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In western intellectual life, the 1940s threw everything up for grabs. The enormity of World War 11, the revelation of the death camps, and the apocalyptic dawn of the nuclear age all contributed to the atmosphere. The emergence of French existentialism in philosophy and American abstract expressionism in painting were but two versions of this world out of focus, as was the stunning popularity of libertarian writers, such as Rand or Hayek. Fading communist sympathy among English-speaking intellectuals was still another sign of the shift. Across the political spectrum, the pieties seemed to disappear.The ferment touched even those satisfied with the basic drift of the western democracies, contributing to an even larger reorientation of western intellectual life in the 1940s. The arrival of Weber's sociology in the non-German-speaking western world during the 1940s was one way that social scientists supportive of the emerging welfare state newly analyzed their situation. A newfound interest in the work of Durkheim in the Anglo-American world was another. Associated with these changes was still a third new foray, that associated with what, in the United States, was called communication research. Whereas intellectuals had worked on communication issues before, nothing called communication research existed until the 1940s. The very emergence of the term indicated a new perspective on the subject that by the end of the decade was loosely shared by an assortment of sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and public opinion experts.Whereas there were numerous differences about details, the broad picture was generally shared. Mass communication, these scholars argued, was a critical glue for modern societies. It could foster a sense of belonging and bond strangers together in a national community. It could also, the argument ran, deter modernity's more corrosive side effects. As the sociologist Robert Merton (1946) understood it, communication research could help fight the cynicism dangerous to all modern societies. If anomie was the wound, communication was the salve.The emerging American academic orthodoxy was not, however, the only way to think about communication during the 1940s. The Frankfurt School portrayed Kenneth Cmiel is a professor in the

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