La «inopinable» opinión pública de los doctrinarios

Abstract

This essay aims at questioning the historiographic revision that adscribes the concepts of public opinion and publicity, as normative concepts of the modern age, to French Doctrinarians, in particular, to Guizot. This error seems to have its origin in Kosseleck and Habermas and in the use of subjective moral categories, specific to German Enlightenment, in order to explain the physiocratic concept of public opinion, a concept proper of English Enlightenment whose main concern was the laying down of an objetive social morality that would provide the new trade-based society with stability. According to the Doctrinarians, it was this natural and rational social order, brought forward by British authors, what had to «rule the world», not a real public opinion. If public opinion had any normative value was because it was meant to represent the right order of things, not people's consciousness. For the Doctrinarians, the public sphere was not an autonomous sphere interceding between the State and society, but the very public or social order considered as a determining factor. Hence, no opinion about the public sphere could exist.