Abstract
The crowd was once to be a major topic in classical works in sociology and political science, but is now seen as rather old fashioned. Christian Borch has returned to this tradition and shows that it was transformed in subtle ways with the development of sociology and that many of its ideas have a deeper life within contemporary concerns. He argues that the time is ripe for a reassessment of its original theories and their influence as a way of reorienting our understanding of the present. He looks at how it is that changing disciplinary conceptions has made a subject that was so central to social theory in the nineteenth century into a rather marginal topic. Borch investigates these changes through a consideration of the French, German and American traditions of thought.
French theorists such as Taine, Le Bon and Tarde, he argues, saw crowd or ‘mob’ action in terms of suggestibility, imitation, contagion and leadership. The dominant Durkheimian tradition assigned these processes to the ‘collective effervescence’ that Durkheim saw as occurring only in the margins of social life. Among German theorists, it was only Simmel who gave serious attention to ideas of imitation and suggestion in his view of the crowd as a distinct form of sociality. Not until the Weimar period was this taken up more widely, in sociology and in psychology, in the form of ‘mass’ behaviour. Freud explored the ‘irrational’ in mass behaviour, replacing ‘suggestion’ with ‘libido’ and seeing this as producing a mutual identification through affective attraction to a leader. Geiger saw the crowd as a feature of the modern proletariat, a lower class freed from the constricting value consensus of medieval society. For Geiger, deprived and alienated proletarians had become the ‘revolutionary crowd’ that attempted to create new frameworks of meaning and significance. The early work of Giddings, Small, Cooley and Ross had followed many of the themes in Le Bon and Tarde. Mead developed a view of suggestion and imitation based on the view that the social self had to be seen as constructed in relation to other selves. It was Robert Park, however, who combined these views with ideas drawn from Simmel and laid the basis for a view of mass and collective behaviour that was developed by Blumer.
The 1930s, then, was a major turning point. It was at this point that ‘mass society’, rather than ‘crowd behaviour’, became a major topic of discussion. Each of the three national traditions, Borch argues, gave way to a diversity of approaches that explored the extended societalization of ‘crowd’ phenomena into those of large-scale and anonymous ‘mass societies’. This breakdown of national traditions was, in part, due to the enforced migration of German scholars during the 1930s, bringing the German and American traditions closer together. Borch looks at the new ideas developing in writers such as Ortega Y Gasset, Mannheim, Arendt and Lederer. He shows how the cultural and class-based arguments of these writers underpinned the emergence of the work of the Frankfurt theorists and others who explored Hitlerism through psychoanalysis and social psychology. In this work, an account of libidinal repression was allied with one of cultural standardization. In a similar vein, Riesman in the United States used character analysis to link ‘other-directed’ psychological orientations to cultural standardization.
Not until the 1960s was there a revival in a specifically crowd theory, when Canetti drew on studies of collective behaviour and social movements by Smelser, Turner, Lang and Tilly in sociology and Lefebvre, Rudé, Thompson and Hobsbawm in history. Though remaining on the margins, this work was echoed in the later development of post-modern theory by Maffesoli, Baudrillard, Hardt and Negri, who focused variously on ‘majorities’ and ‘multitudes’.
This is a powerful and interesting interpretation of the history of sociology. It is, however, a rather selective reinterpretation. It is striking that Borch’s overview of the German tradition does not consider Weber’s discussion of charisma and its implication for crowd theorization. This is an account of mass and mob action that has striking parallels with many of the arguments that he considers, yet it barely figures in his account. He does give some attention to the ideas of Luxemburg and Michels on crowds, but these are not developed and their arguments do not seem to fit into the main line of Borch’s analysis. Given the recognition accorded to Geiger’s emphasis on the proletariat, it is surprising that these Marxist arguments were not considered more fully. It is also significant that the similarities between Geiger’s arguments and Merton’s later discussion of ‘responses to anomie’ are not alluded to, making it impossible to consider the relationship between Merton’s argument and American work on mass communication and collective behaviour in the 1960s and later. Among recent writers, it is surprising that little attention is given to Moscovici, who is considered chronologically in the discussion of post-modernism, but is dismissed as a ‘modernist’. This chronology minimizes his role. In fact, Moscovici proposed a powerful synthesis of Freud and Durkheim that could have been considered as a central part of the discussion of these two writers.
None of this detracts from the central importance of the book, which has, indeed, uncovered a hidden tradition of social theory and helps to develop a new understanding of both the history of sociology and of the social world itself. Without the understanding provided by Borch’s work, it would not have been possible to make the critical connections that I have outlined above. In bringing the crowd in from the cold, Borch has done a great service to sociologists, political scientists and social psychologists.