Page 137 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

110 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

come to the study of public opinion with different assumptions and
methodologies. In addition, the meaning of ‘public opinion’ is also tied to
historical circumstances – the sort of political culture that exists, the
nature of communication technology, and the importance of public
participation in the everyday workings of government. Yet, these are not
the only reasons why public opinion is hard to define. Some of the
ambiguity in the term simply reflects the problematic nature of the
concept, which attempts to unite the seemingly absolute incompatible, i.e.
the public and opinion. Whereas the first aspires to achieve the universal,
objective, and rational, the concept of opinion is market by the variable,
subjective and uncertain. Thus, for some, public opinion does not exist;
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others faced difficulties in further defining the concept of public opinion
mainly in terms of its scope and representativeness, as expressed in the
early circumscription by the historian Hermann Oncken:

Public opinion is a complex of similar utterances of major or minor
social levels on subjects of public life, at times debouching
spontaneously, at times artificially created; it expresses itself in
various organs, in associations or assemblies, mainly in the press and
publishing, or simply in the unuttered sensation of the individual be
him an ordinary man on the street or of the small circle of the
cultured class; here a respectable sway even statesmen look at, there a
factor without political importance; [...] at times consistent rising
against the government and experts like a powerful flood wave, at
times fragmented [...]; sometimes expressing the plain and natural
sensation of the human being, sometimes being a clamorous and
absurd burst of wild instincts; always guided but permanently leading;
[...], infectious like an epidemic, moody and unfaithful and imperious
like people themselves, and after all nothing more than a word by
which potentates deceive themselves.
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In view of the uncertainty in defining public opinion, it is essential
initially to clarify what constitutes a public. The concept of a public
emerged from Enlightenment democratic ideals and the many important
social transformations that took place in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. A working definition of a public grew from its
contrasts to other kinds of social formations, most prominently ‘crowds’
and ‘masses’. While it is considered that the crowd develops in response to
shared emotions, the public organises in response to an issue. From the
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proposition that there is a public opinion only when a large number of
people hold an opinion on a specific topic, some would argue that the
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term ‘public’ should be confined to those who do, in fact, have an opinion