3658925934

Opinion
17
OPINION AND CONVERSATION *1
1898
Opinion is to the modern public what the soul is to the body, and the study of one leads us naturally to
the other. Might one object that public opinion has always existed whereas the public, as defined
here, is fairly recent? This is certainly true, but we shall soon see how little this objection amounts to.
What is opinion? How is it born? What are its various sources? While growing, how is it articulated,
and by being articulated, how does it grow still further—a phenomenon illustrated by its
contemporary modes of expression, universal suffrage and journalism? What is its productivity and
its social significance? How is it transformed? And toward what common outlet, if there is one, do its
multiple currents converge? It is to these questions that we shall essay a few answers.
Let us first say that in the word opinion two things are generally confused which are intermingled
in practice, but which a careful analysis must distinguish: opinion proper, a totality of judgments; and
the general will, a totality of desires. It is primarily but not exclusively opinion taken in the first sense
that will concern us here.
However great the importance of opinion and despite its present excesses, its role must not be
exaggerated. Let us try to circumscribe its domain. Opinion should not be confused with two other
parts of the social mind, which both feed and limit it, and which are in perpetual border disputes with
it. One is Tradition, a condensed and accumulated extract of what was the opinion of those now dead,
a heritage of necessary and salutatory prejudices frequently onerous to the living. The other is what I
take the liberty of calling by the collective and abbreviated name Reason. This I understand to be the
relatively rational although often unreasonable personal judgments of an elite which isolates itself,
reflects, and emerges from the popular stream of thought in order to dam it up or direct it. Originally
priests, then philosophers, scholars, lawyers—councils, universities, law courts—are successively
or simultaneously the incarnation of these resistant and directive judgments, which are clearly
differentiated both from the passionate and sheeplike enthusiasms of the multitudes and from their
own innermost motives or age-old principles. I should like to be able to add to this listing
parliaments, whether assemblies or senates. Are not their members elected specifically to deliberate
in perfect independence and to serve as a brake to the public train? But it is a long way from the ideal
to reality. Well before an opinion is experienced as such, the individuals who comprise a nation are
aware of possessing a common tradition and knowingly submit to the decisions of judgments deemed
superior. Thus of the three branches of the public mind, Opinion is the last to develop but also the
most apt to grow after a certain time; and it grows at the expense of the two others. No national
institution can resist its intermittent assaults; there is not one individual judgment that does not
tremble and stutter in the face of its threats or demands. Which of its two rivals does Opinion most
impair? This depends on who is in control of Opinion. When those in control are part of the reasoning
elite, they sometimes raise up Opinion like a battering ram to breach the ramparts of tradition,
enlarging them through destruction, an act not without danger. But when the direction of the multitude
is left to the firstcomers, it is easier for them, leaning on tradition, to rouse opinion against reason,
which nevertheless triumphs in the end.