In 1928, Edward Bernays put feminist actresses on Fifth Avenue with cigarettes in their hands and sold tobacco to half of American womanhood. He called what he did the engineering of consent. He had no idea what was coming.

Bernays ? Sigmund Freud’s nephew, the inventor of modern public relations ? believed that the systematic management of public opinion was the precondition of democracy in a mass society. He worked with the bluntest of instruments: opinion polls, focus groups, the typewriter, the press release.