Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation

by Avishai Margalit, Professor of Philosophy Assaf Sharon

From philosophers Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon, an erudite yet approachable inquiry into political manipulation and the grave threat it poses to human freedom today.

Manipulation is as old as history itself, yet Aldous Huxley’s paraphrase of Churchill rings truer than “never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” Manipulation presents a clear danger to liberal democracy today. Demagogues undermine civic discussion, and propagandists and conspiracy theorists create cognitive traps that erode critical thinking.

What exactly is manipulation, and what sets it apart from other forms of influence? How does it differ from convincing, attracting, or nudging? Drawing on examples from mythology, literature, history, and politics, philosophers Margalit and Sharon argue that manipulation is not just a form of deceit and intellectual harm; it is, above all, an exercise of power. Manipulation exploits mental weaknesses and vulnerabilities with the goal of establishing control. Whereas liberal philosophers overlook manipulation, instead treating coercion as the primary form of political domination, Margalit and Sharon argue that manipulation should be seen as coercion’s insidious counterpart in undermining human freedom.

Public support is fundamental to the legitimacy of government. Today, political manipulation is corrupting the formation and expression of public opinion, making manipulation a driving force of the global crisis of democratic decline. A timely work, but also a work for all times, Captive Minds stands as the definitive study of a pervasive threat to political freedom and the increasingly fragile institutions that sustain it.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2026

About the author

Avishai Margalit (Hebrew: אבישי מרגלית, b. 1939 in Afula, British Mandate for Palestine – today Israel) is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Reviews

[bhansy]

Im annoyed, it's prolly my 3894th DNF of the month.

This looked promising UNTIL I read the first page and .. HELLO? read the bible properly? like genesis? also the beginning. if you read it you'll see my friend Eve did not SEDUCE anyone:

"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it."

OH WOW he was seduced. rip Adam.

can't read a book that's BIBLICALLY inaccurate. adios.

[Arista]

I give it up. They can’t differentiate between persuasion and manipulation (besides superficially contrasting the concepts), because by their own definition, intent and veracity don’t matter. They must know on some level that doesn’t work, because all of their examples draw on ill-intent and/or deception, but they explicitly refuse to concede the point, which make the rest of the book seem like more of a pedantic exercise than an interesting read.

[Riccardo Tedesco]

Not really sure what to think about this one. It felt like putting an intellectual framework around the topic of manipulation, and at times I struggled to understand whether that framework was really needed.

It still gave me a few interesting thoughts and angles, but nothing that really stayed with me beyond that.