The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular governmentFollett, Mary Parker
Science
The new state : $b Group organization the solution of popular government
Follett, Mary Parker
Democracy; Political participation; Social psychology; State, The
Some writers seem to think that the difference between a crowd and a
not-crowd is the difference between organized and unorganized, and the
example is given of laborers unorganized as a crowd and of a trade-union
as a not-crowd. But a trade-union can be and often is a crowd.
We have distinguished between the crowd and the group; it is also
necessary to distinguish between the crowd and the mob. Often the crowd
or mass is confused with the mob. The examples given of the mass or
crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken audience in
a theatre fire, the mobs of the French Revolution. But all these are
very different from a mass of people merely acting under the same
suggestion, so different that we need different names for them. We might
for the moment call one a crowd and the other a mob.
An unfortunate stigma has often attached itself to the crowd mind
because of this tendency to think of the crowd mind as always exhibiting
itself in inferior ways. Mass enthusiasm, it is true, may lead to riots,
but also it may lead to heroic deeds. People talk much of the panic of a
crowd, but every soldier knows that men are brave, too, in a mass.
Students have often studied what they called the mass mind when it was
under the stress of great nervous strain and at a high pitch of
excitement, and then have said the mass acts thus and so. It has been
thought legitimate to draw conclusions concerning the nature of the mass
mind from an hysterical mob. It has been assumed that a crowd was
necessarily, as a crowd, in a condition of hysteria. It has often been
taken for granted that a crowd _is_ a pathological condition. And color
has been given to this theory by the fact that we owe much of our
knowledge of the laws of suggestion to pathologists.
But the laws of the mass can be studied in ordinary collections of
people who are not abnormally excited, who are not subjects for
pathologists. The laws of the mass as of the mob are, it is true, the
laws of suggestion and imitation, but the mob is such an extreme case of
the mass that it is necessary to make some distinction between them.
Emotion in the crowd as in the mob is intensified by the consciousness
that others are sharing it, but the mob is this crowd emotion carried to
an extreme. As normal suggestibility is the law of the mass, so abnormal
suggestibility is the law of the mob. In abnormal suggestibility the
controlling act of the will is absent, but in normal suggestibility you
have the will in control and using its power of choice over the material
offered by suggestion. Moreover, it must be remembered that emotional
disturbance is not always the cause of the condition of suggestibility:
the will may lose its ascendancy from other causes than excitement;
suggestibility often comes from exhaustion or habit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account