Public Opinion: An Ambiguous Reality? A Quick Tour of “the Classics”

By Esteban Lopez-Escobar

Historically, the subject of public opinion has been of interest not only to political thinkers, sociologists, and journalists, but also to philosophers, lawyers, and psychologists, among others. And, depending on the specifically adopted perspective, the meaning of public opinion has varied, as have its implications for acting upon it.

Though many tend to think of it mainly in terms of the advent of scientific polling in the 1930s, public opinion gained identity, power, and respectability in the last several centuries, forming a triangular relationship with democracy and the press whose implicit meaning is associated with social and political progress. Nevertheless, even the most enthusiastic apologists of public opinion occasionally soften their enthusiasm, recognizing in it a certain frailty. A reading of the “classics” of political, social, and intellectual history, though perhaps challenging, can be an enlightening and rewarding way to gain insight into the ambiguous, ambivalent character of public opinion.

The concept of public opinion has changed greatly since the end of the seventeenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers embarked on explorations of the relationship between subject and monarch or citizen and state. In his 1990 book, Inventing the French Revolution, Keith M. Baker wrote that “in migrating from the philosophical to the political sections of the work [Baker is referring to the French Enciclopédie méthodique], and accepting its designation as ‘public,’ ‘opinion’ has also taken on a radically different character.” John Durham Peters has brilliantly pointed out that “opinion,” a villain for philosophy, became “public opinion,” a hero in politics.

Over time, public opinion became more and more praised, but some authors have seen a darker side to it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss-born eighteenth-century political philosopher, understood public opinion as a positive force in some of his works because he saw it as conservative. But in others (for example, the Lettre XXIV à Julie) he presented it more as a menacing reality.

Another view was offered by Jacques Necker, a minister to the French monarch Louis XVI, who was extremely instrumental in the spread of the notion and operation of public opinion. He and other authors characterized it as a tribunal before which everybody should appear—the real power ruling even in the palace of the king, without needing an armed force to support it. In De l’administration des finances en France, Necker emphasized that “it was necessary to support [public opinion], to enlighten it.”

Similarly, Thomas Jefferson declared in a letter sent to Nicholas Lewis in 1791 that "Government being founded on opinion, the opinion of the public, even when it is wrong, ought to be respected to a certain degree."

The idea of public opinion as a tribunal was shared by many thinkers. As we move into the nineteenth century we find Jeremy Bentham in Great Britain daring to propose it as a constitutional power in his Constitutional Code. Even he saw it as a double-edged sword, however. In Essays on Political Tactics he praised it lyrically:

The public compose a tribunal, which is more powerful than all the other tribunals together… everyone feels, that though this tribunal may err, it is incorruptible; that it continually tends to become enlightened; that it unites all the wisdom and all the justice of the nation.

But in his Principles of Penal Law, Bentham not only acknowledged its eventual errors but also warned of the possible corruption of this “first and the purest of the tribunals.” If that should happen, he said, “Many cases would be found in which public opinion is unjustifiable.”

The highest expression of British middle-class optimism regarding public opinion was the 1828 book On the rise, progress and present state of public opinion in Great Britain and other parts of the world. Scottish author W. Alexander MacKinnon wrote that

public opinion must be said to be, that sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community, which is gradually spread and adopted by nearly all persons of any education or proper feeling in a civilized state.

Note, however, MacKinnon’s emphasis on people of education. He distinguished their sort of public opinion from another sentiment he labelled “popular clamour,” which he defined as “that sort of feeling, arising from the passions of a multitude acting without consideration; or an excitement created amongst the uneducated, or amongst those who do not reflect, or do not exercise their judgment on the point in question.” In his view, popular clamor, “based on ignorance and prejudice,” was powerful proportionally to the ignorance and size of the lower class.

In the last third of the nineteenth century another British author, James Bryce, the Northern Irish “champion” of public opinion, argued that public opinion excelled in the United States. In American Commonwealth, Bryce made a very fervent plea concerning the democratic meaning of this phenomenon. But he contradicted himself in one of several instances when, having stated that democratic government, popular government, and government by public opinion should be taken as synonymous, he declared that the duty

of a patriotic statesman in a country where public opinion rules, would seem to be rather to resist and correct than to encourage the dominant sentiment. He will not be content with trying to form and mould and lead it, but he will confront it, lecture it, remind it that it is fallible, rouse it out of its self-complacency.

Meanwhile, back in France, Gabriel Tarde cleverly analyzed the relationship between the press and public opinion, suggesting that in the former voices are weighted, while in the latter they are counted: “The press,” he wrote, “without knowing it has contributed to create the power of numbers, and also to diminish the power of character, if not of talent.” Tarde thought the most interesting thing in society was the relationship among “the three branches of public spirit”: tradition, reason, and opinion; and he suggested that “the best alliance” would be between reason and opinion, to form the tradition of tomorrow.

Certainly, Tarde's contemporary, Gustave Le Bon, was also convinced of the force of public opinion—and that worried him. “This power of public opinion, so great, and so fluctuating, extends not only to politics, but to all the elements of civilisation. It dictates to artists their works, to judges their decrees, to governments their conduct,” he stated in Psychology of Socialism. Writing about a politician in Psychologie de la foule, he fretted,

It is plain that he has cost us very dear; but a great part of his influence was due to the fact that he followed public opinion, which, in colonial matters, was far from being at the time what it has since become. A leader is seldom in advance of public opinion; almost always all he does is to follow it and to espouse all its errors.