Crowds

by Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Editor)

Crowds explores the key role assumed by human multitudes in modern life by means of a graphically innovative, multi-author volume in which essays, word histories, and personal testimonies are woven together into a multiperspectival and multilayered group portrait. The portrait in question includes analyses of market crowds, crowds in modern art and literature, modern assemblies as compared to their premodern and ancient counterparts, modern sports crowds, human multitudes and mass media such as photography and cinema, crowds as political actors, and the emergence of crowd-centered discourses in social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Contributors include Stefan Jonsson, Allen Guttmann, Susanna Elm, John Plotz, Christine Poggi, William Egginton, Haun Saussy, Joan Ramon Resina, and Charles Tilly, with testimonies by authors such as Greil Marcus, Richard Rorty, Michel Serres, Alain Schnapp, Michael Hardt, T. J. Clark, and Susan Buck-Morss. The book represents the main output of one of the Stanford Humanities Lab's prototype "Big Humanities" projects and is supported by an extensive website ( ) which includes virtual galleries, video capture of the November 2005 Crowds seminar, and a database of early social science readings on modern crowds.

416 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2006

Reviews

[Benjamin]

Crowds is a collection of essays, mostly historical, having to do with crowds and their representation: Fascist Italy's photo-magazines, French Revolution drawings, the Roman crowd in Cicero's speeches, crowds in Falangist Spain's mental hygiene, in China, protesting the Iraq War. There are some more theoretical (crowds and intimacy) and activity specific (sports crowds through history, the market as a crowd) essays as well, but most of the essays are only so-so (exception: John Plotz's superb essay on the crowd in American sociology, from the terrors of losing individuality in the 1950s "lonely crowd" to the current backlash against the phenomenon of "bowling alone"). What really makes the book worth looking at (if not reading) are the marginal essays: each academic essay is accompanied by a short personal reminiscence of the crowd (Jessica Burstein is hilarious on the Barneys New York Warehouse Sale) and a short etymological examination of some particular word for crowd ("ocholos, vulgus, mob, foule, gente, zhong," etc). The book gains points for self-consciously being crowded; it loses some points for the editors' introduction that declares crowds to be a thing of the past.

[Edit: Bonus -- John Plotz's website at Brandeis has a pdf of his contribution to the book: http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/e....]