Paul Beaud

Common knowledge on historical vicissitudes of the notion ofpublic opinionIn: Réseaux, 1993, volume 1 n°1. pp. 119-137.

AbstractSummary: This article makes a detour through anthropology and history in an attempt to clarify some of the meanings covered bythe notion of public opinion. Rather than assigning to it an a priori definition, the author attempts to reconstitute the strata ofmeaning which remain embedded as much in the representations which society associates with the term as in theconceptualization which sociology or political science have tried to make from it.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Beaud Paul. Common knowledge on historical vicissitudes of the notion of public opinion. In: Réseaux, 1993, volume 1 n°1. pp.119-137.

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COMMON KNOWLEDGE

On historical vicissitudes of the notion of

public opinion

PaulBEAUD

Summary: This article makes a detour through anthropology and

history in an attempt to clarify some of the meanings covered by

the notion of public opinion. Rather than assigning to it an a

priori definition, the author attempts to reconstitute the strata of

meaning which remain embedded as much in the representations

which society associates with the term as in the conceptualization

which sociology or political science have tried to make from it. I I У

COMMON KNOWLEDGE

7 COMMON

KNOWLEDGE

On historical vicissitudes of the notion of public opinion

Paul BEAUD

Opinion: from the Latin opinio: ЪеНеГ ; Opine: to hold or express an opinion The dictionary

It is impossible to provide a standardized definition of public opinion, consequently, it is preferable, if possible, to avoid using the term ...'.

This is not a recent recommendation, but a motion adopted by American political scientists during a congress in 1924 (quoted by Padioleau, 1981). George Horace Gallup, who was twenty-three years old at the time, was perhaps present.

If the latter had the descendants we know him to have had, those of the other participants at the congress were just as rich. We shall thus limit ourselves to a few quotations. In 1953 Paul A. Palmer dared to affirm that the expression 'public opinion' was tending to disappear from German sociological and political science treatises (Palmer, 1953). About ten years later Jurgen Habermas returned to the attack, affirming that, not being able to

substitute a precise definition of qffen- ttiche Meinung for the jargon of the bureaucracy and mass media, sociology had to accept '... the logical consequence which forced it to abandon this type of category' (Habermas, 1986). The highly respectable International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1968, affirmed: There is no generally accepted definition of 'public opinion' (quoted by Noelle-Neumann, 1977), which in fact meant that the definitions were so numerous (more than fifty, according to reputable authors) (Childs, 1965 is always quoted as the source) that one could not choose any single one. And to conclude these warnings, let us call to mind what Pierre Bourdieu clearly stated more than twenty years ago: 'Public opinion does not exist' (Bourdieu, 1972).

After so many authoritative opinions (we could have added dozens of others), we could be tempted to stop there, to conclude with the establishment of this single paradox of an expression which, it seems, has passed from the vocabulary of political philosophy to that of the social sciences, and then to that most commonly used and which the social sciences do not seem to want to recognize as being theirs - which does not however prevent them from referring to it at every available opportunity. Since its creation in 1937, the review The Public Opinion Quarterly consistently questioned the very basis of its own existence. Less than that could make one choose other subjects for reflection!

But sociologists well know that they cannot capitulate just because the dimly perceived truth by which, yesterday, they struggled to explain everyday life is today's common sense. This already presents a problem to sociology, and sociology all too often thinks it can resolve it by other 'common knowledge' of its own.

Let us then start with the consideration that public opinion is an invention of

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modem parliamentary democracies, irrespective of whether it is considered as fiction or reality. Agreement exists; the appearance of the notion public opinion is historically linked to the disappearance of absolute and hereditary power and everything that justifies a given social order, whilst standing outside it. Opinion is by nature substitutive (Ozouf, 1987); it is the institution which replaces - in reality or ideologically - God and the king and which implies the existence of a certain number of conditions and means, such as publicity or the separation between the private and public spheres. In other terms - notably those of Lefort and Kantorowicz, which we shall paraphrase - in order for public opinion to emerge, an omnipresence must be substituted by that which is symbolized by The Two Bodies of the King, (Kantorowicz, 1988), both mortal and immortal, which 'give substance to society' (Lefort, 1966) and ensure its transcendental permanence; over-fullness must be replaced by a vacuum, that is, indétermination, history (Lefort, 1986).

Thus, the conceptual device is set up and one can easily recognize in it other peri- odization, other divisions, the 'befores' and 'afters', the 'withs' and 'withouts', without which the social sciences seem unable to think or evaluate. For example, one can identify, without and with history, that typical differentiation which so easily permits one to classify societies, the ones holistic and extrodetermined, where tradition and the gods have an answer to everything, the others individualistic and introdetermined, or even better, undetermined, where inter-subjectivity and argumentation become a primary necessity,

since no unshakeable rule any longer automatically regularizes interactions.

And so we return to the point of departure, that which creates the departure, defines the object public opinion and generates the categories which will permit us to analyse it, legitimizing both the empirical practices of those counting who is for and who is against, and the most ambitious of theories. As far as the latter are concerned we shall not contest here the heuristic virtues of the models built on such differentiation. We shall simply, at first, try to add a supplementary phase to the methodological process to which the elaboration of this ideal-type leads. That is, that of the testing of categories created by a return to what, by comparison, Implicitly or explicitly defines them, the counter-model of societies from 'before*. Any reflection, any classification, based on a 'before' and an 'after' contains the risk of trading the 'always thus' illusion for the 'never before' illusion, in this case of a society whose aim is self-determination and which has given itself the means to achieve it*. Before attaining this, it is appropriate at least to look elsewhere to see if, in particular, it really is necessary and sufficient that someone (Rousseau, the philosophers of the Lumières or the 1789 revolutionaries) name this spe- cificicity in order for public opinion to become at least the object of sociological attention. We shall attempt to do so by getting rid of a priori definitions, with the exception of that implied by a 'yes' or 'no' and we shall need to consider how other societies asked themselves and still ask themselves the question of the determination of collective action by negotiated confrontation of points of view, and that,

* I have borrowed this epistemological warning - the 'never before' and 'always thus' - from Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron (1968), as a reminder that the comparative approach is the only one which can allow one to highlight breaks and continuity. It is in order to do so that we shall first deal with public opinion here as a historic category, as Habermas advised (1968, p. 10), (contd) but we shall also cross the barrier which he established when he wrote that one can only talk of public opinion 'in a specific sense in England at the end of the 17th centry and in France in the 18th century ..." (ibid).

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broader still, of the concerted elaboration of representations.

Polling in Papua

Amongst the many empirical questions to which this notion of public opinion has given rise, there is one which has motivated many American researchers, all convinced that it could not be asked elsewhere than in a society corresponding to the model described above and which, incidentally, also disposes of modem means of communication and institutions allowing well-informed opinion to control the decisions of governments, and even to dictate policy. This question, chosen because it is as old as the world, it that of war and peace. There is no treatise on public opinion, particularly North American, which does not make use of the examples of the United States' entry into the first World War or its withdrawal from Vietnam. Formerly, it is well known, wars were due to the moods of tyrants only.

The problem is that nothing is less sure. One does not have to be an anthropologist - being a cinema-lover is enough - to know that the Iroquois did not dig up the hatchet because the chief told them to. Barrington Moore, who is not used to using concepts rashly, frequently speaks of public opinion concerning the Jivaro or Mbuti Pygmies*. An anachronism of a sociologist venturing into fields which are not his, many may think. Not necessarily.

There is no use, or almost none, in turning to anthropology for references to public opinion, and anyone who took the risk of thus rebaptizing interminable discussions would no doubt be suspected of a major sin, ethnocentrism. To our knowledge, hardly anyone other than Margaret

Mead risked explicitly using the term which so many others in the same discipline systematically excluded from their vocabulary only to, we shall see, take a continual interest in the same thing eventually. Let us then briefly discuss some of the latter - and return to Mead shortly - but specify that we are doing nothing other than questioning indirectly, by a few incursions into the field of anthropology, the historicist preconception just mentioned. In fact it is not appropriate for sociologists to contribute to this unformulated discussion of the existence of public opinion in primitive societies although it is one of the main questions of anthropology today, since it contains the further questions of power and politics.

For public opinion to exist, mediation, as sociologists say, there must be an end to the immediate social control (from Clastres, 1974, p. 19) which characterizes all so-called traditional or primitive societies. There is no place either for open controversy, when everyone is permanently being watched by everyone else in a way which ensures adherence to the norms, or even for the 'as-for-me', when each person has interiorized the norms so well that surveillance of the community becomes almost superfluous; authority or rules are not questioned. Such is the anthropology of many sociologists or political scientists - of some anthropologists too -which allows them to build the model we have just discussed. But field anthropology is a perpetual refutation of this fable. One need only refer here to the famous example of the 'writing lesson' which Lévi-Strauss talks of in Tristes Tropiques. In it he tells of the exclusion of a chief of the Nambikwara tribe, a subject of contestation because he had wanted to increase his power and prestige by pre-

* An important comparatlvist because he practises the look back backwards, Moore re-exports to other societies other concepts which were forged on the supposition that, applied here, they could by definition not be applied there. He thus evokes the alternance of periods of intense social life and those of withdrawal into private life in certain tribal societies, or the individualism of the Greeks as a factor favouring the development of democracy (Moore, 1984 and 1985).

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tending to know how to write and thus to penetrate the secrets of the foreign visitor (Lévi-Strauss, 1955). This is also a theme which runs through all Pierre Clastres's oeuvre, that of 'society versus the State' (Clastres, 1974), of the primitive refusal of One, of the chief who wants to be chief, against the opinion of all. Society versus the State; is this not the metaphorical expression of public opinion as defined by the Revolution?

The proof is thus there, permanently. Public opinion is in no way a specificity of modern democratic societies if we define it in the terms which we have just referred to, on the basis of this periodization which so many anthropological and historical publications invite us to criticize - even for example, amongst the latest, Jean Baechler's Démocraties, which was recently the subject of an interesting debate in La revue du MAUSS (notably Caillé, 1990; Godbout, 1990). In the same way that Sahlins inverted the common sense of traditional anthropology to make primitive societies those of abundance and our societies those of want, Baechler contrasts the common affirmation that democracy is incompatible with the absence of intrasocial antagonism, with the consensus, considered as tyrannical, which are normally associated with tradition and metasocial elements of the social order and give the holistic and transcendental aspect to primitive social cohesion (Baechler, 1985). What we are invited to question here is another aspect of the 'great divide' between primitive and modern, the contrast between myth and reason, pre-scientific thinking and scientific minds, overlapping that which justifies the boast of modem parliamentary democracies that they are founded on the right of the individual to publicly argue about his manner of belonging to a community, and almost always descibe other societies as being based on either the violence of a despot, or the obligation of all to adhere to the community 'without

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question', one could say, since what governs this adherence is by definition established once and for all, tradition having foreseen everything. To this vision of things, anthropology has, we repeat, contributed so many empirical contradiction- s that it is surprising that all the theoretical conclusions were not drawn before Baechler. As Godbout wrote, 'paradoxically, primitive societies, who ... "waste" their time in interminable discussions, are informational societies which thus perhaps resemble, in certain ways, the predicted post-modern society based on communication' (Baechler, 1985). If there is a distinction between primitive democratic societies and modern democratic societies (for Baechler, the demand for democracy is universal and was only contradicted in the long history of humanity by those exceptions represented by empires and kingdoms), it lies in the fact that in the one participation and freedom of expression have the same goal, unanimity, whilst in the other 'dis- sensus' has been institutionalized.

We shall not go further in this brief summary of Baechler's thesis, nor in the critique for which it calls. What criteria allow one, for example, to say that direct and unanimist democracy is more democratic than representative democracy, based on delegation and majority rule, which he says was imposed on us because of large numbers which materially preclude the functioning of the other model? Or what can be said of Baechler's first assumption that democracy exists, so to speak, in a natural state because man, being naturally calculating and selfish, finds it in his interests to have a system which is best suited to ensure the independence of everyone? For the moment the answers to these questions are not relevant.

We must at this stage return to the possibly unique anthropological writing in which the notion of public opinion is ex-

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plicitly explored. Mead's short text (Mead, 1937) of more than fifty years ago is doubly surprising, first because of the questions it raises, and secondly because of the fact that it is hardly ever quoted by specialists in public opinion, sociologists, political scientists or others. It is as if its contents challenged an entire conceptual system based on the contrasts which we have just discussed, and menaced the consensus on which, as we have seen, shared certitude rests, certitude which serves as a definition of the term*.

Written during one of her stays in Bali, Margaret Mead's article describes the mechanisms of collective decision-making, both large and small, in three types of Oceanic societies. The first case studied was that of the Arapesh in New Guinea, an ethnic group made up of small mountain communities without political institutions, chiefs, priests, or hereditary leaders, where each event concerning the group was subject to the play of ephemeral alliances. Mead took as an example the following incident. The owner of a garden found it wrecked by a pig from a neighbouring village. The custom in such a case would be for him to kill the pig and give the body to its owner, either because he was on good terms with him, or to avoid a quarrel. But it could happen that the person whose crop had been damaged felt that he deserved compensation and thus thought of eating the pig. Because of a risk of conflict between the two villages, he would not however take such a decision alone. He would consult those closest to him and, subject to their encouragement, he would count those for and those against, for an Arapesh always has an opinion on everything which should and should not be done in every circumstance. The notion of public opinion is here taken politically in its most demanding sense. This society founded its collective action on the aggregation of its members' opinions, noted Margaret

Mead, who thus applied to a primitive society the individualistic definition of public opinion in which liberalism would like to see the foundations of modern democratic societies alone.

Another New Guinea tribe, the Iatmul, are those head-hunters to whom Bateson dedicated the anthropological classic La cérémonie du Naven, a work containing a general theoretical proposition for understanding the mechanisms of collective interaction and which, without acknowledgement, was to be applied by public opinion theoreticians to crowd behaviour in particular. According to Bateson, the Iatmul's social life is organized on a communication system, schismo- genesis - 'a differentiation process in the rules of individual behaviour, the result of a set of cumulative interactions between individuals' (Bateson, 1971). Thus, for example, authoritarianism in an individual or group may generate subjection in another, or boastfulness might provoke even greater boastfulness in the other. What is important in both cases is the relationship producing progressive social differentiation.

There may be food for easy but contest- able transpositions of these propositions onto the modes of opinion-forming in contemporary societies. Our interest will thus, with Margaret Mead, be in the most formal aspects of the Iatmul's social interactions. They in fact have recourse to an original device for avoiding the conflict which this one-upmanship would certainly provoke if it contributed, within a given ethnic group, to the constitution of increasingly opposed groups, whether by their similitude or the growing differences in their attitudes. Iatmul society adopted a dual structural principle of action which formalizes the expression of antagonism to prevent its crystallization, without having to rely on a centralized authority. In the event of dispute, individuals are called

• To our knowledge, only Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1980, 1984) refers to it. 125

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upon to express themselves, not accord- Ing to their own opinions, but according to their belonging to a group, a belonging which is assigned to them on purely arbitrary dichotomous criterion: those born in winter as opposed to those bom in summer, those who live south of the cemetery and those who live north of it, those not allowed to eat falcon meat and those who must not eat parrots, etc. Since each individual inevitably belongs to several groups formed in this way, he is continually led to cooperate, on such occasions, with part of those who will be or were his opponents regarding something else, and vice versa. Yesterday's formal enemy is tomorrow's ally. Individual opinion disappears behind collective opinion, but in such a way that the overlapping of loyalty to different groups preculudes the formation of permanent antagonism.

The last case studied by Margaret Mead was that of Balinese rural civilization, the organization of which precludes individuals from being personally and emotionally involved in collective decisions, or bound to multiple loyalties. All able-bodied men are members of the village council and in it occupy, each in turn, a more and more elevated position, until they are retired and replaced. The individual is but a number within a rigid system whose essential function is to ensure the perpetuity of established social norms. Faced with any event having public repercussions, an Arapesh asks himself: "What is my feeling in this respect?', an Iatmul: "What is my group's position, and what is that of the opposing group?', a Balinese: 'How can this be resolved in accordance with tradition?'. When it is a matter of, for example, deciding if a man who has married a second-cousin is guilty of incest, the council goes by a single criterion, i.e. close or distant, a cousin is a cousin and the guilty must be banished. Nobody pleads for or against, nobody takes sides - the law is the law.

To these three types of social

tion, of collective social problem-solving, Margaret Mead attempted to find modern equivalents, considering that in complex societies like ours, people cohabit. We must admit, the examples chosen often seem contestable (the comparative sociology of anthropologists, however illustrious, is often worth no more than sociologists' anthropology). In reacting on impulse, an Arapesh behaves, she wrote, like someone participating in lynching or a spontaneous uprising for improved working conditions(f). As for an Iatmul, he barely differs from the political party militant of today who has to adhere to the party because his father before him did and who approves any position taken by it and loathes anything from outside of it. Finally, the Balinese does what we all do when conforming to collective rules never questioned by public discussion, like the obligation not to work on Easter Day, that is, on a date set arbitrarily.

We shall not try here to find more convincing contemporary parallels to the situations described by Margaret Mead. What counts is less the answer than the question which she refers to sociology and political science, too often doubly guilty not only of ethnocentrism, but also and particularly of inattention to that superposition of levels of reality to which research on public opinion should be attentive, instead of proceeding by dogmatic exclusion, according to antagonistic methodological options. In fact the typology established by Mead stretches the notion of opinion from the concrete, immediate situation to the impersonal and legalist framework of institutions, particularly political and judicial, which lay claim to a function of representing this opinion. Without taking the point further here, in what claims to be a mere critical historical reconstitution of the social and sociological construction of such a notion in its normative and analytical aspects, we shall suggest that, provided that its terms are questioned again, this proposi-

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tion is of essential theoretical and methodological interest. This is because it incites one to re-think public opinion, even on the level of daily intersubjective exchange, according to the co-presence of these various levels of reality and of the referents which are constituted by historic accumulation of the diverse meanings which the expression has taken on, and by all the institutions which the latter have generated. What remains now is for us to pursue the inventory of these meanings and institutions, beyond that established by Mead, on the basis of examples which of necessity short-circuit the entire political history of Western civilization.

In Plato's cave

War or peace? That, as we have said, is the question which historians, sociologists and political scientists often ask themselves to provide the answer which we know; public opinion only makes sense where a dilemma cannot be settled without the confrontation of everyone's arguments. Let us then follow our experts in the study of war. All good manuals tell us, thus again challenging an already disputed periodization, that the first known description of an 'opinion poll' comes from Thucydides' History of the war between the Pelopennesians and the Athenians. The Lacedaemonians, he reports, had the habit of expressing themselves on public matters by acclamation. But when it was a question of declaring war or not on the Athenians, Sthene- laïdes, the elected magistrate, was incapable after long debate of discerning who, of those for and against, were in the majority. He then decided to count the opinions: '"Those Lacedemonians amongst you who consider that the treaty is broken and that the Athenians are guilty, stand up and come over to this side - and he gestured to them - and those who are of the opposite opinion, to the other side".

The citizens stood up and split into two groups. The treaty was thus broken by a large majority' (Thucydides, 1964).

One could of course say that we are mixing two domains here: that of public opinion on the one hand, that of the long history of social devices for collective decision-making on the other. But for the historian, rightly or wrongly (this is not the moment for deciding), one seldom goes without the other. We shall come back to the definitions given by historians of public opinion. Let us simply recall that of Joseph Strayer: the historian 'thinks ... that it is action, and not verbal expression, which is the real indicator of opinion, or, to be more precise, that an opinion which is not represented by an act, or which does not transform an action, is of little importance' (Strayer, 1968). And in the present case, we must define what action means. A historian of slavery, and thus hardly inclined towards the indulgence with which the gap between Greek political philosophy, ever so humanistic, and the barbarity of this absolute exploitation, is still often considered, Finley nevertheless considers that in the ancient world a citizen's participation in politics was no doubt more real than it is today where, according to him, it is restricted to an impersonal act - choosing a ballot paper. Commenting on Thucydides, Finley remarked that giving an opinion in such circumstances amounted for many to voting at the same time for their own enrolment in the army (Finley, 1976). When saying was really doing, one could write, in Austin's manner. Since then, as Lefort wrote, the citizen has been excluded from the networks of social life 'to be converted into a counting unit. Numbers have been substituted for substance' (Lefort, 1986).

Substance: that is what Montesquieu was concerned with, long before Finley, when he wrote that 'philosophical freedom consists in the exercise of one's will, or at least ... in the opinion one has of exercis-

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ing your will. ... in a State which might moreover have the best possible laws, a man being tried, and to be hanged the next day, would be no freer than a pacha in Turkey' (Montesquieu, 1951). Without the right to give one's opinion publicly, there is no free man. Such proclamations have been plentiful, from the Greek philosophers to the century of the Lumières. But to understand how we could have gone from substance and the individual to numbers, to understand what happened so quickly to the publicity Habermas talks of, we must scratch the varnish off great principles and look for other invariables challenging them. We must make a detour through the shadows of Plato's famous cave, where chained men think their own shadows on the wall, or puppets moving past in front of them, are reality (Plato). The doxa finds its first definition in myth; it is opinion returned to the it stands to reason, to the pre-re- flexive, to infantile ignorance of those for whom the real is nothing other than the tangible, the opposite of reason, of objective representation, the products of education, of long experience. Recent history will bring us back to this debate. Let us remain at the origins.

After all, the debt is obvious; the Greeks and Romans had already thought these categories. The legacy is in words, even if they have sometimes changed meaning. Very few terms to which the entire modem debate on public opinion refer do not have their source in the political philosophy of classical antiquity, and have not also inherited a part of its normative value. Following the progression of words is also often forcing oneself to give up the facility of certitudes.

Amongst those words on which conceptual construction is inclined to play, there

is of course firstly that public/private distinction outside of which, it seems and not without some apparent paradox, we cannot today think of the history of public opinion. As Lucien Jaume wrote, 'it is commonly admitted that the Revolution inaugurated in France the institutional distinction between public and private' (Jaume, 1987). It is also recognized that that was but the concretization of ideas propagated earlier by Adam Smith for whom the distinction was at the very base of liberalism, without which, of course, there could be no question of public opinion*. Yet the revolution is the very example of what should impel caution in dating. By excluding women from political life for over a century and a half more by sending them back to their private Vocation'*, the revolutionaries found, no doubt without knowing it, the etymology of all the derivatives of the Latin publiais (of the people) on which Habermas also played to construct his model of the modern public sphere (public, publicity, publish), forgetting however to go further back to the root which precisely returns women to that infantile status in which Roman aristocrats or nineteenth century bourgeois agreed to keep them. The etymon [etumo- logia, the true meaning) of all these terms is pubes, which gives us pubère, but which originally referred to only the male population at an age to carry arms and deliberate, and which, crossed with po- plicus gave publicus.

Greeks and Romans thus had the merit of talking directly. Priuatus did have that meaning of privacy on which Hannah Ar- endt gave a lengthy commentary (Arendt, 1961). A strange destiny, that of this word, which reveals the hesitations of history, there where things were thought to be clear. Having at times been dispara-

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• On tills subject see Malret, 1978. We shall of course come back to the filiation often established between economic liberalism and the modem conception of public opinion, envisaged as the free market of opinions between private persons.

t Cf. on this subject Fralsse (1989) who deals with the masculine use of reason - that other correlative of opinion - with the aim of 'genderizing women's reason' during the Revolution.

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ging, and at times meliorative, the epithet has retained a strange ambiguity, both in French and English. It would perhaps be going too far to put into the mind of a nineteenth century man that meaning which, by opposition, contributes to structuring the constellation of meanings which we place behind public opinion and public sphere on the one hand, and private sphere on the other. The 1863 edition of Líttré still gave as the main definition of 'private': "Who lives without rank or employment involving him in public affairs'. Words passively resisted the Lumières, the Revolution, the separation of peoples' abode from that of economic activity which Max Weber said was one of the essential conditions of modem industrial development. Two centuries earlier Ri- chelet's dictionary stated: 'Private: own, personal, who has no rank' (quoted by Chartier, 1986). The Oxford English Dictionary similarly records expressions still in use such as private soldier referring to the former meaning of the term private, 'having no public office nor official position' (quoted by Hirschman, 1983). It was only in the nineteenth century that the word partly lost its original meaning to be associated more positively with the notion of privilege, as in private house, private education, private view, private property *

etc.

If it is a tributary of a new definition of the contrast and complementarity of private and public, the birth of the modern public sphere nevertheless brought to light again those same categories on which the public sphere of classical antiquity was founded. Castan discussed this. When at the end of the Ancien Régime interest in a 'general society' grew, there was a simultaneous waning of 'family feeling. There was no more pity nor indulgence towards children or women who were not on the level of enlightened or worldly conversation;

they were thus excluded from society where broader interests were discussed .... Caring for the family seemed old- fashioned, even in bad taste' (Castan, 1986). Thus, after centuries of confinement, the old Greco-Roman contempt for the privatus, the idion, that which one possesses, which leads, says Arendt (1961, p. 48), to an 'idiotic' life, re-appeared. Classical antiquity celebrated public activity to the point of not considering as entirely human someone who had no right to the public domain, 'the only one which allowed man to show what he really was, what he had which was irreplaceable' (Arendt, 1961, p. 51). The revolutionaries of 1789 did not think any differently, when it turned the res publica into a cult, a metaphysical of the supreme Being. Robespierre even went as far as suspecting the existence of God behind all that (see Jaume, 1987).

Continuity, then, but not only that. The ancient distinction between public and private covers a social distinction: citizens on the one hand, non-citizens on the other, reduced to what Habermas called a negative definition of themselves. But eighteenth century man was both pub- licus and privatus. Rousseau illustrated this well, he who, Arendt wrote, symbolized modern man, in 'his incapacity to live both in society and outside of if (Arendt, 1961, p. 49) - the intimate opposes the social. We are far from having, historically and sociologically, covered all the results of this observation.

Rumours

Rousseau has often been credited with the authorship of the expression public opinion. He even wrote a thesis about this of more than 700 pages (Ganochaud, 1980). But other appellations considered

• Cf. Williams (1976, pp. 203-204). 'Privé' and 'private' nevertheless retain such derogatory connotations that Littrè gives as a second sense 'lavatories and the English still call 'private parts' that which the sixteenthth century French referred to as ' shameful parts'.

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synonymous and other inventors' names have also been put forward; that of William Temple, for example, the first modem theoretician of opinion as a source of political authority. A century apart, Pascal and Voltaire asked themselves whether it was or was not the queen of the world. In L'esprit des lois, Montesquieu called it l'esprit général and listed its components: customs, manners and cli- mate(l), religion, laws, things of the past, government maxims. States of mind, general will, generalopinion, гюхрориИ; as many terms and definitions as there are authors*. It is not surprising that sociologists and historians themselves hesitate; attitudes, beliefs, mentalities or collective conscience, as with Durkheim - everything is included.

But after all, these definitions, necessarily normative, are of little importance. The essential is rather to know when, why and how we started wanting to redefine this undefinable something. One may without difficulty agree to say that it could not be done in a world dominated by primitive Christian philosophy whose rhetoric was entirely for resolving this paradox - maintaining the social link, the ideal of a common world, whilst preaching the refusal of the world and ordering everybody to 'take care of their own affairs'*.

It is nevertheless is so doing that nascent commercial and financial capitalism was to restore that on which the bourgeois public sphere was later founded. Habermas well described this process which, from the thirteenth century, created a new complex of social exchange; exchange of goods and exchange of information (Habermas, 1986). It was a slow underground movement often discovered

inscribed in royal censure or in the concessions made to powerful corporations, between two repressive measures to confine the individual in his role of family producer when the economy had already overtaken the urban scale and extended to national limits.

We need not paraphrase Habermas to resume in a few lines a historical itinerary which is today, if not entirely known, then at least well marked out; that of the rec- onquest of the right to trade, constituent of the bourgeois society, of a political economy which frees social activity from the restricted framework of oikos. Nor need we talk again here of literary circles, erudite societies, the development of private correspondence and then of the press. What it would however be appropriate to recall, because it has lasted, is the early ambiguity of this reawakening of public opinion, a metaphysic entity as much as a political category, and an object both of social mistrust and of scientific faith.

The expression was not yet listed in dictionaries when there were already attempts to measure the state of public opinion. In 1745 the general comptroller Orry addressed to the administrators of the provinces a questionnaire chiefly designed to record individuals and goods. Nothing particularly new; the practice had been known for over a century. What was however new was the final instruction given to the 'surveyors': "You must start a rumour in the free towns of your department that entrance rights are to be increased by a third. You must also start a rumour, in the towns and in the countryside, on the introduction of a future militia of two men in each parish ....

• According to Mona Ozouf, public opinion only found its definition in French In the 1 798 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie. As for the public/private distinction, It appeared only in that of 1835. The notion of opinion, she wrote, remains linked to that of personal feelings: 'that is why public, which can qualify a place, a depot, a path, a woman, cannot qualify opinions' (Ozouf, 1987). t On this subject Hannah Arendt developed that apparent paradox already mentioned by which, for a public domain to be restored, politics have to take on a transcendental dimension which religion denies to life on earth, since salvation of the spirit Is the only common preoccupation (Arendt, 1961, p. 42 et seq).

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You are to carefully note whatever the people say about this and mention it in your account to the King* (quoted by Le- cuyer, 1981). Orry opened a way to the study of opinion which proved to be fertile for an ever-present questioning, to which Rousseau was already providing an answer (opinion ferments), and which Le Bon was to resolve in talking of contagion and Tarde of imitation (de Tarde, 1911, 1922; Le Bon, 1906; Lecuyer, 1981, p. 187).

It is in fact one of the paths which was to be followed, theoretically and empirically, by thought on the notion of public opinion until the famous American psychosocio- logical works devoted to propaganda. The two terms were often linked in publications until recently, as they were in the sense in which nineteenth century philosophy and twentieth century sociology understood terms such as 'crowd' or 'mass'. Revolutionary enthusiasm for what Tocqueville, in De la démocratie en Amérique, called people's spontaneous Cartesian rationalism, died down very fast. The people were rational by instinct, an infallible judiciary, for but a brief instant, the moment of a celebration one could say, to paraphrase Ozouf*. Opinion returned to that by which Rousseau sometimes defined it - prejudice. Even renowned sociologists joined in. Tónnies, in his Kritik der ôffentliche Metnung, saw in opinion but irrationality and pure emo- tiveness, thus following in the footsteps of generations of philosophers, historians and political thinkers of the nineteenth century who thought, like Hegel in his Principles of the philosophy oflaw, that the people 'In so far as this word refers to a particular fraction of the members of a State, represents the part which does not

know what it wants' (quoted by Stourdze, 1972). The list of sceptical defenders of great principles would be never-ending; we shall settle for quoting Talne, who reused Plato's words without the mythology, to talk of the state of the masses' minds on the eve of the Revolution, and quietly agreed with him to say that without education ... (and God knows how much time that takes!). The list of paragraph headings of chapter III, volume five of Origines de la France contemporaine, speaks for itself: 'Mental incapacity - How Ideas become legends - Political incapacity - How new government policies and acts are interpreted - Destructive impulses - At what is blind anger aimed - Mistrust of natural leaders' etc. fTalne, 1877, p. 489). By justifying a posteriori the end of the revolutionary Intermission, Taine in fact stated clearly what had been hidden by the principles professed for a century: the dêmokratia is a question of time. Take the mind, still so unrefined, of one of our contemporary peasants, and cut out all the ideas which for the past eighty years have entered it in so many ways - by primary schooling instituted in each village, by the return of conscripts after seven years of service, by the prodigious multiplication of books, journals, roads, railways, journeys and communications of all kinds. Try to imagine the peasant of those times, confined from father to son to his hamlet, without local roads, without news, without information other than the Sunday sermon, entirely preoccupied with earning his dally bread and taxes, 'with his miserable and withered look', not daring to repair his house, forever tormented, defiant, narrow- minded, and, so to speak, hardened by poverty. His condition was almost that of his ox or his donkey, and his ideas in- keeping with his condition. He had re-

* Of all the metaphors used to talk of public opinion, that of the judiciary ('an unpaid and incorruptible judicatory' said Bentham) is certainy one of the most common. It also refers to a reality. As Moore wrote (1984, p. 1 12), punishment of the guilty was, in the Athenian public sphere, the unifying act par excellence of opinion. The modern era has also understood this, since it has made the jury one of the institutions for representing the voxpopulL

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mained torpid for so long "he even lacked Instinct".' (Taine, 1877, pp. 489-^490).

Like the dictionaries of the former century, scholarly or romanesque literature was thus an inevitable phase to guard against a vision of the modern renaissance of public opinion which was too idealized. Old ambiguities remained. There was the doxoc, there was also the opinion of poets called upon by Plato so that they may publicly condemn that vice pederasty. Those who are accused too easily of thinking only of politics, reason, universality, often have their minds elsewhere. Opinion is less often that civil religion of which Rousseau spoke in Du contrat social than plain reputation, others' judgement, even when envisaged in its social or political implications. It is hardly surprising to find in Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses a similar acceptance of the expression public opinion. It is more so to note its continual presence in 'political' thinkers during the preceding few centuries and for a long time afterwards. What was Shakespeare thinking when he imagined Henry IV reprimanding his son, the future Henry V, because he was seen too often in bad company, reminding him that it was to opinion that he owed his crown?*. Ma- chiavelli similarly recommended that the Prince should not neglect what he called commune optnione or pubblica voce, in short that he 'take care of appearances', since that was the only thing which impressed the common people (which means, incidentally, that the question of a link between opinion and legitimacy did not emerge with the disappearance of the power of kinship). In that same sixteenth century, in his Essais Montaigne, who was to be the first (rather than Rousseau, who is always quoted) to have spoken of public opinion, referred to it in particular to justify the care he took in dressing. Politics were first and foremost the

struggle of a descendant of wine and dye merchants for the right to those signs of social distinction which the king still reserved for the nobility through petty sumptuary laws. We should not however reduce Montaigne's contribution in the knowledge of opinion mechanisms to those mere vestimentary preoccupations. Do we not owe him the famous aphorism on the relativity of all truth which an accident can convert into an error; and also the idea that although a man can think what he likes deep down, his public life compels him to conform to customs and fashions, to the opinion of others?

Opinion was still understood primarily in the sense of reputation by seventeenth century political philosophers like Locke, as by those of the following century like Rousseau, who is credited with a different conception of the term. It would hardly be worth insisting further on this point, if this assimilation of public opinion to a form of social control did not conceal other ambiguities which explain the long delay in turning principles into facts, and in relying on opinion to rule the world. John Locke was the first to clearly state the question. Man in society cannot live by continually confronting others' disapproval; the opinion of others forces him to conform. But since it is also volatile, there is no point expecting from it any political wisdom.

David Hume was the only one to judge with undivided optimism this capacity of individuals belonging to the same nation to reconcile their 'moods' and ways of thinking, and it was in this capacity that he situated the legitimacy of power. A government is based on opinion; a sentence which was to inspire the 'founding fathers' of the American Constitution

(Noelle-Neumann, 1984, p. 74 et seq.). Many others were less affirmative. Rousseau, as we saw with Arendt, saw in the

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* I have borrowed this example, as well as most of those which follow, from Noelle-Neumann, 1984, p. 64 et seq.

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pressure of opinion a major dilemma, the cause of conflict between private and public. If he saw in the general will the foundations of society, in both the political and moral sense (law, he said in Du contrat social, is the authentic expression of this), he nevertheless deplored the fact that what was good for all was not good for the individual as soon as opinion became reputation. When, in an often-quoted phrase, he made opinion 'the queen of the world', was he not going so far as to affirm that even kings were its slaves? Rousseau sometimes has an accent of Sahlins - to return to anthropology - when comparing the freedom of primitive peoples with the tyranny of life in civilized societies. The stoic's ataraxy, he wrote, is nowhere near the profound indifference of the primitive person to all which surrounds him, for that would require 'that these words, strength and reputation, 'have meaning in his mind, that he leam that there is one type of man for whom the regard of all the universe counts, who knows how to be happy and pleased with himself on the testimony of others rather than on his own ...; the Savage lives within himself; sociable man, always outside of himself, does not know how to live but on the opinion of others, and it is, so to speak, from their judgement that he draws the sense of his own existence' (Rousseau, 1964).

Tocqueville made an even clearer distinction between the laws of the conscience and those of opinion of which Rousseau wrote in Emile. This time, it was what Norbert Elias was to call self-constraint and Richard Sennet self-repression, which were anticipated. Domination by the what-will-they-say of the as-for-me left ambiguous ground, that of morality, to concern cultural structures (those of the personality in public), and political structures, the very functioning of democracy . The immediate opposite of that modern individualism in which it was hoped would lie the generating principle of a new

necessity, argumentation, was that despotic conformism to which the power of majority opinion leads, and which Tocqueville noted in the United States. Because 'the majority (lives there) in perpetual adoration of itself (Tocqueville, 1951, vol. I, p. 267), he wrote, T know of no country where there reigns, in general, less independence of minds and genuine freedom of discussion than in America ... The inquisition never managed to prevent the circulation in Spain of books opposed to the religion of the majority. The empire of the majority does better in the United States - it has removed even the thought of publishing them' (Tocqueville, 1951, vol. I, pp. 266-267).

With Tocqueville were thus established the elements of an examination and definition of public opinion which were normative, descriptive and ideological; normative because still linked to a narrow conception of social control, descriptive because linked to relational structures and political organization in democracies, and ideologically linked to questions which these had on themselves. It was a surprising blend of old questioning, taken from Plato, of empirical observations and theoretical intuition which sociology has only recently discovered. We understand his difficulty - and ours, when trying to sort out all that! 'I clearly see two tendencies in equality' he wrote, 'one which carries every man's mind towards new thoughts, and the other which would willingly reduce it to no longer thinking' (Tocqueville, 1951, vol. II, p. 19). This opinion "which leads the world' (Tocqueville, 1951, vol. II, p. 18), was it reason, knowledge, or belief? The question, Platonian in its form, expressed the entire dilemma of an era, because 'common opinion is the only guide which individual reason retains in democratic peoples', but also because this common opinion was made of beliefs which the public imposes and 'impresses into souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on

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the intelligence of everyone' (Tocqueville, 1951 , vol. II, p. 18). The answer was partly borrowed from Plato, but in a vocabulary which sometimes calls to mind contemporary sociology: 'Experience, customs and education almost always end up creating this sort of practical everyday wisdom and science oj 'everyday events called common sense. Common sense is enough for the ordinary pace of society ..." (Tocqueville, 1951, vol. I, p. 238, author's italics).

The ideas market

We shall leave Tocqueville here, not without specifying that this latter debate is far from being closed. Habermas reminds us of it: for today's thinkers, communication of all kinds, in which Taine seemed to have placed all his hopes, has failed in their tasks. How can public opinion be formed 'from the mass of leanings, of confused ideas, of popularized points of view, such as those spread by the media' (Hennis, quoted by Habermas, 1986, p. 248)? There are henceforth but two solutions: renouncing the principle of universality and relying on the open institutions of an informed elite of citizens (genuine public opinion, endowed with reason), or, even simpler, considering elected representatives as the incarnation of the general will (Habermas, 1986, pp. 248- 249).

In short, talking of public opinion is also retracing the history of liberalism's contradictions, of that which separates the representations which it has of the principles on which it is founded and the representations it makes of social reality. Democratic theory invented the citizen, as Offerte wrote (cf. Offerte, 1985), but continually questions itself on his existence. And this absolute dead-end led it to a

fragmentation which forced it to put together a solution for replacing its universal and rational model of opinion, based on the public confrontation of arguments, thanks notably to that other invention peculiar to the twentieth century, of two symbolically semi-equivalent institutions: the polling booth which refers opinion to the private sphere and against which an extreme left which still believed in principles fought, and more recently of course opinion polls, which also individualize opinion and serialize individuals by stating that public opinion is but the sum of private opinions. We shall do no more here than mention opinion polls, a compulsory task in any analysis on the subject. We merely wish to specify that in relating the polling booth, introduced in France on the eve of the First World War, and opinion polls, officialized by the creation in 1938 of the IFOP (French institute of public opinion), we approach, in a certain way, Slávko Splichal's critique of traditional criticism of empiricism: 'It would be appropriate to emphasize that the concrete methods of public opinion research do not have an intrinsic anti-democratic character, but that the object of the research itself, that is public opinion, is the result of a non- democratic evolution and it is precisely to such evolution that the aim of research is subjected* (Splichal, 1987). We could also say, in different words, that what the polling booth represents and what polls measure, is the process of serialization of individuals of which Sartre spoke in his Critique de la Raison Dialectique*.

But we are not there yet; we must still linger on the first invention and on another type of deconstruction of the common sense of science, which is not either without danger. Keane stated it clearly: critique of the fiction of the omnicompe- tent citizen, an inevitable phase in any thought on the genesis of the notion pub-

* Cf. Sartre, 1960, who takes this example of voting in a booth as a sign of the more general process referred to under this term - also see Offerlé (1986) on this subject.

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lie opinion, may very well be constructed on another fiction, that of a classical and homogeneous democratic theory*. And we must still discuss that other stumbling block which can be led to by the critical comparison, common today, of this theory and that of liberal political economy. Saying that the omnicompetent citizen in the one, and that which corresponds to him in the other - the individual who is rational in both his economic and political choices - are one and the same fiction, is perhaps not false in itself. But this can also conceal the subjection, which for certain is already complete, of the political system to the market, even if the latter does not function according to the dreams of those who once believed they were discovering the amazing predisposition in man to know always, in matters concerning him, how to make the best choice. It is thus difficult to choose one's words to say that opinion is no longer what it never was, whilst agreeing on certain points. At the two theoretical extremes in this field, is one not talking here of a 'marketplace of ideas', and there of clientèle and of political products?

Once these precautions have been taken, it is nevertheless advisable to remember that in both the vocabulary of political philosophy and in that of political economy one must simultaneously look for the definitions and modern attributes of the notion public opinion. Both, we know, start from a common notion (the sovereign), from the same space (the people/nation space for Rousseau, the market space as a place of exchange for Adam Smith*). Both have developed the same vision of social exchange, where the notions of rationality and individualism occupy a central place. Mills is no doubt the one who updated these relations the most clearly. The idea of public opinion in the eighteenth century can be compared to the economic notion of a free

market. In the one, the public composed of discussion circles, peers crowned by Parliament; on the other, a market of free competition between entrepreneurs. In the same way as prices are the result of negotiations between anonymous individuals of equal strength, public opinion is the result of the thought of each individual contributing, by his weight, to the general formation of opinion' (Mills, quoted by Padioleau (1981), p. 166).

Saying in this way what had almost become conventional - that to the utilitarian rationality of homo oeconomicus, corresponds that of the elector - is a starting point, perhaps also in another way a finishing point, but is not however of much help in understanding the fate of such a notion as public opinion. Certainly, if we return to what we have just called a finishing point, it is not merely for anecdotal facility that we note that the main opinion survey institutes are often only divisions of market research bodies; that, in particular, the old relationship between homo politicus and homo oeconomicus is theoretically and methodologically Justified by the majority practice of these institutes which have adopted the principles of methodological individualism, like the definition of public opinion given by one of the most recent dictionaries of sociology: 'Accumulation of similar individual opinions on problems of public interest' (Bourdan et al, 1989).

The problem is that there is no certainty that between the starting and finishing points one will find that obvious filiation in which we are meant to believe. Is this subject, 'supposedly totally free of any belonging to a group, class, nation, and entirely moved by rational behaviour' (Spire, 1983) the same - we are talking here on the representation level - as that imagined in the eighteenth century, as historical leaps which are too easy and too

* Keane (1982), p. 13 and pp. 39-40, note 6. On this subject also see Keane (1984). t Cf. on this subject Mairet, in Smith (1976).

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rapid seem to want to have us believe? Nothing is less sure.

In the meantime, reality is responsible for making theories evolve, and new theories have also made reality evolve. It is herein that one of the major difficulties in talking of public opinion, in a necessarily

cal and sociological perspective, resides. All that we wanted to say here, is that we cannot rethink this notion without restituting, in all its aspects and in their superposition, that temporal depth peculiar to all social science subjects.

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