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All would be for the best if opinion limited itself to popularizing reason in order to consecrate it in
tradition. Today’s reason would thus become tomorrow’s opinion and the day after tomorrow’s
tradition. But instead of serving as a link between its neighbors, Opinion likes to take part in their
squabbles and sometimes, becoming intoxicated with new and fashionable doctrines, it pillages
established ideas or institutions before it is able to replace them; sometimes, under the authority of
Custom, it expulses or oppresses rational innovators, or forces them to don the hypocritical disguise
of traditionalist livery.
These three forces differ as much in their causes and effects as in their natures. They work together,
but very unequally and variably, to create the value of things; and value is very different according to
whether it is primarily a question of custom, or of style, or of reasoning. Later we shall affirm that
conversation at all times, and the press, which at present is the principal source of conversation, are
the major factors in opinion, without counting, of course, tradition and reason, which never cease to
have part in it and to leave their stamp on it. The factors 1 of tradition, besides opinion itself, are
family education, professional apprenticeship, and academic instruction, at least on an elementary
level. In all the judicial, philosophical, scientific, and even ecclesiastical coteries where it develops,
reason has as its characteristic sources observation, experience, inquiry, or in any case reasoning,
deduction based on subject matter.
The battles or the alliances of these three forces, their clashes, their reciprocal trespassing, their
mutual action, their multiple and varied relations are one of the keen interests of history. Social life
has nothing more intestine but also nothing more productive than this long travail of often bloody
opposition and adaptation. Tradition, which is always national, is more restricted between fixed
limits than Opinion, but infinitely more profound and stable, for opinion is something as light, as
transitory, as expansive as the wind, and always striving to become international, like reason. It can
be said, in general, that the cliffs of tradition are endlessly eroded by the flow of opinion’s unebbing
tide. Opinion is all the stronger because tradition is weaker, which is not to say that then reason too is
weaker. In the Middle Ages reason, represented by the universities, the councils, and the courts of
justice, had much more strength than today to resist and repress popular opinion; it had much less
strength, it is true, to fight and reform tradition. The misfortune is that contemporary Opinion has
become omnipotent not only against tradition (which is serious enough) but also against reason—
judicial reason, scientific reason, legislative or political reason, as the opportunity occurs. If Opinion
has not invaded the laboratories of scholars—the only inviolable asylum up to now—it overwhelms
tribunes of the judiciary, it submerges parliaments, and there is nothing more alarming than this
deluge, whose end is not in sight.
Now that we have delimited Opinion, let us essay a better definition.
Opinion, as we define it, is a momentary, more or less logical cluster of judgments which,
responding to current problems, is reproduced many times over in people of the same country, at the
same time, in the same society.
All these conditions are essential. It is also essential that each of these individuals be more or less
aware of the similarity of his judgments with those of others; for if each one thought himself isolated
in his evaluation, none of them would feel himself to be (and hence would not be) bound in close
association with others like himself (unconsciously like himself). Now, in order for the consciousness
of this similarity of ideas to exist among the members of a society, must not the cause of this similarity
be the manifestations in words, in writing, or in the Press, of an idea that was individual at first, then
gradually little by little generalized? The transformation of an individual opinion into a social
opinion, into Opinion, is due to public discourse in classical times and in the Middle Ages, to the