From 'Will of the People' to 'Public Opinion'

I’m rereading Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy for a project that I am working on and it makes a passing point that I had not fully internalised the first time that I read it: that ‘public opinion’ is just a modern reinterpretation of the ‘will of the people’, shorn of some of its loftier ambitions.

In the eighteenth century, people like Condorcet---representatives of what Schumpeter calls the ‘classical’ view of democracy---tried to determine how to best make collective judgements. One outcome of this was Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. It is an impressive effort and an interesting discovery, but hinges on two assumptions: that there is some ‘correct’ answer and that people are more likely right than wrong.

Perhaps this is not so unreasonable when it comes to deciding guilt and innocence. But Schumpeter argues quite persuasively that it is not true of democracy writ large. People have conflicting values, so it is not clear that there is some correct answer in the first place. As such, they cannot be more right or more wrong, only different. In short, the view is a non-starter.

It’s not the case that Schumpeter caused the shift from ‘the will of the people’ to ‘public opinion’. Walter Lippmann was writing about the latter in the 1920s. It’s more likely that Schumpeter simply characterised the zeitgeist. He was writing in the midst of the Second World War, so it is understandable that he and others were reevaluating the classical view. We then see the rise of large-scale social surveys soon after, both Gallup and the American National Election Survey, which likely consolidated the shift.

It’s interesting to think what the two terms have in common. Both imply some general position, as though the public or people constitute a single actor. Clearly, that is not the case. We are talking about a mass of individuals, not a single coherent organism. Nonetheless, the term ‘public opinion’ is less committal than its predecessor. It suggests a general viewpoint, rather than a general will to power.