ABSTRACT
Public Opinion is supposed to be the prime mover in democracies, one might reasonably expect to find a vast literature. There are excellent books on government and parties, that is, on the machinery which in theory registers public opinions after they are formed. But on the sources from which these public opinions arise, on the processes by which they are derived, there is relatively little. Yet democracies, if we are to judge by the oldest and most powerful of them, have made a mystery out of public opinion. But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists, speculation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head. For in one fundamental respect the political science on which democracy was based was the same science that Aristotle formulated.
