Consciousness-raising theorists held that democratic citizens act irrationally and need awareness to resist exploitation

Evidence

Another pioneer in the modern effort to integrate psychology and politics was Graham Wallas (1859–1932), who argued that it was impossible to understand the nature of political affairs without considering the psychological nature of those conducting these affairs. In his book, Human Nature in Politics (1908), Wallas warned that it is dangerous for proponents of democracy to assume that “every human action is the result of an intellectual process.” He believed that teaching people to become consciously aware of their own psychological processes would help them to defend against the exploitation of these processes by others and to better control their own behavior. The notion that consciousness-raising would be both personally and politically liberating was also consistent with the popular conjunction of Marxist and Freudian ideas. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Wallas’s non-rational-democracy thesis prefigures the strategic-essentialism question: if democratic subjects act from unconscious processes, can they hold an identity claim with deliberate ironic distance? — connects to: Officials defending democratic processes can enact democracy even from self-interested motives — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 361; Consciousness-raising framed personal problems as political ones requiring collective action. — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 61; The masses hold a contradictory consciousness that can produce political passivity — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1199

Broader Connections

• Consciousness-raising framed personal problems as political ones requiring collective action. #expands (0.92) — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 61
• The masses hold a contradictory consciousness that can produce political passivity #expands (0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1199
• Officials defending democratic processes can enact democracy even from self-interested motives #qualifies (0.75) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 361