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The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
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The Part Played by Gentiles in the Flow of Mass Communications: On the Ethnic Utopia of Personal Influence

John Durham Peters

University of Iowa

Personal Influence is not only a landmark study within the sociological literature on networks, influence, and decision making. It is also an allegory of Jewish-ethnic identity in mid-twentieth-century America and a side-ways commentary on modern Jewish involvement in communications. The book participates in a utopian imagination of society in which Jews and Gentiles alike would be centrally involved in the flow of communications. It turns from Gentile-style status toward Jewish-style connectivity as the basis of social power; defends socially grounded conceptions of mental life against Gentile individualism; insists in its notion of the two-step flow on the rabbinic principle that a text without a commentary is meaningless; and performs some amazing intellectual-moral-historical footwork with the most inconspicuous of all its central terms, "people." In all these things, it can be read as a "Jewish" text in some sense.

Key Words: communication research • Jewish studies • American democracy • intellectual history • social science • sociology • ethnicity

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 608, No. 1, 97-114 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0002716206292425
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This article has been cited by other articles:


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 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social ScienceHome page
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Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1, 2006; 608(1): 130 - 156.
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 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social ScienceHome page
S. Livingstone
The Influence of Personal Influence on the Study of Audiences
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1, 2006; 608(1): 233 - 250.
[Abstract] [PDF]