Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One Ferdinand Tönnies and the Development of Sociology
- Chapter Two Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel
- Chapter Three Whither Gemeinschaft: Willing and Acting Together as
- Chapter Four Tönnies and Globalization: Anticipations of Some Central Concerns of Twenty-First Century Sociology
- Chapter Five From Metropolis with Love: Tönnies, Simmel and Urban Social Architecture
- Chapter Six Ferdinand Tönnies: Hobbes Scholar
- Chapter Seven Gender and Family
- Chapter Eight The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will
- Chapter Nine The Politics of Ferdinand Tönnies
- Chapter Ten Crime and Law in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
- Contributors
- Index
Chapter Eight - The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One Ferdinand Tönnies and the Development of Sociology
- Chapter Two Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel
- Chapter Three Whither Gemeinschaft: Willing and Acting Together as
- Chapter Four Tönnies and Globalization: Anticipations of Some Central Concerns of Twenty-First Century Sociology
- Chapter Five From Metropolis with Love: Tönnies, Simmel and Urban Social Architecture
- Chapter Six Ferdinand Tönnies: Hobbes Scholar
- Chapter Seven Gender and Family
- Chapter Eight The Power and Value of Public Opinion as a Form of Societal Will
- Chapter Nine The Politics of Ferdinand Tönnies
- Chapter Ten Crime and Law in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
This chapter is aimed at “rehabilitation” of Ferdinand Tönnies's largely forgotten comprehensive efforts to conceptualize public opinion as a complex form of social will —as a “common way of thought, the corporate spirit of any group or association, in so far as its opinion formation is built upon reasoning and knowledge, rather than on unproved impressions, beliefs, or authority” (Tönnies 1922, 78). Tönnies's critical theory of public opinion is an attempt to integrate the ideas of rationality, discursivity and morality of public opinion postulated by normative-philosophical and early psychological approaches to public opinion. It represents one of the most significant classical, social-theoretical contributions to the field, and a unique effort to make public opinion an integral part of a complex and refined general social theory. His approach stands in sharp contrast to the social-psychological tradition that developed since the 1930s and completely abandons the idea of a specific unity and collectivity in which public opinion is formed and expressed.
During the 1920s, when Tönnies's Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung appeared, several grand theoreticians published their ideas on public opinion—among them Wilhelm Bauer and Carl Schmitt in Germany; Walter Lippmann and John Dewey in the United States; and, 20 years earlier, Gabriel Tarde in France, to mention just the most prominent ones—representing the greatest concentration of the most diverse (re)conceptualizations of public opinion. It was also the period of the grandiose advent of empirical social research, when random sampling, attitude scales and interview response data gathering made the development of public opinion polling possible. After that period, issues of empirical analysis dominated public opinion research, while theoretical endeavors were marginalized for the next 50 years until the publication of Jurgen Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in English in 1989, almost 30 years after its German publication.
Of course, reconceptualizations of public opinion do not occur by chance. They reflect specific theoretical assumptions and propositions, and address specific social (political, economic, cultural) realities of the time. Tönnies conceived his theory of public opinion in the most puzzling stage of a rather short intellectual history of public opinion.
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- Information
- The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies , pp. 159 - 180Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016