Paris, Wall Street: Reflections on the political crowd and labelling World Historical Events

Abstract

This article examines the political crowd as a World Historical Event (WHE). Historians define the latter as an episode, incident or emergency that transforms the course of history. The article analyses Hayden White’s discussion of the WHE and the grounds he submits for separating it from pseudo-events: namely, the identification of collective trauma and the attribution of the episode as the fulfilment or ‘filling out’ of an historical sequence. The article offers a preliminary taxonomy and concentrates on the non-violent political crowd protest. It examines Occupy (2011) as a World Historical Event. It draws comparisons between Occupy, the Paris Commune (1871) and the May Spring in Paris (1968). The aim is to set the evidence for Occupy as a World Historical Event against claims made on its behalf by the media of the day and leading political and social commentators, notably David Harvey, Todd Gitlin, Cornell West and Noam Chomsky. The concept of ‘Event inflation’ is introduced and the claim that World Historical Events can only be determined by retrospective (historical) wisdom is advanced.