Crowds and Party · 第 60 页

was the collapse of civilization.

The Crowd appeared at a time of increasing worker militancy.⁵⁴ In France, the number of workers in syndicates tripled between 1890 and 1900. The number of strikes quadrupled over two decades. In 1886, in the dramatic miners’ strike in Decazeville, workers threw a deputy director of the company out of a window; he was then mauled to death by the crowd. In 1890, plans for massive May Day demonstrations prompted the government to garrison 38,000 troops in Paris to avert what some feared would be a resurgence of the Commune. Le Bon offered his theory of the crowd as guidance for understanding this new era even though he thought little could be done to shape it. His subsequent fascist admirers try to disprove this second point by drawing from his work in their efforts to stir and channel mass feeling.

Le Bon’s account of crowds arises out of his antipathy toward the transformation of the popular classes into governing classes. Lamenting that the “divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings,” Le Bon decries the way association, far more than universal suffrage, is making the masses conscious of their strength. They are founding syndicates and labor unions, before which authorities capitulate. They aim to limit the hours of labor, nationalize mines, railways, factories, and soil, equalize the distribution of products, and eliminate the upper classes. The claims of the masses, Le Bon warns, “amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization.”⁵⁵ Le Bon’s findings confirmed and amplified already intense anxieties among the elite.

A primary concern of the nineteenth-century crowd theorists was how it was that law-abiding individuals could act like criminals when they were combined together in a crowd. Le Bon’s answer is that a crowd is a new collective being. Assembly into a crowd results in new psychological characteristics as all the thoughts and feelings of the collectivity are turned in an identical direction.⁵⁶ Under conditions that Le Bon attributes to “exciting causes,” something emerges that is not present in individuals alone, “just as in chemistry, certain elements, when brought into contact—bases and acids, for example—combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.”⁵⁷ Despite his claims to originality, Le Bon steals this idea from Sighele, who had been involved in a public dispute with Tarde over who deserved credit for originating crowd theory.⁵⁸ Plagiarizing both, Le Bon schematizes the tropes that had by that time become inseparable from the crowd concept—contagion, suggestion, affective intensification, and de-individualization.⁵⁹

The vehicle for Le Bon’s schematization is the unconscious. He writes, “The substitution of the unconscious actions of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.”⁶⁰ It is this emphasis on the unconscious that provides the opening for psychoanalysis. In Group Psychology, Freud joins the crowd theory discussion via a twist: not only is the crowd unconscious but the unconscious is itself a crowd. Freud thus accepts Le Bon and inverts Le Bon. The inversion is possible because Le Bon’s own concept of the crowd is psychological.

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