Randal Marlin

Randal Marlin (born 1938 in Washington, D.C.) is a Canadian retired philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who specializes in the study of propaganda.

He was educated at Princeton University, McGill University, the University of Oxford, Aix-Marseille University, and the University of Toronto.

Randal Marlin spent his early childhood in Washington D.C. where he was born in 1938.

His father worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The family moved to Montreal in 1946 after his father started working for the United Nations.

Marlin moved again to Ampleforth, a Benedictine college and boarding school, in England.

In 1955, Marlin began four years of university studies at Princeton.

He intended to pursue a career in physics, but discovered that he "couldn't really handle the math of nuclear physics in the second year."

Fortunately, the university encouraged students to enroll in subjects outside their main fields and Marlin studied Greek philosophy.

He also worked as a journalist at the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian where he enjoyed stirring up controversy.

Marlin's interest in both philosophy and journalism led him to study the philosophy of language at McGill University.

He wrote his thesis on Ernst Cassirer and the phenomenology of language earning an MA degree in philosophy in 1961.

At Trinity College, Oxford he spent two years studying Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophy of existentialism.

In 1963-64, Marlin taught and studied existentialism at the Institute for American Universities at Aix-en-Provence, France.

Then in 1964, he began two years of teaching and PhD studies at the University of Toronto.

In 1966, Randal Marlin accepted a teaching post at Carleton in Ottawa, partly because the university had a journalism school.

By then, he had worked for two summers at the Montreal Star.

He decided to institute a course called Society, Values and Technology to explore several interrelated themes.

One reflected his growing involvement in preserving the older neighbourhood where he lived from being overwhelmed by heavy traffic.

Marlin says that in the midst of that campaign, he realized from reading Aristotle's Rhetoric that a vivid example can be much more persuasive than logical arguments, an insight reinforced by a fellow community activist.

"One thing I recall him saying," Marlin told an interviewer years later, "'If there's an accident in the area, exploit it. That's the time people will act to make changes in the traffic patterns. So don't miss the opportunity when something like that comes up.'"

Marlin's growing interest in persuasion took on added dimensions as he began reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul.

The book argues that every field of human activity is now dominated by efficient technical methods or, what Ellul calls, technique.

Marlin says Ellul's work showed him how the techniques of creating and managing public opinion feed off of or augment each other.

Ellul had also published a landmark study of propaganda which explains how information can be used in the exercise of power.

"That's the central idea of propaganda," Marlin says, "the maintaining or gaining of power over others."

Marlin's fascination with Ellul's writings gave him an idea.

His PhD thesis, completed in 1973, examined problems concerning morality and criminal law.

After receiving a Department of National Defence fellowship to study under propaganda scholar Jacques Ellul at Bordeaux in 1979–1980, he started a philosophy and mass communications class at Carleton called Truth and Propaganda, which has run annually ever since.

"During a crazy moment," he recalls, "I saw one of those advertisements for a Department of National Defence (DND) fellowship, offered for study abroad. It was $12,000, which, in those days -- 1979-1980, was a lot of money."

In 1998, Marlin published a book examining the public uproar following the appointment of a former separatist Quebec political candidate to the top administrator's post at the new Ottawa Hospital.

The David Levine Affair: Separatist Betrayal or McCarthyism North? criticizes the Ottawa news media for fanning the flames of intolerance in their quest for higher circulations and audience ratings.

The book also documents how the media kept the controversy going with a barrage of stories, columns, letters, editorials and radio phone-in shows.

The David Levine Affair draws on Marlin's knowledge of propaganda techniques that play on stereotypes as well as pre-existing fears, suspicions and resentments to incite intense emotional reactions.

One of the texts for this class is his 2002 book Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, which examines historical, ethical, and legal issues relating to propaganda.

"The school ran largely through the authority of the older boys over the younger boys," Marlin recalled during an interview in 2008.

"You can see how people abuse power, and I got very interested in things about law."

The revised second edition, released in 2013, examines the Bush administration's use of propaganda based on fear to persuade Americans to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Marlin acknowledges that there are many definitions of propaganda, including favourable ones.

However, his book reflects Ellul's view that propaganda suppresses individual freedom and autonomy.