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.
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.
Works Cited
Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990)
Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
Leo Bogart, Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness Of Public Opinion (1972)
Jeremy Bentham, Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code for Any State (1823)
Essays on Political Tactics (1791)
Principles of Penal Law
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1888)
John Fenton, "In Your Opinion..." The Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll Looks at Polls, Politics, and the People from 1945 to 1960 (1960)
George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy: The Public-Opinion Poll and How It Works (1940).
Thomas Jefferson to Nicholas Lewis, 1791.
Vladimir Orlando Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy (1961).
John M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (1933).
Gustave Le Bon, Psychology of Socialism (1899)
Psychologie de la foule (1895)
Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (1920)
W. Alexander MacKinnon, On the Rise, Progress and Present State of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Other Parts of the World (1828)
Jacques Necker, De l’administration des finances en France (1794)
John Durham Peters, Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion (1995)
Edward Ross, Social Control (1901)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le contrat social (1762)
Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750)
La lettre a d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758)
Lettre XXIV à Julie
Gabriel Tarde, L’opinion et la foule (1901)
Ferdinand Tönnies, Der Kritik der Öfentliche Meinung (1922)
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