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Communication History

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Communication History
PETER SIMONSON
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

Communication history is a domain of inquiry that attends to practices, ideas, and fields
of communication in the past and brings historical sensibilities to bear on communica-
tion research and theory in the present. In attending to practices, communication his-
tory investigates the full range of mediated and face-to-face forms of symbolic exchange
and dissemination—from conversation and oratory to mails, journalism, television, and
the Internet. It also looks to the intersections of social communication with phenom-
ena like empire, nation-building, organizational publicity, international development,
or the cultural production of gender, race, and power. In attending to ideas, commu-
nication history inquires into the meaning, influence, and production of concepts and
theories. It also provides frameworks for investigating and classifying theoretical frame-
works, categorizing them, for instance, by their own understanding and use of history.
In attending to fields, meanwhile, communication history investigates organized realms
of inquiry, research, and education across traditions and disciplines—from journal-
ism/newspaper science, speech, and public opinion research to the full range of sub-
fields within contemporary communication studies.
As such, communication history overlaps in multiple ways with the philosophy and
theory of communication. This entry will discuss those overlaps, moving across three
main topic areas: (a) communication history and its prehistories, sketching ways that
thinking about communication has been tied up with concepts of historical change
and progress since classical antiquity; (b) the place of the history of communication
in different traditions of and orientations to communication theory, particularly since
the 1950s; (c) the history of ideas and fields of communication. Reflecting the bulk of
research on the subject, the entry emphasizes European and North American writing
while also considering more global and multicultural directions.

Communication history and its prehistories

Studying communication as a historical process is a relatively recent development that

trails a long prehistory. A longer, detailed map of this development is available else-
where (Simonson, Peck, Craig, & Jackson, 2013b). Here, Emanuel Kulczycki’s (2014)
distinction between explicit and implicit communication history is useful. The for-
mer depends upon the emergence of the concept of communication as an interpretive
framework for understanding the world. Though there were ancient precursors cut-
ting across world cultures (about which, more below), this was largely a 20th-century

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (Editors-in-Chief), Jefferson D. Pooley and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (Associate Editors).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect180
2 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y

development, which helped feed the institutional invention of the field of communica-
tion after World War II. The social-scientific mainstream of that field—particularly its
influential US variant—has conducted its research in a largely ahistoric manner.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, historical studies began to appear in greater
numbers, coinciding with theoretical paradigm shifts toward critical and cultural
views that tended to historicize communication as a practice (i.e., see it as embedded
in historically specific conditions that fundamentally shaped it). Some of this work
came out of longer traditions of journalism and newspaper history dating back to the
19th century. Others drew upon the influential Canadian tradition of media history
pioneered by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. The Marxian tradition was also
a major influence, committed as it was to a view of ideas as products of historical
processes and social practices embedded within particular social formations. The
rhetorical wing of speech communication had long made historical speeches a central
object of study, and that too fed the emergence of communication history. Historians
in the 1970s and 1980s also turned to communication in, for example, studies of the
printing press and conversation. In the last decade, communication history has begun
to organize itself into a more intercommunicating and explicitly conceptualized field
of study (see, e.g., Kulczycki, 2014; Nerone, 2013; Simonson et al., 2013a; Zelizer,
2008).
That said, one can also cast an eye toward implicit communication history operating
without fully developed concepts of communication. It encompasses all those ways of
investigating and representing ideas, practices, technologies, institutions, events, and
flows of communication from the past. This perspective invites a long and culturally
broad view of communication history that would include traditions of representing
human speech, declarations from the gods, and movements of people that occurred
among earlier generations.
Perhaps the most influential tradition of implicit communication history is embed-
ded within the European rhetorical tradition as it developed out of Greek and Roman
antiquity and spread through the colonization in European empires. Not only was there
a long tradition of reproducing speeches for purposes of study or representing impor-
tant events from the past; history itself was also understood as a rhetorical genre. One
can find analogous if sometimes less formalized traditions of representing speeches
from the past across other civilizations and cultures, from ancient China and India to
the indigenous peoples of the Americas (see Kennedy, 1998).
The Greco-Latin rhetorical tradition also housed a long tradition of grander, specula-
tive history that cast the development of civilization in terms of the history of what mod-
erns would call communication and media. The ancient Greek philosopher-educator
Isocrates, in Antidosis (353 bce), asserts that

because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each
other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts but we have come together
and founded cities and made laws and invented arts. (2000, p. 327)

The power of persuasion was at that moment being conceptualized through philosoph-
ical and practical discourse in Athens—by the sophists, Plato, and, soon, Aristotle, who
codified it theoretically in his treatise On Rhetoric. Conceiving humans as speaking
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y 3

animals, Aristotle cast rhetoric as the art (techne) through which the capacity to per-
suade (seen as unique to the species) was learned, intelligently practiced, and theorized.
The capacity to speak in a manner considered civilized and achieving standards of
excellence distinguished some peoples (e.g., Athenians) from others (barbarians and
precivilized beasts who lived before cities, laws, and arts were established).
Ancient communication theory, operating under the name rhetoriké, was conceived
against the backdrop of a view of civilizational progress tied to speech and its devel-
opment. Less is known of the historical horizons of ancient non-Western rhetorics,
though origin stories are a cultural universal, and many open up in some way toward
words, speech, or expression. Isocrates and the Greek view would influence the Romans,
most notably the orator-statesman and philosopher-rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero.
His De Oratore (55 bce) championed the union of speech and knowledge through the
ideal of eloquence, underwriting it with a historical tale of their one-time union and
subsequent separation. Often drawing upon Cicero, Renaissance humanists alternately
praised the eloquence of the ancients or of the moderns, indexing historical narratives
of progress or decline tied to achievements in communicative expression.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, grander speculative histories coincided with deepen-
ing thought on language, expression, and communication (see Heyer, 1988). The Italian
rhetoric professor Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova (New Science, 1725) outlined three
ages through which nations develop, each with a distinctive language: an age of gods,
in which communication occurs through gesture, signs, and physical objects; an age
of heroes, powered by communication through aristocratic coats of arms and related
emblems of military heroism and patriarchal family superiority; and an age of men
driven by communication through speech and words. The French philosophe Étienne
Bonnot de Condillac, meanwhile, developed his important expressivist theory of lan-
guage in a way that opened toward the long history of humankind. His Essai sur l’origine
des connaissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 1746) argued,
contrary to John Locke, that speech does not merely transmit ideas but helps to create
them. National languages each have their distinctive character or “genius,” expressed
over time through different modes of communication. He offered a speculative his-
tory of communication that touched upon language, speech, music, hieroglyphics, and
writing among other media. Theory linked with history and underwrote a philosoph-
ical anthropology of humans as communicative beings developing through different
modes and media. Elements of the historical tale appeared elsewhere in the French
Enlightenment, too, centered upon the invention of printing as a force of social and
epistemological progress. These narratives fed ideologies that distinguished more and
less advanced peoples and helped legitimize European colonization and enslavement of
populations around the world.
In the 19th century, communication and related concepts developed in ways often
tied to liberal progress and enlightenment unfolding historically. Networks perceived
as both material and spiritual fed into ideas of communication as constituting a pro-
gressive, universal social bond (Mattelart, 1996). The English philosopher and liberal
social reformer John Stuart Mill’s Civilization (1836) championed the free exchange of
ideas made possible by modern forms of communication and transport, and held print-
ing and literacy up as hallmarks of civilization not shared by the “savage” world. In the
4 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y

late 19th century, “communication” became an explicit, central, and fully articulated
concept in the sociological thought of the German Albert Schäffle and the American
Charles Horton Cooley. Both developed theories of society constituted through mate-
rial transport and symbolic communication; the modern world was distinguished by
modern media and systems of transport, whose speed and breadth provided the basis
for new levels of complexity and social connection.
In the first half of the 20th century, there was an accelerating sense of the mod-
ern age being distinguished by its communication systems. Readings of history fed
new concepts of communication and vice versa. Anglophone liberal modernism had
a particular affinity for the communication idea and historical narratives that tended
to emphasize change and progress. The Englishman Graham Wallas captured aspects
in his widely read The Great Society, announcing that transformations in transport and
communication over the last 100 years had created “an environment, which, both in its
world-wide extension and its intimate connection with all sides of human existence, is
without precedent in the history of the world” (1916, p. 3). Borrowing Wallas’s trope,
the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey saw communication as the mecha-
nism through which a socially disorganized, industrializing great society might become
a great community. At the University of Chicago, where Dewey’s influence was signif-
icant, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers all deepened
the unfolding discourse of communication in the interwar years. They advanced multi-
ple accounts of communication in history, each feeding particular theoretical concep-
tions as well. Some, like Harold Lasswell, would operate with a partly muted sense of
modernity as an age of propaganda and mass communication that could be normatively
guided toward the project of liberal modernization that he and others would energet-
ically pursue in the postwar era. Others, like Edward Sapir and Robert Park, took a
more anthropological view that tied modes of communication to kinds of cultures that
developed across epochs defined by their media.
More influentially, the long historical view provided the matrix from which the Cana-
dian political economist Harold Innis forged his important concepts of time- and space-
binding media, monopolies of knowledge, and their relation to lines of authority and
political power. In contrast to most of the Americans, however, Innis rejected liberal
progress narratives in a view of communication that was both radical and tradition-
alist. New forms of media brought mixed results and ironic consequences, and Innis
maintained an affinity for orality and the long university tradition.
In the postwar era, the term, concept, and discourse of mass communication
proliferated, birthing some of the first major theories in the new and institutionalizing
academic field of communication. Dating back to radio broadcasting discourse of
the 1920s, mass communication was an American rhetorical invention that helped
mark the perceived historical transformation of society. When it entered scholarly
discourse in the late 1930s and 1940s, it carried this historical sense, but theories
of it often marginalized (or expunged) history in pursuit of social-scientific gen-
eralizability and transhistoric knowledge. The Viennese-born Paul Lazarsfeld, who
with Robert K. Merton and others made Columbia University the heart of US mass
communication theory in the 1940s, certainly had a sense of history, but his canonic
middle-range theories of opinion leaders and the two-step flow of communication
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y 5

did not. It was also true of Wilbur Schramm, who led the institutionalization of
communication research from the late 1940s onward and helped disseminate it
abroad. While the textbooks and readers he edited made scattered references to
the history of mass communication, the science of mass communication aspired
to shed history—though its application to development and modernization efforts
were legitimated through narratives of liberal historical progress through modern
communication.
European theories of mass communication embedded themselves in history in a
way their institutionally dominant US counterparts did not. This was deeply true
for the Frankfurt School, though they preferred the concept of mass culture to mass
communication. As part of their Hegelian/Marxian inheritance, Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno, and Leo Löwenthal forged theories of mass media, audiences,
industries, and culture as manifestations of particular historical moments and not
comprehensible without reference to them (see Hardt, 1992, chap. 4).
From very different ideological quarters, the fascist-leaning Spanish legal/political
scholar Juan Beneyto (1957) offered a sociological perspective on mass communica-
tions that demonstrated the need for historical understanding of their growth over
time. Such historical attention was part of the German tradition of Zeitungswissenschaft
(newspaper science), which Beneyto had had contact with in the 1930s (Ribeiro, 2016).
It also reflected the ways that newspapers, public opinion, and other subjects related
to communication were studied in some European law schools in the middle third of
the century—in a broader perspective that incorporated history, philosophy, and other
humanistic learning. Though Beneyto titled his book Mass Communications (the first
and probably only major Spanish-language work to do so before the 1960s), he made
a case for the concept of comunicaciónes comunitarias (communal communication) as
a preferred, more precise, and ultimately more powerful alternative that included both
traditional cultural forms (e.g., the theater) and new media (radio, television, and the
cinema). Beneyto’s example points us toward transnational flows of influence and alter-
native national traditions of theorizing with an eye toward communication history.

Communication history across traditions of communication

theory

In the postwar years, communication theory began to emerge as an interdisciplinary

field, taking a range of attitudes toward history across its different intellectual lineages.
In its US-centered objectivist social-scientific mainstream, communication was a
discipline focused on the present and future, not the past. It implicitly championed
Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that a science that hesitates to forget its founders
is lost. Speaking for the broader mainstream of postwar US social science, the soci-
ologist Robert K. Merton would quote Whitehead’s dictum in the opening chapter
of his Social Theory and Social Structure (1968), “On the History and Systematics
of Sociological Theory.” For Merton, who with Lazarsfeld at Columbia laid the
foundations for social-scientific mass communication theory in the 1940s, there was
a clear difference between history and the ongoing work of formulating, testing, and
6 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y

codifying theory. This was especially true of his preferred “theories of the middle
range” which sat between grander theories of a social totality on one side and the
positivist accumulation of empirical findings on the other. Such middle-range theory
has marked the mainstream of social-scientific mass communication research from
its 1940s beginnings, with concepts like opinion leaders, two-step flows, diffusions of
innovations, short-term behavioral effects, and the uses and gratifications of audiences
dominating thinking. None made any but the most passing reference to history; nor
did the sender–message–channel–receiver model that was adapted from cybernetics
and provided an overarching heuristic for understanding communication as a process
of who says what to whom through what channel and with what effects (in Harold
Lasswell’s influential formulation).
Postwar communication theory was, of course, much broader than its behavioral
and structural-functionalist social-scientific mainstreams, however. Here Robert T.
Craig’s typology of traditions of communication theory provides a useful guide, albeit
one centered on Western European and US thinking. Across his traditions—rhetorical,
semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and
critical—one can see how different theoretical orientations to communication variably
orient themselves toward history (Craig & Muller, 2007). There are differences across
traditions but also variations within them and difference across historical moments of
theorizing.
As we saw, the European rhetorical tradition gave rise to early iterations of theorizing
speech and other forms of communicative expression within the frameworks of specu-
lative histories of the evolution of civilization. As a humanistic pursuit, rhetoric has also
long maintained a conversation with the classic Greek and Roman writers—Aristotle,
Plato, the sophists, Quintilian, and Cicero. This has been true in spite of efforts to break
from the classics and modernize rhetoric that date back at least to the 16th century.
Translated into rhetorical theory, conversation with the classics and other precursors
carries with it, at minimum, a sense that historical works continue to speak to the con-
cerns of the present. More strongly, it can also open into the position that rhetorical
theory is itself an expression of a historical moment, entangling theory with history in
a much deeper way. This stronger view, historicism, has its roots in Vico. Only since the
late 1960s, however, has it been prominent in rhetorical theory, under the influence of
hermeneutics or critical theory.
The semiotic tradition of theorizing communication has had competing impulses
with regard to history. On the one hand, in his foundational writings the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure made a rigorous distinction between diachronic and synchronic
analyses of language—the former investigating its development over time, the latter its
status at a particular moment. While Saussure recognized that language was itself his-
torical and the relation between signs and their referents arbitrary, he argued that the
science of semiology (or the study of signs) should focus on the synchronic dimensions
of signification and interrelations among signs. This in turn opened the way for semi-
otic analysis to bracket if not ignore history, particularly in its structuralist variants.
The tripartite semiotic theory of the US philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce opened up
slightly more toward historical processes of meaning-making insofar as it emphasized
habits of interpretation of signs and looked toward what he called final interpretants as
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y 7

meanings that would emerge after processes of critical inquiry. The Saussurean tradi-
tion would be far more influential in communication and media theory, orienting itself
more strongly toward history as it cross-pollinated with Marxism in Roland Barthes’
writings of the 1950s and 1960s, which emphasized the links between the meanings of
signs and their sociohistorical contexts.
Craig’s phenomenological tradition encompasses a range of thought held together
by a common focus on communication as dialogue or the experience of otherness.
Across it, there is a corresponding range of orientations to history as an element of
theorizing communication. On the one hand, both Edmund Husserl’s transcendental
phenomenology and Martin Buber’s existential philosophy of dialogue center authen-
tic communication deeply within a present moment and champion normative ideals
that transcend particular historical contexts. On the other hand, Craig also includes
the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer within the phenomenological
tradition, which takes a very different attitude toward history (and one could make a
case for separating the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions partly on that
basis). In its focused attention on understanding texts from the past, the hermeneu-
tic tradition from St. Augustine onward was deeply attentive to the historical distance
that separated inscriptions of meaning and interpretations of them. In the 20th cen-
tury, when Martin Heidegger expanded hermeneutics into an ontological philosophy of
human being itself, historically mediated language became the vehicle through which all
understanding occurred. In principle, it became impossible to theorize communication
without reference to the linguistically mediated historical cultures within (or across)
which it occurred. Hermeneutically influenced cultural sciences would be fundamen-
tally historicist endeavors, understanding themselves to be operating through language
and horizons of significance and meaning embedded in particular historical contexts.
Again, it has only been since the 1970s that strands of disciplinary communication the-
ory have come to adopt this view, however.
The cybernetic tradition—which theorizes communication as information process-
ing and often emphasizes systems thinking—is on its face resistant to history as a com-
ponent of communication theory, but here too there are exceptions. The pioneering
Norbert Wiener, for instance, in the early 1950s conceived cybernetics within a longer
sweep of the history of science and the history of communication, calling up images of
epochal changes and technological progress that call for new communication theories
to organize them. More recently and in a very different register, the German media the-
orist Friedrich Kittler blended elements of cybernetic thinking with Michel Foucault’s
archaeological theory of discourse as establishing the conditions of intelligibility in his-
torical epochs. For Kittler, historically specific discourse networks constituted through
media provided the conditions under which the exchange of information might occur.
The next two traditions are worth considering together, for both emerged in the
United States in the first half of the 20th century and represented two dominant lines of
disciplinary thought in communication before the 1970s. The sociopsychological tra-
dition formed the core of mainstream social-scientific communication theory from the
1940s into the 1970s and, to a somewhat lesser degree, since then. Arising out of social
psychology, it has been part of the behaviorist social-scientific tradition that tends to
abstract both communication and communication theory from processes and contexts
8 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y

of history. Tending ultimately to focus on the individual, it is distinguished from the

sociocultural tradition, which took a turn more toward sociology. Internally variegated,
one strain developed from the pragmatists—especially Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley,
and George Herbert Mead, whose attention to cultural symbols, dynamic communities,
and the evolution of society all helped make history relevant to theorizing communica-
tion. Another strain came from a more positivistic sociology that focused on structures,
functions, roles, and social effects. While in principle open to historical research, this
positivist strain in practice focused nearly exclusively on communication in the present,
and theories rarely acknowledged their historicity but instead aspired to universality in
their applicability.
Craig’s seventh tradition is the critical, which developed from Marx’s materialist
refiguration of Hegel’s philosophy of history and a politics of emancipation and
critique. Along with hermeneutics, the critical Marxian tradition is the one that most
strongly adjoins theory and philosophy to history. Inverting the Hegelian insight
that philosophy gives voice to the spirit of an age, the Marxian tradition has situated
theory within the sociomaterial contexts of history and its own activity of theorizing
communication as critical praxis for illuminating, critiquing, and ultimately changing
problematic social realities of the age. Theorizing communication as discursive
reflection of historically specific realities, the critical tradition gained influential voice
through the Frankfurt School’s writings from the 1930s to the 1960s. Those works,
along with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s posthumously published writings,
provided theoretical resources to left-leaning communication scholars around the
world from the late 1960s onward. They deepened the perceived relevance of history to
theories of communication at two levels—in critical accounts of social communication
in the world, which always reflected its historical conditions; and in critique of
dominant theories of communication, whose rise, appeal, and inadequacies could all
be explained in terms of material and ideological realities of the historical contexts of
which they were part.
While by no means dominant, historicist approaches to communication theory
began congealing in the 1970s and have developed since then through a number of
traditions, including some not part of Craig’s schema. The main early drivers were
the Marxian and hermeneutic traditions and their uptake in critical, cultural, and
humanistic communication theory. After the 1970s, certain kinds of poststructuralism
were also major forces, particularly those influenced by Michel Foucault and taking
seriously the historicity of discourses through which communication and media
take shape within shifting regimes of power. Some non-essentializing strands of
feminist communication theory were also deeply attentive to history, particularly those
influenced by the Marxian or Foucauldian traditions. They advanced their own kinds
of two-tiered historicism—seeing communication practices as elements of historically
specific gendered social systems, and critiquing dominant theories for their reflections
of patriarchy. Also significant in the historicist turn was Thomas Kuhn’s Structure
of Scientific Revolutions (1970). Rejecting images of a steady growth of disciplinary
knowledge over time, it introduced the idea of historical paradigms and paradigm
shifts, which invested history with new epistemological and political significance for
the natural and social sciences.
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y 9

In recent decades, there have been increasing efforts to expand communication

theory beyond the Euro-American sources and intellectual matrix that have over-
whelmingly dominated it in the field. This is tied to larger and diverse efforts to
de-Westernize communication and media studies and draw out intellectual and
cultural traditions from other regions of the globe. Across Latin America, Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East, scholars have looked toward indigenous ways of practicing and
thinking about communication. They provide the basis for theories that aim to give
voice to and formally develop distinctive and often long-established cultural traditions
(nicely represented in Christians & Nordenstreng, 2014). This is an intellectual impulse
that dates back to the 1960s and 1970s and the critical ferment that rejected dominant,
largely American social-scientific paradigms. In Latin America, for instance, where
a strong tradition of leftist intellectuals has struggled against both US hegemony
and repressive political regimes in the region, traditions of theorizing comunicación
comunitaria and Latin American forms of cultural communication have provided
alternatives to imported ways of thought. Since the 1970s and 1980s, there have been
efforts to develop African and Arab theories of communication grounded in the
historical cultures of those diverse regions. And since the 1990s, there have been
analogous efforts in East—and to a lesser extent South—Asia. Rhetorical scholars have
also begun to look outside the European tradition, attending to non-Western rhetorical
practices and concepts and bringing them to more explicit theoretical formulation.
Across this heterogeneous array of thought, history and cultural traditions embedded
in it have typically been seen as fundamental elements of the process of theorizing
communication, setting it off in kind from aspirationally universal and ahistoric
social-scientific theory.

The history of ideas and fields

Communication history is also relevant to communication theory insofar as it has

attended to the history of ideas of communication and the history of communication
fields. These are distinct but overlapping enterprises. The former investigates the history
of particular ideas, shared concepts, theories, paradigms, and intellectual traditions.
The latter attends to the history of organized inquiry as a social, institutional, and
intellectual endeavor. As such, the history of the field of communication theory focuses
not merely on the cognitive or epistemological domain of ideas (broadly conceived)
but also on the sociological and material domains of, for example, professional
associations and special interest divisions within them, journals, social networks,
lineages of scholars associated with particular schools, funding institutions, patterns
of influence and citation, and the scientific capital accruing through recognition and
socially ascribed authority.
As John Durham Peters (1999) shows, the roots for the idea of communication are
ancient. He focuses particularly on normative ideals of dialogue and dissemination
found respectively in Plato’s Phaedrus and the synoptic gospels of the Christian New
Testament. As Peters and others have charted, there are different contemporary under-
standings of communication whose deep intellectual and cultural histories date back to
antiquity as well.
10 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y

The modern concept of communication, however, began to be forged in European

(especially British and French) philosophical discourse of the 17th and 18th centuries
(see Heyer, 1988). Parts of this discourse were articulated with the communicative his-
tory of civilization discussed above, but—like the traditions of 20th-century communi-
cation theory—much of it assumed meanings wholly independent from history. John
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was hugely influential and cast
communication as the means through which ideas are shared among independent and
self-governing minds. As Peters argues, the concept served liberal political ends, under-
writing a view of knowledge as attainable independent of church, crown, or custom
(1999, p. 82). The idea of communication found a place in the writings of 17th-century
English scientists as well, where it stood for transparency, clarity, and the growth of sci-
entific knowledge. It served analogous ends in the French and Scottish Enlightenments
(though Condillac would reject the Lockean ideal of language as neutral conduit, edging
through expressivism toward a more constitutive view of communication). Moving into
the 19th and 20th centuries, the conceptual foundation was laid for communication as
an idea yoked to metanarratives of social, political, and epistemological progress.
The bulk of work on the history of ideas and theories of communication focuses
on the era since the last quarter of the 19th century. Beginning in the 1870s, com-
munication took on more sociological meanings and came to be conceived as a
fundamental mechanism through which society maintained itself. During this same
period, communication as a concept began to separate itself from material transport, a
centuries-old connection that reflected the inseparability of the movement of symbols
from the movement of people and things. The telegraph helped sunder that linkage,
though the conceptual connection between communication and transport persisted
into the 20th century. Dan Schiller (1996) has taken up a different axis for considering
the dematerialization of the concept of communication, tracing its sundering from
ideas of labor and production since the late 19th century.
As part of the historical turns in communication studies since the 1970s, there has
been a great deal of work published on the history of ideas and theories of communi-
cation. Beyond the influence of critical, cultural, and hermeneutic traditions discussed
above, this proliferation of work also reflects both the discovery of communication and
media by professional historians as well as the disciplinary growth and differentiation
of communication studies into progressively institutionalized subfields. This has been
a global phenomenon far too complex to be captured by even a rudimentary sketch
here (see Simonson et al., 2013b). It has ranged across a spectrum of methodological
approaches and orientations—from textual interpretation of classic writings to critical
appraisals and apologias for dominant paradigms, recovery of forgotten or underappre-
ciated texts and traditions, and tracing flows of influence and transnational receptions
and resistances to theories and ideas.
Also since the 1970s, a growing body of work has cast the international history of
the field of communication into better relief (drawn together in Simonson & Park,
2016). We have increasingly good composite views of the two oldest national contexts
for the field—Germany and its traditions of Zeitungswissenschaft, Publizistik, and
Kommunikationswissenschaft; and the United States and its traditions of journalism,
speech/communication, and mass communication. There are also solid histories of
 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y 11

Canada, the Nordic region, and a few other countries in Western Europe as well
(especially Spain, France, and the United Kingdom). Histories of the field elsewhere in
the world are also coming into better view—sometimes in tandem with indigenizing
efforts in communication theory as well. This is true of Africa, the Arab world, and
East Asia. There is significant difference in the amount of attention that has been cast
on the history of the field across different nations and regions, reflecting both the state
of the field in those places and the North Atlantic structuring of the discipline more
generally. Among that work, to date there has been no history written of the academic
subfield of communication theory in either its intellectual or institutional dimensions,
though pieces of it are scattered across a number of sources.
Reflecting the growth of work on the intellectual and institutional history of com-
munication inquiry—and providing sources for further reading on the subject—there
are now a number of collections and other resources that bring together thinking
about communication history and theory. The online Bibliography for the History of
Communication Research provides an invaluable database of more than 1,800 works
published in English (historyofcommunicationresearch.org). With the affordances
of digital media, it is searchable by keyword and tag. Hundreds of entries at least
touch upon the history of theories of communication along with the history of fields
and subfields. Recent edited collections include essays that survey the literature and
advance the international history of communication studies (Averbeck-Lietz, 2016;
Christians & Nordenstreng, 2014; Gehrke & Keith, 2015; Nerone, 2013; Park & Pooley,
2008; Simonson & Park, 2016; Simonson et al., 2013a).
Across its four volumes, The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory
and Philosophy itself captures and advances the historical turns sketched in this
entry. Setting out, in its self-stated mission, to “cover the history, systematics, and
future potential of communication theory” in global perspective, it holds together
the sometimes-dichotomous Mertonian categories and advances a cosmopolitan and
multicultural vision whose genealogy one might trace back to 18th-century discourses
on communication and beyond.

SEE ALSO: Cultural Studies; Hermeneutics; History; Innis, Harold A.; Marxism; Mer-
ton, Robert K.; Rhetoric; Traditions of Communication Theory

References and further readings

Averbeck-Lietz, S. (Ed.). (2016). Kommunikationswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich:

Transnationale Perspektiven. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer.
Beneyto, J. (1957). Mass communications. Madrid, Spain: Instituto de Ciencias Políticas.
Christians, C., & Nordenstreng, K. (Eds.). (2014). Communication theories in a multicultural
world. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Craig, R. T., & Muller, H. (2007). Theorizing communication: Readings across traditions. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gehrke, P. J., & Keith, W. M. (2015). A century of communication studies. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Hardt, H. (1992). Critical communication studies: Communication, history, and theory in America.
New York, NY: Routledge.
 12 CO M M U N I C AT I O N HI S T O R Y

Heyer, P. (1988). Communications and history. New York, NY: Greenwood.

Isocrates. (2000). Antidosis. In Isocrates, Vol. 2. Loeb classical library, 229. Trans. G. Norlin.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kennedy, G. (1998). Comparative rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Kulczycki, E. (2014). Communication history and its research subject. Analele Universităţii din
Craiova Seria: Filosofie, 33(1), 132–155.
Mattelart, A. (1996). The invention of communication. Trans. S. Emanuel. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Free Press.
Nerone, J. (Ed.). (2013). Media history and the foundations of media studies. Malden, MA: Wiley
Blackwell.
Park, D. W., & Pooley, J. (Eds.). (2008). The history of media and communication research. New
York, NY: Peter Lang.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Pooley, J., & Park, D. W. (2013). Communication research. In P. Simonson, J. Peck, R. T. Craig,
& J. P. Jackson (Eds.), The handbook of communication history (pp. 76–92). New York, NY:
Routledge.
Ribeiro, N. (2016). Communication studies on the Iberian Peninsula: A comparative analysis
of the field’s development in Portugal and Spain. In P. Simonson & D. W. Park (Eds.), The
international history of communication study (pp. 151–170). New York, NY: Routledge.
Schiller, D. (1996). Theorizing communication: A history. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Simonson, P., & Park, D. W. (2016). The international history of communication study. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Simonson, P., Peck, J., Craig, R. T., & Jackson, J. P. (Eds.). (2013a). The handbook of communication
history. New York, NY: Routledge.
Simonson, P., Peck, J., Craig, R. T., & Jackson, J. P. (2013b). The history of communication history.
In P. Simonson, J. Peck, R. T. Craig, & J. P. Jackson (Eds.), The handbook of communication
history (pp. 13–57). New York, NY: Routledge.
Wallas, G. (1916). The great society: A psychological analysis. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Zelizer, B. (Ed.). 2008. Explorations in communication and history. New York, NY: Routledge.

Peter Simonson is associate professor in the College of Media, Communication, and

Information at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. His research interests include
the intellectual history and social philosophy of communication, the international his-
tory of the field of communication studies, mass communication theory, and the history
and theory of rhetoric. He is the author of Refiguring Mass Communication: A History,
and editor of The Handbook of Communication History and The International History of
Communication Study.

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