ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at rethinking two important conceptions for use in social and political science: (1) public sentiment—the term used here interchangeably, as is the common practice, with public opinion, and commonly but incorrectly understood as an arithmetic function of individual sentiments; and (2) people power—a term already encountered in Chapter 2, and currently being used by a number of researcher-activists, prominent among them Erica Chenoweth and colleagues (2011, 2021, 2021) to refer to the force of nonviolent (“civil”) resistance against state authority. I argue that, where the first conception (public sentiment) is currently conceptualized in such a way as to direct attention to the wrong place, the second (people power) is conceptualized in such a way as to render the phenomenon under scrutiny fuzzy or hazy. The phenomena surrounding civil resistance are thus currently obscured rather than illuminated by the pair of concepts as currently conceptualized. The first of the two concepts suffers from widespread tendencies towards reductionism in politics, and the second from inattention to important facts about how power operates in human societies, depriving it of clarity and definition. The aim of re-conceptualizing these two conceptions, at one and the same time, and at a time in history when the two could not be more important, will help us understand how reasoning enters upon the largest stages of contestation for the political beings that we are. Reconceptualization is required because the two concepts are closely intertwined, and study of each is further diminished by the infelicities in the current condition of study of the other. The refinements we seek to effect are important to making scientific progress with both concepts, and therefore constitute contributions to the social and political sciences that require them.
