number of inhabitants ever verified.” If, through such a principle, one wants to indicate that those with responsibility for making the laws received from the people that very august investiture or that, given the law, the citizens accept it, those obligated to it by their social pacts, then, yes, it has a just and true meaning, and the will to carry out what the law prescribes is perfectly understood as the primitive will to observe what those whom the peoples elected for that very important end decree. Everything that is not this is neither intelligible nor philosophically sustainable and is the eternal breeding ground of anarchy and its consequent misfortunes.
It remains, then, to resolve the third question, and what has been said until now will shorten much of the road that we have to walk in examining
If there will be some fixed signs by which to recognize whether public opinion has been formed.
On this matter it is easier to say what is not than what is; the negative rules are very certain and, on the contrary, the positive ones are ambiguous, and generally their application to the practical can produce only probabilities.
It has been said that there is no public opinion if the question or proposition with which it deals is not practical and experimental or so simple as to be within the reach of the majority of people, and consequently there
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is not public opinion except, as we will state later on, over propositions that, although practical, have complication of circumstances and aims that, in order to combine them, require more than trivial attention and some thorough reflective meditation, for it is clear that the generality of citizens is not capable of this.
In questions and propositions that are speculative, complicated, and profound, there can be no true public opinion unless these questions and propositions have been the object of popular, constant, and generalized education, in which case, although they come to be adopted traditionally and generally without proofs, the way of thinking is uniform, although it cannot strictly be called opinion, given what has just been said.
Self-love is the universal passion of all men, and in the judgment of even the great philosophers, all the other passions, to which are given different names according to the object to which it applies, are the very same. What is beyond doubt is that, if not every man is lascivious nor vindictive, etc. . . . every man loves himself and seeks his well-being wherever it may be and in all his actions, so that, although the objects of the application and reflective meditation of men might be infinitely varied, and although the exercise of study might be for so very few, there is no man at all for whom his individual interest does not require of him attention, deliberations, and frequent periods of thinking; and as meditation is a source of opinion, it follows that there can be public opinion on objects of common interest or utility.
The wise Bentham was, then, quite correct when, referring to legislation, he said public utility was the surest criterion of public opinion,2 an expression that we convert into a negative maxim, saying: no measure whatsoever that is not in the common interest, immediate and readily perceptible, is a proper object of true public opinion.
Focus for a moment on the expression immediate and readily perceptible because there are innumerable measures that will surely produce general well-being and happiness; but because this has not been their immediate outcome nor has it yet been experienced, they do not have in their favor the majority of the people, for whom only experience is the foundation for believing and thinking, and for whom good and evil have either to enter through the senses or they enter them almost never.
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Bayle3 observed, before us, that it is almost natural in men not to think for themselves and that a quasi-innate apathy makes them form an idea of one or some individuals to allow them to know and hold for certain what those individuals tell them they have thought. Generally we pay that respectful deference to our parents, masters, and superiors, in whom we are accustomed to imagining more learning and talent. Thus, we experience, generally, that the opinion of the father is that of the sons, the opinion of the master that of his servants, and the opinion of a leader of a community, if he is well liked, that of those who are his subordinates. Besides these relationships, sources of opinion, there are others that, in order to distinguish them from those, we could call artificial. Among every people, individually if the people is not very numerous, one or some inhabitants acquire a following because of their generosity, because of their honesty, because of their beneficence, and even sometimes because of some reprehensible vice. Such as these also become sources of beliefs and persuasions, and their way of thinking spreads among their cronies, who by tradition embrace it. Opinions adopted and generalized in this way do not merit, as I have already repeated, the name of opinion, but it is appropriate to call them belief or persuasion; and we say that it can be taken as common persuasion what is felt to be so by the greater part of those individuals who have a following in their towns.
Nonetheless the previous rule is very open to ambiguities, principally in times of factions, for well known are the efforts that each one of them makes to win over those popular coryphaeuses, those who, won over by fairly well-known means repeat, many times against their conscience, the favorite axioms of the faction that won them. Their followers hear them, and they do the same thing. Be advised, however, that the voices are not diverse; it is one voice with various echoes, a very interesting observation, especially for legislators whom the situation always subjects to torments from which they will not emerge well except with rules that we will present in the fourth question, anticipating them now, the celebrated maxim and eternal truth of the immortal Bentham, “Good faith and justice are the most healthy politics and the most lasting.”4
Neither of each individual alone, nor of all or most of them taken
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together, can it be said that they have opinion, as long as understandings vacillate and wander uncertain over the truths under discussion. In order that there be opinion it is necessary that the understanding be decided, and not willfully, but because of foundations so solid that they must have compelled assent despite not having found a satisfactory response to the conflicting ones; and when the understanding has been settled for reasons of this nature, neither has it done so instantaneously, but rather by a slow and reflective process, nor does it change opinion easily, and so long as another reflective meditation, yet slower than the first, does not present new and more solid reasons in opposition.
One must understand that constancy is not the same as invariability, and thus when we establish as a rule that one cannot have public opinion without constancy, that is to say without the majority of the citizens being constantly advised of it (which is known either, first, when the same opinion is observed despite varying circumstances or, then, when it is being repeated notwithstanding the passage of time), we do not mean that the public cannot change its opinions, but rather that it has to change them in the same way it formed them, slowly and gradually and (the same as each individual) by this silent examination of the opposing foundations with which public opinion can sometimes be changed; but this is neither frequent nor the work of a moment, but rather worked out over a long time.
This reliable rule should allow us to give their legitimate value to those popular and tumultuous surges, principles of revolutions and exclusive work of ambitious demagogues. They will never be the mark of public opinion and the general will, because among other qualities they are lacking stability and firmness; they will be passing thoughts and desires, because always suggested by the depraved, but they will not be the public desire. A stirred up and deceived multitude will applaud the death of the Gracii in Rome; in Paris it will carry off to the guillotine the most enlightened and virtuous men; it will request,
