Abstract: Public opinion is not only the key to Rousseau's interpretation of social conditions, but also an important reference in Durkheim's analysis of social facts. By focusing on Durkheim's discussion of public opinion domination, we are able to present his triple vision of social facts and reveal how Rousseau's social theory is reconstructed through a process of interpretative system revision. In Rousseau's view, the domination of public opinion is the root of social degradation, and it needs the guidance of legislators to become the keystone of political building. In the early path of social morphology, Durkheim analyzed the internal relationship and differences between public opinion and law, and examined the causal and functional relationship between "comparative law" and social types. While objecting to Rousseau's fundamental point of human nature and negative social landscape, he emphasized the role of society in enhancing human nature. To rid of the materialistic social determinism, Durkheim included individual consent conditions for the public opinion mechanism in the debate with Tarde, making society a "natural constraint" in line with individual nature. From the perspective of collective representation, Durkheim's social vison was completely free from the negative elements in Rousseau's view and it was transformed into a mechanism for maintaining and reconstructing "moral ideals". At the same time, the fundamental point of human nature was also shifted from Rousseau's natural nature to the duality of individuality and sociality. In so doing, while perfecting his own explanatory system, Durkheim had inverted Rousseau's hierarchical sequence of nature and society, and remade social facts from the shackles of human nature that "suppressed nature" to the cornerstone of civilisation that "enhanced nature".

Key words: public opinion, social, Durkheim, Rousseau