| OPINION AND PUBLIC OPINION III

The more the rationalisation of political rule questioned and sought to replace the familiar reference to God as the origin of social order, the more indispensable the principle of representation became. In this context, representation has been until recently – at least in constitutional states – the self-evident link between the democratic constitution of society, the free formation of a political public, and legitimate state authority. While the development from early modernity to modernity moved towards limiting the theatricalization of power, the so-called transition to ‘postmodernism’ – whether rightly or wrongly named – has been marked by a significant resurgence of the affective, expressive, and presentational in public debate. Faced with the impending collapse of then-fragile democracies, interwar thinkers – most notably Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno – warned against a relapse of reason into mythical forms of thought. According to them, all signs pointed to rationalisation reaching a limit where it risked turning into its opposite. However, they were by no means naïve and understood the historical and structural entanglement of myth and reason. Their readings included Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, particularly the second volume – “Mythical Thinking” – published in 1925. The third conference on Opinion and Public Opinion (#OPO2025) aims to explore this structural inner limit of rationality both historically and philosophically, while also addressing the specific nature of new media in the context of the rationalization of the lifeworld and the public sphere.