The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti

by John S. McClelland

This study defines theories of "the crowd" from ancient times to the 1960s. It reveals how the anti-democratic bias of treating the ruled as a "mob" has crept unconsciously into the histories of political thought.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

McClelland offers a useful overview of crowd theorists, especially as a political understanding of how nineteenth-century theorists sought to define and quell their fear that the masses could overturn societal institutions. The criticisms of Taine, Tarde, and especially Le Bon are intriguing. His worship of Canetti's book is starkly different from his piercing critique of every other theorist he examines, making his concluding chapter feel like he is stumbling over himself in his efforts to compliment Canetti and lacking the exacting level of analysis and argument that the rest of the book makes the reader accustomed to.

[Benjamin]

In a majestic and opinionated review of crowd theory through the ages, McClelland (a) gives a useful summary of formative crowd theories -- the ancient Greeks, Machiavelli's love of the mob, Scipio Signele's criminological view and Gabriel Tarde's theory of imitation, Le Bon's best-selling warning against the crowd, Freud's group cathexis, Canetti's crowd-as-refuge -- and (b) sometimes seems to go off on tangents about the political instantiation of crowd theory, as for instance in Montesquieu (and his influence on American democracy) and Hitler. I'm not sure there's a real argument in this book (although in the introduction he does state that political theorizing may have been invented to show that democracy meant mob-rule -- which places the power implicitly in the crowd from the very beginning), but it is very opinionated about a few things, most notably, Le Bon as plagiarist-of-ideas and manipulator of crowds. In fact, McClelland argues that Le Bon's book may not be a perfect study of the crowd, but it is a great example of how a leader may attempt to lead a crowd through repetition of simple phrases and the use of vivid images, two techniques the Le Bon offers for controlling crowds.