Theorizing Communication

The book traces the extraordinary development of ideas about the concept of communication over the past two centuries. It focuses on how these ideas developed out of economic and social conditions, and how the ideas have been constantly subject to radical critique.

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This is the first book to offer a detailed intellectual history of communication study over the last century. Schiller looks at the relationship between early communication theory and contextualizing social and economic changes, and finds that the evolving dualism between intellectual and manual labour became deeply embedded in the work of theorists, even into our own time. Close attention is paid to leading thinkers in the field, including John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Daniel Bell.