The Disappearance of the Masses: The Future of a True Illusion (original) (raw)
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The Advent of the Masses and the Making of the Modern Theory of Democracy
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The contribution will attempt to reflect on the interplay in recent theories of populism and crowd psychology between the ideas of mob and crowd on the one hand, and those of mass and people on the other. Using an approach deriving from the history of ideas, it will outline two fundamental aspects of the complex and ambivalent interaction between the concepts of people, crowds, masses and mob: first, the transformation of the protesting crowd or mob into “the people,” the legitimate source of sovereignty; second, the distinction between regressive crowds and mobs and progressive masses and peoples, stated both explicitly and implicitly in crowd psychology and populist theory. This article will also aim to highlight an idea that has come to the fore in much of the recent literature on populism. It has long been observed that populism opposes “corrupted” elites and the “honest” people. But it has recently been observed that a major source of populist mobilization is a distinction, wit...
SUMMARY OF THE BOOK THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES BY
In this chapter, Jose Ortega y Gasset tries to tell us that his use of the word "masses" is not to be viewed from the angle of politics whereby the word masses connotes "rebellion," "masses," and "social power" but that public life is equally and even primarily, intellectual, moral, economic, religious and that it also comprises of all our habits, including our fashions both of dress and amusement.
Contextualizing the crowd in contemporary social science
This paper situates contemporary social scientific studies of crowd events and crowd behaviour in their historical and ideological context. The original ‘crowd science’ developed from definitions of ‘social problems’ that emerged in the late nineteenth century – in particular the concerns among the French establishment about the threat of the ‘mass’ to ‘civilization’. This, and the surrounding intellectual context, encouraged the development of theoretical models of the crowd characterized by forms of reductionism and irrationalism. Early accounts of ‘mass panic’ similarly suggested that collective behaviour was irrational because it was governed by primitive bio-psychological processes. After describing these early approaches to the crowd, the paper outlines how changes in the late twentieth century, whereby those writing about the crowd were no longer necessarily ‘outside’ crowd events, have coincided with the development of accounts of the crowd which draw upon contemporary social scientific concepts (such as social norms, social identities, and cognition) and which assume that crowds are not alien to meaningful social and political participation, but integral to it.
Introduction From ‘mass hysteria’ to ‘people power’
Mass Hysteria
concept of the 'masses' is again and again invoked in order to render certain actions, thought and behaviour as irrational and pathological. People power The British newspaper, the Guardian claimed on the 8 January 2000 that: 'in almost every field of British life-from the games we play to the work we do, from the movies we watch to the products we buyyou can spot the greenshoots of a new kind of landscape, less centred on the self, more collective than before'. It added that 'after years of fretting over Me, we might be on the brink of the decade of Us' (p. 11). Later in the same article, this new collectivity is claimed to be in the power of consumption rather than production, as earlier. Instead of unions, they say: today's consumers are uniting, demanding a new kind of collective bargaining: for lower prices and, increasingly, for good corporate behaviour. Where once workers threatened a strike, today's mass consumers threaten an internet-organised, global boycott. They are realising that even in that most stereotypically selfish of activitiesshopping.
International Sociology, 2021
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