Public Opinion

Historical and Philosophical Background

The concept has origins in early political philosophy dating to the writings of Plato, who was mainly concerned about the mercurial nature of crowds and the problems associated with direct democracy. Aristotle is often cited on the point of the collective wisdom of the group being wiser than individuals', but he was not in general a reliable advocate for rationality of the common people.

The controversies about the competence and rationality of people continued throughout the history of Western philosophy, through the Middle Ages to the present day. From the perspective of our contemporary representative democracies, public opinion is considered with reverence as “the will of the people.” But such representations are often accompanied by doubts about the extent of the public's competencies, levels of knowledge, ability to weigh contradictory information, and level of emotion.

The origin of public opinion is often portrayed as an achievement of Western culture and civilization, coming together in word and deed on the eve of the French Revolution. Informed people met frequently in the upper-class salons of the day to discuss public affairs. Records of this era are clear about the frequency and quality of these conversations and their importance in influencing events in that time and place. Coming together were the developments in popular information, regular venues for conversation and deliberation of the issues of the day, and people self-consciously interested in being a part of a public. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, and Jacques Necker, the French finance minister, were setting out their philosophical ideas justifying public opinion and [Page 636]its relationship to governance as well as coining the phrase public opinion.

The true origins of public opinion as we understand it today are more properly attributed to 17th-century England than to 18th-century France. England was a country profoundly influenced by the Reformation, which set off a burst of creativity in the printing industry. This led to economic and political conditions that produced a wide range of printed products, such as pamphlets and early newspapers, for a wide swath of society. England had a vigorous popular press and an egalitarian pub culture in which people of many diverse classes, informed by the pamphlets and early newspapers, met and discussed issues of the day. Framing the contemporary issues and providing concrete avenues for political activity was a vibrant system of petitions. These petitions, which were inexpensively produced and reproduced in large numbers by the commercial printers of the day, were debated in pubs across the country. Signed petitions representing the outcomes of these conversations were presented at court. Kings and their advisers for their own reasons felt duty-bound to reply to these petitions. This was not the elite salon culture of 18th-century France, but a broad-based social movement. English culture lacked the eloquence of Rousseau' s philosophical arguments and the concise elegance of the French phrase l'opinion publique. But English society developed a working system of public opinion, based on a system of news and popular information, about a century before the French.

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