‘The Crowd’ century: Reconciling practical success with theoretical failure

Abstract

On the centenary of the publication in English of Le Bon's The Crowd, this paper examines its legacy. On the one hand, many recent theorists point to the flaws of Le Bon's crowd psychology which are centred on an abstraction of crowds from their social and ideological context. On the other hand, many leaders claim to have based their techniques of mass manipulation on his ideas. How come, if Le Bon's ideas are so flawed, they were so useful? The paper tries to resolve this apparent paradox by examining the crowd rhetoric of Le Bon's most notorious followers, Mussolini and Hitler. It is argued that, far from simply using assertion and repetition to sway a mindless mass, both leaders rooted their rhetoric in a particular construction of social categories through which the audience was defined and by reference to which actions were legitimated. However, they also obscured this ideological basis so as to render it inevitable and unchallengeable. It is therefore concluded that the very weakness of Le Bonian theory is what renders it a useful rhetorical resource. This makes it all the more important to study how social categories are constructed both in order to understand mass political rhetoric and also to undermine future authoritarian practices.