bruno debaenst In the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the public opinion was only the opinion of a small percentage of the population:the wealthy, educated, male upper class. This started to change in the second half of the nineteenth century. More people became literate, and the printed press grew exponentially in size.33 At the same time, there was an increase in political participation, through suffrage reforms, which led to a process of democratization and the mass society. These phenomena caught the attention of several German scholars, such as Ferdinand Tönnies,34 Hermann Oncken, Wilhelm Bauer35 and Max Weber.36 For Weber, the press played an important role in the process of the formation of public opinion. It could educate people and lead them to elaborated reflected standpoints.That is why Weber himself often published articles in newspapers. The twentieth century saw the rise of new media communications, such as radio, film and television. This new media complemented the old, printed press. The 1925 Scopes Monkey trial for example, was not only covered by dozens of newspaper journalists, but also by the radio.37 People all over the United States could hear the voices of William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. The case is important because it helped spreading the ideas of creationism.38 It is a typical example of what Meierhenrich and Pendas call “didactic trials” in their book Political Trials in Theory and History: trials that are used to 33 Geiss for example describes how the journals in Paris in the 1820s only reached a maximal number of 10.000 copies, while the Petit Journal reached the enormous number of 1,5 million copies just before the First World War. Geiss, Der Schatten des Volkes, s.136. 34 Tönnies, Ferdinand, Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung, Berlin 1922. 35 Bauer, Wilhelm, Die öffentliche Meinung und ihre geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Ein Versuch.Tübingen 1914. 36 Senigaglia, Cristiana, Parliament and public opinion in Max Weber’s analysis, Parliaments, Estates and Representation. 36 (2) 2016. 37 Szasz, Ferenc, The Scopes Trial in Perspective, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 30 (3) 1971, s. 288–298. 38 Moore, Randy, Creationism in the United States: II: The Aftermath of the Scopes Trial. The American Biology Teacher, 60 (8) 1998, s. 568–577. 71 The democratization of public opinion
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=