The idea of public opinion is not as recent as commonly believed, but it has only been discussed in the academic literature for the last two centuries. In this last period, two research cycles can be identified, each beginning with a popular rise in the idea of public opinion, followed by extensive social enquiry into it and the controversies over its conceptualisations and ending with a period of the marginalisation of public opinion (see Figure 2).

The first long cycle of rich theoretical exchanges began after the French Revolution and ended shortly before the rise of opinion polls at a time when Lippmann declared the public a phantom. Thanks to Gabriel Tarde, Ferdinand Tönnies, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, in particular, the beginning of the twentieth century became the historical pinnacle of social theories of public opinion, ending the transition from the former normative-political to the new sociological paradigm in studying publics and public opinion. Tönnies's Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung (Critique of Public Opinion 1922), one of the historical highlights of theorising public opinion, was undoubtedly unique in that it placed public opinion at the heart of general theory of society. His fundamental book was a comprehensive effort to conceptualise public opinion as a complex form of societal will – along with convention in economy and state legislation – and to examine it in its historical manifestations in different countries by combining pure, applied and empirical sociology. Strangely enough, unlike the theories of three other great public opinion scholars in the early twentieth century – Tarde, and especially Lippmann and Dewey – Tönnies's theory did not attract attention in English public opinion literature and met with a conspiracy of invisibility even in Germany (although Tarde did not fare much better until recently).

The flourishing theoretical controversies about public opinion were unexpectedly marginalised as early as the 1930s. The reason was quite banal – the birth and rise of opinion polls severely weakened the socio-critical vigour that was embedded in public opinion theories intellectually anchored in the Enlightenment. The invention of opinion polls marked the beginning of the second major wave of research, which ended with the rise of opinion mining at a time when Fishkin declared polls to represent phantom opinions. In the mid-dle of the second wave, public opinion had disappeared from the vocabulary of critical theory as an ideologically tinged concept that had lost its critical epistemic value inherited from the Enlightenment.