9. Publicity of discussion in the assembly of the classes or estates is the great means of civic education. It is not in the least true that every one knows what is for the good of the State, and has only to go down to the House and utter it. It is in the work of expression [1] and discussion that the good takes form by adjustment of private views to facts and needs brought to bear by criticism. “The views a man plumes himself on when he is at home with his wife and friends are one thing; it is quite another thing what happens in a great assembly, where one shrewd idea devours the other.” [2]
[1] It is a remarkable point in English politics to-day that legislation is practically in the hands of the Government departments. Bills are rejected or “knocked about in Committee”; but the mass of organised knowledge necessary to initiate legislation in a complex society can hardly be found outside the gathered experience of an office which has continuity in dealing with the same problems. This tendency more than justifies Hegel’s point of view. An act of the “General Will” has not only, as he said, to be moulded by running the gauntlet of public and critical discussion, but has even to be first drafted by the help of immense piles of experience, which the general mind does not possess, and could not deal with, but which, nevertheless, enable its typical wish and intention to be embodied in effective form.
{ 286} The free judgment of individuals based on the publicity of political discussion is “public opinion.” In public opinion we have an actual existent contradiction. As public, it is sound and true, and contains the ethical spirit of the State. As expressed by individuals in their particular judgments, on which they plume themselves, it is full of falsehood and vanity. It is the bad which is peculiar, and which people pride themselves on; the rational is universal in its nature, though not necessarily common. Public opinion is a contradictory appearance, in which the true exists as false. It is no accident, but inevitable insight, that leads both of these characters to be proverbially expressed, as in “Vox populi, vox Dei,” contrasted with Ariosto’s
“Che’l Volgare ignorante ogn’un’ riprenda E parli plu di qual che meno intenda”; [1]