Milieu 11 of 12
Older foundations and early crowd theory
The founding question is not why tyrants rule but why millions obey, and it was asked by an eighteen-year-old in the sixteenth century.
- Years
- Roughly 1548 to 1939
- Location
- France, Italy, Russia, Germany, the United States
- Funder
- Not a funded programme. Individual works across four centuries, grouped here because everything later rests on them.
- Institution
- UNKNOWN. No common institution.
La Boétie, and the question underneath everything
Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, written around 1548 when he was about eighteen and circulated in manuscript.
The question is not why tyrants want to rule. It is why millions obey a man who has only the power they lend him. Stop lending it and he falls, with no violence required at all.
Everything from Gramsci to Gene Sharp is downstream of this, and Havel's greengrocer is the twentieth-century restatement.
Tarde against Le Bon
Gabriel Tarde, L'opinion et la foule (1901), argued against Le Bon that the modern formation is not the physical crowd but the public: dispersed, never assembled, held together only by simultaneous reading of the same newspaper.
He identified the mediated public decades before broadcast, and network theory has substantially rehabilitated him. What his mechanism does under recommender systems, where people read different feeds at different times, is one of the open questions.
Included for its effect, not its truth
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1895) is weak as science and historically decisive. It was read by Mussolini, by Hitler, and by the founders of public relations. It belongs here because of what it did, not because of what it established, and reading it that way is a useful exercise in itself.
The technician's account
Serge Chakhotin, The Rape of the Masses (1939). A student of Pavlov who worked on anti-Nazi symbol campaigns for the German Social Democrats and analysed propaganda as conditioned reflex. A rare thing: a technical account written by someone using the techniques defensively, and aware of the problem with that.
Veblen
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Engineers and the Price System (1921). Conspicuous consumption as a status control mechanism, sabotage as a normal business practice rather than a scandal, and the rule of a technical class as a live proposal rather than a warning.