No matter how semantically overloaded or empty the notions of publicity, public opinion and the public sphere may have become, they are nonetheless instantiations of publicness. In one way or another, they are distinctive features of every democratic society, including of course the problems and contradictions in their formation and effectuation, which societies in general and critical scholarship in particular have to deal with. For more than two centuries, the issue of the ideal and reality of publicness has attracted much research and debate especially on public-opinion polls in the past and more recently on the public sphere. The recent deployment of AI, opinion mining and big data analytics in communication management and research has raised new hopes but also new fears about the future of publicness. As Dewey warned, despite all technological inventions, social retrogression is as recurrent as social progress.

The principle of publicness was conceived in the eighteenth century and, persistently supported by organised social action and the improvement of material societal conditions, was eventually made operationally feasible at least to some extent. The idea helped pave the way for the civil right (but also obligation and audacity, as Kant would say) to public use of reason and more generally the right to communicate, which guarantees an unfettered right to hold opinions; to express, disseminate, seek and receive information or ideas and to have access to media. This complex right cannot be limited to exercising one's will and audacity; it should be extended to the right to control the process of social opining (forming and expressing opinions) and to the obligation to participate in the formation of a functioning societal communication infrastructure embodied in the public sphere. The exercise of these rights and obligations requires that appropriate societal conditions be created, and the totality of all these conditions must be subjected to theoretical and empirical scrutiny. The classical sociological tradition originally substantiated publicness as part of a general theory of society and provided it with a comprehensive theoretical foundation and societal context. Tönnies's contribution to the public-opinion scholarship by making it a constitutive part of the general Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft conceptual system and combining mutually informed pure, applied and empirical sociology in examining publics and public opining in their historical manifestations is a powerful account of this tradition.