power requires… a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order.”
Ibid., 6.
174
have shown in Chapter One, the British Documentary Movement’s interest in further developing
cinematic realism stemmed from this ideological function to, as art historian John Tagg argued,
capture and frame meaning.
394

The BBC docu-histories continued with this interwar application of documentary cinema,
and it might seem obvious, even self-defeating, to point out that Civilisation was an ideological
plea for the preservation of British imperialism in its Commonwealth iteration. The series was an
archaic if not pitiful attempt to make Western cultural heritage relevant in the post-1968 moment
when several decolonization projects delegitimized the liberal world-system’s primacy. And yet,
it is important to remember that this was a trait shared with the international neoliberal
movement.
395
A desire to overcome the West’s civilizational decline ignited the neoliberal project
to form international allegiances since liberal philosophy would, otherwise, become a victim of
the Austro-Hungarian defeat. As historian of neoliberalism Jessica Whyte described, the neoliberal
movement began in Mises’ office at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce when he wondered
whether the West had any chance of surviving the specter of mass politics unleashed through
universal suffrage and the fall of European imperial regimes: “One day, as Mises looked out of the
window… onto Vienna’s opulent grand boulevard (Ringstrasse), he told [Fritz] Machlup, ‘Maybe
grass will grow there, because our civilization will end.’”
396
Mises was the first among the Mont
Pèlerin Society (MPS) members to devote sustained attention to the problem of civilization. Indeed,
Mises’ protégé Friederich Hayek established the MPS in April 1947 while proclaiming the
preservation of Western civilization as one of its official aims. This goal is still relevant to the

394
John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2009).
395
The Mont Pelerin Society’s 1947 Statement of Aims quite bluntly pronounces their goal of preserving Western
civilization.
396
Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London and New York:
Verso, 2019), 55.
175
Society. While I devote more time to contemporary MPS in this dissertation’s Epilogue, it is
interesting to notice that one of its leading members, historian Niall Ferguson, became a world-
renowned public intellectual precisely through his docu-history series that have dealt with the
problem of civilizational decline. Ferguson’s series such as Empire: How Britain Made the
Modern World (Blakeaway Productions, 2003), and Civilization: Is the West History? (Chimerica
Media, 2011) were, in effect, animated by Clark’s late-1960s plea for saving the West.
397
Even
though this modern employment of the docu-history form in Ferguson’s public work, one can
observe the continuity between the BBC’s mid-1960s educational television and neoliberalism. It
is no coincidence that Ferguson and the modern-day MPS still choose to promote their values
through televised discourse on the benefits of economic liberalism, represented as Western
civilization’s chief attribute.
398

Clark’s and MPS members’ calls to preserve the West emanate from a particular strand of
classical liberalism established as a reaction to the French Revolution. In The Reflections on the
Revolution in France, written just a year after 1789, philosopher Edmund Burke established
political conservativism of the nineteenth century, a new form of political thought, to remain
central to what Judith Shklar called “conservative liberalism.”
399
It comes as no surprise that
Burke’s writings influenced neoliberal thinkers in their incessant belief in the futility of

397
The Iraq War and the perceived threat of Islam propelled the production and popularity of Ferguson’s shows. I
return to Ferguson and contemporary MPS in my observation of its 2020 Special Meeting at the Hoover Institution
which I was fortunate enough to attend. Indeed, MPS is a tight-knit community that hand-picks its members; guests
are allowed to attend the meetings but must be nominated by existing members and undergo a somewhat lengthy
vetoing process with the MPS Board. Moreover, the tickets to attend the event are also pricey.
398
Historical narratives were used to justify the futility of revolution in the 1960s at a moment when first truly global
protests delegitimized postwar liberalism’s political and economic viability including its tendency to bureaucratize
power.
399
Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1957).
176
revolutionary politics by the sheer destruction that followed their wake.
400
Burke inspired a
particular form of anti-Jacobinism that became the central aim of neoliberalism and other
conservative liberal projects.
401
Likewise, Clark expressed a deeply ambivalent although no less
reactionary view of the French Revolution and its political turmoil through several episodes.
402
In
episode eleven “Fallacies of Hope,” the series juxtaposed the French Revolution to contemporary
1968 protests at the Sorbonne to underline the perpetual instability of politics. Undeniably, Clark
connected the failures of 1789 to those in 1968. (Fig. 24)

400
Enlightenment political economists and philosophers such as Adam Smith and James Mill, the father of British
sociologist John Stuart Mill, argued that politics was only detrimental to the stability of societies because they stifle
international trade. Specifically, James Mill’s political philosophy was written as a reaction to the Napoleonic Wars
in Europe and Napoleon’s enactment of first economic sanctions against Britain, the so-called “Continental Blockade”
(1806-1814). But instead of adopting an alarmist language over Napoleon’s grip over continental Europe, James Mill
argues that political influence over British government, in form of regulation, will prove more harmful to its commerce
than an international war: “But in regard to Europe itself, it is only to the superficial eye, that the power of Bonaparte
over our commerce can appear formidable… The fact is, the British commerce has much more to fear from the
injudicious regulations of the British government, than from the decrees of Bonaparte.” James Mill, Commerce
Defended, London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1808, 9-12.
401
“Through out the 19th century the fear of Jacobinism, no less than hostility to conservatism, disturbed liberal minds
and contributed vastly to their uncertainty. Today a conservative school of liberalism has gone so far as to make anti-
Jacobinism its primary aim, without, however, abandoning its liberal fear of authority and devotion to personal liberty.
But this has not been the work of one day. It took many years of adversity to bring liberals to abandon the
Enlightenment, and finally even to submit to the spirit of fatalism.” Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of
Political Faith, 226.
402
Neoliberal thinker Wilhelm Röpke, writing from neutral Switzerland at the height of World War II, indicted the
Enlightenment for unleashing political violence that reached its culmination within Nazi-occupied Europe culminated.
Röpke begins the book The Social Crises of Our Time with an image of Louis XVI before the guillotine that Röpke
reads as a current position of people under Nazism, in front of that same guillotine of history that stemmed from the
French Revolution’s failed political project. Röpke ends the passage with a crucial question: “But how, we may well
ask, was it possible that the calamitous conditions for a world crisis would arise in such a period of order, peace,
freedom, and general prosperity?” Wilhelm Röpke, The Social Crises of Our Time, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1950, 3. [1942]
177

“I can see them still… impatient to change the world, vivid in hope,
although what they precisely hope for or believe in, I don’t know.”

Fig. 24: Civilisation, episode eleven “Fallacies of Hope”

This was a classic strategy of delegitimizing 1968 and the protests that preceded the year.
By presenting 1968 exclusively as a student movement, the series intentionally ignored its labor
and anti-colonial background. As Kristin Ross reminds us in May ’68 and Its Afterlives, the
protests in France were the largest ever labor strikes in the country’s history. But as they happened,
the French government sought to subvert these uprisings by replacing the image of workers and
178
immigrants with those of students.
403
Even before that consequential May, French workers and
immigrants protested from at least the mid-1950s. By choosing to focus exclusively on May 1968,
Civilisation disregarded the long history of labor struggle in liberal democracies after World War
Two.
404

Like Burke and neoliberal thinkers, Clark was also reactionary in support of an
institutionalized and depoliticized society so as to circumvent the impulsivity of national politics.
In the final episode “Heroic Materialism,” Clark concluded the series with calls for moderation:
One does not need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that even
in the darkest ages it was institutions which made society work… At this point, I reveal myself in
my true colors as “a stick in the mud.” I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the
liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than
destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta… and I am sure that human
sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of recent triumphs of science, men
haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years. And in consequence, we must still try to
learn from history; history is ourselves.

Clark’s support of gradualism and liberal institutions resembled Hayek’s and Mises’ plea for
a global institutionalized order that would prevent nation states from imposing their will (and
economic tariffs) on their neighbors and economic partners. The World Trade Organization and
the International Monetary Fund are just two of the most well-known international organizations
that protect the circulation of capital from national politics while simultaneously devising new
ways through which all states could be brought into a global community facilitated by the market
mechanism.

403
“By the time of the twentieth anniversary, when May had been reduced to a quest for individual and spiritual
autonomy on the part of its authorized spokesmen, these ex-student leaders then project that quest onto an entire far-
flung ‘generation,’ a worldwide age cohort for whom the 1980s watchword of ‘liberty’ has definitively (and
anachronistically) replaced what I argue in this book to be the properly 1960s aspiration to ‘equality.’” Kristin Ross,
May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10.
404
Even in socialist countries such as Yugoslavia, workers strikes were not uncommon especially after the
liberalization of the economy following the 1965 banking and economic reform when unemployment rose sharply.
179
But even though neoliberals and Clark sought to solicit sympathy for the salvation of
Western “ideals” and to, along the way, undermine organized human action (i.e., politics), there
was no concrete proof that these televised messages would reach their audiences in their original,
intended form. Moreover, numerous audience letters testify that the viewers of BBC-2 docu-
histories would not necessarily accept that the West is a sustainable model for the future. Indeed,
as Stuart Hall wrote in one of his most famous essays “Encoding and Decoding in the Television
Discourse,” messages produced and disseminated through mass media are not received in an
unobstructed way. To be sure, each audience member decodes the messages based on their unique
social context; viewers are independent when interpreting and interacting with on-screen discourse
even when their leisure time becomes increasingly saturated by mass media.
405
In other words,
some “oppositional readings” of this discourse exist that are often contradictory to the producer’s
general intention. As media scholar Eileen Meehan asserted, television’s “structure mitigates for
bursts of innovation and creativity just as surely as it mandates duplication and imitation.”
406

Indeed, Civilisation produced a variety of contradictory claims that were exploited by John
Berger’s Marxist reading of art history in the BBC docu-series, although not a docu-history, Ways
of Seeing (1972) as well as in Jacob Bronowski’s history of science The Ascent of Man (BBC-2,
1973). I return to this question of ideological production and reproduction in the following Chapter
Four when I contrast the BBC-2 docu-histories in the 1970s with Milton Friedman’s docu-history

405
While speaking of violence on television, a popular if not central topic of 1960s media studies, Hall argues that it
cannot exist on its own, separate from other elements. “As the signifying element, among other elements, in a discourse,
it remains polysemic. Indeed, the way it is structured in its combination with other elements serves to delimit its
meanings within that specified field, and effects a ‘closure’, so that a preferred meaning is suggested. There can never
be only one, single, univocal, and determined meaning for such a lexical item, but depending on how its integration
within the code has been accomplished, its’ possible meanings will be organized within a scale which runs from
dominant to subordinate.” Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” Paper for the Council
of Europe Colloquy on “Training in the Critical Reading of Televisual Language,” September 1973, 9.
(https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-
papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/SOP07.pdf)
406
Eileen R. Meehan, “Conceptualizing Culture as Commodity: The Problem of Television,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, Volume 3 (1986): 450.
180
Free to Choose (PBS, 1980). For now, it is important to note that ideology created through the
content of Civilisation would not solidify the meaning of the 1960s crises that Clark sought to
classify as civilizational rifts and symptoms of cultural decline.
I presented a small sample of Civilisation’s ideological similarity with the international
neoliberal movement because the series inaugurated the docu-history form of educational
television, thus influencing subsequent productions in the 1970s and 1980s. I also want to
underline different ways in which neoliberal ideology operated within television. On the one hand,
the series presented the reactionary, anti-political impulse of neoliberalism on the level of content
and explicit meaning. Clark’s arguments were often purposefully abstract, non-materialist, and
anti-political. In this way, ideology operated by illuminating how modern society functions and
what kind of institutions are necessary for preserving the West. And in a typical Althusserian move,
television as an educational apparatus sought to instill ideas that ensure the reproduction of
capitalism. Indeed, in 1968, Civilisation provided a powerful albeit conservative Burke-esque
argument on the futility of political action.
But, on the other hand, the show also inaugurated a more subtle way of supporting
neoliberalism through a particular experience of the world. As the series’ director Peter Montagnon
argued, Civilisation presented ideas through revolutionary montage sequences that carried them
through various temporal and spatial settings. Unlike traditional educational television, entirely
shot in TV studios, Clark’s ideas were followed by a particular visual impression that sought to
depict the world as connected and held together by perpetual movement. While above I analyzed
Civilisation within the mid-1960s political and economic climate, I shift my attention to color
broadcasting. I do so to underline this Chapter’s core argument—television, as a cybernetic
machine of history, created a neoliberal mental landscape that naturalized the world as bounded
by the market mechanism. Indeed, I argue that Civilisation and subsequent BBC docu-histories
181
sought to create an experience of the world as if it was constituted by incessant mobility and flow
of, consequentially, the global market. If the first part of my analysis of Civilisation was
ideological and symbolic, I will call the final part “experiential.” In other words, I shift from
studying the series’ content vis-à-vis neoliberal ideas to the series’ viewing experience. This
consists of explicating Hayek’s involvement with cybernetic theory—his radical transformation of
knowledge and subjectivity—and how the Hayekian epistemic project aligns color broadcasting
as a central televisual technology of the 1960s. The goal of the final section is to show how color
broadcasting complemented cybernetic and neoliberal understandings of human vision and reason
as unreliable.

182
The Sensory Order in color
Having spent the war working simultaneously on problems of Allied communication and
historiography, the language of cybernetics was unsurprisingly appealing to Friedrich Hayek. His
now famous essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), which inaugurated a new approach
in economics, was entirely based on the promise of cybernetics to decouple human agency from
knowledge production. While the allocation of goods and economic planning were central
questions to interwar economists, Hayekian economics was organized around an epistemological
problem—what is the nature of (economic) knowledge? “Today it is almost heresy to suggest that
scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge,” Hayek wrote, “but a little reflection will
show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which
cannot possibly be called scientific.”
407
For him, localized “individual” knowledge gained from
experience and situated within a particular spatio-temporal setting was of more value than
knowledge produced from “objective” engagements with material reality. It was the fallacy and
intellectual entitlement that led us to believe, Hayek argued, that the world can ever be grasped in
an objective manner by a central authority. Indeed, he sought to develop an alternative to extensive
economic planning on grounds that we can never obtain complete knowledge necessary to
undertake such complex operations.
408
Hence, Hayek’s solution to the instability of human agency
and reason was a global implementation of market’s price signals, a form of artificial cognition,

407
F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945):
522.
408
“…who is to do the planning… This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as
to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among
many individuals… Competition…means decentralized planning by many separate persons.” Ibid., 520-21.
183
that could quickly and effortlessly connect dispersed bits of individual information across the
globe.
409

In no small way, cybernetics reformulated basic assumptions about knowledge as a
conscious assemblage of known facts. Hayek argued on the contrary, that the nature of knowledge
is such that some parts of it that are most useful to our society remain unconscious. While this
statement might seem Freudian, Hayek was content with abolishing human agency in excavating
unconscious knowledge.
410
Indeed, he insisted that we should abandon the scientific method as
well as psychoanalysis by replacing them with supra-human systems of cognition; the human
reason is properly used only when it accepts these limitations and the market mechanism.
411
As
Hayek insisted, only through the market’s circulation and flow—not conscious knowledge
production about the world (i.e., science and philosophy) and oneself (i.e., psychology)—will we
be able to connect people’s unconscious bits of knowledge (e.g., “information”) and apply them
for the greater good of society not least our economic well-being.
Following the 1945 essay, Hayek continued to expand his interest in cybernetic theory.
Although an economist, Hayek’s unlikely detour in psychology had a peculiar goal—to show how
our cognitive apparatus, the brain, experienced material reality. In The Sensory Order (1952),

409
Led by the similar impulse over world-alienation explained by Braudel and Arendt, Hayek offered a post-humanist
solution to the postwar knowledge problem. Rather than give up on society’s technological and scientific momentum,
modern economics should develop a new appreciation of the global market economy as a sophisticated information-
processing system. Undoubtedly influenced by the rising science of cybernetics, or the merger between human beings
and artificial intelligence, Hayek sought to displace contemporary calls for economic planning and, instead, center the
world economy and human knowledge production around market logic. Hayek’s argument was simple; people are
unable to possess complete knowledge of the ever-expanding world because it exists as “dispersed bits of incomplete
and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Ibid., 519.
410
Hayek described the twentieth century as “an age of superstition” because it rested on Marx’s and Freud’s ideas of
society and human psychology. In contrast, Hayek argued that “man is and never will be the ultimate master of his
fate.” “Mont Pelerin Society Meeting: Hong Kong and elsewhere,” September 26, 1978, 11, Box 71, The Mont Pèlerin
Society, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.
411
He quotes British mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead to make the point: “It is a profoundly erroneous
truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the
habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number
of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” Ibid., 528.
184
Hayek used theoretical psychology to undermine human cognition while arguing for the necessity
of market-based knowledge production. From prominent cyberneticians such as Walter
McCulloch, Hayek took the idea that the brain, “the apparatus by means of which we learn about
the external world is itself the product of experience.”
412
Undoubtedly, our minds are shaped by
external events but in such a way that already conforms to our past experience. To be sure, Hayek’s
statement was in discord with a classical scientific view of the brain as both a processor of stimuli
and their classifier. Art historian Jonathan Crary pointed this scientific understanding of vision
from the seventeenth century was based on a strict division between the observer and the outside
world. Camera obscura, as the period’s dominant visual instrument neatly illustrated, as Crary
argued, the Cartesian duality between the body and the mind. The Scientific Revolution’s
epistemology was based on the study of “pure” or “a priori” external objects.
However, Hayek sought to dispel the notion that scientific discourse could produce
objective knowledge of the external world, devoid of our own memory of prior experiences.
413

Although Hayek took from British Empiricists that our minds are products of experience, Hayek’s
theory diverged from John Locke’s on the question of memory.
414
This is because memory, our
past experience, creates patterns in the brain that influence how we approach and classify new
phenomenon.
415
This was an important insight for Hayek because it could help societies dispense

412
Friedrich Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 165.
413
“According to the traditional view, experience begins with the reception of sensory data possessing constant
qualities which either reflect corresponding attributes belonging to perceived external objects or are uniquely
correlated with such attributes of the elements of the physical world. These sensory data are supposed to form the raw
material which the mind accumulates and learns to arrange in various manners. The theory developed here challenges
the basic distinction implied in that conception.” Ibid., 165.
414
This is how John Locke described knowledge production: “Let us then suppose that the mind to be, as we say,
white paper, void of all characteristics, without any ideas; How comes it to be furnished… To this I answer, in one
word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.” John Locke,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1689), 59.
Compare Locke’s quote with Hayek’s short passage on British empiricists. Friedrich Hayek, The Sensory Order: An
Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 167.
415
“Every sensation, even the ‘purest,’ must therefore be regarded as an interpretation of an event in the light of the
past experience of the individual or the species.” Friedrich Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations
of Theoretical Psychology, 166.
185
with our “habitual assumption that all we have learned from experience must be true of the external
(physical) world.”
416
In no small part, Hayek sought to dismantle scientific knowledge gained
through objective, experimental means; it was also a charge against human agents in their search
for objective knowledge from external experience. These conclusions served to naturalize the
necessity of introducing the market order to coordinate and supplement the imperfect knowledge
of the world dispersed across individuals participating in market exchange. It was unconscious,
hidden knowledge that each of us possessed that was most useful for society, and not our conscious
opinions and action.
417
Through the market’s abstraction of the world via “price signals,” people
could finally dispense with intentional planning and politics, or all social activity, and adjust their
societies in response to information provided by the market.
This change was not without consequences. As media scholar Orit Halpern argued, the
result of cybernetics was that it “transformed what had once been a question of political economy,
value production, and the organization of human desire and social relations to problems of
circulation and communication by way of a new approach to modeling intelligence and agency.”
418

Indeed, what the cyberneticians first dispensed with was the question of both ontology and utility.
For cyberneticians such as Norbert Wiener, understanding the universe was never of great
prominence and they were content with accepting this fact; what mattered was the ability to control
and contain the future, or chance, “by way of technology.”
419
It was, in effect, an intentional
abolishment of politics from society by replacing it with a biological and mechanistic system of
algorithmic logic. But apart from politics, these new theories of subjectivity repudiate the need to

416
Ibid., 168.
417
“… the types of knowledge that mattered most were inarticulate and largely inaccessible to the thinking agent.”
Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in
Modern Economics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 68.
418
Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Rationality,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 2 (2014): 231.
419
Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945, 41.
186
know oneself. Indeed, Hayek is explicit about this in The Sensory Order’s conclusion: “the mind
must remain forever a realm of its own which we can know only through directly experiencing it,
but which we shall never be able fully to explain or to ‘reduce’ to something else.”
420
Likewise,
for McCulloch, subjectivity “in its very lack of transparency to itself, its incompleteness—
becomes an explicit technology.”
421
The mind becomes a node in the machine system of artificial
cognition to supplement the defects that it inherently possesses.
But if Hayek managed to decouple the observer and her brain from any form of knowledge
production, then the world collapsed into a purely representational form. Reality becomes
unknowable without the market’s and, by extension, television’s mediation. Increasingly, for Cold
War scientists, visual metaphors such as “the image” were becoming useful for postulating human
behavior. Consider, for example, Kenneth Boulding’s post-World War Two transition from
economics to social science. Influenced by Hayek’s expansion of economics from purely
pragmatic issues of allocation and business cycles, Boulding wrote The Image (1956) to explain
behavior in a media-saturated world. To be sure, he implemented Hayek’s notion that our minds
are subjective receptors of external stimuli; our brains produce a particular subjective worldview
that Boulding entitled “the image.”
422
These subjective impressions—our brain’s visualizations—
were responsible for how we interact with the outside environment.
Historian Philip Mirowski explains Hayek’s shift from economics to psychology as
motivated by the desire, on part of the neoliberal thought collective, to win the ideological
argument against socialism. Hayek’s rhetorical push for a market-based economy was a strategy
to paint the market mechanism and the neoliberal world order as a more natural and orderly system

420
Friedrich Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 194.
421
Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Rationality,” 227.
422
Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 149.
187
than socialist planning.
423
In Mirowski’s view, Hayek’s appropriation of cybernetics and modern
science was not motivated by a “true” commitment to uncovering scientific truth, but by a desire
to once and for all do away with socialist views of the economy. Whether Hayek’s shift to
epistemology was the result of his intention to break an ideological deadlock that neoliberal
thinkers encountered in the interwar period are less relevant to my argument. He could have “felt”
the inability of human comprehension to provide real knowledge, or Hayek could have developed
a new understanding of the market as an information-processing system as a rhetorical gesture
toward legitimizing the neoliberal project or what others have called Hayek’s “ideological coup
d’état.”
424
What mattered was that the influence of these cybernetic ideas of humans and society
eclipsed psychology by finding its wide application in science, media, and visual culture.
But how is Hayek’s engagement with cybernetics relevant to the history of educational
broadcasting? What connects Civilisation and the docu-history form to cybernetic notions of
reason? In part, we could say that television was developed as a cybernetic machine because it
functioned as an information system that interconnected the globe, especially through program
exchange via satellites and links from the 1960s onwards. And yet, providing this technologically
determinist answer would not account for TV technology’s counterpart or its transmission of
symbolic representations. Certainly, focusing on technology would fail to include mid-1960s
television’s main charm—depictions of the world in color. To be sure, color broadcasting was sold

423
“I heartily endorse [Bruce] Caldwell’s thesis that sometime after 1945 Hayek finally decided that he would employ
natural science to ‘naturalize’ the Market and therefore paint socialist planning as ‘unnatural’; but, in opting for this
stratagem, I would argue instead that Hayek was not at all innovative or imaginative in this regard. Rather, by jumping
on someone else’s Natural Science bandwagon, he was finally conceding that all his earlier attempts at refutation of
socialists had been for naught.” Philip Mirowski, “Naturalizing the market on the road to revisionism: Bruce
Caldwell's Hayek's challenge and the challenge of Hayek interpretation,” Journal of Institutional Economics 3, no. 3
(December 2007): 365.
424
“Between the 1940s and the 1960s the theory of self-organization in markets contributed to the theories of self-
organization in computing networks, and vice versa… Hayek’s theory of the market’s spontaneous order was part of
an ideological coup d’état. Nothing looked less spontaneous than a market order within the sphere of influence of a
nuclear superpower.” Matteo Pasquinelli, “How to Make a Class: Hayek’s Neoliberalism and the Origins of
Connectionism,” Qui Parle 30, No. 1 (June 2021): 161.
188
to viewers not only as providing a more pleasing viewing experience but one that could surpass
our cognitive limitations. No doubt, this explanation resembles Hayek’s and cyberneticians’ main
insight that the human sensory apparatus is inherently flawed—a fact that prevented us from
objectively experiencing the world and gaining any complete knowledge. As such, color
broadcasting was thrust in the middle of leading Cold War debates on subjectivity and knowledge.
I want to suggest that postwar television was influenced by these new epistemic theories; color
broadcasting echoed this desire to supplement human cognition and decision-making with machine
logic.
The development and understanding of color television’s function in British society were,
perhaps, central to the first days of BBC-2 existence. While it might seem that color television was
solely introduced to heighten the viewing experience, it was also heavily implicated in Cold War
geopolitics. Consider, for example, Susan Murray’s brilliant history of color television in which
she analyzed the imbrication of Cold War values and color broadcasting in the United States. One
of the leading figures in developing color television, RCA’s head David Sarnoff, believed that
color television would add a dimension of veracity to the subjects televised by color cameras.
425

His explanation of the potentiality of color tapped into the 1950s anti-Communist sentiment and
the desire to distinguish hidden Communist elements and expunge them from American society.
As a form of televisual McCarthyism, color television promised to provide a more thorough study
of televised subjects and uncover their hidden desires—their unconsciousness—through an
automatic way without them disclosing anything particularly relevant about themselves; without
the televised subjects engaging in any form of intentional deliberation. And yet, television as a

425
“In this rather bombastic speech, Sarnoff placed electronic color at the center of a Cold War visual regime and
culture of surveillance, aligning it with the camera’s ‘relentless’ ability to reveal truth and shine a light on those who
might wish to hide in the dark or behind an iron curtain.” Susan Murray, Bright Signals: A History of Color Television,
220.
189
medium was theorized, by contemporaries such as sociologist Daniel Boorstin, to function as an
x-ray machine by its ability to pierce through appearances.
426

Color broadcasting also trained observers on the way it should relate to the experience of
the modern world.
427
American journalist Stanley Reynolds who spent most of his career in Britain,
writing for The Guardian, argued how a year of color television changed the way he experienced
the world outside his home. Indeed, Reynolds credits color television for helping him
“reexperience” grass during the inaugural color programs of the 1967 Wimbledon tournament:
Naturally, people without it must think it rather silly getting worked up over such things as
the grass being green; after all you can merely look out of the window and there it is with no knobs
to turn. But colour television does heighten one’s awareness of colour; it has, anyhow, heightened
my own awareness. I look at the green grass on the television and then looking out of the window
I seem to be seeking the green of the real grass for the first time… I do not wish to make colour
television sound as if it were a great artistic experience, but I more or less rediscovered colour
through it.
428

During these early years of color television in Britain and the U.S., inventors and journalists
praised the experience afforded by color television on the grounds that it enhanced the experience
of the world off screens. Such laudatory remarks could be justified (and dismissed) by the simple
fact that British broadcasters were in the business of selling color programming to increase the sale
of television sets. Undoubtedly, this was the impulse behind Civilisation, as explained by
Attenborough, to provide a compelling program based on the exploration of Western cultural
heritage in color. But to only use this purely economistic argument for the propensity of color
programming is not enough for it undermines the intellectual and political context that equated
technological development with historical progress, even though, Civilisation was at times critical

426
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 43.
427
The terms that I am using purposefully invoke the language and work of art historian Jonathan Crary whose 1990
book Techniques of the Observer argued how modernity and capitalism changed human perception by training the
attentiveness and focus of its subject needed for life in the city and in the factory. Capitalism and modernity wanted
to change and create subjects that were necessary for the high-speed conditions of life ruled by the incessant and
unstable logic of capital.
428
Stanley Reynolds, “A Year of Colour Television,” The Guardian, July 5, 1968, 8.
190
of these technologized versions and understandings of the West’s cultural essence.
429
Such
materialism would ignore that very essence that color television came to present for people such
as Sarnoff and Reynolds—the extension of human capabilities. Indeed, at the heart of color
broadcasting was a conviction that color could extract from reality what the human sensory
apparatus, our eyes and minds, could not. After all, color technology worked based on our “faulty”
sensory apparatus that could not detect the high-speed electronic beams hitting the screen. Color
television enhanced vision and trained perception to meet the challenges of a complex nuclear
environment. Color, in other words, extended and complemented human capabilities; it enhanced
their comprehensive abilities and uncovered that which could not be seen or appreciated through
human cognition. It functioned similarly to Hayek’s understanding of the market for its supposed
ability to produce that which we cannot experience otherwise.
The Hayekian epistemological project was based on the need “to reactivate the self-
organizing mechanisms that convert contingency into order.”
430
Not only did Hayek’s theory
dispense with purely economics questions of planning and allocation, but he decoupled knowledge
from thinking subjects to machine automation. This was a profound reformulation of knowledge
and subjectivity with far-reaching consequences. Indeed, digital projects such as Wikipedia were
directly influenced by Hayek’s 1945 essay and his understanding of knowledge as dispersed and
localized, but nevertheless, unified through technological means.
431
However, I argue that our
digital environment has been influenced by this radical epistemic transformation made possible
through an incessant flow of information as televisual bits of information—as electronic and digital
images. This was, as Gilles Deleuze noted, the main difference between television and cinema:

429
A position most sharply voiced in the final episode 13 “Heroic Materialism.”
430
Martijn Konings, Capital and Time, 104.
431
Philip Mirowski, “Defining Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought
Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press,
2009), 417-419.
191
The electronic image…the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being,
either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death… They are the object of a
perpetual organization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding
image. The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege
of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omni-directional space
which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates.
432

For Deleuze—much like for Braudel, Hayek, and nuclear scientists—World War Two
represented a radical split. As media scholars argued, television and its electronic vision produced
a perceptual revolution within capitalism and culture.
433
Certainly, altered notions of temporality
brought on by the decline of belief in linear time and progressive history were made part of
television as a Cold War medium. The BBC docu-history form with its multilayered temporal
order that incessantly shifted between past-present-future, as if in a cybernetic loop, sought to
construct the past and human action as always already “in the image of making.”
434
As Heidegger
presciently noticed in The Age of the World Picture (1938), modern technologies automate human
praxis and transform truth “into the certainty of representation.”
435
This was, ultimately, the

432
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 265.
433
“Situating these three critical moments in the 1840s, 1890s, and 1940s, Jameson correlates the major technological
changes that revolutionized the structure of capital—changing market capitalism to monopoly capitalism to
multinational capitalism—with the changes wrought by the “cultural logics” identified as, respectively, realism,
modernism, and postmodernism, three radically different axiological forms and norms of aesthetic representation and
ethical investment. Extrapolating from Jameson, we can also locate within this historical and logical framework three
correspondent technological modes and institutions of visual (and aural) representation: respectively, the photographic,
the cinematic, and the electronic. Each, I would argue, has been critically complicit not only in a specific technological
revolution within capital but also in a specific perceptual revolution within the culture and the subject. That is, each
has been significantly co-constitutive of the particular temporal and spatial structures and phenomenologic that inform
each of the dominant cultural logics Jameson identifies as realism, modernism, and postmodernism.” Vivian Carol
Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),
140.
434
Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” 79.
435
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2002, 66. I end with Heidegger’s well-known lecture Heidegger’s main insight was that with the
development of modern science and technology, human experience of the world and the self that he classified as “the
Being,” became stifled through machines’ propensity to automate human praxis. For Heidegger, scientific research
with its modern methodology can also serve as a machine for it alters and objectifies them “in research.” In other
words, representations of the world rather than direct, lived experiences of it, are left as the only ways through which
people can understand the world around them. This is what Heidegger meant by the term “world picture,” or a
representation of the world in its totality through mechanistic means that absolve contemplation and thought from
revealing truth outside the pictorial constraint: “world picture does not mean ‘picture of the world’ but, rather, the
world grasped as picture.” (Ibid., 67)
192
connecting point between cybernetics, postwar television, and the Hayekian epistemological
project. By turning physical reality into bits of dispersed information and setting them in constant
motion, cyberneticians resolved future uncertainty.

193
Conclusion
As if in a cybernetic loop, I end at this chapter’s beginning. “My great problem, the only
problem I had to resolve,” wrote Braudel, “was to show that time moves at different speeds.”
436

To be sure, this was Braudel’s main insight, first described in The Mediterranean, a book he wrote
during wartime as a POW in Germany.
437
And although historians had to wrestle with reconciling
the seemingly linear “world history” with social histories of daily life where linearity was often
difficult to find, postwar television successfully depicted these multilayered experiences of time.
As a medium entangled in Cold War redefinitions of vision and reason, television was uniquely
suited to batter manifold socio-political crises brought on by the nuclear age, not least by
television’s claim to bring a total vision of the world albeit through an individualized lens. In this
chapter, I have delineated the BBC’s second channel as a good example for the study of television
in the postwar era. It was here that cyberneticians’ impulse to use the past to generate the future
materialized on the BBC-2’s docu-history programs. Initially established to expand adult
education, the docu-history forms addressed several economic and political crises of the period.
By providing a plethora of images about time and the present, the histories were able to resolve
contingencies and chance under a single visual order. To be sure, this was the docu-histories’ main
charm which made them into high-quality programs, thus contributing to their wide circulation on

436
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1990), 39.
437
Braudel accomplished this by dividing historical time into geographical time, social time, and individual time. The
questions over absolute time and space as espoused by Newtonian physics had been seriously challenged at the turn
of the century in theories of Austrian physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach. He attacked the Newtonian
universe particularly on the level of individual perceptions and experiences of time that conflicted with the absolutist
and universal regimes of time. Mach’s theories undeniably influenced Albert Einstein when writing up the two theories
of relativity. Most importantly, Mach’s insistence that time was not a universalized state against which other objects
were measured but that “time itself derived from the motion of things—the earth as it spins, the pendulum as it swings,”
was crucial to Einstein’s conceptions of post-Newtonian physics. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps:
Empires of Time (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), 236.
194
the global market. Although produced by public funds, their very structure was always already
made to address this globality.
Not surprisingly, this was the point of postwar media’s merger with neoliberalism. The
point was not to produce a concrete ideological image, but to facilitate experiences of the world
that would account for the general representation of physical reality as governed by incessant
motion and flow. Showing how this functioned on the examples of several docu-histories will be
the goal of my final Chapter Four. In it, I focus on several docu-histories including Milton
Friedman’s Free to Choose (PBS, 1980) series to underscore similarities in style and experience
the docu-histories provided. Irrespective of their ideological differences, these series provided the
experience of the neoliberal mental landscape that was conducive to the system’s ascendency and
its global geopolitical acceptance from the 1980s onwards, a trend that particularly intensified with
the destruction of socialism in Eastern Europe.
However, I have also made another important point—television and neoliberalism had
been entangled before the proliferation of reality television in the 2000s. As I have shown,
members of the Pilkington Committee granted the BBC an additional channel because of the
assurance that this will align most closely with their desire to build television as a form of liberal
governance. Indeed, Adam Smith’s understanding of a free market economy as inducing societal
benefits by taming individual idiosyncrasies was invoked in the defense of public television in
Britain. Furthermore, Kenneth Clark’s docu-history Civilisation which inaugurated this form of
broadcasting was ideologically in line with the neoliberal thought collective through their Burke-
esque retelling of the French Revolution as well as their commitment to preserving “the West”
through institutional means. Lastly, Cold War television’s newly developed technologies such as
color broadcasting complemented the Hayekian epistemological project.

195
Chapter Four: The Image of Capital
The Docu-histories and the Neoliberal Mental Landscape

Man cannot live without an economic theology.
438

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Each of us individually provides the market
and the demand of illusions which flood our experience.
439

- Daniel Boorstin

“I thought that science is not a very visual subject,” exclaimed scientist Jacob Bronowski in
1972 in an interview for the BBC’s corporate magazine Ariel. “Kenneth Clark had an absolute
natural. You put the camera in front of a picture and talk about it and it’s fascinating in itself. You
can’t do that with a scientific subject.”
440
This was how Bronowski promoted the BBC’s new docu-
history The Ascent of Man (BBC-2, 1973), a history of science program made to counter the history
of art series Civilisation (BBC-2, 1969). To be sure, Bronowski invoked a well-known postwar
debate—the supposed divide between science and art, formulated as “The Two Cultures’ Debate”
by scientist-turned-poet C.P. Snow in 1959—to underscore the novelty of visualizing science.
441

But just as Snow’s “debate” was a rhetorical gesture in support of the British government’s
expansion of science education to meet the demands of its nuclear institutes, Bronowski’s critique
of Civilisation was a marketing strategy that underlined the show’s novelty.
442
While the
difference between science and art was invoked throughout The Ascent of Man’s promotional
campaign, the two series shared problems of televising and thus of visualizing history. The archival

438
John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1993), 17.
439
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 3.
440
Anon., “The Fascination of Bringing Science to the Screen,” Ariel, July 21, 1972.
441
C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures’ and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1961).
442
For a history of British nuclear science and visual culture, see my MA thesis Jelena B. Ćulibrk, “Aliens at Harwell:
British Representations of Nuclear Science and Nuclear Scientists, 1945-1961” (Budapest, Central European
University, 2015).
196
documents relating to the production of The Ascent of Man evoke Civilisation, not through a “clash
of cultures” narrative, rather the BBC and Bronowski were interested in perfecting the BBC’s
visual histories.
And yet, scholars such as art historian Jonathan Conlin regarded the differences between
Civilisation and The Ascent of Man to be immense, almost to the point of disarming further inquiry:
“Though powerful, the visuals in Ascent never really establish their own presence, rarely
communicate with the viewer without the presenter’s mediation. In Civilisation presenter and the
visuals were evenly balanced.”
443
Conlin’s view that The Ascent of Man is anti-visual, for
Bronowski took most of the screen time, misunderstands the fact that the show conceived its
visualization differently from Civilisation. Instead, these differences were propelled by the
divergent historical and though less impactful, geographical scopes of the two series. In contrast
to Civilisation’s Eurocentric history, The Ascent of Man televised a history of “deep time,” one
prior to human life and of recorded history. Indeed, the series visualized what historian Dan Smail
called “deep history.”
444
Because it dealt with the history that was largely left undocumented, The
Ascent of Man’s production team had to rely on a different “way of seeing” from Civilisation’s
televised tour through Western Europe's cultural heritage. This was because Bronowski and the
team understood science as an “invisible” process, which had to be visualized as it was supposedly
unfolding.
As I have argued throughout this dissertation, neoliberal thinkers conceived the post-1918
liberal world-system as constituted by a visible institutional framework and the market’s invisible
mechanism. The point of liberal propaganda for Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek was to

443
Jonathan Conlin, Civilisation (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 72.
444
Indeed, Smail argued that historians of science had been far more receptive to the nineteenth century’s discovery
of prehistoric times. Dan Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005):
1337–61.
197
explicate to the public how these two domains simultaneously functioned. In line with this
neoliberal goal was, as I have argued in Chapter Two, Kenneth Clark’s wartime service at the
Ministry of Information where he helped transform liberal propaganda from pure didacticism to
visual experiences of liberal governance. Likewise, I argue that The Ascent of Man’s fascination
with visualizing the invisible realm of science contributed to perfecting the docu-history form as
it was conceived by Clark at the Ministry of Information and on television in Civilisation. Despite
public refutations of Clark’s docu-history Civilisation, the series served as an inspiration to The
Ascent of Man’s production team; they adopted out-of-studio shooting and historical recreations
while also distinguishing the series from Civilisation by perfecting “historical presence” through
novel visualization techniques. But precisely for The Ascent of Man’s focus on “the unseen,” the
series helped, perhaps more successfully than its predecessor, underscore television’s relevance to
liberal governance. By emphasizing the supposed invisibility of science vis-à-vis visual culture,
The Ascent of Man’s production team perfected the central tenet of liberal propaganda—the
experience of invisible liberal processes—by naturalizing the mobility of information, people, and
capital.
In this chapter, I focus on the docu-histories following Civilisation’s broadcast such as The
Ascent of Man (BBC-2, 1973), The Age of Uncertainty (BBC-2, 1976), and Free to Choose (PBS,
1980), to show how irrespective of their ideological differences, they contributed to the
development of what I call “the neoliberal mental landscape.” Although the series wanted to
surpass the perceived limitations of Civilisation, they were, nonetheless, influenced by the docu-
history form as it was pioneered in 1969. This fact is apparent through similarities that run across
the docu-series regardless of their ideology. In technological terms, the docu-histories were high-
quality color productions, established to display all the possibilities of the new televisual
technology. In economic terms, propelled by the BBC’s financial constraints, the BBC series were
198
planned for export to non-British markets, most predominantly North American. In terms of their
approach to historiography, the series implemented out-of-studio shooting and historical
recreations to bring a novel televised take on “historical presence.” Most importantly, however,
they all contributed to visualizing the world as governed by market logic.
445

I began this chapter with a manufactured controversy between The Ascent of Man and
Civilisation to suggest that debates aided rather than stifled the (re)production of the docu-history
form as high-quality television. Before cable television challenged network broadcasting, the BBC
established the docu-histories as artistic and, indeed, highly self-conscious productions. This was
a successful strategy—in less than a decade after Civilisation, the docu-histories were globally
revered. As President of the Motion Picture Association of America and an assistant to Lyndon
Johnson, Jack Valenti, remarked in 1977, “much of what passes for excellence on PBS comes from
Great Britain.”
446
BBC’s impulse to produce stylistic novelty might remind us of what TV scholars
called “televisuality” or a self-reflexive effort on part of American network broadcasters to address
their competition in the 1980s. Akin to the moment when Hollywood studios were challenged by
television’s expansion in the 1950s, as John Thornton Caldwell argued, American networks sought
to “produce” themselves out of the crisis through “innovation and stylistic development.”
447
I want
to suggest that televisuality, as a self-reflexive mode of production, was present within 1960s
public television. As I have shown in Chapter Three, the BBC-2 docu-histories sought to
aestheticize their way out of the decade’s political and economic crises, but also to create new
possibilities for television as a medium.

445
The extent to which the docu-histories were seen as complementary rather than in conflict can be illustrated through
Galbraith’s first visit to the BBC in August 1973. While there, he was shown three screenings—Civilisation’s episode
one, America’s episode 10, and The Ascent of Man’s episode eleven. Letter from Adrian Malone to John K. Galbraith,
July 31, 1973, “The Age of Uncertainty,” T63/123/1, The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
446
Jack Valenti, “Can America’s Public TV Get Turned On?,” Los Angeles Times, August 1977.
447
John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 288.
199
Debates, controversy, and competition are crucial to television’s success, and they were
central to the BBC in the 1960s. After the British government granted an additional channel to the
BBC, its second channel BBC-2 competed not only with Britain’s commercial broadcaster ITV
but also within its corporate structure by distinguishing itself from BBC-1. Even at the micro-level
of the docu-history form, The Ascent of Man directly competed with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation
and Alistair Cooke’s America. For instance, while still in pre-production, Bronowski and the team
were anxious to find out whether Cooke will televise the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.
448
But this
was not only a matter of getting an exclusive “image” of an exotic object or location; the BBC
producers were eager to distinguish the series from the Corporation’s routine programming.
Consider, for example, how The Ascent of Man’s executive producer Adrian Malone persuaded
Bronowski to challenge Civilisation. As Malone wrote, Bronowski should join the project “to
make it the biggest and best thing that has hit telly, with you and I in sole charge, otherwise I would
not do it at all. I will resign and go freelance if necessary.”
449

Institutional conflict is appealing to historians. As a narrative strategy, conflict creates
dynamism within procedural archival research, thus allowing historians to devise compelling
narratives in line with Aristotle’s Poetics—individuals tempted by the hubris of fame and
recognition strive for freedom within a world of restrictions. In that same letter to Bronowski,
Malone underscored conflicts within BBC-2. And while Malone was hoping to maintain creative
control, he warned Bronowski that the BBC executives such as Robert Reid were committed to
limiting this freedom. And yet, Malone never resigned; he continued to produce docu-histories at
the BBC until 1977 when he relocated to the United States to develop Cosmos (PBS, 1980), an

448
“We tried to discover whether Alistair Cooke had thought of the Watts Towers without actually naming them—for
fear of giving him the idea… The Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty are too pedestrian…” “Program points,” page
2, October 26, 1971, 6/3/1/1, Jacob Bronowski Papers, Jesus College Archives, University of Cambridge, UK.
449
Letter from Adrian Malone to Jacob Bronowski, June 12, 1969, p. 2, 6/4/1, Jacob Bronowski Papers, Jesus College
Archives, University of Cambridge, UK.
200
American version of the BBC docu-histories produced with scientist Carl Sagan. However
compelling Malone’s letters are, they only tell part of the story.
Television is a paradoxical medium; it was established by large economic and political
interests but capitalizes on the circulation of symbolic representation. Indeed, television’s capital
is its electronic image. This duality of industry and culture is reflected on television’s programming,
which accounts for both innovation and duplication.
450
Visual, thematic, and ideological diversity
allowed the BBC’s TV executives to sell the docu-histories on the foreign market. Consider, for
example, the controversy created by the neoliberal thought collective in September 1976, just
months before The Age of Uncertainty’s premiere on British television.
451
John Kenneth
Galbraith’s history of economics provoked free marketers to challenge his Keynesian view of
modern capitalism as based on, what Galbraith called, “the countervailing powers” of capital and
labor. “I didn’t care for this,” Galbraith remembered the dispute, “nor did my BBC producers.”
452

But as Galbraith and the production team were irked by Milton Friedman’s attacks, the BBC-2’s
Controller Aubrey Singer capitalized on the opportunity to expand the series’ influence.
453

450
Eileen R. Meehan, “Conceptualizing Culture as Commodity: The Problem of Television,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 3, no. 4 (December 1986): 450.
451
Although the controversy began in Britain, it soon migrated to the United States where the neoliberal thought
collective’s influence was somewhat greater. For example, The Age of Uncertainty’s co-producer KCET had to include
additional remarks from neoliberal economists and well-known U.S. conservatives that would give “balance” to
Galbraith’s views. This disgruntled several American audience members. I include one illustrative example: “…In
this area there was a short refutation (sic, yea even sick) by that jackass, William Buskley [sic], sandwiched between
the end of your remarks and the credits. Did BBC do this? I called the local PBS station about this and was told that
it was done in order to present both sides. I told them that Buckley’s side was being presented 24 hours a day, 365
days a year, in and on all the media and their loyalty to fair play and dedication to freedom of speech was greatly
misplaced. I look forward to the reminder of the series.” Letter from E.F. Patterson to John K. Galbraith, May 20,
1977, 1, “American Comments, May 1977,” Box 567, John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers, The John F. Kennedy
Library, Boston, MA.
452
John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 534.
However, the controversy escalated and reached the Conservative Party. They asked Aubrey Singer for the series’
synopses, but Adrian Malone threatened Singer if he allows such censorship and overreach. “… the opposition to
Galbraith is a small but vocal minority whose attitude is based on long nurtured prejudice rather than on rational
disagreement.” Letter from Adrian Malone to Aubrey Singer, September 30, 1976, “The Age of Uncertainty,”
T63/123/1, The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
453
“…even as we find elements of oppositional ideologies within the artifact, producers may be planning to capitalize
on those elements as a key to a new and profitable generic form of production.” Eileen R. Meehan, “Conceptualizing
Culture as Commodity: The Problem of Television,” 454.
201
It is tempting to charge the culture industry with producing what Horkheimer and Adorno
called “sameness” through mass media’s impulse to “impress the omnipotence of capital…
regardless of the plot selected by the production directors.”
454
However, such arguments fail to
explain agency. Certainly, the BBC producers were genuinely distinguishing their series from the
Corporation and the common understanding of television as the machine of daily banalities. In
their mind, the docu-history form represented a revolutionary, almost artistic experience of
television. As I have argued in Chapter Three, BBC-2 was a particularly self-conscious channel,
which engaged in extensive self-analysis. Therefore, in this chapter, I emphasize competition and
conflict within the Corporation to underscore the docu-histories’ conscious effort in producing
difference. As J.D. Connor remarked, “if corporations are the same, they are the same in that they
have to be different, even if they hire the same people.”
455

But apart from the production teams’ intent, television audiences have agency in
consumption. In contrast to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s characterization of the culture industry as
hegemonic, the producers’ original intent would not necessarily totalize the audiences’ experience.
Certainly, the docu-histories’ dominant ideology would not always prevail. To be sure, audiences
received the docu-histories differently; the archival records contain a plethora of examples, mainly
audience letters to the BBC or the presenters, that illustrate this diversity in reception. Cultural

454
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Media
and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, Revised Edition (Malden, MA
and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 44.
455
“However true Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique might have been, the reaction of the moguls who made that
culture was never going to be ‘Oh, gosh, I hadn’t realized that Donald Duck takes his punishment on screen so the
audience will learn to take theirs. This shall stop at once.’ The only response the producers of the culture industry
could make was to internalize or introject or co-opt the critique. If Hollywood cinema was part of the death knell of
the Enlightenment, it was also, in the hands of what we might call, after André Bazin, the evil geniuses of the system,
a necessary site for brand cultivation. ‘Look,’ they might say, ‘all our movies are made up of the same parts—yours,
mine and Fox’s. But they are spectacularly successful at selling things. Now that we have the parts figured out, I’m
going to use my movies to sell my studio. Besides, I have to convince my contract players that there is something
different about working here.’ If corporations are the same, they are the same in that they have to be different, even if
they hire the same people.” J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010), Post
45 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2015), 31-32.
202
studies made an important intervention in our understanding of ideology by underscoring the
polysemic quality of media texts.
And yet, the docu-histories did produce “sameness” in one aspect—they naturalized the
experience of the world as interconnected by capital’s incessant movement. However different in
detail or ideology, The Age of Uncertainty and Free to Choose rested on visualizing this mobility
of capital, labor, and information. Indeed, as Horkheimer and Adorno wrote “even the aesthetic
manifestations of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhythm.”
456
While Friedman and
Galbraith debated the function of the economy in public life, their ideological opposition had very
little influence over the audiences’ experience of capitalism—its movement represented in the
docu-histories as a historical process. Both series prioritized an individualized experience of the
world set in motion through the flow of images. Moreover, they both used the past to generate
alternative realities that did not exist but were nevertheless possible.
It is crucial, however, to understand that these differences in production will not be grasped
if we remain within the audience’s polysemic reception. Indeed, as Raymond Williams insisted,
audience research (i.e., consumption) is not sufficient for understanding modern communication.
No matter how inspiring or contrary audience readings of a media text’s “dominant” ideology are,
studying reception overlooks the means of production as well as “the always significant and
sometimes decisive relations between these modes of consumption… and the specific modes of
production.”
457
There is no sameness of production or consumption not least because production
and consumption of commodities are always already intertwined.

456
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Media
and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, Revised Edition (Malden, MA
and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 41.
457
Raymond Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” in Culture and Materialism (London
and New York: Verso, 2005), 54.
203
Here I return to Marx’s introduction to Grundrisse. By altering political economists’ linear
understanding of economic processes (production-distribution-exchange-consumption), Marx
argued that these four seemingly independent stages of capitalism were, in fact, entangled.
458
For
him, “production is also immediately consumption” on two levels. Subjectively, production
develops and expands our abilities; objectively, production “consumes” raw materials and means
of production by wearing out machines used in the process.
459
But here was Marx’s key insight:
“consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subject for
whom they are products.”
460
Although Marx was obviously writing about material commodities,
objects created from raw materials and physical production, his argument can be extended to
immaterial objects such as the BBC docu-histories. By producing an experience of the world as
bounded by a flow of images (capital), these productions altered how people related to material
reality.
On this point of consumption, Jean Baudrillard sought to expand (and dismantle) Marxist
definitions of culture. Much like his post-structuralist contemporary Michel Foucault, Baudrillard
published For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1973) to trace power outside
Marxism’s “productivist” mentality.
461
He began from a simple observation—mid-twentieth

458
“Production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs; distribution divides them up according to
social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs; and finally, in
consumption; the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual
need, and satisfies it in being consumed… This is admittedly a coherence, but a shallow one.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse:
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Random House, 1973), 89.
459
But, at the same time, produced objects only become “real” when they are properly consumed. Indeed, manuscripts
that never get published and read will never become books. Nor would films and television shows that are not made
available through distribution.
460
Ibid., 91.
461
I have said very little about an obvious critique of Marx’s supposed “productivist” mentalité. His focus on
production, labor, and the historical process has been criticized throughout the twentieth century by a variety of figures
from Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck to Jean Baudrillard and Dipesh Chakrabarty. For Arendt and Koselleck,
Marx’s focus on production neglected not only pre-modern societies but a possibility of politics (and political thought)
that was not directly related to labor. Today, we can see this critique reemerge in David Graeber’s and David
Wengrow’s recent book The Dawn of Everything in which they offer an alternative to capitalism via a historical and
sociological analysis of pre-industrial societies. These critiques of Marx are surprisingly interchangeable.
204
century capitalism was radically different than the one of Marx’s times. To be sure, Baudrillard
could have read this in any of Galbraith’s popular books such as American Capitalism (1952) or
The Affluent Society (1958) in which Galbraith described consumer capitalism as antithetical to
both nineteenth-century capitalism and the period’s theories of political economy.
462
Indeed, the
welfare state’s consolidation of capital and organized labor helped satiate workers’ basic needs for
food, shelter, and improved working conditions.
463
However, this appeasement did not dismantle
capitalism’s impulse to expand and circulate, it only allowed the liberal world-system to find new
avenues for generating a profit by manufacturing a surplus of needs.
464
In this way, for Galbraith
and Baudrillard, modern capitalism is propelled not by production, but by advertising which
generates desire while simultaneously promising to satisfy it in consumption.
465
For both,
consumer capitalism is reproduced through information—text and image—and not labor power.
In part frustrated by the failures of 1968 and the French Communist Party’s conservativism,
Baudrillard charged Marxism with ignoring modern capitalism’s altered state that now was based

462
“Poverty was the all-pervasive fact of that world. Obviously, it is not of ours. One would not expect that the
preoccupations of a poverty-ridden world would be relevant in one where the ordinary individual has access to
amenities—foods, entertainment, personal transportation, and plumbing—in which not even the rich rejoiced a century
ago. So great has been the change that many of the desires of the individual are no longer even evident to him. They
become so only as they are synthesized, elaborated, and nurtured by advertising and salesmanship, and these, in turn,
have become among our most important and talented professions. Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth
century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.” John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York,
N.Y: New American Library, 1958), 14.
463
This was the outcome of the welfare state’s appeasement of organized labor following the Great Depression; to
halt a socialist revolution, the workers were granted improved working and living conditions.
464
“There is a legend, with a great appeal to simple men, that Americans are a nation of salesmen because they have
some peculiar virtuosity in this craft. There are more salesmen, and salesmanship is more highly developed, in the
United States than elsewhere in the world. But the explanation lies not with national character but with national wealth.
The latter means, of course, that there are more goods to be sold. But even more, it means that psychological, not
physical, considerations control desire. The biological minimums are covered. As a result that modem practitioner of
applied psychology, the salesman, gets his opportunity.” Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of
Countervailing Power, 101.
465
“But it has become possible today, at the present stage of consummative mobilization, to see that needs, far from
being articulated around the desire or the demand of the subject, find their coherence elsewhere: in a generalized
system that is to desire what the system of exchange value is to concrete labor, the source of value.” Jean Baudrillard,
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), 135.
205
on producing and circulating “sign value” rather than exchange and use value. To his mind, we
were living in a society of spectacle and not labor.
Decades before Baudrillard’s observations, Walter Benjamin famously argued that
mechanically reproduced media such as photography and cinema alter cultural production by
commodifying art thus detaching it from its material presence. As I have shown in Chapter Three,
television modified this process further by turning physical reality into an immaterial commodity
through its electronic transmission; culture on television became a collection of signals that
engender new experiences of time as well as new images of the world. As Richard Dienst noted,
television’s commodity was based on translating physical reality into “units of value.”
466

Visualizing the world into certainty—data—is what connected television to cybernetics and the
discipline’s epistemic projects. As such, television became not only the post-World War Two’s
most emblematic medium but represented capitalism’s transformation; above all, television
“channeled” capitalism’s newly generated focus on circulating immaterial commodities—signs—
through fashion, advertising, photography, cinema, and television.
In Chapter Four, I turn to the study of this duality between production and consumption to
argue that what I call “the neoliberal mental landscape” was reproduced during the series’
consumption. As we shall see, the series’ ideological differences did not hamper this reproduction
and, in some respects, aided it.
467
Even if my dissertation prioritized production at the expense of

466
“The volatility of the televisual image’s frame distinguishes it from photography and cinema, the two image-
commodity forms corresponding to previous epochal structures of production… No matter what formal changes it
undergoes, television’s basic economic vocation lies in the transformation of material images into units of value
through new framework of circulation.” Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1994), 59.
467
“But ideology is always contradictory. There is no single, integrated ‘ruling ideology’—a mistake we repeat again
now in failing to distinguish between conservative and neo-liberal repertoires. This is particularly damaging, since it
fatally obscures the deep antinomies, the ambivalences of and fault-lines in that most capacious of political traditions
and ‘structures of feeling’ ‘Liberalism’: its progressive and regressive characteristics, its interweaving of and
oscillations between contradictory strands (e.g. social conservatism and free market economics) or, in the colonial
sphere particularly, the double faces of ‘liberal governmentality.’” Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,”
Cultural Studies 25, no. 6 (November 2011): 713.
206
reception, I have argued throughout this manuscript that experience was crucial to liberal
propaganda in wartime documentary cinema and on postwar television. To be sure, the novelty
provided by color broadcasting was advertised as a radically different experience of the world—
more real than objective reality. But I also want to emphasize something else. In the case of
ideology, I have argued that its direct form via, say, Althusser’s state-ideological apparatuses
became less relevant after 1945—experience, as Jill Craigie’s film Out of Chaos (1944)
demonstrated, was central to legitimizing the liberal world-system. To be sure, experience is
crucial because it reproduces ideology in our mental state; it gives pleasure and incites desire. But
mass media do not create meaningless enjoyment—they do not function as a spectacle. Rather, the
docu-histories intellectualized the world and gave it meaning that was postulated, by
cyberneticians and neoliberals such as Hayek, as lacking in our unmediated experience of material
reality.
The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first section, I revisit the controversy between
Galbraith and Friedman. I do so to illustrate how the docu-histories reproduced themselves despite
Galbraith’s and Friedman’s divergent ideologies. Doing so will enable me to show how our
classical understanding of ideology as a set of ideas and commitments was not central to the
acceptance of neoliberalism as an economic and political system. Indeed, it became successful not
through conscious explication of the neoliberal argument as Friedman did in Free to Choose but
by constructing the neoliberal mental landscape in which all docu-histories were equally complicit.
This point brings me to the chapter’s second section. In it, I illustrate what I mean by this mental
landscape through an analysis of visualization strategies in The Ascent of Man, The Age of
Uncertainty, and Free to Choose. The reproduction of this mental landscape was made possible
through visualizing motion and centering individualism as the dominant form of perception. Both
produced “the image of capital,” or externalization of the neoliberal logic on-screen.
207

(Re)production: The Galbraith—Friedman Controversy
Weeks before The Age of Uncertainty premiered on British television, the Institute of
Economic Affairs, a leading neoliberal think tank, invited Milton Friedman to give a public lecture
on Galbraithian economics. The Institute was established in 1955 to promote the benefits of
neoliberal economic doctrines to politicians, journalists, and the public; it was the Mont Pèlerin
Society’s visible hand. As scholars have noted, the neoliberal thought collective’s structure
resembles a Russian Doll. (Fig. 25) This multi-layered constitution allowed the MPS, as the
neoliberal collective’s critical center, to remain obscured by layers of visible institutions—
foundations and think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs.
468
In part, this dispersed
form of power devised by Hayek enabled the neoliberal thought collective to contribute to societal
debates from various angles. When Hayek passed away in 1992, he left this world as an
accomplished man; his dream of a neoliberal order materialized in Britain and the United States,
while neoliberalism was being prescribed as a model to countries across the world not least in
Eastern Europe after 1989. (Fig. 26) These accomplishments also gave him intellectual satisfaction
since neoliberalism was popularized, just as he prophesized in 1947, through a global network of
neoliberal institutions not least his “brainchild”—The Institute of Economic Affairs.
469

468
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought
Collective (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 430-432.
469
This was how the Institute’s founder Anthony Fisher described the think tank’s history: “Our mentor, F.A. Hayek,
pointed the way. Back in 1945 when I was demobilized from the Royal Air Force I worried about England’s tilt toward
Socialism, a worry compounded by Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ just published. So I sought out Hayek at the London
School of Economics and asked him what I should do: enter politics? I remember his answer as, ‘No, society’s course
will only be changed by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers, and writers, with
reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.” Anthony
Fisher, “Marketing the Free Market,” 1, September 1, 1986, Box 83, Mont Pelerin Society Papers, The Hoover
Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.
208

Fig. 25: The neoliberal thought collective’s Russian Doll structure

Fig. 26: Hayek in front of the Institute of Economic Affairs
(Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA)

Undoubtedly, the Institute’s 1976 lecture was a pseudo-event par excellence because its
sole purpose was to discredit Galbraithian economics. It was also the beginning of an orchestrated
assault on the series The Age of Uncertainty. Indeed, much of what Friedman said in the lecture
was turned into talking points, quite clearly in the Institute’s pamphlet of the speech. (Fig. 27) But
also, in subsequent newspaper reviews of Galbraith’s series. Consider how David Kelley, the
Think tanks
(policy)
Foundations
(money)
Academics
(ideas)
The Mont Pèlerin Society
209
founder of another neoliberal institution the Atlas Society, reviewed Galbraith’s series in The Wall
Street Journal’s sister publication Barron’s:
…crucial points of economics are wholly omitted. There is no explanation anywhere, even
in outline, of how a market works. The law of supply and demand is never mentioned… the series
is skewed by Galbraith’s ideology. In order to invent a negative history of capitalism, and a positive
one for socialism, he concentrates on minor facts, manufactures others and ignores almost
everything of significance.
470

Although the 1976 lecture was an effort to discredit Galbraith’s history of capitalism,
Friedman was surprisingly mute on the issue of public broadcasting, which British neoliberal
economists such as Ronald Coase bitterly critiqued ever since the 1950s.
471
The BBC-2 Controller
Aubrey Singer attended the lecture and certainly took note of this absence.
472
Moreover, in letters
to Adrian Malone and Philip Daly, Singer urged them to produce an additional debate between
Galbraith and Friedman as the final episode of The Age of Uncertainty.
473
Singer’s idea never
materialized on the BBC, but a PBS executive Robert Chitester invited Friedman to debate
Galbraith by producing his own docu-history Free to Choose (PBS, 1980).
474
The 1976 feud
reached its most visible form on television, but it was also a product of decades-long debate
between Galbraith and the neoliberal economists.

470
David Kelley, “‘Age of Uncertainty’: The Taxpayer Should Ask for His Money Back,” Barron’s, August 1, 1977.
471
He did, however, mention that the Federal Communications Commission limited television broadcasting in the
United States and argued for the abolishment of government’s regulation of media. The remark was made in passing,
and as an illustration of the benefit in deregulating industries, rather than as an attack on state-sponsored broadcasting.
Friedman, 39.
472
Letter from Aubrey Singer to Adrian Malone, August 3, 1976, T63/125/1, The Age of Uncertainty, The BBC
Written Archives, Reading, UK.
473
Letter from Aubrey Singer to Philip Daly, September 2, 1976, T63/125/1, The Age of Uncertainty, The BBC
Written Archives, Reading, UK.
474
Friedman’s series was produced by an Eerie, PA station WQLN and a British production company VideoArts
usually involved with producing business training videos.
210

Fig. 27: The Institute of Economic Affairs’ talking points
(From Galbraith to Economic Freedom)

In earnest, Galbraith’s criticism of the neoliberal thought collective was first voiced
twenty-five years before the broadcast of The Age of Uncertainty. His popular book American
Capitalism (1952) accused free marketers of deliberately misrepresenting the modern capitalist
system. Unlike nineteenth-century capitalism, Galbraith argued that modern capitalism consists of
two “countervailing powers”—large private industry (i.e., corporations) and strong labor (i.e.,
unions). As he asserted, those that wanted to return to laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth
century willfully chose to disregard this crucial difference between the post-World War Two
period and Adam Smith’s time.
475
Moreover, Galbraith contended that ideas espoused by
neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek were, at best, archaic and of a different world.
476
Not

475
As I have shown in Chapter One, neoliberal thinkers did not want to return to laissez-faire capitalism but rather to
reform the classical liberal world-system to complete its unfulfilled promise of a market-bounded world.
476
Even in his memoirs, published in the heyday of neoliberalism, Galbraith’s description of Hayek as painfully out
of touch is accounted through Hayek’s seminar at the London School of Economics. “At the LSE I attended the
seminars of Friedrich von Hayek and Lionel Robbins, both men of classical faith — seminar in each case being a
conventional term that described a convocation of some seventy-five or a hundred contentiously articulate and deeply
dissenting participants from all over the globe. Most notably present were the recent migrants from the repressive

211
to say anything of their impossibility in a large industrial state that consisted of a strong private
sector and then-strong unions; it was this balance that brought postwar economic prosperity and
stability to the U.S. economic system even if its large deficits were, in theory, projected to
destabilize the global economy.
477

But Friedman did not dispute Galbraith’s distinction between mid-twentieth-century
capitalism and Adam Smith’s description. To be sure, Friedman’s contention with Galbraith did
not arise from intellectual history. Nor did he attack his personality or social standing. As Friedman
said, the lecture was not a matter of different opinions and personalities. To illustrate this point,
Friedman began the lecture by expressing his liking for Galbraith and their friendship:
I have no prejudice against John Kenneth Galbraith. Indeed, some of my best friends are
Galbrathians, including John Kenneth. I say this because there is often somewhat of a tendency to
attribute motives what is really to be attributed to honest difference of opinion. Galbraith deserves
a good deal of credit for his independence of mind, for his diligence in trying to spread and promote
his ideas, and for an attempt to put intellectual content into some of them.
478

Despite their private fondness, Friedman publicly condemned Galbraith for being a poor
scientist, but praised him for being an excellent advertiser because he managed to create popular
terms such as “technostructure” without testing these concepts through scientific data.
479
In
Friedman’s account, Galbraith was an ideologue and an anti-economist, for he was only committed

regimes in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Poland. So competitive was the effort to be heard that Professor Hayek, a
gentle man of comprehensively archaic views — all efforts by the state to protect or advance well-being he held to be
on the downward road to serfdom — was only rarely able to speak. On one memorable evening he arrived, took his
seat, bowed and in his polished accent said, ‘Now gentlemen, as I proposed to you at our last meeting, we will on this
evening discuss the rate of interest.’ Nicholas Kaldor saw the opportunity and said, ‘Professor Hayek, I really must
beg to disagree.’” John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 77-
78.
477
“Yet in the years in question we survived. And many more people were content with the economic system than
unhappy. It can only be, then, that something was wrong with the current or accepted interpretation of American
capitalism.” John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 9.
478
Milton Friedman, From Galbraith to Economic Freedom (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1977), 12.
479
“One of Galbraith’s great abilities is his ability to seize upon key words and sell them. He is an advertiser par
excellence! It has always puzzled me why the commercial advertising industry has not recognized that and taken
advantage of his extraordinary quality. ‘The affluent society’ was one such phrase. ‘Countervailing powers’ was
another.” Ibid., 16-17.
212
to spreading economic falsehoods that limit and strain Western societies’ economic prosperity.
480

This was an ironic classification of Galbraith as a propagandist because The Age of Uncertainty’s
archival documents emphasize an entirely different story. For instance, the series’ producers
repeatedly expressed frustration with Galbraith’s ideological ambiguity; what Galbraith
represented was never entirely certain to those that worked with him and would remain enigmatic
even after the series was completed.
Consider The Age of Uncertainty’s episode three “Karl Marx: The Massive Dissent.” While
in pre-production, the series producer Dick Gilling warned Galbraith that his lack of position on
Marx will endanger the project’s success: “If we see Marxism in its present form as having failed
to live up to its creator’s intentions, we should say so… it could provide the fire that is presently
lacking in our presentation, which is neither wholeheartedly committed to Marx nor to a
thoroughgoing critique of his failings.”
481
To be sure, Galbraith was not a Marxist economist.
Although he analyzed power in capitalist societies throughout his academic career, Galbraith
purposefully undermined the issue of wealth inequality, so central to nineteenth-century political
economists such as Robert Malthus and Marx. Inequality was solved, Galbraith argued, by
American capitalism’s affluence—it was no longer an issue within the liberal world-system.
482

This rebuttal of Marxism was particularly evident when, in post-production, he complained to
Aubrey Singer, that the Marx episode “was a little heavy… I had warned Adrian [Malone] about

480
“…apart from Galbraith’s own assertion, there has been no successful defence of this view of the world. That does
not mean there are no defenders of the view. There are many. There are many who accept it. But I know of no scientific
studies which have validated that view of the world as meaningful and accurate in the sense that it yields predictions
about the behaviour of enterprises, of industry, or of the economy as a whole that can be checked, tested against
evidence, and found to hold.” Ibid., 28-29. On this point, Friedman got to his other section entitled “Galbraith—
Scientist or Missionary?”
481
“Unlike the other programmes, this one lacks a point of view. Without it, it will not come alive.” Memorandum
from Dick Gilling, June 4, 1975, T63/119/1, “The Age of Uncertainty,” The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
482
This was, then, the leading argument of his 1958 book The Affluent Society. In it, Galbraith charged classical
economic theory from the nineteenth century as unable to deal with modern economic problems that are no longer
centered around inequality.
213
that when I saw it.”
483
In hindsight, Galbraith’s uneasiness with coming across as a socialist was
justified; critics were quick to “out” him as an architect of “new socialism.” For instance, The New
York Times’s review of The Age of Uncertainty written by American economist Leonard Silk gave
such a description of Galbraith: “So Mr. Galbraith has at last come out of the closet as a socialist.
This is publicly useful; it will add clarity and realism to the debate—first among the economists
whom Mr. Galbraith taunts as acolytes of the neoclassical myth of the market, and later among the
politicians and the voters.”
484

For all these reasons, it was difficult to understand what Galbraith represented.
Undoubtedly, as the U.S. Ambassador to India under the Kennedy Administration and as an
economics professor at Harvard, Galbraith was part of Cold War America’s political and academic
establishment—a boon for the BBC because Galbraith facilitated numerous contacts with leading
political figures such as Henry Kissinger.
485
Moreover, Galbraith’s international network helped
the BBC to produce content in developing countries such as Singapore and Pakistan which made
filming in far-away locations more manageable, especially when the Non-Aligned Movement
battered Western media corporations.
486
As such, Galbraith was in no sense a political radical not

483
Letter from John Kenneth Galbraith to Aubrey Singer, January 31, 1977, T63/123/1, “The Age of Uncertainty,”
The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
484
Leonard Silk, “Galbraith’s New Socialism,” The New York Times, September 18, 1973.
485
In pre-production, Galbraith asked Malone for a personal assistant—bodyguard that would help protect him from
people: “…I will probably be somewhat more in need of protection than my predecessors. When I move around in the
United States and elsewhere, I am a natural target for a very large number of beseeching academics, politicians and
other supplicants and mendicants. I would like therefore to raise the question of some kind of personal protector and
assistant while on the road.” Letter from John K. Galbraith to Adrian Malone, November 20, 1973, The Age of
Uncertainty Program: Correspondence [1973], 8/53/F/2/1, Box 566, John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers, The
John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
Henry Kissinger and the BBC: Letter from Aubrey Singer to John K. Galbraith, May 18, 1976, Box 568, 8/53/F/2/3,
John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers, The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
486
This was not an easy period for the BBC because in the 1970s, the Non-Aligned Movement led by Indira Gandhi’s
Government charged the Corporation for imperialism through its educational programming. I recently covered these
debates in an article that examined BBC’s broadcast of Louis Malle’s mini-series Phantom India (1969) within the
Non-Aligned Movement’s efforts to decolonize global communication. Jelena B. Ćulibrk, “Educational Imperialism:
Phantom India and The Non-Aligned Movement’s New World Information Order, 1969-1980,” VIEW Journal of
European Television History and Culture 11, no. 21 (August 3, 2022): 70.
214
least because he was good friends with key figures of the New Right such as William F. Buckley
with whom he skied every year at Gstaad, Switzerland’s glitzy alpine resort.
487

However, one thing was certain: Galbraith was whole-heartedly committed to Cold War
liberalism; he prescribed American capitalism and its welfare state as a model for developing
countries.
488
But this was a peculiar type of liberalism that can, as scholars have suggested, only
be understood through television. In 1961, sociologist Daniel Boorstin famously classified
Kennedy’s image on television, during the 1960 Presidential campaign, as “clean cut” for his
televised appearance, which displayed none of the visual deformities that Nixon’s “light, naturally
transparent skin” produced. Although Nixon engaged with political issues more directly than
Kennedy, Boorstin contended, television’s mediation of the debate rallied the public’s support
behind Kennedy: “Finally the television-watching voter was left to judge, not on issues explored
by thoughtful men, but on the relative capacity of the two candidates to perform under television
stress.”
489
But Boorstin’s metaphor of Kennedy’s “clean cut” politics based on appearances rather
than issues was, by default, extended to the Kennedy Administration. To be sure, Galbraith was
equally well groomed and smartly dressed; both men were blunt and confident during their TV
appearances.
490
But “clean cut” means something else here, as J.D. Connor argued—“Kennedy
modernism required more than the medium; it revolved around the critique of the medium, and the

487
Galbraith’s friendship with Buckley is apparent to anyone sifting through Galbraith’s personal papers. For their
correspondence in the 1960s and 1970s see Box 191, 8/52/G/3/8, and Box 192, 8/52/G/4/1, John Kenneth Galbraith
Personal Papers, The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
488
Adrian Malone described him in the following way: “Fortunately, both men [Bronowski and Galbraith] have a
common quality; a passionate liberalism.” Adrian Malone, “Programme Suggestion,” July 27, 1973, 2, “BBC Program
Outline,” Box 579, John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers, The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
489
Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 43.
490
In fact, Galbraith facilitated Kennedy’s television presence when early in Kennedy’s campaign, Galbraith arranged
a special TV program with Elenore Roosevelt. “He said he was coming to Cambridge on January 2, 1960, to do a
television program with Mrs. Roosevelt. (This had been arranged by Galbraith with considerable ingenuity and effort
in order to advance the rapprochement with the liberals.)” Arthur Meier Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F.
Kennedy in the White House, Electronic Book (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002).
215
invocation of an ideology of television.”
491
Consider, for example, one brainstorming session
during the pre-production of The Age of Uncertainty. Amidst a debate on Brecht’s epic theatre,
Galbraith abruptly interrupted the discussion with a blunt albeit revealing statement:
These are things I don’t understand. The only concern I have is one that I mentioned several
times. If there’s a choice between being dry and either frantic or burlesque let’s keep it dry because
that’s my style. We should lean to minimize the frantic quality, minimize the burlesque. Minimize
the symbolism. The less there is the more comfortable I am.
492

What Galbraith’s aesthetic minimalism connoted was tension between “two cinemas”
present within and on television in its Golden Age. On the one hand, there was advertising’s highly
symbolic logic ruled by fast-paced cinematic editing while, on the other hand, Drew Associates’
direct cinema of seemingly little manipulation—a form of filmmaking crucial to the Kennedy
Administration. Robert Drew’s two films on Kennedy’s time in office—Primary (1960) and Crisis
(1962)—have been instrumental in establishing the American version of cinema verité. What
distinguished this style of filmmaking was the so-called “fly on the wall” approach which made
the production crew “invisible” in the image-making process. Certainly, direct cinema was
theorized as observational—a visual testament to the social and political drama unfolding in front
of the camera.
493
But by providing a seemingly direct image of the Kennedy Administration,
Drew’s films, in essence, provided very little. As Brian Winston argued: “The politics of the
situation—Primary’s subject material, after all—remain hidden.”
494
Indeed, the film’s strict focus

491
J.D. Connor, “Clean Cuts: Kennedy Modernism on Screen,” in Film and the American Presidency, ed. Jeff Menne
and Christian B. Long (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 137.
492
AM/JKG: June 1974 Conversation, p. 3, T63/119/1, The Age of Uncertainty, The BBC Written Archives, Reading,
UK.
493
On Auricona and how it was understood by Drew and Leacock: “Now they could really gather evidence, film life
as lived, ‘shoot events as they happened’. The new equipment did not just bolster and protect documentary’s truth
claim; it enhanced and magnified it.” Brian Winston, Claiming the Real II Documentary: Grierson and Beyond
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 148.
494
Ibid., 154.
216
on the 1960 Presidential Campaign precluded its engagement with critical social and political
issues.
495

Consider The Age of Uncertainty’s two final episodes entirely shot on Galbraith’s farm
in Newfane, Vermont. These episodes were filmed over a single weekend in July 1976 when
Galbraith invited several distinguished guests to deliberate about the future of liberalism as well
as its political, economic, and media institutions. Galbraith hosted Henry Kissinger, former
British PM Edward Heath, British trade union leader Jack Jones, the PM of Thailand Kukrit
Pramej, Soviet scientist Georgy Arbatov, British politician Shirley Williams, and, of course,
Arthur Schlesinger.
496
What was officially called “A Weekend in Vermont” was a set of
informal conversations shot in the style of Drew’s direct cinema. Apart from Galbraith’s scant
narration, the participants were free to voice their opinions on the decade’s most pressing issues.
This was, then, the appeal of the docu-histories that privileged audiences by giving them access
to these intimate albeit powerful circles. Frederic Jameson noticed this appeal when he remarked:
“The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much
in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for
grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to
grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself.”
497
And while
the two episodes provided a plethora of interesting observations and subtle personality quirks

495
“Crisis shot in June and aired in October. It has nothing to say about the white riot during the integration of Ole
Miss, even though that disaster was the implicit backdrop for the Kennedys’ concern with the stage-managed conflict
in Alabama. Nor does the film mention the assassination of Medgar Evers the day after Kennedy’s climactic speech
on behalf of his civil rights bill.” J.D. Connor, “Clean Cuts: Kennedy Modernism on Screen,” 145.
496
Several important guests such as Willy Brandt were not able to join for the occasion. Letter from John Kenneth
Galbraith to Kukrit Pramej, June 15, 1976, T63/134/1, “The Age of Uncertainty,” The BBC Written Archives, Reading,
UK.
497
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1989), 37-38.
217
of those in attendance, the episodes failed to provide any additional knowledge about politics or
governance.
498

And yet, we have been told that television’s image is one of excess. For Deleuze,
television’s erratic visuality and its destruction of spatio-temporal unity constitute tele-image’s
schizoid experience.
499
No doubt, it is as Heidegger suggested, a dangerous image for it makes
everything visible, thus possible, but nothing meaningful. Similarly, Jameson described the late
capitalist cultural logic as “an orgy of language and representation, an excess of representational
consumption.”
500
But what if this is a misleading way to describe televisuality? Could there be, in
addition to this image of chaos, a more stable image of late capitalism—a “clean cut” image of
capital? As I have suggested in Chapter Three, the appeal of cybernetics and information systems,
such as television and the market, was their promise to contain the future and eliminate chance.
Chaos is what exists before data and information are fed into the system; before individual or
localized knowledge is properly “digested.” As Jill Craigie’s film Out of Chaos suggested,
salvation from the futility of human existence was through the training of perception.
501

By suggesting “clean cut” postmodernity here I am not committing—in a typical cybernetic
manner—a conflation of historical periods. Indeed, on the one hand, we could regard the BBC
docu-history form as always already postmodern for it was based on visualizing time as multi-

498
For Pierre Bourdieu, focusing on individual human stories depoliticizes television because it inundates meaningless
events with extraordinarily; it creates a political vacuum by trivializing what is really happening in the outside world.
“As I’ve said, human interest stories create a political vacuum. They depoliticize and reduce what goes on in the world
to the level of anecdote or scandal. This can occur on a national or international scale, especially with film stars or
members of royal families, and is accomplished by fixing and keeping attention fixed on events without political
consequences, but which are nonetheless dramatized so as to “draw a lesson” or be transformed into illustrations of
“social problems.” Pierre Bourdieu, “On Television,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi
Durham and Douglas Kellner, Revised edition (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 332.
499
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 265.
500
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1989), 321.
501
Arendt would add that this was why the historical process became enacted in the first place. Following the massive
de-secularization of the world during the Enlightenment, history as a scientific discipline was developed to give
meaning. Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern.”
218
layered. But on the other hand, the docu-histories could still be providing a “clean cut” image of
politics that Connor associated with JFK modernity. Consider, for instance, Jameson’s definition
of postmodernism as “what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is
gone for good.”
502
To invoke Hannah Arendt again, the division between people and nature, as a
stable environment in which people live and act upon, withered away with the explosion of nuclear
bombs in those six faithful days in August 1945. And what about modernization? For Galbraith,
the modernization process culminated with American capitalism in the postwar years since the
basic needs of most people were fulfilled, and capitalism relied on manufacturing the surplus of
needs. As I have mentioned, this process was dependent on advertising, which took its most visible
and appealing form on television rather than in printed media. Although in its earliest days
television commercials mimicked radio advertising, communicating sponsored messages soon
became more sophisticated not least through the employment of fast-paced cinematic editing. But
once these special advertising segments were completed, television programming returned to its
other image of stability—one that was more contained to a particular time and place; in these early
days, this was most certainly the studio. To illustrate how these two images functioned, I turn to
The Age of Uncertainty’s most controversial episode nine “The Big Corporation.” But instead of
just representing the change in modern capitalism, the episode was, in earnest, a story about
television. It was a way of thinking about what kind of work the docu-histories were doing.
“The Big Corporation” explicated Galbraith’s concept of “technostructure” which he
developed in a book based on his 1966 Reith lectures at the BBC entitled The New Industrial State
(1967). For Galbraith, the technostructure represented a novel form of dispersed power that
modern corporations depended on to reproduce their influence in society. To be sure, this was

502
Jameson, ix.
219
another opportunity for Galbraith to lambaste those economists (i.e., neoliberals) who archaically
privileged the individual. As he remarked: “The entrepreneur-individualistic, restless, with vision,
guile and courage—has been the economists' only hero… It is not to individuals but to
organizations that power in the business enterprise and power in the society has passed.”
503

Fig. 28: Letter from Mick Jackson
(The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK)

It doesn’t come as a surprise that the episode was harshly criticized by the neoliberal
thought collective as well as the American and British corporate sectors. Archival records hold a
peculiar example. An undisclosed individual—known to the production team at the time but for
contemporary researchers, the name was redacted—phoned the episode’s director Mick Jackson
to complain about how Galbraith did not provide an honest understanding of the capitalist
economy and the positive role of the corporation. The anonymous individual suggested he produce
a debate on the matter before charging Jackson for being a pawn in Galbraith’s (and Cold War

503
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967), 60.
220
television’s) ideological game. (Fig. 28) An additional rebuttal of the episode is visible in a
different archive which attested to the extent to which PBS series were supported by corporate
sponsorship. We can see this most clearly in the interest of American corporations to find
Friedman’s “answer” to Galbraithian economics through what would become Free to Choose
(PBS, 1980).
504
However, it was not usual for PBS series to be funded by corporate underwriters
(i.e., oil companies) which sociologists already criticized in the mid-1970s.
505
But in the case of
Friedman’s series, PBS doubled their usual limit of seven underwriters to fourteen.
506

Fig. 29: The outline of The Age of Uncertainty’s episode nine
(The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK)

504
Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State and a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society George Shultz facilitated Chitester’s
contacts with American corporations not least Charles Koch. Letter from Robert Chitester to Charles Koch, October
6, 1977, Folder 6, Box 61, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, CA.
505
It was common for sociologists in the 1970s to lambaste the PBS for accepting oil money and agreeing to have
large corporations as the shows’ underwriters Robert C. Toth, “Corporate Gifts to Public TV Challenged,” Los Angeles
Times, September 7, 1977.
506
Free to Choose’s budget was $2.7 million for production and $800,000 for promotion, while Chitester mentioned
in his letters to potential funders that this was a sum still smaller than what Galbraith’s docu-history cost. By the time
he wrote this letter, Getty Oil supported Friedman’s series with $240,000. Letter from Robert Chitester to George
Shultz, October 7, 1977, Folder 6, Box 61, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University,
CA.
221
Less controversially, the episode also displayed “two cinematic images” on public
television. Perhaps, in this way, the episode was the series’ most postmodernist—aware of its
meta-position as the conscious producer of knowledge and using nostalgia to create a sense of
historicity.
507
It was in this episode that Galbraith’s argument about the role of advertising in
modern capitalism was most thoroughly developed. Even structurally, the episode shifts between
several levels of explanation. In the first part, the episode caricatured modern conglomerates by
presenting the story of UGE—United Global Enterprise—a composite or an idealized version of a
modern corporation. Its history is told in a semi-ironic manner by mimicking television
advertisements. Unlike other episodes that are more classic in narrative, this episode breaks the
series’ journey through economic history. (Fig. 29) In the episode’s outline, direct cinema is used
in filming what the document abbreviated as “’genuine’ locations” and the postmodern televisual
image of excess in “theatre locations.”
508
In terms of genuine locations, the audience was given a
glimpse of a real-life corporation from Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Indeed, the episode showed
various ways in which the Philips Corporation influenced the lives of its workers, executives, and
by extension all of the world’s citizens. After illustrating the influence of Philips over its
employees’ lives, the episode turned to direct cinema to bring an observational study of the
corporation’s annual meeting, held in a remote location in Switzerland. This was where all the
representatives of the corporation, from around the world, met to discuss strategies and plans for
the next year.
This visual representation of modern power surely seemed familiar to the neoliberal
thought collective. The episode’s visualization of the technostructure “cut” straight into the crux
of neoliberal power. And yet, Galbraith was not really in opposition to this form of corporate power.

507
The episode was directed by Mick Jackson who later migrated to Hollywood and produced blockbuster hits such
as The Bodyguard (1992).
508
“Corporation Programme,” T63/119/1, The Age of Uncertainty, The BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK.
222
As a Cold War realist, perhaps even a pragmatist, he saw dispersed power as inevitable in modern
societies. In The New Industrial State’s (1967) chapter on technostructure, Galbraith clearly
explains the benefits of decentralized power: “to synthesize by organization a group personality
far superior for its purposes to a natural person and with the added advantage of immortality.”
509

Additionally, archival records support Galbraith’s positive view of modern industry. Consider how
the series’ producer David Kennard in letters to IBM described Galbraith’s views: “He certainly
believes in the future of these large organisations and at the present time he wishes to end on a
note of humourous speculation, looking into the future to see how ‘The ABC Company’ may look
in the year 2000.”
510
In a letter to Mobil Oil, Kennard told the corporation’s executive that the
series “must ensure that the Mobil Corporation is not represented as a faceless entity. We need a
central human situation... Therefore, we suggest that we should film a special meeting of your
responsible planning group, at which all significant departments of the corporation are represented
by the most senior and capable person—perhaps the Vice President.”
511
Perhaps most tellingly,
towards the episode’s end Galbraith asked a surprising question. “If France and Germany are now
de-nationalized that they cannot indulge their ancient animosity, cannot slaughter each other’s
citizens, should we,” Galbraith pauses, “weep?” Here then is the postmodern inevitability of
capitalism as a system and organizing principle of social and political life. Almost as if he
channeled Ludwig von Mises’ arguments from the 1920s, Galbraith shrank alternatives to

509
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967), 61.
510
Letter from David Kennard to Jane Cahill (IBM Corporation), March 3, 1975, The Age of Uncertainty: Program
Correspondence, 8/53/F/2/3, Box 568, John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers, The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston,
MA.
511
Letter from David Kennard to Herb Schmerz, March 4, 1975, 3, The Age of Uncertainty: Program Correspondence,
8/53/F/2/3, Box 568, John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Papers, The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.
223
capitalism as leading to pure violence. Hence, the episode was a comment on late capitalism as
much as it was a product of it.
512

In the Head of History: The Image of Capital and the Neoliberal Mental Landscape
The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself.
513

- Gilles Deleuze

The most serious error of [classical] liberalism
has been that it has had nothing
to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations.
514

- Ludwig von Mises

In the next section of this chapter, I want to unpack the docu-histories’ dominant image,
the one made of both excess and stability. I call it “the image of capital.” The term might seem
contradictory because, as I have argued, images are always already television’s primary capital.
As Jonathan Beller suggested, the classical Marxist formula of M-C-M’, or Money-Commodity-
Money under mass media (and consumer capitalism) transforms into M-I-M’, or Money-
Information-Money. For Beller, commodities have always been forms of media while, in turn,
information represents a commodity that was always already part of the production process as
Marx initially described. While I do not dispute Beller’s characterization of commodities as
inherently informational, I define the image of capital slightly differently. In part, Beller’s
definition did not influence my thinking since I came to his work late when much of this chapter
was already written. But my encounter with Beller’s work was fortunate because it signaled that
my intuitions about docu-histories and their dominant image made sense. Indeed, by using an
abstraction such as “the image of capital,” I wondered whether I was overreading media texts.

512
When the episode shows the corporate culture as a modern-day religion of global nomads—CEOs and
businessmen—the production team is ultimately playing itself. By illustrating “The Big Corporation,” I wanted to
emphasize that “clean cut” and the postmodernist televisual image existed simultaneously.
513
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Fifth edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 189.
514
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (New York and San Francisco: The Foundation for
Economic Education and Cobden Press, 2002), 4.
224
With these prior anxieties in mind, what is “the image of capital”? If I had to write a formula, and
once again assert my agency, then it would go something like this:
THE IMAGE OF CAPITAL =
Motion (Historical process) + Experience (Consumption)

From the equation, we can see that this image comes from after the fact; the image is a
product of action—motion (on-screen) and experience (within bodies). As I have explained in
Chapter Three, the docu-histories’ main charm was based on televised voyages across global
heritage. The docu-histories transformation of educational television not least by exiting the
television studio was crucial to their appeal. But in addition to the literal transportation necessary
to produce these docu-histories, in no small way facilitated by the jet age, I argued that post-World
War Two historiography functioned through processual representations. Indeed, the BBC docu-
histories functioned as cybernetic machines precisely because they were based on this historical
procession that allowed for the circulation of images on the screen.
However, my concept overlaps with Beller’s in one important if not crucial aspect: “the
image of capital is not a single image.”
515
The image functions not as a representation but as an
epistemic regime. I appropriated Deleuze’s concept of the time-image to suggest that the image of
capital functions as an externalized thinking process; the image is not a visualization or a
representation of the capitalist economy, but a form of thought about the economy, and by
extension, the system itself. To be sure, I subvert Deleuze’s hopeful formulation of the time-image
as a liberatory terrain on which people can experience Being and thinking in a cybernetically-
bounded world.
516
For him, the time-image arises from the spur of a moment which makes it

515
We probably both came to this conclusion through Heidegger’s essay “The Age of the World Picture” and
Deleuze’s concept of the time-image. Jonathan Beller, The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial
Capitalism, Thought in the Act (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 108.
516
I am also sure that I am misunderstanding Deleuze’s definition of the time-image because the writing is elusive at
best and oddly restricting towards the potential of television as having the time-image.
225
particularly appealing as an alternative, non-dogmatic image of thought. In contrast, the image of
capital—although equally rare as the time-image—precludes chance and uncertainty by using the
past to generate future outcomes. Let me illustrate this abstraction through Free to Choose’s
memorable image of capital.
In the first episode “The Power of the Market,” Friedman travels to modern-day Hong
Kong to display the appealing promise of unfettered markets. But before the episode showed
Friedman perambulating the streets, the image of capital emerges through the visualization of the
city’s harbor. The establishing shot of the Bay slowly pans out as Friedman utters: “I came here to
the South China Sea. It’s a place where there is an almost laboratory experiment in what happens
when government is limited to its proper function and leaves people free to pursue their own
objectives.” To be sure, Friedman’s description and the sequence are already a double abstraction.
On the one hand, the image of capital emerges from the Hong Kong sequence as an abstract thought
on the future while, on the other hand, the Hong Kong example already served as an abstraction
for Friedman and the production team. In the next shot, Friedman’s off-screen narration is revealed
to be coming from a ship that is now seen gliding towards the city’s harbor. (Fig. 30)

226

Fig. 30: Free to Choose, episode “The Power of the Market”
It is not by accident that these scenes in Hong Kong were the first to be filmed by Robert
Chitester and his production team in September 1978. Indeed, Friedman traveled to this British
Empire’s Eastern outpost for a very special reason—the Mont Pèlerin Society held its first
international meeting outside Europe and North America during the first week of September 1978.
But more relevantly, the MPS’ General Meeting in Hong Kong represented a decisive moment
when various strands of neoliberalism—the Austrian, Geneva, and Chicago Schools—merged to
offer a unified neoliberal program. As Quinn Slobodian argued, the meeting was “a turning point
in the acceleration of the neoliberal search for institutional forms that would account for
democratic realities but nonetheless lock in market-friendly outcomes.”
517
Given the neoliberal
thought collectives’ powerful merger in Hong Kong, I want to suggest that Friedman’s on-screen
voyage to Hong Kong was a visualization, an anticipation, of what the neoliberal thought collective
would accomplish only a few years after the 1978 meeting. Although the ship’s movement
connotes fluidity of capital, it also communicates something grander—a likely image of the future
consolidated by the 1978 MPS Meeting.
But this historical potentiality is only revealed through sequences that immediately follow
Friedman’s visit to Hong Kong. Indeed, the image of capital becomes apparent only when it is

517
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2018), 237.
227
viewed within the episode’s broader logic; the image is exposed through Friedman’s subsequent
on-screen journey to the bedrock of modern capitalism—eighteenth-century Scotland. It was here,
Friedman argued, that Adam Smith wrote his famous book The Wealth of Nations in the same year
as that of the American Revolution. By periodizing Smith’s economic philosophy with the United
States inception, Friedman elucidated his greatest insight—the Western world needs to return to
its economic beginnings within the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith’s original theories of
supposedly unfettered markets. But if the episode juxtaposed 1970s Hong Kong with Adam
Smith’s time it provided a classic image of the docu-histories that I have analyzed as cybernetic
that rested on the conflation of historical periods. Indeed, to create a neoliberal future, Friedman
needed to go back into the past—this was, as I have argued, an enduring premise of the docu-
histories. In a typical cybernetic gesture, the image of capital was eliminating the instability of
future potentialities by offering an image of the future. Since cybernetic knowledge production
was based on using the past (e.g., data) to generate the future, so too did Free to Choose employ
its representation of eighteenth-century Scotland to invoke a future based on the neoliberal order.
And from the vantage point of 1978 Hong Kong, this future seemed bright.
How do we extend this argument to the BBC in the late-1960s? In what way was the Hong
Kong harbor sequence related to, say, Civilisation as the inaugural docu-history program? To be
sure, the docu-histories rarely invoked capitalism directly. However, there was an exception even
with idealists such as Kenneth Clark. As we shall see, one of the earliest representations of the
image of capital, and thus, capitalism was in Civilisation’s episode eight “The Light of Experience.”
This convenient title was supposed to depict how Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch
painters manipulated light and, by extension, physical reality. However, the sequence I want to
focus on did not represent any particular Dutch painting. In a way, the sequence was visually
minimal; one could say that the sequence was aesthetically stable, even clean-cut. It was filmed in
228
its entirety on Amsterdam’s many canals which were built by the genius of Dutch urban planners
and accumulated capital; in the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was the indisputable capital of
financial innovation. Although Clark did not connect the canals to capitalism, he defined this
extraordinary historical period as based on artistic and capitalist revolution:
I didn’t say much about economics in this program chiefly because I don’t understand them.
And perhaps for that reason, I believe their importance has been overrated by post-Marxist
historians. But, of course, there is no doubt there is a certain stage in social development—fluid
capital is one of the chief causes of civilization. Because it ensures three essential ingredients—
leisure, movement, and independence.

As Clark uttered “fluid capital,” the images on screen supported his verbal explanation of
capitalism—Amsterdam’s extensive canal network came to represent the power of the global
economy and its fluidity to produce the material world that Clark and the audiences now
experienced. (Fig. 31) As products of the Dutch Golden Age, these water routes connoted, in
miniature, the extensive trade networks that make capitalist circulation possible in the first place.
Through Clark’s journey, the audience experiences this connection between Amsterdam’s
opulence and the capital’s fluidity. To be sure, canals stand as the metaphor for capital’s
reconstruction of nature to account for the circulation of capital by supporting trade networks that
were crucial, as Clark explained, to the existence of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth
century. Capitalism is based and depends on the mobility of goods, labor, and information. It
cannot exist without this movement. Likewise, for the image of capital to reappear it needs
motion—the flow of images—but also literal transportation that the docu-histories have been
linked to. Surely the docu-histories as on-screen journeys depended on transportation to bring their
images to light. Although several other series implemented actual transportation to illustrate the
presenter’s ideas, Clark’s ride on the canals was the first time he was mobilized. Prior to this
episode, Clark presented his ideas usually en face almost as if holding a short lecture in front of
the camera.
229

Fig. 31: The image of capital in Civilisation’s episode eight “The Light of Experience”

But as Clark argued, the Dutch Golden Age simultaneously produced an additional no less
relevant upheaval—the Scientific Revolution. He used Johannes Vermeer’s paintings to illustrate
the period’s newly found interest in depicting the subtleties of light. Clark cited Vermeer’s
“passion for light” by illustrating it through his painting The Geographer. (Fig. 32) But the painting
famously had a counterpart in The Astronomer, which art historian Jonathan Crary reads as an
example of the period’s perceptual revolution. According to Crary, new definitions of vision and
reason rested on the Cartesian separation of the mind and the body and, by extension, the observer
and physical reality. For scientists of Descartes’ time such as Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton,
or The Astronomer, the world was knowable through representations—globes, maps, and scientific
instruments such as the telescope and microscope—and not through the direct sensorial experience
of material reality.
518
For Crary, the Cartesian division was most clearly expressed through the
camera obscura—the period’s dominant visual instrument; this darkened room provided a
representational image of physical reality while also affording a private space for contemplation
seen as crucial to scientific discovery. So influential was this seventeenth-century idea that even
political economists like James Mill adopted it as a methodological approach. For instance, when

518
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
Mass. and London, England: MIT Press, 1992), 36 and 46.
230
Mill published his well-known book on India, he disparaged economists who travel to far-off
locations in hopes of gaining direct knowledge with the help of their “eyes and ears in India.” In
contrast, Mill was perfectly content with writing from his “closet in England” since this distance
and solitude were more conducive to the production of economic knowledge.
519

Fig. 32: J. Vermeer’s paintings The Geographer (1668) and The Astronomer (1668)

This promise of solitary contemplation was retained by the docu-histories in their insistence that
the series provided audiences with knowledge of the world that they could have not experienced
otherwise.
520
As I have argued in Chapter Three, color broadcasting was extolled for providing a

519
“In his History of India, James Mill expressed his disdain for an economist's travels when he claimed that a “duly
qualified” person could “obtain more knowledge of India” from his “closet” in England, than from using his “eyes
and his ears in India” (quoted by Maria Bach, this issue). Mill thus not only gave a perfect impression of what
nowadays is criticized as the “imperial gaze,” but just like Whately defended a position that put theory over facts and
the economist's windowless cubicle over a direct engagement with the world outside.” Mauro Boianovsky and Harro
Maas, “Introduction: Roads to Economic Knowledge: The Epistemic Virtues of Travel across the History of Thought,”
History of Political Economy 54, no. 3 (June 1, 2022): 386.
520
And yet, there was an obvious twist—the docu-histories obviously depended on voyages to produce images, their
primary forms of capital. Indeed, they based knowledge production on the experience of mobility afforded by actual
travel and the movement of images. Here then is another crucial difference between the image of capital and Deleuze’s
time-image. As he described, time-image was no longer based on movement but a pure experience of time. To illustrate
this statement, Deleuze invoked Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. In contrast to Italian realism based on journeys and
movement, Antonioni “left his bicycle” (Deleuze’s reference to Italian realist films) to focus on pure time. Indeed,
even though L’Avventura’s plot revolves around Monica Vitti’s character’s search for her friend after she disappeared
off an Italian island, it turns into an internal journey. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 23.
231
more complete experience of physical reality than it was ever possible by people’s sensory
apparatus.
I return to the conflict between Civilisation and The Ascent of Man to explicate the last part
of the equation—experience as consumption or experience as labor. As I have mentioned, the
conflict between the BBC-2 series was heavily exploited by the Corporation in its marketing
campaigns—talking points that were later reiterated by production teams. Even though these media
appearances were part of an orchestrated campaign at producing difference, they sometimes
provided important clues on how the docu-history form developed from its 1969 iteration.
Consider, for example, how The Ascent of Man’s producer Adrian Malone delineated the
difference between Civilisation and the history of science series he was completing:
It [The Ascent of Man] deals with history in a different sense to that which Clark dealt with
in ‘Civilisation.’ Clark was a man who stood on the side-lines and said, ‘I’m a spectator of the
excellence man has created; the finished artifact, the great painting.’ We are concerned, if you like,
with what happened in the head of history.
521

Malone’s corporeal metaphor for the series’ visualization strategy was more than a rhetorical
gesture; it was an indication that on-screen images were not just representations of material reality,
but generators of that reality. I want to argue in this chapter’s final section that Malone’s somewhat
clumsy term “the head of history” is the key to understanding how the docu-histories operated and
what allowed them to construct the neoliberal mental landscape. As I have argued, post-World
War Two television and Hayek’s definition of the market were both conceived as sophisticated
information processors that supplemented and enhanced our imperfect cognition. However, I have
not indicated a crucial characteristic; both television and the market did not only transmit

521
“A spoken tape by Adrian Malone,” 3, 6/4/19, Jacob Bronowski Collection, Jesus College Archives, University of
Cambridge, UK.
232
information; they generated it through its process.
522
For instance, the docu-histories’ images were
not representations, but they functioned as externalized thoughts based on the flow of images. And
they were telling several stories at once. Let me extrapolate this argument through The Ascent of
Man’s episode six “The Starry Messenger.”

Fig. 33: The Ascent of Man, episode six “The Starry Messenger”

Based on explaining the Scientific Revolution, “The Starry Messenger” begins with an
analysis of non-Western science—Mayan mathematics.
523
We see Bronowski perambulating
Mayan ruins and lamenting a sophisticated mathematical system that never went beyond its time-
keeping utility, citing the Mayan calendar as an example. By the same argument, Bronowski is on
Easter Islands, among the famous statues, whose repetitive presence Bronowski reads as a failure
of yet another culture to produce the necessary scientific leap—the invention of the scientific
method. The televised spaces of the Mayan ruins, and the Easter islands were, to fit the argument
of the episode, visualized as “dead spaces.” As Bronowski argued, these cultures failed to develop

522
“Information, as relayed by prices, was not only carried but generated through the market—a crucial insight.”
Martin Beddeleem, “Recoding Liberalism,” in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, ed. Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and
Philip Mirowski (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 31.
523
Bronowski understood the history of science still in relation to the “scientific revolution,” a common misconception
discredit only in the 1990s by scholars such as Steven Shapin: “There was no such thing as the Scientific
Revolution…The phrase ‘the Scientific Revolution’ was not in common use before Alexandre Koyre gave it wider
currency in 1939.” Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1996), 17.

233
a sophisticated scientific method that would secure their existence. In contrast to these “dead
spaces,” the show takes the viewers to a lively Venetian square where, in the early seventeenth
century, Galileo made crucial steps in formulating “modern science.” (Fig. 33) It was only after
Galileo, The Ascent of Man argues, that humans were capable of separating science from religion.

Fig. 34: Galileo’s telescope in The Ascent of Man, episode six “The Starry Messenger”

The episode’s focus on Galileo suggested a radical reconfiguration of vision. In devising
the episode, Bronowski wanted the audience to feel as if they are inhabiting the same period as
this key scientist. As such, Bronowski’s journey to modern-day Venice was juxtaposed with
historical paintings from the seventeenth century which enabled the series to show how
contemporary Venetian streets, were like those experienced by Galileo. But then Bronowski
depicted Galileo’s revolutionary contribution to the nascent scientific community in Europe—his
telescope from 1609 which allowed Galileo to not only discover Jupiter’s moons but uncover stars
that were previously unseen, thus opening the possibility of new worlds. The viewers were
expected to experience this important scientific paradigm by becoming one with Galileo. In pre-
production, Bronowski insisted that the episode had to display to “the viewer exactly what Galileo
saw.” In continuation, Bronowski added: “This idea of taking the viewer into the time and feeling
234
of the invention, as it were in his own body, is one I should like to use whenever possible.”
524

Indeed, the audiences were given images from Galileo’s telescope and a look through his scientific
documents, while a narrating voice (supposedly that of Galileo) summarized the relevancy of these
scientific discoveries. (Fig. 34) And yet, the Galileo episode should be viewed as the production
team’s comment on the possibilities of television as a medium. As a product of post-World War
Two’s turn towards Cold War rationality, television was established as a globally interconnected
system of communication. Once television adopted documentary cinema, it developed not only an
extensive distribution network of documentaries but also expanded the films’ claims to represent
the real.

Fig. 35: Cover image of The Ascent of Man’s promotional booklet
(Jesus College Archives, Cambridge, UK)

524
“Program points,” October 26, 1970, 4, Jacob Bronowski Papers, Jesus College Archives, University of Cambridge,
UK.
235

But unlike the Cartesian subject, post-World War Two rationality produced an
understanding of the vision that dispensed with an observing subject. (Fig. 35) As media scholar
Orit Halpern argued, “contemporary forms of observation and perception may not even be linked
back to single bodies or unified subjects. Life here has to be considered as a set of mechanically
calibrated movements and gestures operating at various embodied and even molecular levels.”
525

The work of American cyberneticians such as Walter McCulloch and his theory of neurons as units
of information informed cyberneticians’ understanding of brains as artificial machines. But mere
equation between machines and brains was not McCulloch’s main goal, it was the creation of a
new form of thought that would help scientists “envision new types of brains and
machines…challenging what scientists thought they knew about how mental processes work.”
526

What cyberneticians such as McCulloch sought to accomplish was the creation of cognition
outside the human subject. As I have argued in Chapter Three, McCulloch’s neural networks
inspired Hayek’s definition of the market as a superior system of comprehension and cognition.
For Hayek and McCulloch, imagining cognition outside the body promised the destruction of a
single observer with its infamous proclivity towards chaos and irrationality. Similarly, the docu-
histories sought to mimic this cybernetic ideal by visualizing the world from “the head of history.”
In this way, the docu-histories became modes of thinking about the future while using the past to
limit alternative outcomes.
And yet, thinking through and with the image of capital does not automatically suggest
deception. Nor were the docu-histories trapping people within an incessant flow of sensory
impressions as Baudrillard tended to describe postmodernist media such as television. Rather, the

525
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015),
20.
526
Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Rationality,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 15:2, (2014): 227.
236
docu-histories provided people with a highly intellectualized vision of the world that demanded an
unusual amount of labor on their part. Although mass media, as Dallas Smythe argued, always
already demand labor from their audiences, the docu-histories solicited direct investment through
imagination.
527
Consider the culmination of The Ascent of Man’s episode “The Starry Messenger”
when the production team depicted Galileo’s 1633 trial in a surprisingly atypical way.

Fig. 36: Galileo’s trial in The Ascent of Man, episode six “The Starry Messenger”

The televised trial did not only take place in the never-before televised Vatican archives—
but also underlined the special and privileged place audiences would take while viewing the show.
To be sure, the producers were extraordinarily proud of their ability to film in what they called
“the secret Vatican Archives.” In the promotional material intended for the North American market,
the production team extolled their strategy: “By following the Galileo file, Bronowski was able to
show the number and style of chairs used, the location of the table and list the names of all the
judges.” Hence, the show promised to surpass Civilisation’s televisual journey by putting
audiences at “the head of history.” The episode brought the audience into the room where the
Inquisition met and where the 1633 trial took place. By showing an empty trial room, without a
costumed recreation (as present in Civilisation), the production team illustrated their divergent

527
Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory 1, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 1–27.
237
approach to visualizing history. (Fig. 36) The “unseen” was provided by the production team
through access to the Vatican archives, but also by having the participants of this “great historic
episode” remain invisible, reducing the presence of the historical actors to shots of the empty trial
room, accompanied by the actors’ voices. This is a special example of how the viewer was
supposed to inhabit the creation of history by being present at the formidable scientific event
(possibly sitting in the same chair as the accused Galileo), that would forever propel science to
become secularized. Civilisation introduced historical recreations in episode six, but they were
shot traditionally—actors were present and dressed according to the period’s fashion. While both
shows employed journeys to physical sites of historical significance, The Ascent of Man’s
revolutionary and untraditional recreation of Galileo’s trial foreshadowed the series difference
from Civilisation.
Civilisation was conceived as an act of seeing, of training the observer to appreciate objects
produced under a singular historical period, while The Ascent of Man was interested in a different
visualization, a different kind of seeing. Far from being a televised “museum collection,”
Civilisation revolutionized new ways of seeing by bringing museum objects to a domestic setting,
blowing them up in color, and attentively catering to the detail, texture, and sensibility of these
objects. “Yet, human achievement, and science, in particular, is not a museum of finished
achievements. It’s a progress, in which the first experiments of the alchemists also have a formative
place,” exclaimed Bronowski in The Ascent of Man’s first episode.
The Ascent of Man’s recreation of Galileo’s trial tells us two things. First, the audiences
were not supposed to be deceived by the docu-histories. Rather, they were invited to contemplate
on and intellectualize the ideas represented on screen. To be sure, it is not a coincidence that the
BBC Archives has retained audience letters written to the presenters or the Corporation. These
were crucial in producing subsequent docu-history and developing new programs. The audience’s
238
consumption—their labor—was crucial to the docu-histories reproduction. But viewers were also
asked to labor in a less obvious way. This brings me to my second and final point. By imagining
themselves as either Galileo or by internalizing the fluidity of capitalist production, the audiences
were asked to suspend their subjectivity and metaphorically become one with the on-screen
diegesis.

239
Conclusion
This chapter began with several manufactured controversies to illustrate ways in which the
BBC reproduced the docu-history format. In contrast to our common understanding of the culture
industry as producing “sameness,” I have argued that the BBC-2 production teams were actively
creating difference. Indeed, they were anxious to devise a revolutionary form of television
programming that would later be known as “high-quality” or as I have suggested, even as an early
model of “televisuality” in the 1980s. The BBC-2 production teams’ self-reflexive image-making
and their competition within the Corporation helped develop the docu-history form as the most
prestigious form of educational broadcasting in the 1970s. To illustrate this point, I analyzed the
neoliberal thought collective’s feud with Galbraithian economics through their criticism of
Galbraith’s docu-history The Age of Uncertainty. Although Friedman and Galbraith were
ideologically and methodologically in conflict, Galbraith’s on-screen analysis of modern
capitalism was not antithetical to financial capitalism or multinational corporations. I explain this
paradox through Galbraith’s ideological ambiguity and through a particular ideology of television
in the Cold War.
Although post-structuralist philosophers described television as a dangerous medium for
its erratic visuality and excess, I argued how the docu-histories’ “televisuality” was built on a fairly
stable image of capital. Indeed, as the Cold War’s most emblematic medium, television was
influenced by the period’s new understanding of human (ir)rationality. To prevent a nuclear
catastrophe, postwar nuclear scientists and social scientists including neoliberal thinkers such as
Friedrich Hayek desired to create a post-Cartesian epistemic revolution that would decenter human
observation and comprehension of knowledge production. As such, television and the market
mechanism were seen as custodians of this new form of post-human rationality.
240
And yet, there are social and political ramifications to containing the future through images
of capital. Unlike Deleuze’s faith in the time-image as a form of a non-dogmatic image of thought,
the docu-histories were produced to provide predictability in a world seemingly uncertain. As
political theorist Judith Shklar presciently argued, conservative liberalism represented by the
Austrian school of neoliberalism exhibited unusual pessimism about future outcomes:
The political fatalism of conservative liberalism emerges only in its interpretation of the
entire course of modern history, not in these specific ideas, important as they are to the theory in
general. It is in a view of history as a rigid sequence of causes and effects that conservative
liberalism displays its fatalism.
528

Their loss of belief in linear and progressive history had made them more conscious of the need to
limit political action by enacting a supra-national institutional framework to safeguard capitalism
from instability. Although interwar neoliberals sought to limit mass politics through an
institutionalized order, the docu-histories managed to contract the future through their incessant
employment of the past.

528
Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1957), 236.

241
Epilogue

There was great trepidation at the Mont Pèlerin Society’s (MPS) meeting in January 2020. These
feelings of dread were produced by the new contagion threatening to disrupt the global circulation
of capital. But this virus was not COVID-19 because it was still mid-January when most of us
were oblivious to the ensuing pandemic. From the vantage point of Palo Alto, the Chinese
epidemic was geographically and ideologically far away. To be sure, the fear was produced by a
more insidious pestilence. Neoliberal’s old foe, socialism was becoming more popular with voters
in the United States and elsewhere. Like a zombie, socialist planning of the economy came back
from the dead to haunt the neoliberal thought collective just as it did seventy-five years before.
When Friedrich Hayek established the Society on April 8, 1947, exactly forty-three years before I
was born, he was confronted with a similar alarm. Socialism’s threat of gargantuan government,
neoliberals contended, would once again disrupt economic liberalism, and obliterate all that was
accomplished since 1980. This historical parallel propelled the organizers to convene this “special
meeting” and to recapitulate what they have accomplished in the forty years since the MPS’ last
meeting at the Hoover Institution in 1980.
I end this dissertation with a pseudo-ethnographic study of the Mont Pèlerin Society. I
classify it as “pseudo” because I am not a trained ethnographer nor am I a particularly skilled
interviewer; the archives are my home, and I am most comfortable among the dead. And yet, I was
fortunate enough to attend the MPS’ Special Meeting at the Hoover Institution in January 2020
because it enabled me to contrast my archival findings with narratives of those that have
participated in the development of the neoliberal political and economic order. But most
importantly, the meeting helped further detotalize my understanding of neoliberalism. Although
the MPS acted as a uniform force, especially after its 1978 Meeting in Hong Kong, the diversity
of their ideas on foreign policy, the environment, and politics is still evident. Hence, ending this
242
dissertation by studying the Society in 2020 will further benefit our understanding of the neoliberal
thought collective. As I have argued throughout this doctoral project, media scholars interested in
the cultural ramifications of neoliberalism should examine the diversity of neoliberal thought by
engaging with its primary sources. Hence, the goal of this epilogue is to illustrate one of my
dissertation’s central interventions—using primary neoliberal sources to write about the neoliberal
thinkers’ entanglement with public media institutions. But the epilogue is also a rhetorical prompt
to help us think about some viable alternatives to our neoliberal predicament.
The meeting also enabled me to see how the neoliberal thought collective narrated their
history and how they conceived the future. Unfortunately, we cannot read this in any secondary
studies since the MPS is staggeringly cryptic. Although they publish official papers of the meeting
on their website, these papers do not end up being discussed. More than once, the speakers
presented an entirely different paper which makes me believe that this is a purposeful strategy.
Additionally, all conversations were “off the record.” As such, the Society is a semi-secretive
organization with a rigid vetting process for new members. Even guests need to be nominated by
a member and undergo a vetting process; one cannot simply take part in their meetings by
registering and purchasing the ticket, even if one can afford to pay hundreds of dollars to attend.
For instance, tickets for the MPS’ next meeting in Oslo, Norway cost $1600 per person which
already limits the attendance. As the Hoover Institution’s Research Fellow (2020-2022), I was
allowed to participate in this member-only Meeting in 2020. I wrote to Eric Wakin, the Hoover
Institution’s deputy director, and asked him whether I could attend. To my surprise, I soon got a
positive reply and an assurance that one of the Institute’s senior fellows will support my
nomination. Indeed, my recommendation letter was written by Annelise Anderson, a seasoned
MPS member.
243
As I have remarked in this epilogue’s first paragraph, my impression was that the Society
was rattled by the supposed revival of socialism. Of course, this perception should be taken with
a grain of salt because conservative media outlets such as Fox News tend to lambaste Joe Biden’s
Administration as radically socialist. This is obviously an exaggeration for the purpose of right-
wing propaganda. However, the political and economic atmosphere was starkly different in
January 2020 than it is now in August 2022; COVID-19 had not closed much of the world’s
economy and inflationary pressures were not stifling progressive legislation proposals.
Additionally, the MPS’ anxiety over socialism emerged through formal and informal
conversations. The speakers were repeatedly calling attention to the threats of planning and the
conceit of scientific knowledge, while in informal discussions, senior MPS members complained
about how their grandchildren were now supporting this new political trend. In January 2020, the
Bernie Sanders Presidential Campaign was poised to win the Democratic Primary before the Party
aligned behind Joe Biden in a last effort to kill Sanders’ popularity. But this happened in March
2020; in January, Sanders had a good chance of becoming the next President of the United States.
A senior MPS member from Texas asked me, “What do you think of this socialist menace?” as I
was washing my hands in the restroom. “My grandchildren are completely enamored by this guy,
but they live far away in Minnesota, and Steve was not able to have much influence over their
politics.” This lady’s husband “Steve” is a renowned neoliberal economist born before World War
Two in Yugoslavia; he emigrated after the country turned socialist and became “Steve the
economist” who organized various seminars for Hayek in the late-1970s and early-1980s.
Unlike those attending the meeting, I was a “Bernie bro” and even volunteered a piece of
my “human capital” (knowledge and time) to his campaign. They did not know this about me since
I wanted to blend in. My crash course in ethnography emphasized the essence of fitting in with a
social group that one wants to study. As such, I conceived my presence as “a fly on the wall” in
244
the manner of direct cinema; my impulse was to observe and document. But looking back, I could
have perhaps gained more from the meeting through measured provocations. My usual questions
were centered around the members’ affiliation with MPS, their views on Hayek’s work as well as
their thoughts about the Society’s future. I sometimes asked more intimate questions about their
family, educational background, and sometimes even about their childhood.
But during our first dinner, I allowed myself to be more provocative. “Have you heard of the
Austrian school?” an American middle-aged member asked me. “Of course,” I replied, “I am a big
fan of Hayek’s 1945 essay on knowledge.” I continued to use my academic credentials as a
doctoral student to hoodwink him: “But I am more, we could say, a follower of the Frankfurt
School!” I patiently waited for his reaction— “Oh, I have never heard of Walter Benjamin, I’ll
have to look into it more.” To be sure, Fox News’ “intellectual historian” Mark Levin had not yet
published his history of “the radical left” in which he erroneously described Herbert Marcuse as
an offspring of “the Franklin School of Marxism from Berlin” for which he was ridiculed across
social media.
529
After this embarrassment, Levin’s publisher Simon and Schuster apologized for
this omission and reprinted Levin’s bestselling book. But regardless, my ruse was a cheap trick, I
admit.
And yet, recounting this trickery has a larger purpose because Hayek established the MPS
precisely to avoid such conversations. In no small part, the Society was formed so that “like-
minded liberals” could meet in a safe space to test their ideas which would seclude them from the
ridicule of the larger academic community.
530
Consider, for instance, Hayek’s embarrassment at

529
Mark Levin, American Marxism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021). For the critique of Levin’s book see
Zachary Petrizzo, “Fox News host Mark Levin's bestseller "American Marxism": A work of staggering ignorance,”
Salon, August 20, 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/08/20/fox-news-host-mark-levins-bestseller-american-
marxism-is-built-on-amazing-ignorance/, accessed August 5, 2022.
530
“The purpose was to create a special space where people of like-minded political ideals could gather together to
debate the outlines of a future movement diverging from classical liberalism, without having to suffer the indignities
of ridicule for their often blue-sky proposals, but also to evade the Fifth Column reputation of a society closely aligned
with powerful but dubious postwar interests.” Philip Mirowski, “Definining Neoliberalism,” 430.
245
the 1955 Congress for Cultural Freedom. This CIA-funded organization was established in 1950
by liberal thinkers (i.e., Arthur Schlesinger, Melvin Lasky, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Bertrand
Russell etc.) as an anti-communist group committed to battering Soviet Union’s influence over
culture. Hayek’s friend and fellow MPS member Michael Polanyi co-organized the meeting and
invited Hayek to present. But much to Hayek’s surprise, his paper was bitterly attacked by leading
Cold War philosophers such as Sidney Hook. Polanyi left the MPS shortly after this episode, and
MPS grew more specialized and restricted, especially since the 1960s when Milton Friedman
became its president. As such, it should not surprise us that Hayek was not in favor of intellectuals
which he famously undermined as “second-hand dealers in ideas.” And yet, Hayek begrudgingly
acknowledged that intellectuals tended to be aligned with socialism. As he asserted in The Fatal
Conceit: “Rationalists tend to be intelligent and intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be
socialist.”
531
Perhaps, this was why defending capitalism had to bypass human rationality.
Although MPS began as a philosophical society with an interdisciplinary set of questions
aimed at understanding liberalism as a political and social philosophy, the group no longer serves
that purpose. As Angus Burgin argued, Friedman’s influence over the MPS helped replace its early
philosophical questions on the nature of liberalism by suggesting a pragmatic approach.
532
In
many ways, the MPS became a hotchpotch of businessmen, think tanks, and foundations. After all,
these groups were neoliberalism’s central agents, and networking at the MPS was especially
important to individuals running newly established think tanks in countries under duress. On day
two, I had dinner with two think tank executives—one was running a Canadian organization

531
Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit in The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek (London: Routledge, 1992),
53.
532
“In his capacity as a “radical liberal,” Friedman created a social philosophy that was much less conflicted than
those of the leading figures in the early Mont Pèlerin Society. Whereas they tied themselves in philosophical and
rhetorical knots attempting to escape failings of nineteenth-century liberalism that they readily acknowledged,
Friedman simply argued that those ostensible failures were mythical creations of his ideological opponents.” Angus
Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, 177.
246
committed to creating a more favorable business environment for international corporations by
downplaying the threat of climate change, while the other man had just established a neoliberal
think tank in Venezuela. Although the Venezuelan spoke very little English, he attended the MPS
to garner support for his organization in battering Nicholas Maduro’s government. Undoubtedly,
the second day’s lunch session was inspiring to the Venezuelan man for the talk celebrated the
accomplishments of Chile’s economy after the 1973 coup d’état; Arnold Harberger, one of the
economic coup’s architects, was present to receive these accolades.
And yet, the MPS always relied on its esteemed group of intellectuals such as Harberger that,
paradoxically, tended to exert the most influence. They were responsible for creating ideas that
would later get funded by neoliberal foundations and disseminated through think tanks as policy
proposals. On this point, I would like to begin circling back to my dissertation’s key arguments by
looking at an example of one leading MPS member. Historian Niall Ferguson’s career is
serendipitously illustrative of my dissertation’s argument on the entanglement between state-
sponsored documentary television, the neoliberal thought collective, and modern historiography.
Although scholars tend to equate neoliberalism with ahistoricism and Fukuyama’s infamous
classification of the post-Soviet moment as “the End of History,” historical questions have always
been relevant to the Mont Pèlerin Society and its academic members. As I have argued in Chapter
Three, Hayek simultaneously worked on communication, cybernetics, and historiography during
his most productive period during World War Two. These efforts culminated in 1954 when he
published an edited collection entitled Capitalism and the Historians in which he argued for the
centrality of historians and historical knowledge to capitalism’s future.
247

Fig. 37: Niall Ferguson’s first docu-history Empire

Ferguson was trained as a historian at prestigious British universities where he worked until
relocating to the United States in the mid-2000s. He taught at Harvard until 2016 when he became
the Hoover Institution’s senior fellow. This professional trajectory was typical for MPS
intellectuals; Friedman, Becker, Stigler, and Buchanan were all fully tenured and employed at
prestigious American universities until their mid-fifties when they became fellows at the Hoover
Institution or other neoliberal institutions. Like Friedman, Ferguson became a public intellectual
and his work reached a wider audience only after presenting several docu-histories. It is not a
coincidence that Ferguson’s series were all based on and influenced by the BBC docu-histories
produced in the 1960s and 1970s. Consider, for example, Ferguson’s first docu-history Empire:
How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) which illustrated Ferguson’s and early neoliberal
thinkers’ central impulses—extolling the British empire for developing our world and obsessing
over its demise after World War One. (Fig. 37) These concerns, as I have shown in Chapter Three,
were crucial to the establishment of the BBC-2 docu-histories in the late-1960s. Furthermore,
Ferguson’s subsequent docu-histories such as The Ascent of Money (2008) and Civilization: Is the
West History? (2011) were, even in name, obvious descendants of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation
(BBC-2, 1969) and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (BBC-2, 1973). To be sure, Ferguson
248
often recreated actual scenes from these two series. Moreover, while discussing Amsterdam as the
seventeenth-century capital of financial innovation Ferguson copied Civilisation’s image of capital
that I have analyzed in Chapter Four. (Fig. 38)

Fig. 38: The Ascent of Money, episode “Blowing Bubbles”

It is not by chance that Ferguson produced these series as a nod to the work of Civilisation
and The Ascent of Man. Just like Clark and Bronowski, Ferguson regards historical research as key
to uncovering ways in which our contemporary world functions. But in a typical neoliberal fashion,
Bronowski’s focus on people was replaced in Ferguson’s iteration by capital; The Ascent of Man
became in Ferguson’s series The Ascent of Money. Perhaps nothing communicates Ferguson’s
commitment to historical knowledge vis-à-vis the capitalist economy as his consulting firm
Greenmantle with offices in New York, San Francisco, and London.
533
Named after John Buchan’s
orientalist novel, Greenmantle is in the business of predicting financial and geopolitical trends with
the help of history. Likewise, as I have shown in Chapter Four, the docu-histories employed
historical knowledge and processual representation to contain future uncertainty by generating

533
Indeed, Ferguson’s company was named after John Buchan imperialist novel detailing the first world conflict. This
obsession with World War One is a telling characteristic of Ferguson’s academic work. In his mind, the destruction
of four European empires was a catastrophic outcome of the war that could have easily been prevented had Britain
not joined Russia’s backing of Serbia. As he argued, the war would have been a localized conflict between the Austro-
Hungarian Empire and Serbia. Akin to Mises, Ferguson believed that the war’s aftermath produced staggering political
instability which allowed socialism to become the liberal world-system’s dominant competitor through the twentieth
century.

249
potential outcomes from past data. Consider how Greenmantle describes their curious engagement
with futures past:
We believe that decision-makers today have an acute need for historical perspective.
We believe that bespoke advice, based on real relationships, is superior to commoditized research.
And we believe that a small, exclusive network is superior to a large, open-access one.
534

I see Ferguson’s career as indicative of two things. First, the neoliberal thought collective
continues to reproduce its worldview through on-screen historical visualization. Akin to Hayek’s
1940s work on historiography, Ferguson and the neoliberal thought collective see the historian as
one of the central agents in safeguarding capitalism. Second, the docu-history form as it was
developed by the BBC at the moment when the liberal world-system was challenged through labor
movements and manifold decolonization projects, sought to protect this order by presenting it as
inevitable. By naturalizing the experience of the world as bounded by the historical process, the
neoliberal thought collective and the BBC’s documentary practitioners hoped to tame political
unrest. As I have traced the transformation of liberal propaganda from the Empire Marketing Board
to the BBC, I emphasized the durability of their particular emphasis on individualized knowledge
production in our current media environment dominated by the Internet. From Wikipedia to Netflix
documentaries, the neoliberal mental landscape, and its epistemic regime of decentralized and de-
subjectivized vision and reason continue to shape our everyday experience. And yet, the question
remains—what can we do about our simultaneous neoliberal and digital predicament?
Indisputably, this question has been put forward by scholars from various disciplines. For
economists Thomas Piketty and his protégé Gabriel Zucman, we need ideological and financial
reform. In his recent book Capital and Ideology (2020), Piketty positively described ideology as a
worldview that helps people feel less desperate about the future so that they could consent to a

534
“Philosophy,” Greenmantle’s website, https://www.gmantle.com/, accessed August 10, 2022.
250
particular political and economic system.
535
For Piketty, this public consent provides systemic
stability. The problem with our current system, which for some strange reason Piketty refuses to
call “neoliberalism” but opts for a euphemism “hypercapitalism,” is that it has obviously produced
staggering inequality and xenophobic political movements. For him, the current economic system
needs to be abolished through gradualist social reform by, for example, raising income and
inheritance tax for the wealthiest to 70 percent. This leveling of society, in Piketty’s view, would
benefit most individuals and help stabilize the system. Similarly, his former student Gabriel
Zucman argued for the need to disrupt the international circulation of capital from nation-states to
so-called tax havens.
536
Multinational corporations impoverish nation-states by avoiding tax
legislation and by offshoring their profits elsewhere. While I do not dispute the need to enact strict
international tax regulation as well as a higher tax rate for those colloquially called “the one
percent,” both Piketty and Zucman see political action from a depressingly (neo)liberal perspective.
Similar to the neoliberal thought collective, Piketty sees economic and political ideas as primary
vehicles of history and social change. For him, ideas are “truly autonomous.”
537
And if only, as
Piketty contended, we could change our minds about how the billionaires are brilliant innovators

535
“I use ‘ideology’ in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses
describing how society should be structured. An ideology has social, economic, and political dimensions. It is an
attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society… every society
must attempt to answer questions about how it should be organized, usually on the basis of its own historical
experience but sometimes also on the experiences of other societies. Individuals will usually also feel called on to
form opinions of their own on these fundamental existential issues, however vague or unsatisfactory they may be.”
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2020), 3-4.
536
Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 2015).
537
“Nevertheless, the approach taken in this book—based on ideologies, institutions, and the possibility of alternative
pathways—also differs from approaches sometimes characterized as “Marxist,” according to which the state of the
economic forces and relations of production determines a society’s ideological “superstructure” in an almost
mechanical fashion. In contrast, I insist that the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, is truly autonomous.”
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 7.
251
that make our lives better, we will be able to begin dismantling the “hypercapitalist” ideology.
538

But as I have argued in this dissertation, ideas depend on institutional and systemic structures that
are always already influenced and sponsored by dominant modes of production.
In Chapter One, I noted how John Grierson’s idea of documentary cinema as a social
instrument developed within the Empire Marketing Board and the G.P.O. Unit; both institutions
sponsored the British Documentary Film Movement to support British imperial interests. As an
early example of a liberal think tank, I showed in Chapter Two how the Ministry of Information
grew into an influential organization not because it centralized wartime information but because it
fostered collaborations across British industry and visual culture; geopolitical needs dictated the
necessity to develop non-centralized forms of liberal propaganda. Indeed, these wartime
experiments in multimodal communication continued on Cold War television in Britain and
elsewhere. Likewise, the neoliberal thought collective emerged from a desire to safeguard the
circulation of capital on the global market and to, ultimately, rebuild the nineteenth-century liberal
world-system. Their ideas were directly influenced by class interests and wealth preservation.
And yet, as I have witnessed at the MPS meeting in 2020, an alternative to neoliberalism
will have to emerge from a materialist route. To be sure, organized labor movements and left-wing
populism have already challenged the neoliberal world-system. This is because these political
actions create a break in the seemingly effortless circulation of capital on the global market. The
elimination of tax havens, undoubtedly, does too, but financial reforms accomplish little to alter
our mediated experience of the world as always already ruled by the incessant flow of images
(capital). Although this dissertation was originally planned to include an additional chapter on the

538
“Today’s meritocratic ideology glorifies entrepreneurs and billionaires. At times this glorification seems to know
no bounds. Some people seem to believe that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg single-handedly invented
computers, books, and friends. One can get the impression that they can never be rich enough and that the humble
people of the earth can never thank them enough for all the benefits they have brought.” Ibid., 713.
252
Non-Aligned Movement’s 1970s projects at decolonizing media, the COVID-19 pandemic has
limited access to these archives. Unlike James Mill, I could not write about India and its television
system from my closet in Serbia. Not including this chapter is unfortunate since my doctoral
dissertation would benefit from expanding its strictly Anglo-American context. However, I
managed to publish parts of this abandoned chapter in the journal View in which I analyzed the
NAM’s efforts at creating an independent media network. These policy proposals were produced
in direct response to the BBC-2 docu-histories which the Movement specifically criticized as
educational imperialism.
539
I focused on Yugoslav television in the 1960s and 1970s to show its
foreign policy was often in discord with the country’s TV executives who saw themselves as
building a modern European TV system which was, in no small part, influenced by the BBC.
I am not recounting my research trajectory just to underline the necessity of future work,
but I also want to argue that finding an alternative to neoliberalism was already envisioned through
bold policy proposals in the 1970s. Indeed, this fact complicates our understanding of
neoliberalism as an undisputed hegemon that was only recently challenged by left-wing
populism.
540
As such, tackling neoliberalism and our digital predicament should start, as it did in
the 1970s, with criticism of its cultural and media ownership. Media systems need to be
democratized and our internet needs to be demonopolized. We need to create a break in the
circulation of capital and images that naturalize the experience of the world as fluid.
Challenging a hegemonic system of power will necessitate a change in our political system.
To be sure, there is a reason why neoliberal thinkers and right-wing politicians are interested in
limiting enfranchisement. This obviously must be addressed and voting rights need to be protected.

539
Jelena B. Ćulibrk, “Educational Imperialism: Phantom India and The Non-Aligned Movement’s New World
Information Order, 1969-1980,” VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 11, no. 21 (August 3,
2022): 70.
540
Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford
University Press, 2022).
253
And yet, direct democracy would still not resolve the crucial issue—our modern conception of
politics and political action. As long as political questions are approached, to use John Grierson’s
term, “as practical considerations,” we won’t be able to surpass this institutionalized social order.
I am probably already too steeped in liberalism to suggest rational discourse, but however
frustrating or slow these deliberations are, they are worth it. Only then will our future remain an
exhilaratingly unknown horizon, and such epistemic uncertainty horrifies the neoliberal thought
collective more than socialist planning.

254
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract “Screening the Invisible Hand: State-sponsored Documentary, (Neo)Liberalism, and the Riddle of Politics, 1918-1980” examines the simultaneous rise of documentary media and neoliberalism. I argue that British state-sponsored documentary media and the neoliberal thought collective emerged at the end of World War One to fill the political vacuum of post-imperial Europe, mitigate the rise of mass politics, and safeguard the global market from political instability. Historians of neoliberalism have argued that neoliberalism was developed to inoculate capital from politics by establishing supranational regulatory institutions, I show that these regulatory bodies also included media organizations. The BBC and other media institutions have been left out of recent histories of neoliberalism even though these state entities had a central role in defining and disseminating neoliberalism.

Based on extensive archival research in The Hoover Institution Archives, The BBC Written Archives, The John F. Kennedy Library, The Tate Archive, The British Film Institute, and The British National Archive, this project shows how state-sponsored documentaries produced both a justification for and an experience of the world guided by neoliberalism. The dissertation brings together three dominant modes of engagement with neoliberalism—intellectual history, capitalism studies, and media studies—to illuminate the interconnectedness between financial capitalism and popular modes of historical knowledge. I use archival research to uncover the shared albeit lesser-known intellectual allegiances and impulses between leading neoliberal thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Walter Lippmann, Michael Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, and British documentarians and broadcasters such as John Grierson, Kenneth Clark, and David Attenborough. The latter created media forms and practices that were not only influenced by neoliberal ideas but also emerged from a shared need to preserve liberal capitalism by restricting mass politics and direct democracy in both 1929 and 1968. Rather than simply being informational and ideologically neutral, docu-series such as "Civilisation" (BBC-2, 1969), "The Ascent of Man" (BBC-2, 1973), and "Free to Choose" (PBS, 1980) helped promote individualism through the subjective experience of time akin to the seemingly effortless circulation of capital on the global market.

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Creator Ćulibrk, Jelena B. (author)

Core Title Screening the invisible hand: state-sponsored documentary media, (neo)liberalism, and the riddle of politics, 1918-1980

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema and Media Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 09/29/2024

Defense Date 09/01/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag BBC,Friedrich Hayek,history of neoliberalism,intellectual history,Jill Craigie,John Grierson,Milton Friedman,OAI-PMH Harvest,political economy of culture,public television,state-sponsored documentary cinema,twentieth-century capitalism,visual historiography

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Advisor Imre, Aniko (committee chair), Connor, John D. (committee member), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email culibrk@usc.edu,jelenaculibrk@icloud.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112059627

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