NOTES FROM THE NUMBER ONE COUNTRY

Abstract

Herbert Schiller, one of the most important cultural critics of the American postwar Left, has been little read in cultural policy circles. This article sets out to introduce the main themes in his work and to argue that far from being passé, his analysis is now more relevant than ever. Writing from the United States, where public deliberation and intervention was continually pressured and often captured by commercial lobbies and interests, he was one of the first to analyse in detail both the ascendancy of market thinking and the quickening migration of key decisions from public committees to company boardrooms. He was also one of the first to grasp that the locus of global power in the postwar era was moving from the appropriation of territory to the annexation of imagination, and to analyse in detail the connections between American‐mediated culture and the new global economic order.

KEYWORDS:

• corporate capture
• cultural imperialism
• American empire
• commercial media
• new technologies
• digital inequalities

Notes

1. Herbert Schiller left few autobiographical notes apart from the interview he gave to John Lent (1995) and the reflections on his life and career in his last book: Living in the Number One Country (Schiller 2000). I have supplemented these sources with information and insights gathered in the course of over a decade of conversation and intellectual argument with him conducted in many places, but most particularly in San Diego where I taught his class on political economy while he was on sabbatical leave working at home on his next book. This attempt to take stock of his legacy continues this dialogue.