{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":110,"pdf_page":109,"physical_index":109,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f24ba50bd7af8b93c7630c4218fb91c8eac5c8ffd2cb79e43111084d661fb86c"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"As leaders emerge, the rank and file become less able to conduct or supervise the organization’s affairs. They have to trust those to whom they’ve delegated the various tasks, perhaps instructing them to provide reports on the work of the group. Generally speaking, most people like it that way. Michels notes that the majority rarely participate. They leave meetings and discussions and organizational tasks to others. “Though it grumbles occasionally,” he writes, “the majority is really delighted to find persons who will take the trouble to look after its affairs.”<sup>32</sup> This delight is an affective response, a shared sensibility, what we might call relief in delegation or the pleasure that arises from pawning tasks onto others. What matters for my argument here is the flow from the technical to the psychological tendency to oligarchy. Michels argues that the majority reveres or even adores their leaders. Accompanying the crowd’s need for direction and guidance is “a genuine cult for the leaders, who are regarded as heroes.” So not only does the crowd need leaders for technical reasons, it is also affectively attached to them.\n\nMichels’s account of this attachment is more suggestive than precise. But a decade before Freud, likely due to the influence of Le Bon and Tarde (he cites both), Michels anticipates key elements of Freud’s crowd psychology. The first is a primitive love. Michels attributes to the crowd the lofty moral quality of gratitude to the leaders for working on its behalf. He observes that leaders ask for gratitude as their reward for service and that the mass regards gratitude “as a sacred duty.”<sup>33</sup> Reelection or long-term support for party leaders displays this gratitude. At the same time, Michels describes an attachment to leaders exceeding the “sense of obligation for services rendered.”<sup>34</sup> This attachment is “an atavistic survival of primitive psychology.” Invoking the British anthropologist James George Frazer on myth and political power, Michels finds a latent “superstitious reverence” even for socialist leaders: “It reveals itself by signs that are barely perceptible, such as the tone of veneration in which the idol’s name is pronounced, the perfect docility with which the least of his signs is obeyed, and the indignation which is aroused by any critical attack upon his personality.”<sup>35</sup> He gives the example of Ferdinand Lassalle’s appearance in the Rhineland in 1864. Lassalle was received “like a god.” Garlands bedecked the streets; maidens threw flowers; the crowd overflowed with “irresistible enthusiasm” and “frenzied applause”—“Nothing was lacking.”<sup>36</sup> Michels notes that this fanatical devotion is not unique. Masses everywhere, in industrial as well as agricultural regions, England as well as Italy, “need to pay adoring worship.”<sup>37</sup> They exhibit, Freud might say, a horde mentality. At times the masses’ veneration of their leaders takes the form of an “imitative mania” that can grow into “absolute idolatry.”<sup>38</sup>\n\nGratitude and reverence are not the only feelings that adhere the crowd to its leaders. The crowd’s admiration also stems from prestige and identification. The prestige of celebrity influences the crowd. Michels invokes Tarde, noting the way fame impresses with the number of admirers. Prestige is like fame insofar as it incorporates the views of many. It’s a matter less of talent than of the esteem held by the crowd. Even as the crowd responds enthusiastically to great orators, it responds even more to the enthusiasm of others, to others’ feelings and responses. These responses indicate the greatness of the oratory, not its content. People adhere with and to others in common admiration. One admires the leader because others do. When celebrity influences us, Michels explains with a quote from Tarde, “it is with the collaboration of many other minds through whom we see it, and whose opinion, without our knowledge, is reflected in our own.”<sup>39</sup> Unconsciously, we see through others. We take the perspective of the many. Our seeing is collective.\n\n110","previous_page":109,"next_page":111}