The Opinion System
Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas
Publication Year: 2008
Published by: Fordham University Press
Title Page, Copyright Page
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Preface: The Opinion Machine
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‘‘Tankstelle’’ (Filling Station), the first aphorism of Walter Benjamin’s One- Way Street, highlights the changed role of opinion in modern societies through a structuring opposition between conviction (Überzeugung) and opinion (Meinung).1 Starting with the latter: the closing sentences of this...
Introduction and Overview
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The epigraph to Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as well as to Herder’s philosophy of history, Epictetus’ innocent observation may also be a battle cry of radical relativism. The things themselves, the epigraph says, their order, natural order, or total lack of order, are not problematic...
Excursus I: Fama and Fatum in Virgil's Aeneid
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Fama, a Latin translation of the Greek doxa, carries many of the same meanings: fama is popular opinion based on commonly held beliefs; it is the reputation or esteem—the fame—in which a thing or a person is held; it is also rumor and gossip. All of these possible significances include the idea of a...
One: Manifestations of the Public Sphere in Christoph Martin Wieland
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At the turn of the nineteenth century there was no word and no idea that was more awe-inspiring than the word opinion. Wieland’s words dramatically reflect this, but it should also be noted that they are not his own; he puts them in the mouth of a character in a dialogue. These words are not a...
Excursus 2: Nomos, Gnomae (The Council of War)
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As a starting point for his etymological analyses of the German word Meinung (opinion), Jost Trier takes Herodotus, the father of history, as the father of opinion.1 For Trier, the most important context for the concept of opinion is not the competition of ideas in a public sphere, nor does his...
Two: Representation and Opinion (Koselleck, Habermas, Derrida)
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The long-term fallout of the revolutionary advent of public opinion, especially with regard to what is loosely called ‘‘the arts,’’ is nowhere more evident than in what is equally loosely called ‘‘modernism’’ (here exemplarily of the Viennese variety). The painter and novelist Albert Paris Gütersloh, a...
Excursus 3: Politics and Belief ( The Parable of the Sower)
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One of the oldest and most influential models for the function of opinion— and, in comparison to Virgil or Herodotus, highly programmatic—comes from the Christian gospels. The parable of the sower appears in much the same form in Mark, Luke, and Matthew, where it presents not only a germinal...
Three: The Opinion System and the Re-Formation of the Individual (Hobbes, Locke, Mendelssohn, Fichte, and Goethe)
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Before the French Revolution, an ‘‘opinion-system’’—as Lichtenberg called it, and later Fichte, though in a different sense—had been developing in Europe for at least a century. The practical model for the system came from England, where this new ‘‘system’’ was generally viewed—perhaps even...
Excursus 4: Polystrophon Gnoman (Findar and Hölderin)
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Pindar’s fragment 169, the source of the nomos basileus (discussed in the context of Herodotus), has been always an object of much discussion and interpretation, most recently and prominently in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer.1 My reading of Herodotus’ conception may complement existing readings...
Four: Lichtenberg’s ‘‘Opinions-System’’ (Meinungen-System)
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Only after his death in 1799 did Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher (Waste Books)1 enter the public sphere by way of posthumous publications. Among the extremely wide-ranging topics addressed in these private notebooks, Lichtenberg often writes about an ‘‘opinions-system’’ (Meinungen- System), by which...
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The following is less a comprehensive conclusion than a short list of principal
findings; they represent desiderata—sketches for future work—more
Perhaps the most significant and unexpected insight to emerge in the course of writing this book was the specific parallelism or structural analogy...
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Page Count: 256
Publication Year: 2008