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31661 - Theory and History of Public Opinion

Academic Year 2020/2021

                
                        Docente:
                        Maria Laura Lanzillo
                    
                        Credits:
                        8
                    
                        SSD:
                        SPS/02
                    
                        Language:
                        Italian
                    
                        Teaching Mode:
                        Traditional lectures
                        
                            Campus:
                            Forli
                        
                            Corso:
                            Second cycle degree programme (LM) in
                            Mass media and politics (cod. 8051)

                            Teaching resources on Virtuale

Learning outcomes

The course analyses the genealogy of the concept of public opinion, its evolution and its transformations during modern and contemporary age from an historical-philosophical-political point of view.

Course contents

This course examines the genealogy of the political concept of public opinion, its evolution and its transformations during modern and contemporary age.

In the first part of the course, we'll examine the nature, structure and critical role of public opinion and its relation with political and social institutions in the XIXth Century. We'll read also some of the most important political thinkers on public opinion, like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. Then, we'll analyze the social and political transformations enabled in public opinion by the process of democratization during XXth Century with the help of authors like Tarde, Bentley, Lippmann, Dewey and Hannah Arendt.

During the second part of the course, we'll refer to authors like Adorno and Marcuse, Lazersfeld and Kaplan, Debord, Habermas, Baudrillard, Bourdieu to understand the new political configurations of the public opinion in the age of mass democracy; then, we'll analyse the crisis of public opinion in the age of globalisation, the age of information, the show society age, the post-truth age, and we'll argue on the possibility for public opinion in contemporary democracies to gain (or not) a new political role (Chomsky, Barber, Sunstein, Lévy).