We are brought into the twentieth century by Edward Ross, a member of the first generation of American sociologists. Ross, who framed public opinion as a means of social control, said that the “primitive public opinion,” “far from being a wise disciplinarian, meddles when it ought to abstain, and blesses when it ought to curse.” Nevertheless, he added, the “ascendancy of the wise” is possible, and “the remedy for the abuses of public opinion is not to discredit it but to instruct it.”

Ferdinand Tönnies also emphasized the need to instruct public opinion in his Der Kritik der Öfentliche Meinung (1922), stating that its future was “the future of civilization,” and that its power was constantly increasing and would continue to grow. For that reason he called upon the most educated, “the most elevated strata of society—enlightened people, the expert, the intellectual man” to “infuse moral and spiritual motives in public opinion. Public opinion should become public consciousness”—a sentiment not very far from Walter Lippmann’s proposal that “public opinions should be organized for the press and not organized by the press.”

Of deeper concern was the twisting of public opinion to support political agendas. It is difficult to read without a shudder the first paragraph of Propaganda (1928), one of the first Edward L. Bernays books. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in the democratic society. Those who manipulate this mechanism constitute an invisible government that is the real power ruling our country,” he wrote.

The British economist and Nobel prizewinner John M. Keynes was also convinced of the limitations of public opinion and of the responsibility of writers regarding it. “If, indeed, public opinion were an unalterable thing,” he wrote in Essays in Persuasion in 1933,

it would be a waste of time to discuss public affairs. And though it may be the chief business of newsmen and politicians to ascertain its momentary features, a writer ought to be concerned, rather, with what public opinion should be. I record these platitudes because many Americans give their advice, as though it were actually immoral to make suggestions which public opinion does not approve.

Even when the scientific turn of public opinion thinking took place, in spite of the deep appreciation of surveys and polls as an invaluable tool in the democratic process, some authors were cautious. Certainly, George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae made the plea in favor of surveys as a truly democratic device. In The Pulse of Democracy in 1940, they emphasized that “in our day the study of public opinion has developed from a glorified kind of fortunetelling into a practical way of learning what the nation thinks.” The same Gallup, twenty years afterward, in his foreword to John Fenton’s book "In Your Opinion..." quoted Harvard professor Samuel Stouffer, who had said surveys “represent the most useful tool that democracy ever devised.” Nevertheless, making reference to the “mystical democrats,” Gallup rejected “public opinion as a sort of supernatural force able to create the best of the possible worlds.” Public opinion, he continued, “is neither a deity nor infallible. It is as good or as bad as the human beings whose ideas and aspirations constitute the whole current of opinion.”

And when, a year later, Vladimir Orlando Key published Public Opinion and American Democracy (1961), the view of “the public”—the key element in public opinion—was obviously much less optimistic than the Enlightenment image of two centuries before. With a more realistic understanding Key stated that blows from several sources had “battered the idyllic vision of the guidance of affairs by the opinions of a virtuous public.” In his analysis he considered very attentively the role played by the elites.

Finally, in his 1972 book, Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion, the recently deceased Leo Bogart recognized that “the study of public opinion goes well beyond what surveys tell us.” He, too, made a reference to their limitations, concluding nevertheless that “surveys are the only sensible means of describing the constant changes...” But taking into account the manipulation of public opinion, he criticized the “naive proposition that a democracy should be ruled by the public will as surveys describe it.”

This rushed trip through the work of some relevant authors—I wouldn’t say “que están todos los que son, pero sí que son todos los que están”*—confirms that in spite of the positive appraisal of public opinion that took place in the past centuries since the Enlightenment period, there has been some continuity stressing its ambiguity. In my view this idea highlights the importance of sound empirical studies of public opinion, but also points to their obvious limitations, and calls for a responsible activity that cannot be separated from the substance of public opinion itself. “The classics” made the point.

*"All the quoted authors had to be quoted even if one does not quote all the possible ones."

Esteban Lopez-Escobar, past president of WAPOR, is a professor of public opinion at the School of Communication at the University of Navarra, Spain.