AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 119

In nineteenth-century
Britain and France,
Charles Mackay (left) and
Gustave Le Bon (right)
pioneered the idea that
crowds are by nature
irrational
Charles Mackay (1814-1889) is best known for his Extraordinary
popular delusions and the madness of crowds (1841), in which he ridiculed
financial ‘bubbles’ and the speculators they attracted. But Mackay was
also fascinated by what is today loosely termed crowd psychology .
Famously, he maintained that people think in herds – and go mad in
herds, too. Reviewing the conduct of angry crowds in Paris in 1720, he
held that no mob, the world over, was as given to derisive singing as
a French one. About the South Sea Bubble of 1718, Mackay felt that the
people’s credulity, avarice and ‘extraordinary infatuation’ with the
possibility of financial gain, though unmentioned in public discourse,
were in fact just as culpable as the widely-hated conduct of the South
Sea Company. Madness, he said, ‘infected’ the people of England.
Mackay harped on about the gullibility of the crowd, its anger,
and its capacity to throw stones when incensed. In all countries, he
wrote, the mob was ‘easily moved’. Yet Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)
was even more hostile to crowds.
Disturbed by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the subsequent
emergence of mass society, Le Bon’s short book The crowd: a study of the
popular mind (1895) was a lesson in hauteur. Crowds, Le Bon argued,
were little adapted to reasoning, but quick to act. The worldwide rise
of powerful crowds marked, in his view, a complete return to past
periods of confused anarchy.
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APPENDIX A: FEARS OF THE CROWD
Writers have long given vent to fears of crowds, often basing
themselves on some pretty dubious sociology. It’s worth reviewing
the work of two key authors here: the Scots sensational journalist
Charles Mackay, and the French anthropologist Gustave Le Bon.
Why? Because in the future, prejudices like theirs – suitably
modernised, no doubt – may come to be aired about the crowds that
attend informal events.