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Public Opinion Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1951, 341–44. Volume nineteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection appeared as Chapter 11 in Book Third of Dominations and Powers. As early as 1918 Santayana mentioned his intention to write this book ( LGS, 2:314–15), which he described as “a sort of psychology of politics and attempt to explain how it happens that governments and religions, with so little to recommend them, secure such a measure of popular allegiance” ( LGS, 2:327). He thought the phenomenon well exemplified by athletics and on learning that his alma mater Harvard had beaten Yale at football he wrote in a letter, “I used to care immensely about this: and [ Dominations and Powers] is largely based on that experience: it seems to me to explain all politics and wars” ( LGS, 3:113). He put the work aside in 1937 as political instability increased and decided to wait until “a calm retrospective view is made possible” ( LGS, 6:78, 138–39, 268). He began work on the book again in 1944, finished in 1950, and published it—his last book—the next year. This selection expresses Santayana’s long-held belief that ideas exert no material influence but rather reflect material circumstances. A scrupulous logician might insist that the phrase “public opinion” makes nonsense , since the public is not a person, has no brain, no consecutive memory, and cannot opine. It can only assemble and shout, and many shouts make a public demonstration; but many ballots do not make a public idea. And yet a public act may ensue which a possible idea might justify; and if the act excited a public interest which did not exist before, the possible idea might well become actual in the persons who had acquired that interest. A crowd or an electorate may vote for war, and thereby create a thousand commercial and moral interests in portions of the public; parties who will tend to embrace ideas that justify the interests so suddenly thrust upon them. Then each variety of interest will favour a different type of opinion: first, for instance, a common enthusiasm for war and confidence in victory (though none of the persons concerned may have originally desired that war or dreamt of its possibility). Later, perhaps, a common desire for peace may follow in order that one man may escape taxes, another bombs, another military service, and another the ignorant tumult of public passions. Public opinion is therefore a most real thing, and often a dominant power; many individuals habitually and all individuals occasionally embrace opinions together, under a common provocation and expressed in the same words. This public opinion is a distinct psychological event in each person, with a different intensity, duration, and field of suggestion; and this seems public opinion to each only in the measure in which its special character in himself is not distinguished. Nothing is heeded except some public action, sentiment, or words in the midst of which that personal opinion arose, with a powerful sense of being backed or The Essential Santayana 462 borne forward by an irresistible persuasion, at least momentarily unanimous. The force of such public opinion in the private mind comes in no way through argument or evidence; for even if some eloquent phrase or the report of some crucial fact has occasioned it in each person, its public force lies entirely in the social blast that carried it, with magic conviction, into many minds at once. If the argument or evidence that rationally justifies this conviction is considered separately , coolly, and reflectively, the opinion so revised becomes a purely private opinion, independent of the character and number of the people that may happen to agree with it. Only if the prevalence of that opinion is expressly made the ground for accepting it, as in the maxim quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, does public opinion still govern the private mind; and we shall probably find on examination that the society so clothed with authority is strictly limited and congenial to the man who adheres to it, and contrary to the prevalent opinion of mankind at large and in most ages. Under criticism, such a trust in unanimity becomes a private preference; the man respects a public authority because that particular public authority teaches what he likes to believe. The spell of unanimity can therefore...

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