INTRODUCTION
A BOOK OF CROWDS
Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews
In his foreword to a 1987 publication on The Crowd in Contemporary Britain, the
eminent judge Lord Scarman declared that “it is high time that a properly re-
searched and scientific study should be published of the crowd in contemporary
Britain.”i Though his lordship’s statement reflects his own recent role as leader of
a government inquiry into the 1981 Brixton riots, it also unconsciously echoes the
urgent sense of timeliness underlying Gustave Le Bon’s justification for his 1895
best-seller on crowd psychology: “Organized crowds have always played an impor-
tant part in the life of peoples, but this part has never been of such moment as at
present.”ii Crowds, it appears, are an idea whose time has not infrequently come,
particularly during the past two and one-half centuries of world history. That this
should be the case is perhaps unsurprising: as Lord Scarman also points out, “The
crowd is nothing new in human society.”iii Indeed, accounts of collective behavior
span Western history from Plato’s worries about mob rule in The Republic to the
Gospel descriptions of the crowd that cried for Christ’s death, from concerned re-
ports of peasant revolts in the early modern era to newspaper headlines about the
riots of the post–World War II era, Watts to Brixton to Seattle and Genoa.iv Yet Le
Bon struck a powerful and enduring chord with his ominous pronouncement that
“the age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS” (C, xv).
Le Bon isn’t known for understatement, and the popular success of his Psychologie
des foules is attributable more to his way with aphorism than to rigorous socio-
logical analysis. Rigorous or not, Le Bon’s formulations caught on because of their
C R O W D S | INTRODUCTION A BOOK OF CROWDS 1
ability to sum up a conviction that had been in the air since the American and
French revolutions. It was shared with nineteenth-century predecessors such as
Gabriel Tarde, Hippolyte Taine, Enrico Ferri, and Scipio Sighele,v and with twenti-
eth-century successors such as Sigmund Freud, Robert Park, José Ortega y Gasset,
and Elias Canetti, not to mention with the leading artists, writers, commentators,
historians, and politicians of both centuries.vi The conviction in question held that,
even if “the crowd is nothing new in human history,” a quantitative and qualita-
tive difference distinguishes modern crowds from their premodern counterparts. In
some deep and essential sense, crowds are modernity. Modern times are crowded
times. Modern man is the man of the crowd.
By providing a readable and provocative synthesis, Le Bon’s treatise both inaugu-
rated and popularized the subdiscipline of collective psychology. It has been con-
tinuously in print since its first publication, translated into every major language
and many minor ones—a Latvian version appeared in 1929—and going through
innumerable editions. “While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappear-
ing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one,” the work goes on
to argue in a prefatory passage alluded to in several essays in the present volume,
“the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the
prestige is continually on the increase” (C, xiv–xv). Despite their purported ties to
a primal scene associated with premodern and even prehistoric predecessors,
modern crowds are not reducible to updated tribes or clans. Heterogeneous and
unstable, they arise as the result of the promiscuous intermingling and physical
massing of social classes, age groups, races, nationalities, and genders along the
boulevards of the industrial metropolis. They can no longer be conceived of as the
passive subjects of history: as unruly hordes—or, better, herds—tamed and disci-
plined by some higher order of beings, be they priests, nobles, monarchs or phi-
losophers. Rather, the tumultuous events of 1776 and 1789 have recast the once
reviled multitudes in the role of history’s protagonists. The res publica or “public
thing” is now firmly in their hands: the state, economic production, communica-
tions, culture, the law. Theirs is the power to make and unmake all forms of gov-
ernment. Theirs is the new language of political action based upon electoral cam-
paigns, popular assemblies, and symbolic protest marches performed in city streets
and squares. Theirs are the new media of mass persuasion from broadsheets to
newspapers to posters to radio and television. In the era of crowds, the cornerstone
of the state is popular sovereignty, not the inherited privilege of monarchs. ■
i Lord Scarman, “Foreword” to The Crowd in Contemporary Britain, ed. George Gaskell and Robert Benewick (London: Sage
Publications, 1987), ix.
ii Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind, 2d ed. (1895; Atlanta, Georgia: Cherokee Publishing Company, 1982),
v; hereafter abbreviated as C.
iii Lord Scarman, “Foreword,” ix.
C R O W D S | INTRODUCTION A BOOK OF CROWDS 2
iv For a historical overview of the role of the crowd in Western political theory, see J. S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob:
From Plato to Canetti (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
v See, for instance, Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (1890; New York: Holt, 1903); Hippolyte
Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, 1875–1893), selections translated as The Origins of Contem-
porary France: The Ancient Regime, the Revolution, the Modern Regime: Selected Chapters, trans. Edward T. Gargan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974); Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology (1892; London: Fisher Unwin, 1895); Scipio Sighele, La Folla
delinquente. Studio di psicologia collettiva. (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1891; revised 2d ed. 1895). For more on these and other
“founders” of crowd psychology, see http://shl.stanford.edu/Crowds/theorists/theo.htm.
vi See Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (1921; New York: Norton, 1959);
Robert E. Park, The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays, ed. Henry Elsner, Jr., trans. Charlotte Elsner (1904; Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1972); José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans Anthony Kerrigan (1929; Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (1960; New York: Viking, 1962).
For the proceedings of a recent conference devoted to Canetti’s book, see Die Massen und die Geschichte. Internationales
Symposium Russe, Oktober 1995, ed. Penka Angelova (St. Ingbert, Germany: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 1998).
C R O W D S | INTRODUCTION A BOOK OF CROWDS 3
