Once the people become sovereign – as they ostensibly have in today's self-described democracies – public opinion must play some role in determining the legitimacy of sovereign power. In standard treatments of democratic politics, public opinion – the will of the people – is widely assumed to be the origin of public policy. While empirical studies may call into question the extent to which public policy does in fact reflect public opinion (Gilens and Page 2014; Enns 2015; Bashir 2015), there is no debate among normative theorists of democracy that public policy ought to reflect public opinion. There may be disagreement about how, how much, and subject to which constraints public opinion ought to be reflected in public policy, but there is a general consensus that respect for public opinion is essential to the legitimate exercise of sovereign power (Fishkin 1997; Urbinati 2014).

Public opinion derives from a variety of sources, far too numerous to list and probably impossible to fully catalogue. One of those sources – the one that will be explored in this essay – is the government itself, through an activity that is referred to variously as statesmanship, nation building, civic education or simply government. How (and how much) the government influences public opinion is not clear but has recently become a subject of sustained interest among political scientists (Bullock 2011; Matsubayashi 2012; Boudreau and MacKenzie 2013). Rousseau for his part believed that the effect was substantial: ‘It is certain that the people are in the long run what the government makes them’ (PE OC III: 251; Collected III: 148). Whether this is the case or not, it is clear is that political elites attempt – and often have no better option than to attempt – to manage public opinion. This essay explores the role of the state in the formation of public opinion in the works of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

For ancient political thinkers, the management of public opinion was the government's chief function. The government's success or failure in this regard was the measure of its success or failure generally, and the project itself was normatively unproblematic, because they in no way believed that the exercise of sovereign power needed to be justified via a notion of the will of the people.