ABSTRACT
This article investigates the use of the concept of public opinion in the constitution of a liberal French language of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to do this investigation the works of Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, François Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville are compared. Our central hypothesis is that these authors use of the concept of public opinion to define the people as a sovereign body. Society, as a locus of legitimacy, exercises its sovereignty not only through the representative mechanism, but fundamentally through a public space in which narratives are articulated and disputed by the best way of organizing and conducting government. At the same time, the expansion of public opinion and the risks of its instability put it as a central problem in understanding the relationship between liberalism and democracy.
Public Opinion; Public space; Liberalism; Constitution; Democracy