The Crowd and the Mob (Routledge Revivals)

From Plato to Canetti

J. S. McClelland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415602495
• eBook ISBN: 9781136857133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

First published in 1989, this persuasive and original work by John McClelland examines the importance of the idea of 'the crowd' in the writings of philosophers, historians and politicians from the classical era to the twentieth century.

The book examines histories of political thought and their justifications for forms of rule, highlighting the persistent and profoundly anti-democratic bias in political and social thought, analysing in particular the writings of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hitler, Gibbon, Carlysle, Michelet, Taine and Freud.

1
The Crowd in the Ancient World

Philosophers and historians in the ancient world took a great deal of interest in the crowd, and although this interest lasts from the beginning to the end, from Plato to Procopius, only Plato ever worked out anything approaching a theory of the crowd. Plato’s serious theoretical interest reflects the seriousness of the crowd’s claim to be able to rule a society successfully, because it is only at a fairly elevated level of theorizing that he can in fact find really damaging things to say about the rule of demos, and even at that level some of his criticisms of democracy, for example, his claim that the democratic man is unhappier than the timocrat or the oligarch, are difficult to sustain. The Roman historians, Livy and Tacitus, wrote when whatever pretensions the populus ever had to consideration as a force in the State were a thing of the past. They can afford to shed a generous tear for the brave days of old without any risk. Livy’s account of early Roman history is interesting because it became one of the great Renaissance and modern sources of republican inspiration because it provided a finished account of the only republican government about which enough was known to make it worth talking about. That was certainly Machiavelli’s view, so that even if Livy’s own reflections about the republic never reached the level of high theory, his account of its early history did get into high theory, if only at second hand. And there is a good case for saying that the most celebrated theory of liberty in the modern world, that of Montesquieu, has its origins in Machiavelli’s critical reading of Livy’s treatment of the Roman crowd in the first Decade. Tacitus and Procopius see the crowd off the stage of Roman history. Procopius sees it making a world of its own. In Tacitus, the crowd is so sated with theatrical shows that it ends up by being unable to distinguish between a show and a desperate battle where the blood that is flowing is real blood. In Procopius, the circus crowd lives in a world of its own making, a fantasy world in which all the rules of ordinary living are turned upside-down, a nightmare utopia at which the ordinary sane spectator can only gawp.

The Mob and its Leaders: Plato on the Institutionalized Crowd

One problem that Plato did not have to face was the problem of who the crowd was and where it came from. The crowd of Athenian democracy was official. The Assembly, the Council and the Jury were made up of men whose names were on the citizen rolls, and who meant to keep them there because that meant they could enjoy the privileges which made being a citizen worthwhile. The critics of democracy said the lists were so long that privileges shared by so many were not worth having, but that is not what the citizens thought. The privileges were modest enough: citizens were different from women, slaves and foreigners; they received a small per diem for offices open to everyone by lot; there was pay for rowing on a trireme and an occasional distribution of grain or loot; citizens could own land (it may be that one of the reasons why Aristotle did not succeed Plato as head of the Academy was that Aristotle as a foreigner would not have been able to take over the property). However, the privileges seem to have been enough to make Athenians proud of their democratic constitution and to spread its fame. When there was trouble at Rome between the plebs and the patricians at the time of the Decemvirs, it seemed natural to send envoys to Athens to find out how the Athenians ran their affairs, a thing the Romans would have been unlikely to do if the Athenian democracy had not caused a stir in the world, and even a prejudiced critic like the Old Oligarch admitted grudgingly that although there were strong grounds for objecting to democracy on principle, the Athenians seemed to be able to make a go of their democratic constitution and even to prosper under it (Moore, 1975, p. 45). By the time he was writing, the Athenians had had a democratic constitution of sorts for nearly a hundred years, and was to have one, except for a few minor oligarchic deviations, for another hundred years after that.

What seemed peculiar to contemporaries about Athenian democracy was the choosing of men by lot for offices (though not the highest ‘executive’ and military posts), payment for public service, and what we would call a democratic way of life. Selection by lot from the whole citizen body was the assertion of legal equality over inequalities which were plain for everyone to see. Not everyone was equally competent to exercise state power, so it seemed to fly in the face of common sense to allow the operation of chance among the many to decide who should decide on questions which could have very serious consequences for fellow citizens. Payment for public service gave those paid an interest over and above the public interest which everyone publicly agreed was the only thing that should be in the minds of those who were called upon to serve it. The democratic way of life called out the most damning comment, though even Plato is forced to admit that it was attractive, at least at first sight and for those who have not thought the matter out properly (Republic, 561). In a democracy, everybody is allowed to live as he likes; there is a bewildering variety of individual characters; this freedom rubs off on women, slaves and foreigners. The Old Oligarch grumbles that at Athens free men are not allowed to hit slaves, because the Athenians dress so scruffily that it is very hard to tell who is a slave and who is a citizen, so a random assault on a slave might be an assault on a citizen instead (Moore, 1975, p. 39). Plato playfully extends this moral and social anarchy to the domestic animals. The only damage any of the interlocutors in The Republic admit they have suffered from democracy is that Glaucon was once bumped into by a donkey in the street (Rep., 563). The variety of democratic characters is matched by the variety of democratic constitutions (Rep., 557), and Plato extends the notion to the desires: the democratic character follows the desire of the moment. He fails to order his desires and treats them all as if they were equal; the desires multiply until they overcome the disposition to self-discipline by sheer force of numbers (Rep., 559). Democracy is a mess for its critics; it cannot be a sensible way of doing things.

What the ancients took to be the characteristic features of democracy are not the features which would strike a modern observer, especially if he looks fondly at British and American ideas about constitutionalism. Athenian democracy was direct democracy; there was little of the refining effects of the Iron law of Oligarchy which critics of representative democracy find reassuring. The only representative feature of Athenian democracy was in jury selection, where large popular juries were chosen by lot (501 tried Socrates), but as Finley points out, juries were large to make sure that they represented a true cross-section of the Athenian Ecclesia, and so were representative in the sense that a modern market sample is representative, not in the sense that someone who may be different from you may still represent your views and interests (Finley, 1973, p. 78). Nor was there much of the Whiggish pretence about an ancient constitution which could not be altered easily. The Greeks knew that the antiquity of a constitution was one reason for being loyal to it and wanting to preserve it, and they recognized the value of provisions for making it difficult to alter a constitution, but a free polis gave itself laws, and there was no reason in principle why those laws could not be changed. As Rousseau recognized, that is what made a people sovereign. And it is not very clear that the Greeks had an idea of antiquity apart from a feeling for the good old days. Any historical continuity came from the poets’ tales of gods and heroes which served for a state religion. Severe penalties could be dealt out for impiety, for religion was a part of public, not private life. The distinction between public and private had very little meaning when the sovereign people could decide about anything, and when it was open to any citizen to lay a charge against any other in the courts. There was no way in which a citizen could protect himself from a majority in the Assembly or the courts short of politicking, or conspiracy, or self-exile. There was a notion of balance in a constitution. Aristotle praises the constitution of Solon for being a mixed constitution with power being shared among the monarchical, aristocratic and democratic principles which gave way under the pressure of increasing public wealth and the growing importance of the people as rowers of the triremes which were the basis of Athenian naval and imperial power, but the critics of democracy saw the subsequent democratic constitutions as victories for the democratic faction at the expense of the rest. Changes in constitutions do not abolish the social divisions upon which the mixed constitution is based, and some balance was preserved. Important offices were not filled by lot, and most of the statesmen and generals came from wealthy families; the leaders who unseated the oligarchic governments in 411 and 403 BC were wealthy, and so was Anytus who laid the charge of impiety against Socrates (Jones, 1957, p. 42). But if a certain political balance was preserved, there was none of the idea of the separation of powers which constitutionalists after Montesquieu have tended to associate with it. The courts were the sovereign people acting in particular cases, the Assembly in miniature, not a separate branch of government.

Athenian democracy institutionalized the crowd and allowed it to make decisions about matters of life and death. The democratic Assembly was not a mob or a revolutionary crowd. The Athenian crowd did not have to resort to violence to make itself heard, like the Roman plebs or the French Sansculottes. All it had to do was to assemble. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that Athenian politics was not especially violent, and it accounts, at least in part, for the longevity of the democracy. If it had had that tendency to violence, its critics would not have failed to point it out, but the criticisms are typically worked out at the level of political and psychological theorizing, and the examples of the democracy misgoverning and degenerating into a mob are examples of the Assembly doing something stupid, or rash, or out of ignorance, following some demagogue or other who manipulates them for his own selfish ends.

Everything Plato has to say about democracy applies to the crowd, and everything Plato has to say about the crowd applies to democracy, because the democratic constitution of Athens made them the same thing. The questions he asks about the crowd are about its character and the kinds of leaders the crowd will follow. For Plato, crowds are always easily led. Like all the ancients, he believes that rhetoric works and necessarily works; the Guardians in The Republic are brought up on dialectic, not rhetoric, and their education is a preparation for the victory of the dialectical mind over the falsely persuasive powers of rhetoric. The final test of suitability for Guardianship is the capacity not to be fooled by false arguments of the kind that might have convinced the young men at the beginning of the dialogue if Socrates had not been there to show Thrasymachus up. The Athenian constitution was a standing invitation to demagoguery, so Plato is interested above all in the character of the popular leader.

Plato does not treat the demagogue as if he comes from the crowd itself. He is not worried about leaders who emerge from the common people but about leaders of the people who come from the upper classes. (Aristotle notes that it was not until after Pericles that badly dressed, common leaders like Cleon appeared to shout and use abusive language in the Assembly (Moore, 1975, p. 171).) Plato gives two accounts of the rise of the crowd leaders, first in his account of the corrupted philosopher and second in his account of the corrupted oligarch, but the two accounts can be seen as two different roads to the same end.

The type of the corrupted philosopher is Thrasymachus. The dramatic structure of the first book of The Republic allows us to find out a good deal about him. He is a strong character, a natural ruler, persuasive enough to get other characters in the dialogue on his side. His demand to be paid for his conversation is accepted without comment, so we can assume that this is not the first time that Thrasymachus has taken part in a conversation like this, and he expects his opinions to prevail again as they have in the past. He is famous; he comes to the conversation with a good track record; he is overbearing and has to be tamed by Socrates after he starts firing in all directions. Thrasymachus is also worldly-wise; he has been around; he has seen and seen through the world. He lays claim to a genuine political expertise, and this expertise is never challenged by Socrates, whose refutations of Thrasymachus are completely formal. The case against Thrasymachus is that he would only be tolerated in a democratic society, where real philosophers, who are prepared to tell the crowd what it does not want to hear, are despised. The sophist is not just a corrupter, but is himself corrupted by the crowd in democratic societies. It is ‘the public themselves who are sophists on a grand scale, and give a complete training to young and old men, and women, turning them into just the sort of people they want’. Young men of philosophical inclinations cannot be expected to resist the plaudits of the mob!

when they crowd into the seats in the assembly, or law courts or theatre, or get together in camp or any other popular meeting places and, with a great deal of noise and a great lack of moderation, shout and clap their approval or disapproval of whatever is proposed or done, till the rocks and the whole place re-echo, and re-double the noise of their boos and applause. Can a young man be unmoved by all this? He gets carried away and soon finds himself behaving like the crowd and becoming one of them.

(Rep., 492)

The young men are faced with a choice. They can become leaders of the crowd themselves, when, paradoxically their good qualities help them to success. They are quick to learn, have good memories and are brave and generous (Rep., 487), and if they can add good looks and noble birth they would be natural crowd leaders who, like Alcibiades, could aspire to lead the whole of Hellas and to conquer the whole world (Rep., 494). The alternative would be to become a sophist and aspire not to lead the crowd but train crowd leaders. Plato has no doubt that this can be done, because the sophists have a genuine grasp of crowd psychology whose principles are well-enough understood to be taught. Crowd psychology is not a true science like statesmanship or medicine, which aim at the good of their subjects. The sophist earns his living by teaching men how to lead the crowd. It is like learning how to control a ‘large and powerful animal’; you could learn to control the crowd yourself by carefully watching its moods over a long period of time, but the sophist can pass his own ‘knowledge of the passions and pleasures of the mass of the common people’ more quickly (Rep., 493). This short-cut to bastard knowledge gets real philosophers a bad name because they do not deal in easy answers.

Plato gives his second account of the crowd leader in his long discussion of how the Ideal State degenerated into timarchy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. He imagines the Ideal State as a beginning and shows how other forms came out of it. It is sometimes said that Plato does not mean us to take this scheme of things historically, let alone as a ‘theory of history’, but if we set aside the existence of the Ideal State at the beginning, there is a good deal of reconstructed history in it. Plato certainly wants us to take seriously the connection between oligarchy and democracy, and the connection between democracy and tyranny was to become one of the commonplaces of the ancient world. Oligarchic society collapses when the oligarchs’ obsession with wealth makes the society they dominate unfit for war. The oligarchs, like all unjust men, compete with each other; they are jealous of each others’ wealth and are not united as a class; they despise the poor and are afraid to arm them against the enemy, and they are too mean to pay the expenses of war, but they are few in number and so are forced to arm the people (Rep., 551). When war comes they can no longer afford to despise the people, but the people, seeing how few the oligarchs are, and how unfit their idle and luxurious life has made their sons, begin to feel contempt for them. The people rise against the oligarchy, kill or exile the oligarchs, and establish a democracy, with equal access to office by lot (Rep., 557), where everyone is allowed to live the kind of life he chooses (Rep., 557). But democratic society does not acquire its leaders from the poor, but from the corrupted sons of oligarchs. One of the effects of oligarchic society was the corruption of well-born youths by the oligarchs’ practice of letting out money at high rates of interest to allow borrowers to pursue lives of ruinous pleasure. Each oligarch saw a profit in the corruption of other oligarchs’ sons. These ‘thriftless idlers’, some ‘drones with strings’, some without, plotted against the oligarchs when they realized they had been ruined by them, and joined the people when they rebelled against the oligarchy. They survive into the new democratic society as the class from which the leaders come (Rep., 564). Democratic society consists of three classes: surviving drones, out of which the ‘drones with strings’ emerge as leaders while the rest support them in the assembly, ‘buzzing on the benches and not letting anyone else speak’; the mass of the people ‘who earn their own living, take little interest in politics, and aren’t very well off, and a third class, the new money-makers, who come out of the mass. The leaders of the democracy flatter the crowd and keep them sweet by robbing the rich, keeping most for themselves, and distributing the rest among the poor (Rep., 564–5). These leaders need the sophists’ crash-course on crowd psychology to manipulate the people whose character they have come to share. The only difference between them and the crowd is that they are cleverer and have access to the techniques of mass leadership.

A further degeneration of the democratic character produces the tyrants from the sons of corrupted oligarchs. Democratic liberty is attractive only in the short term. The democratic crowd has no high principles and does not look for high principles in its leaders. It cares nothing about their training, and will support them ‘provided they profess themselves the people’s friends’ (Rep., 557–8). The people need something more than flattery to remain convinced that their leaders have a care for their welfare, so the demagogues plunder the new rich and make promises about the cancellation of debts and an agrarian law which they find hard to keep. Oligarchic plots are invented as an excuse for robbing the rich who take to real plotting to defend themselves. Impeachments and treason trials follow, and the democratic leader gets a taste for blood (Rep., 565–6). He is now surrounded by oligarchic enemies and popular rumblings begin over his failure to satisfy popular appetites, which are in principle not satisfiable because the desires like the people themselves, are many. The demagogue-becoming-a-tyrant tries the expedient of war, which reinforces the people’s conviction that they need a leader and sends them back to work from their idleness to pay the high taxes which war requires. This gives them less time for plotting (Rep., 567), but they are not altogether fools and begin to realize which way the wind is blowing. The would-be tyrant has no option but to hire a foreign praetorian guard (Rep., 567–8) and these become the companions of his debauches. They make it their business to see that his character continues to be dominated by the desires which they share. The tyrant’s character does not go under without a last struggle. He might try to mix debauchery with discipline, indolence with study, so he can get the best of both worlds. This attempt at democratic moderation alarms the desires who begin to despair of their mastery over him. To retain that mastery, the desires decide to sacrifice equality and plot to implant a ‘master desire’ to rule him completely, while they act as the master desire’s bodyguard, making sure that no parsimonious, oligarchic, desires return to overturn the rule of the baser passions (Rep., 571–4). The master passion is the most deep...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• Introduction: The Idea of the Crowd in History
• 1 The Crowd in the Ancient World
• 2 Some Medieval Crowds and Machiavelli on the Roman People
• 3 The Crowd and Liberty: Machiavelli, Montesquieu and America
• 4 Some Historians on the Crowd before and after the French Revolution: Gibbon, Carlyle, Michelet and Taine
• 5 The Crowd as the Clue to the Mystery of the Modern World: Taine against the Enlightenment
• 6 From the Criminal Crowd to a Social Theory: Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde
• 7 Crowd Theory Makes its Way in the World: the Le Bon Phenomenon
• 8 The Leader and his Crowd: Freud’s Group Psychology (1921)
• 9 The Triumph of the Crowd: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1924–5)
• 10 The Sanity of Crowds and the Madness of Power: Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960)
• AFTERWORD:
• Bibliography
• INDEX