British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 by James Thompson (review)

James Thompson’s British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 seeks to reconstruct the concept of public opinion as it developed in the nineteenth-century world of political inclusion and a transforming economy. In defining public opinion as both a social and political concept, Thompson argues that the traditional ways historians understood public opinion did not fully take into account the importance of consumerist society and the impact a growing labor movement and Labour Party had on the definitions of public opinion. He marries an “extensive and intensive reading of nineteenth and early twentieth century discussion of ‘public opinion’ … [to] the interaction between ideas about the public and public opinion, and ideas about labour” to describe the change in definition (22-23). Specifically, Thompson argues that “a language of public opinion that was as much about producers and consumers as about class,” began to change the nature of political debate and demonstrated a more inclusive and complex picture of public opinion and political culture, one committed to activism and a dynamic political debate on engagement, both politically and economically (250).

To understand the growing electorate’s views in liberal England, Thompson traces the relationship between electors and the larger political dialogue. With the emergence of a more inclusive definition of the “people” in the late eighteenth century, he begins a careful examination of the evolution of traditional understandings of political culture and its expression. Parliamentary debate and oppositional organization, the use of the parliamentary petition and an increasingly educated political public through news, education, and the market, all played a role in widening the expression of nineteenth-century public opinion. The book, therefore, begins with a careful look at political language. Before political polling, public opinion was shaped by the press, the pulpit, writers, politicians, petitions, and, of course, parliamentary debates. Thompson offers a lengthy discussion of how contemporaries constructed what he calls “the political public” (23). It examines political thought in the nineteenth century and how intellectuals and writers, like Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill portrayed the “interactions between intellectualist and consuming conceptions of the public … [from which] both reflected and shaped a political culture in which consumption and citizenship were not conceived as polar opposites” (84). In the second chapter, Thompson challenges the Victorian “mania for enumeration,” or the obsession with polling and statistics (85). From parliamentary petitions to sermons to the creation of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Thompson shows that the Victorian public was far broader than just the electorate and that traditional means of measuring political opinion were often manufactured. Those responsible ranged from the publication of the Pall Mall Gazette and Quarterly Review to the political platform of the Suffragists and from the petition from The Charter to temperance advocates.

Thompson then examines how economic life and party politics (not to mention tabloid journalism) persuaded, or more cynically, manipulated people to leave reason behind and associate political culture and public opinion with the same behavior as a consumer. Some liberal commentators, he points out, feared that the “force of capital and labour would develop the power to shape views possessed by political parties and so extinguish enlightened public opinion” (182). The 1870s witnessed the change in collective bargaining and wage rates, further moving the political culture away from reasoned intellectual thought and tradition to a new moral economy in the age of emerging consumer society, trade union organization, and social challenges associated with the production economy. The debates attacking orthodox political economic theory contributed to a new understanding of public opinion. For example, “In the hands of the positivist,” Thompson argues, “public opinion was characterized more by acute self-consciousness and interventionism … distinguished from the sleepy antiquity studied by historical economists and ruled by custom” (194). Organized labor’s attitude to the public as consumers contributed to both demands for legislation and regulation of...