Abstract
The book is a culmination of Christian Borch’s thorough work over the last decade in rethinking the history of sociology from the point of view of the crowd or mass (often used synonymously) rather than in terms of the more frequent legacy in modern sociology: the rise of the individual. The phenomenon of the crowd has anguished scholars from many points of view, but especially from “the dark side”: it presents social order with irrationality and possible violence; its reliance on “suggestion” threatens the disciplinary autonomy of sociology; last, but not least, its appearance has been threatening the liberal project and the rise of autonomous individual as such. By focusing on the crowd in social science thought, Borch wants to sketch an alternative history of sociology in looking at that which has been left out, or what he himself labels the “loser’s point of view.” He looks at the phenomenon, the rise and fall of the crowd, as a history of internal sociological disciplinary endeavors and labels his efforts “crowd semantics,” stimulated by among others, Niklas Luhmann.
Borch depicts the unruly setting of revolutionary France and refers both to Emile Zola’s novel Germinal and the French historian Hippolyte Taine. While at odds politically, both were in agreement when describing the mob behavior of crowds as violent and destructive. Le Bon’s book on crowds (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) became a best seller as it picked up ideas already in swing (from Taine) and in turn influenced the ideas of his time. As a conservative, le Bon feared the rise of socialism in general and anarchism in particular. Crowds in his view were only destructive and even barbarian. The crowd had to be combated for the very reason that the evolution of mankind was in danger. Although popular among the general public, le Bon’s conservative project met with criticism within more academic circles in France for the reason that it conflated the crowd with backwardness and societal regression, thus restricting a more generalized exploitation of the new research field. Gabriel Tarde was a scholar with great influence in forming the ensuing academic field of crowd behavior. In his early texts, crowd behavior was addressed from a criminological view in that crimes committed by crowds were especially violent and destructive.
Tarde’s influence in the field of criminology helped him in establishing a position also in sociology. His work led him to think also of general society as being based on imitation. In this regard, imitation no longer had a pejorative meaning but was viewed from a neutral point of view as the very basic of the social bond. Tarde’s sociology elaborated on a distinction between the family and the crowd, both entrenched in suggestion but with different implications. The family pursues a form of imitation based on customs, and preserving that which is; the crowd pursues a form of imitation based on the immediacy of presence. The crowd is in his view a metropolitan phenomenon where many strangers meet. Urbanization is likely to generate more crowds which are suggestible to fashions and imitations, a popular theme in later sociology.
A curious shift in Tarde’s sociological thought is identified as the transition from crowds to publics. In both entities, imitation is in operation but apparently with different outcomes: in the crowd, imitation is immediate and based on physical proximity; in the public, imitation is mediated by objects (texts or goods) and thus distanciated. The shift from crowds to publics also signals a shift in his understanding of what imitation is: in the crowd, imitation as suggestion is close to hypnotism and operates as “somnambulism,” while in the public, imitation becomes more reciprocal and assumes the regular feature of what G. H. Mead later labels inter-action.
Between Tarde and Emile Durkheim, a disciplinary feud arose with quite severe consequences for Tarde. His work on crowds and publics was largely forgotten when academic sociology was established in France. From early on, Durkheim had the ambition to “discipline” the field of sociology, and to cleanse it from the unscientific work on the crowd immersed in more psychology than sociology.
In introducing German crowd semantics, Borch distinguishes between pre-Weimar, Marxist, and Weimar approaches. Among the pre-Weimars, the work of Otto Stoll is listed in particular as he was critical of the dominant approach to Völkerpsychologie for not taking serious the booming French research on hypnosis and suggestion. The Marxist approaches emerging around the turn of the nineteenth century and the decades immediately thereafter linked crowd behavior with mass strikes, and thus to the proletariat. Rosa Luxemburg’s praise of the spontaneous act as a moment of Enlightenment paved the road for a wholly new political and intellectual understanding. Georges Sorel in France reread le Bon from a syndicalist perspective: in its height, the crowd can become a social cataclysm. But within the German Social Democratic Party (August Bebel, Karl Kautsky), skepticism grew vis-a-vis Luxemburg’s understanding of the mass strike as spontaneous acts. Instead, such acts were to be seen as reactions to concrete historical conditions such as, for instance, famine. Suggestion as a general mechanism did not suffice as an explanation; each member of a crowd is triggered by a previous chain of events and thus “excitable” in advance. Political organization was necessary. As Borch observes, the Marxist appropriation of crowd behavior covers quite a wide stretch from Luxemburg’s reliance on spontaneous acts over to Michel’s fascist appropriation of the phenomenon.
Borch takes notes of the social and political sentiment brought about by World War I (WWI) in also generating intellectual needs to analyze the phenomena of crowds and suggestion from a new perspective. The suggestion doctrine now stood for serious attack. Weimar sociologists aimed at establishing a viable sociological alternative. Basic to the work of Weimar sociologists was the group and a question was to what extent the crowd could be considered as a special specie. Wilhelm Vleugel, a prominent scholar at the time, viewed the crowd as a special formation based on an intense community of feeling. Vleugel’s lasting contribution was the distinction between latent and active crowds depending upon the degree to which members are absorbed. In a latent state, individuals are at the same time members of many other groups, while in its active state, the crowd absorbs their attention fully. Furthermore, in its latent state, the alleged community of feelings generates positive vibration around a set of values, while in its active state, the crowd threatens with destruction. A curious research question then becomes under what conditions a latent crowd emerges as an active one. The role of the leader in forming such a transition then becomes vital.
The work of Theodor Geiger is from this wider vantage point of curious interest. Geiger’s book Die Masse und ihre Aktion. Ein Betrag zur Soziologie der Revolutionen should be seen as a culmination of the Weimar efforts to transform French crowd psychology into proper sociology. Geiger’s own political standpoint as a member of the German Social Democratic Party (later its revolutionary strand) could not be discarded in understanding his intellectual endeavors; his text on Die Masse was a scholarly attempt to capture the revolutionary whirl of November 1918. As Freud before him, Geiger was also extremely critical of the explanatory power of suggestion. Contrary to Freud’s psychology, Geiger aimed at finding a sociological response to the “revolutionary crowd” (of which he himself had been a part). Utilizing the Marxist vocabulary, modern society was bifurcated in a class struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat. And in Geiger’s view, the proletariat was especially liable to become the “human material of the social association of the crowd.” Geiger drew on Vleugel’s distinction between the passive and the active crowd in seeing the proletariat as both inside and outside society: as an inside force, it is capable of political organization in labor unions and so on, but as an active crowd, it becomes a pure outside negation. Among the many achievements of the Weimar sociologists, culminating in Geiger, Borch notes that their functional reading amounted to a “rationalization” of the crowd, seeing its often violent expression as a legitimate “collective rational protest.” Ironically, as the author notes, the Weimar achievements also resulted in the disappearance of the crowd, as the phenomenon now became subsumed under other premises.
In the American context, crowd semantics took a different route than in Europe, much less related to the purported danger of socialism and labor unrest. But the “urban sprawl” posed a danger in uprooting a stable community life and a possible threat to the liberal values of individual selves. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” epitomized the threatening layers of dark cities where crime and obscenity flourish. Walt Whitman assumed a very different posture in his Leaves of Grass as the wild city life was approached as a space for breaking down social hierarchies as people came close to one another’s bodies. The crowd carried the prospects of new assemblages with sexuality, bodies, and affects; in short, it created new forms of life.
The early US sociologists (Franklin H. Giddings, Albion Small, Charles H. Cooley, James Baldwin, Charles Ellworth, Edward Ross) were concerned with the suggestion doctrine of le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, and debated it accordingly. A call for urban planning ensued as a form of crowd control in the rapidly growing cities, or what Borch with a reference to Ross calls “positive environmentalism,” an early rise of bio-politics via city planning. Robert E. Park, the famous Chicago sociologist, took a more generous view of city life, inherited from Walt Whitman. In The Crowd and the Public, he approached social life in much the same way as Tarde, as a special form of group lives with no previous history, and thus lack of tradition structuring their expressive behavior (they serve to bring individuals out of old ties and into new ones). Herbert Blumer, a prominent student of Park, furthered the thoughts on “the mass” through which heterogeneous individuals were homogenized into a unity following the same fads or fashion. Curious to note was how Blumer here captured the classic de-individualizing traits of crowd behavior while completely freeing it from its negative undertones. The mediation of crowds via electronic devices also opened up for propaganda, the directions of which could assume many forms, both positive and negative. Crowd semantics in the United States now became sponged in the problem of propaganda and public opinion. “Repression of rationality” had now a new platform of concern, for the new media, in Walter Lippmann’s influential texts, threatened to endow people dispersed from one another with new forms of mass hypnoses.
The arrival of “mass society” caused wide concerns (1930–1960) both among literary writers and sociologists proper. The Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, whose text The Revolt of the Masses feared that modern society had erased the distinction between human beings (minorities and masses) in that all humans now were considered on equal foot. As other conservative observers before him, Ortega y Gasset warned for the rise of totalitarianism with mediocre leaders. Karl Mannheim also espoused concerns with the arrival of mass society and the destruction of elites. Arnold Gehlen and Hannah Arendt expressed similar concerns on the threatening (totalitarian) consequences of the rise of mass society as did William Kornhauser and Ernst Lederer. A stratified social order engendered modesty and restriction in humans, and when such an order is destroyed in the wake of mass rule, totalitarianism threatens from within.
Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism attempted a cross breeding between Marx and Freud. Its basic idea was that present socio-economic conditions also promoted a special sexual structure making people susceptible to reactionary impulses. The authoritarian family inhibited sexual expressions which in turn were seen to lead individuals (especially the lower middle class) to seek substitute gratifications in, for instance, Fascism rule. Erich Fromm’s Escape of Freedom epitomizes the theme of the isolated modern individual, the psychological reaction of whom leans toward authoritarianism and destruction: the Nazi movement became an authority in that it offered security (escape) to isolated and panicking individuals (p. 213). The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno et al. significantly borrowed ideas from both Reich and Fromm. In Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the typical Frankfurt strand was embraced that despite technological progress, modern individuals were enslaved in cultural mass deceptions. Crowd semantics came here to assume that of alienation: de-individualizing standardization. Despite the radical undertones, the two authors espoused views quite similar to the conservatism of Ortega y Gasset. The reproduction of sameness in modern mass culture constituted a key difference to classic culture where uniqueness reigned. Walter Benjamin’s interest in film and photography translated classic crowd semantics into the field of objects, as the art object now lost its aura. The Frankfurt School appropriated classic crowd semantics and extended it into a wide cultural media domain.
The two well-known books by David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowds) are visited as they certainly espoused some of the depressive themes of crowd semantics, while at the same time diluting the semantics: the crowd is here concomitant with society; “the other-directed man” is also seized by loneliness. But significant was Riesmann’s wide employment of empirical methods in lieu of previous crowd studies where emphasis had been on theoretical or conceptual work.
Elias Canetti is little recognized by professional sociologists for the reason that his work is considered “literary” rather than scientific. As Geiger before him, Canetti had known the crowd from the inside and felt the joy of intense union. An important starting point was the emancipatory feature of the crowd: in regular life, individuals are “distanced” from one another. In the crowd, the “burden of distance” is dissolved; another feature of the crowd is absolute equality between acting bodies. When social hierarchies are erased and the “power of command” silenced, then absolute freedom reigns. For Canetti, there is no agony between the crowd and the individual as the individual is being reborn and thus transformed via participation in collective ceremonies. Although severely criticized by his contemporaries (as different scholars as Adorno and Ralph H. Turner) as unscientific and subjective, Canetti’s main achievements in the view of the author lie in “normalizing” the crowd as essential and even “primordial” to social life, a theme conjoining him with sociology proper and its interest in collective behavior.
In United States, professional sociology from 1960s and onwards, Borch identifies a strand that he calls “normative-rational approach” to crowds. Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian’s Collective Behavior initiates this approach by looking into the “emergent norms” appearing in crowds. Consequently, individuals follow such norms “rationally,” that is, they are no longer the subject of suggestion and hypnosis. Neil Smelser developed a slightly different approach in studying the “determinants of collective behavior.” In Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang’s Collective Dynamics, a firm tenet was to move the study of crowd, the fad, and so on, out of the absurd and into the normal realm: such behaviors lacked “a structure,” thus it became a crucial aim to study “the dynamics.” Richard A. Berk “radicalized” the study of crowds even further in subsuming such studies in a game-theoretical perspective, insisting that crowd participants take a number of rational decisions in the course of their actions. In this way, Berk completed a “conceptual-analytical” architecture which, in the views of Borch, had been under way for some time in American sociology. As a last nail in the coffin of crowd semantics, Borch refers to the work of Clark McPhail (The Myth of the Madding Crowd). Charles Tilly’s pioneering studies of collective action and collective violence left a lasting imprint on the study of social movements by studying the organizational base and its relation to existing power structures. Borch ends the chapter by ironically pointing to the “unintended consequences” of marginalizing the crowd in sociology proper; it led to the “collapse of the social” within sociology.
A renewed attention as to crowd/mass semantics is, however, discernible in European thought, but outside the domain of professional sociology. In In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Jean Baudrillard denounced not only Marxism but also social science tout court for having lost touch with the reality that they purport to explain. Arguing for an intimate relation between the social and the crowd/mass, the crowd becomes emblematic of modernity itself. But the masses that he espouses has no real reference “out there,” they exist only as signs or simulacra. The German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, ventures some similar ideas in Die Verachtung der Massen where “the patronizing gaze” of Enlightenment thinkers is thoroughly scorned. The end of physical crowds as in the nineteenth-century crowd semantics has misleadingly led social scientists to think that the crowd as such has evaporated. In Sloterdijk’s view, the masses continue to play an important role although in mode of organization and expression, their appearances are different. (Post)-modern society abounds with “non-physical massification.”
Michel Maffesoli addresses the return of the masses in a much more affirmative view in that he celebrates the “decline of the individual,” and the return of the collective in terms of tribes and neo-tribes. While classic modernity celebrated rationality, individuation, and differentiation, the arrival of post-modernity sees the rise of “affective communities” that come and go. The popular book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is also mentioned. The new governing rule of “decentering and de-territorialization” of global capitalism produces new forms of exploitation with implications for the possibility of a new “revolutionary subject.” Taking recourse to what they call “the multitude” from Spinoza’s philosophy, a collective subject of creative and innovative production making “rebellion into a project of love.” They contrast the classic crowd as largely passive as it cannot act by itself but is in need of a leader with its own view of the multitude as a series of active productive events. Their crowd semantics, Borch says, turns le Bon upside down: the unruly crowd now appears as a world savior.
In a brief epilogue, Borch summarizes his ambitious project while also speculating on “the future(s) of sociological crowd theory.” He looks at the field of economic sociology where “financial markets” are being analyzed along crowd vocabulary. Traders transform the notion of crowd from being more semantic into something that informs market actions: invest contrary to the market! Borch also takes notice of how the suggestion doctrine is no longer restricted only to interactions between humans, but now extended to transaction between human–non-human relations. Objects trigger behavior patterns among individuals that resemble seduction. In the political field, passions compete with reason, moderation, and consensus. “The specter of crowds” may once more come to haunt sociological thought.
The Politics of Crowds. An Alternative History of Sociology is a truly rewarding reading as it sheds scholarly light on a vital social phenomenon once in the center of sociological attention, but with the maturing of the discipline increasingly marginalized, if not even forgotten. Borch’s work provides an extensive, well-researched, and well-argued review of the ways in which the topic of “crowds” was addressed in the history of sociological thought. It draws on an enormous amount of material in several languages. The author chose to define his object as the exploration of a topic rather than the analysis of a given corpus of material (such as e.g. sociological journals over a certain period) and, thus, had to face the problem of identifying the writings in which the topic was addressed from a vast range of possible sites. This is a risky procedure, potentially a target of methodological concern, but the result demonstrates its viability as well as its fruitfulness.
The following more critical remarks should not be understood as indeed contesting the methodology or the design of the research and its presentation, even though they touch on some such aspects, but rather as issues that were opened up by the richness of observations contained in the study. As the reading of the book proceeds, a more significant observation becomes apparent. The book emphasizes less and less the anchoring of crowd analysis in sociology, as opposed to other disciplines such as literary studies and post-modern philosophy. One may doubt whether the crowd semantics really dissolved within sociology, given the sustained – and maybe even: newly revived – interest in social movements of various forms. As noted by the author, Tilly’s paradigmatic work on collective violence has become an equivalent in sociology to the work long carried out within (labor) history by such renowned scholars as Georg Rudé, Edward P. Thompson, and Eric J. Hobsbawm in rationalizing the phenomenon of the crowd into various forms depending upon underlying structures and organizational bases. While Borch certainly is acquainted with these classic historical texts, early on in the discussion, he says that his intellectual aims differ from these more time–space delineated studies. But the question arises as to whether or not also in the evolution of sociology proper a similar process of rationalizing crowd phenomena occurred. Borch’s book gives indeed a splendid testimony to such processes in the evolution of sociology. Thus, the crowd has not disappeared from the retina of sociology but has become dissected into various components, the relations of which differ somewhat in collective behavior and sociology of movements.
The revival of the crowd that Borch now detects mainly outside sociology proper in post-modern philosophy and literary studies, I will suggest, signals a return to the classic, pre-sociological, and generic concept of the crowd as a negation of prevailing orders, more specifically, the reign of the liberal individual. Appropriating the concept of the crowd as negative logic, as a threat to that which “is,” as the “non-identical other,” the crowd either thrills or threatens depending upon which side you are on. Le Bon and Negri/Hardt certainly differ politically, but they employ the same negative logic: the crowd defies order.
What is missing in Borch’s brilliant overview of crowd readings in the history of sociology is a more careful concept – logical elaboration of the crowd as pure negation or else an object prone to variable-analysis in a time–space matrix. In the latter sense, crowds are thriving in sociological analysis either as social movements or else as more spontaneous collective behavior acts (festivals or riots). In the former sense, crowds impinge upon our liberal self-understanding and promote a critical negation of that which is. The return of the crowd now visible outside the field of sociology turns into a vehicle of critique of modernity as depicted in dominant sociology of our times. Nevertheless, the denunciation of modernity by recourse to the re-emergence of the crowd is only possible on the premise that there “is” something to be critical of: the negative logic of the crowd as the threatening “other” assumes the positive logic of individuation. From such a point of view, the crowd and the individual are not two wholly different entities informing alternative logic of development, but different and often intermingling phases in the instantiation of the social.
Borch has written an impressive, original, and profoundly scholarly book on a vital social phenomenon. His book has a good chance to become a classic, perhaps even mandatory reading in courses and discussions on the history of sociology, or for that matter, in the history of modern society. It is without doubt a major contribution to the history of social thought.