After graduating from Cornell University in 1912 he initially worked as a journalist and then a theatrical press agent, representing high profile clients including Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and ballet dancer Vaslav Najinsky. Bernays in fact, prided himself on being part of what he saw as an ‘invisible government’, the pioneers of public relations who made the manipulation of public opinion their life’s work.īernays was born in Vienna in 1891, the son of Sigmund Freud’s sister Anna and Ely Bernays, brother of Freud’s wife Martha, and later moved to America with his family when he was just one year old. While they may sound like something from an Orwellian dystopia, for Bernays these are words of approval and not warning.
In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Edward Bernays wrote of secret and ubiquitous persuasive powers at work in society: ‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of’.
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