Public Opinion and European Security

Abstract

35 years ago, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu published an essay entitled Public Opinion Does not Exist (Bourdieu 1973). In this essay he claims that public opinion polls never refer to ‘the people’ they claim to represent because the kind of ‘cultural capital’ underpinning the opinion of those who are polled has already been conditioned by other societal factors which we would also have to study in detail. Furthermore, Bourdieu leads us to the important question whether entities such as ‘the public’ or ‘the people’ do exist or not. Undoubtedly, ‘public opinion’ itself does not exist in real social life, it is something ‘constructed’ and ‘shaped’ by the interaction and communication of numerous individuals. Bourdieu’s essay encourages us to re-think our theoretical concepts and notions again when making references to statistics and results of public opinion polls.