Overton window
English
Etymology
Named after Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former vice-president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Noun
Overton window (plural Overton windows)
- The range of ideas that the public will accept, i.e. those ideas that are not considered too extreme or radical.
- Synonym: window of discourse
- 2012, Ryan Holiday, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, Penguin, →ISBN, page 258:
- Nor is he the only one of his kind—on all sides of the spectrum, there are individuals like Mike, shaping what we read, setting the Overton Window in our political debate, stirring things up and laughing (and profiting) as we freak out about it.
- 2017, Kevin Marsh, Strategic Communication, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 80:
- If we plot possible policy solutions against a 'Freedom' Axis, we could devise an Overton Window rather like the one in the previous page. Most would judge a total ban on all recreational drugs, including those we're used to in the west such as […]
- 2017, Rutger Bregman, “epilogue”, in Elizabeth Manton, transl., Utopia for Realists, Kindle edition, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 255:
- And yet, despite all this, a society can change completely in a few decades. The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible.
- 2017, Angela Nagle, chapter 3, in Kill All Normies, Zero Books, →ISBN:
- Although the tactics of the online right are updated to a digital age, it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics.
Translations
Translations
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Further reading
Overton window on Wikipedia.Wikipedia