A Cry of Brutes

[monk222]

When in his later life Voltaire took the lead in seeking to overturn official, sanctioned injustice, his biographer Ian Davidson argues that Voltaire opened up a novel strategy of working to enlist public opinion on his side against the authorities (novel to the French, I suppose). However, Davidson interestingly notes that Voltaire had a decidedly qualified understanding of public opinion.

Of course, Voltaire did not understand ‘public opinion’ in anything like the sense we do today; on the contrary, he rejected the idea that the whole of society at large could have a valid opinion, as he made clear several years later, in the context of a quite different case: ‘When I say “the voice of the public”, I do not mean that of the population at large, which is almost always absurd, that is not a human voice, it is a cry of brutes; I mean the collective voice of all the decent people who think, and who, over time, reach an infallible judgment.’ Voltaire’s concept of public opinion was more limited, but still astonishing: he aimed to appeal to the political class as a whole, not just to individual members of it.

This may seem a bit harsh and crude to twenty-first-century sensibilities, but one thinks of the so-called Tea Party as well as the Birther Movement that even today rejects President Obama’s proffered birth certificate as final and dispositive proof that he is indeed an American, and one can appreciate Voltaire’s point.