Any­one famil­iar with ‘crowd the­ory’ will have been told repeat­edly that Gus­tave Le Bon is an ori­gin. This asser­tion is quickly masked by obfus­ca­tion. He is not a first, of course, pre­ceded by the his­to­rian Taine and the early crim­i­nol­o­gists Lom­broso and Sighele. But Le Bon is the one who draws these dis­persed though influ­en­tial works together into a tra­di­tion or a the­ory. He con­sti­tutes an iden­tity of crowd psy­chol­ogy, crowd the­ory or even social psy­chol­ogy. Le Bon was a pop­u­lar­izer and a syn­the­sizer, rejected by the aca­d­e­mic and sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment, he writes for pop­u­lar audi­ences. And with The Crowd he cer­tainly finds one. In a sense, Le Bon per­fectly instan­ti­ates the para­dox of ori­gins. They do not begin any­thing but are still the begin­ning. Le Bon is not the start of think­ing about crowds. But he con­sti­tutes a dis­course, or bet­ter, we ret­ro­spec­tively con­sti­tute the dis­course of crowd the­ory by ascrib­ing Le Bon the orig­i­nat­ing sta­tus. To put it in the most banal and obvi­ous of ways: when we start talk­ing about crowds with Le Bon, we make him the start. This ori­gin then echoes through the oeu­vre, requir­ing that each per­son who takes up the the­o­ri­sa­tion must work hard to try to over­come the ori­gin that we our­selves perpetuate.
古斯塔夫·勒龐被視為群眾理論的起源。

Le Bon’s crowd is a sav­age thing. But sav­agery does not sim­ply equate to con­dem­na­tion – although that comes as well. To begin, the crowd is not an aggre­ga­tion of indi­vid­u­als. It is not made up of a col­lec­tion of sin­gle enti­ties, but rather in this gath­er­ing a new sub­ject it born. The crowd is a col­lec­tive uncon­scious­ness. When men enter the heav­ing mass of the crowd they descend the lev­els of civil­i­sa­tion, los­ing their indi­vid­u­al­ity and regress­ing to their com­mon uncon­scious nature.¹ In this sense, Man’s most base instincts are released.
勒龐的群眾是一個野蠻的事物。但是野蠻並不等同於譴責 - 儘管也有這種情況。首先,群眾不是個人的集合體。它不是由單個實體的集合組成的,而是在這次聚會中誕生了一個新的主體。群眾是一種集體無意識。當人們進入群眾的沸騰質量中時,他們就會下降到文明的水平,失去個性並倒退到他們共同的無意識本性。在這個意義上,人類最基本的本能被釋放了。

A crowd is not merely impul­sive and mobile [in its sen­ti­ments]. Like a sav­age, it is not pre­pared to admit any­thing can come between its desire and the real­i­sa­tion of its desire. It is the less capa­ble of under­stand­ing such inter­ven­tions, in con­se­quence of the feel­ing of irrestible power given it by its numer­i­cal strenght. The notion of impos­si­bil­ity dis­ap­pears for the indi­vid­ual in a crowd. An indi­vid­ual knows well enough that alone he can­not set fire to a palace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will eas­ily resist the temp­ta­tion. Mak­ing part of a crowd, he is con­scious of the power given to him by num­ber, and it is suf­fi­cient to sug­gest to him the ideas of mur­der and pil­lage for him to yield imme­di­ately to temp­ta­tion.²
群眾並非只是衝動和移動[在其情感上]。像一個野蠻人,它沒有準備接受任何東西會出現在它的欲望和願望實現之間。由於其數量優勢給予的不可抗拒的力量感,它越是無法理解這種干預。對個人而言,在人群中,不可能的概念消失了。個人很清楚,單獨一個人無法縱火燒毀宮殿或劫掠商店,如果受到誘惑,他會很容易抗拒。作為群眾的一份子,他意識到數量給予他的力量,僅僅是向他暗示謀殺和搶劫的想法,他就會立即屈服於誘惑。

The crowd, ‘like a sav­age’ will not allow any inter­rup­tion between that which it desires and the real­i­sa­tion of this desire. Theindi­vid­ual can quickly repress any desire he might have had to over­throw, loot or pil­lage. His civil­i­sa­tion depends pre­cisely upon his abil­ity to sus­pend the real­i­sa­tion of his desire. In fact, the extent to which he is civilised is deter­mined by the extent to which this thought even enters his head. Some­one who has to con­sciously repress the urge to trans­gress has not suf­fi­ciently inte­ri­orised this civilisation.
群眾，「像野蠻人一樣」不會允許任何干擾在它所渴望的事物與實現這種渴望之間。個人可以迅速壓抑任何他可能有的推翻、劫掠或搶劫的慾望。他的文明正是基於他能夠暫停實現自己欲望的能力。事實上,他被文明化的程度取決於這種想法進入他腦海的程度。有意識地壓抑違法的衝動的人尚未充分內化這種文明。

The sus­pen­sion of indi­vid­u­al­ity in the crowd is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the sus­pen­sion of civil­i­sa­tion. Man is ‘torn between the pri­mal ele­ments of sen­ti­ment and rea­son, the lat­ter hav­ing emerged only recently in human evo­lu­tion and sel­dom exer­cis­ing real influ­ence on human affairs.… All emo­tions, fear, hate and sex­ual pas­sions, were sur­vivals of sav­agery, and, accord­ing to Le Bon, espe­cially dom­i­nant in those who lacked the oppo­site prin­ci­ple, rea­son.’³ The crowd is sav­age, unrea­soned. With the sus­pen­sion of indi­vid­u­al­ity, comes sug­gestibil­ity. The crowd is a col­lec­tive sub­ject capa­ble of being infi­nitely directed from above. This sounds like the crowd is being framed as a pure instru­ment, but the leader’s own psy­chol­ogy is not the ratio­nal Machi­avel­lian idea that we might expect. Leaders:
在人群中個體性的暫停,是文明暫停的表現。人『被一種原始情感和理性的元素撕裂,後者在人類演化中才剛剛出現,且極少對人類事務產生實際影響。...所有情緒,恐懼、仇恨和性激情,都是野蠻殘餘,特別體現在缺乏相反原理理性的人身上。』群眾是野蠻的、無理的。伴隨個體性的暫停而來的是可被暗示性。群眾是一個可以無限受高層領導的集體主體。這聽起來好像群眾被框定為純粹的工具,但領導者自己的心理卻並非我們所期待的理性的馬基維利主義思想。領導者:

are espe­cially recruited from the ranks of those mor­bidly ner­vous, excitable, half-deranged per­sons who are bor­der­ing on mad­ness…. They sac­ri­fice their per­sonal inter­est, their fam­ily – every­thing. The very instinct for self-preservation is entirely oblit­er­ated in them, and so much so that often the only rec­om­pense they solicit is that of mar­tyr­dom….. The mul­ti­tude is always ready to lis­ten to the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose him­self upon it. Men gath­ered in a crowd lose all force of will and turn instinc­tively to the per­son who pos­sesses the qual­ity they lack.⁴
特別從那些痛苦神經質、易激動、半瘋狂的人員中招募。他們犧牲了個人利益、家庭,甚至一切。自我保護的本能在他們那裡完全被消除。他們所求的僅僅是烈士般的報償。群眾總是樂意傾聽一個強意志的人,他知道如何在群眾中施加自己的影響。群眾失去了意志力,本能地服從擁有他們所缺乏品質的人。

These lead­ers start from the mass, but break away by their fix­a­tion upon an idea. The are pos­sessed by the idea. ‘It has taken poses­sion of him to such a degree that every­thing out­side it van­ishes, and that every con­trary opin­ion appears to him an error or a super­sti­tion.’⁵ The leader uses the crowd instru­men­tally, cer­tainly, but they are not in con­trol of their use, their desires. Instead it is the idea which pos­sesses them that has become sov­er­eign. Their maddness, their pos­ses­sion by the idea, gen­er­ates a crowd that is rabid.
這些領導者起源於群眾,但被對一個想法的迷戀所束縛。他們被這個想法佔有。「它佔有他們的程度到了一個地步,以至於一切外部事物都消失了,任何相反的意見在他們看來都是錯誤或迷信。」⁵這位領導者無疑利用群眾,但他們並不控制他們的使用和欲望。相反,是佔有他們的想法成為了主宰。他們的瘋狂,他們被這個想法佔有,產生了狂熱的群眾。

Cru­cially then, the crowd become an expres­sion of the lead­ers uncon­scious­ness. ⁶ This uncon­scious­ness how­ever, is not a mys­ti­cal thing, but rather it stems from the shared hered­i­tary (racial) nature of the crowd. And this is what so often goes unsaid in the var­i­ous accounts of Le Bon, par­tic­u­larly in the post-Freudian read­ings. In their regres­sion down the line of civil­i­sa­tion, the crowd return to their ‘com­mon origns’. Pre­vi­ously in The Psy­chol­ogy of Peo­ples, Le Bon wrote:
關鍵是,群眾成為領導者潛意識的表達。這種潛意識並非神秘事物,而是源於群眾所共享的遺傳(種族)本性。這是在各種關於勒龐的說法中常被忽略的。在退回到文明的原點上,群眾回到了他們的'共同起源'。在《人群心理學》中,勒龐曾寫到:

This iden­tity of the men­tal con­sti­tu­tion of the major­ity of the indi­vid­u­als of a race is due to very sim­ple phys­i­o­log­i­cal rea­sons. Each indi­vid­ual is the prod­uct not merely of his imme­di­ate pre­ci­dents but also of his race, that is of the entire series of his ascen­dents. A learned econ­o­mist M. Cheysson has cal­cu­lated that in France, sup­pos­ingth­ere to be three gen­er­a­tions in a cen­tury, each of us would have in his veins the blood of twenty mil­lion of the peo­ple liv­ing in the year 1000. ‘In con­se­quence all inhab­i­tants of a given local­ity, of a given dis­trict, nec­es­sar­ily pos­sess com­mon ances­tors, are moulded of the same clay, bear the same impress, and they are all brought back unceas­ingly to the aver­age type by this long and heavy chain, of which they are merely the last links. We are the chil­dren at once of our par­ents and our race. Our coun­try is our sec­ond mother for phys­i­o­log­i­cal and hered­i­tary as well as sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons.’’⁷
某一個種族中大多數人的心理構成的同一性,是由於非常簡單的生理原因所造成的。每個個體都不僅是其直接前輩的產物,也是其整個種族的後代。一位受學的經濟學家謝松先生計算過,在法國,假設每個世紀有三代人,那麼我們每個人的血管中都會有來自公元 1000 年時期二千萬人的血液。因此,同一地區、同一區域的所有居民都擁有共同的祖先,都是由同樣的泥土塑造,都承載著相同的印記,並且通過漫長而深重的連鎖永遠被拉回到平均類型。我們既是父母的孩子,也是種族的孩子。從生理和遺傳,也從情感上來說,我們的國家就是我們的第二個母親。

As he repeats, through­out his odi­ous oeu­vre, the crowd is an expres­sion of the psy­chol­ogy of quasi-national races.⁸ Thus he can say that crowds ‘are every­where dis­tin­guished by fem­i­nine char­ac­ter­is­tics, but Latin crowds are the most fem­i­nine of all.’⁹ He con­trasts the ‘latin crowd’ with the ‘anglo-saxon crowd’, which is more sta­ble and less likely to spring into being at the slight­est national insult.¹⁰
他不斷重複,通過他令人厭惡的作品,群眾是半民族性種族心理的表達。⁸因此,他可以說群眾"無一例外都帶有女性特徵,但拉丁人群眾是最具女性特點的"。⁹他將"拉丁人群眾"與"英美群眾"形成對比,後者更加穩定,不太容易因最微小的民族侮辱而爆發。¹⁰

Race is the cru­cial deter­min­ing fea­ture of Le Bon’s work. In Ori­en­tal­ism, Said was cor­rect to say that Les Lois Psy­chologiques de L’Evolution des Peu­ples (1894) is the par­a­digm of a type of ori­en­tal­ism that:
种族是勒邦作品的关键决定性特征。在《东方主义》中,萨义德正确地说,《种族心理学法则》(1894)是一种东方主义范例,即:

was linked… to ele­ments in West­ern soci­ety (delin­quents, the insane, women, the poor) hav­ing in com­mon an iden­tity best described as lam­en­ta­bly alien. Ori­en­tals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analysed not as cit­i­zens, or even peo­ple, but as prob­lems to be solved or con­fined or – as the colo­nial pow­ers openly cov­eted their ter­ri­tory – taken over. The point is that the very des­ig­na­tion of some­thing as Ori­en­tal involved an already pro­nounced evau­la­tive judg­ment, and in the case of the peo­ples inhab­it­ing the decayed Ottoman Empire, an implicit pro­gram of action. Since the Ori­en­tal was a mem­ber of a sub­ject race, he had to be sub­jected: it was that sim­ple.¹¹
被連結到西方社會(違法者、精神病患者、婦女、窮人)有著可悲的異質身分。東方人很少被注意或觀看;他們被當作對象,不是作為公民或人,而是需要解決或約束的問題,或者—正如殖民大國羨慕他們的領土—需要被征服。問題在於,將某物稱為東方已涉及一項已經明確的評判,而對於居住在衰落的奧斯曼帝國的人民而言,則隱含著一項行動計劃。因為東方人是一個臣屬種族的成員,所以必須臣屬:這就是問題的核心所在。

But unlike the rest of his work where the sav­age oth­ers are analysed through the degen­er­ates of France, The Crowd uses the ori­en­tal to under­stand ‘west­ern civil­i­sa­tion’. The sav­age other is there within ‘west­ern civil­i­sa­tion’, as Said notes.
但與他其餘作品不同,在那裡野蠻的他者是通過法國的退化者分析的,群眾使用東方人來理解'西方文明'。正如賽義德指出,野蠻的他者存在於'西方文明'之中。

In The Crowd, it is not sim­ply a mat­ter of den­i­grat­ing the crowds as ori­en­tal, but mak­ing them ‘the objects of a new tech­nol­ogy of power.’¹² The crowds’ for­ma­tion and ten­den­cies are shaped by the shared herdi­tary uncon­scious­ness of the par­tic­i­pants.¹³ The crowd was the sav­age within society/the indi­vid­ual, capa­ble of ter­ri­ble acts of degri­da­tion. How­ever, Le Bon also notes that the crowd, the sav­age beast, is also capa­ble of acts of fero­cious hero­ism. In fact, he insists that were it not for the crowd, ‘civil­i­sa­tion would not have grown up on our planet, and human­ity would have had no his­tory.’¹⁴ The crowd is the motor of his­tory, bru­tally dri­ving mankind for­ward. Thus, we dis­cover a strange moment in Le Bon’s analy­sis of crowds. The crowd is an echo of an old form of mankind (sen­ti­ment), super­sceded in West­ern soci­ety by the higher level of con­scious­ness (rea­son). But yet the motor of this progress, this evo­lu­tion of Man, is pre­cisely the crowd. To have his­tory which leads to higher con­scious­ness, Man must first regress to the unthink­ing, uncon­scious Man. Irra­tional­ity is the motor of rea­son. Le Bon sees a meta­phys­i­cal dichotomy between ‘sen­ti­ment’ and ‘rea­son’; between pas­sion, affect and sav­agery on one side; with civil­i­sa­tion, rea­son and indi­vid­u­al­ity on the other. Because he sees rea­son as a recent addi­tion in the long chain of the his­tory of man’s evo­lu­tion, it has not been ‘bed­ded in’. Civil­i­sa­tion still lies on the sur­face. To ‘bed it in’ fur­ther, Man must live through rea­son for gen­er­a­tions. The progress of civil­i­sa­tion does not march inex­orably, how­ever, because the crowd (of sen­ti­ment and sav­agery) threat­ens its course. And yet this threat also presents the process whereby rea­son progresses.
群眾 群眾中，這不僅僅是貶低群眾為東方人，而是將他們視為「新權力技術的對象」。¹²參與者共同的潛意識遺傳形塑了群眾的形成及傾向。¹³群眾是社會/個人內部的野蠻面,能夠做出可怕的退化行為。然而,勒龐也指出,群眾這隻野獸,也同樣能夠做出勇敢的英雄主義行為。實際上,他堅持,如果沒有群眾,「文明不會在我們的星球上發展,人類也就沒有歷史」。¹⁴群眾是歷史的推動力,殘暴地推動人類前進。因此,我們在勒龐對群眾的分析中發現了一個奇特的時刻。群眾是人類舊形態(感性)的回響,在西方社會被更高層次的意識(理性)所取代。但是,這種進步,這種人類的演化,的動力正是群眾。要有導向更高意識的歷史,人類必須首先退回到無思考、無意識的狀態。非理性是理性的動力。勒龐看到「感性」和「理性」之間的形而上二元對立;一方是激情、感性和野蠻,另一方是文明、理性和個性。由於他認為理性是人類歷史長河中最近才出現的,所以它還沒有根深蒂固。文明還停留在表面。要使其深植,人類必須通過理性生活若干代。然而,文明的進步並非必然,因為群眾(感性和野蠻)的威脅也是理性進步的過程。

Le Bon draws our atten­tion¹⁵ to the con­ti­nu­ity between west­ern civil­i­sa­tion and sav­age colo­nial­ism. Iden­ti­fy­ing that beas­t­ial acts are per­formed in the name of rea­son, but this beas­t­ial­ity is not exter­nal to rea­son, it is its dark side. In other words, The Crowd intu­its that beas­t­ial­ity is actu­ally a fun­da­men­tal part of civil­i­sa­tion. If Man is beas­t­ial to ensure civil­i­sa­tion, if civil­i­sa­tion is civilised because of beas­t­ial­ity, then the two form a con­ti­nu­ity not a break: Civil­i­sa­tion and bar­barism are on a moe­bus strip, front turns into back and then front again with­out inter­rup­tion. Civil­i­sa­tion is/becomes bar­barism, and bar­barism is/becomes civil­i­sa­tion. Le Bon, how­ever, does not see this as a cri­tique. Per­haps Le Bon did not even quite realise the con­tours of the idea that he was propos­ing. But this con­ti­nu­ity between civil­i­sa­tion and bar­barism, would later become cru­cial to the rad­i­cal responses to Euro­pean ‘enlight­en­ment’ and colo­nial­ism. The Sur­re­al­ists,¹⁶ for instance, in 1932 penned theMur­der­ous Human­i­tar­i­an­ism pam­phlet: ‘The colo­nial machin­ery that extracts the last penny from nat­ural advan­tages ham­mers away with the joy­ful reg­u­lar­ity of a pole ax. The white man preaches, doses, vac­ci­nates, assas­si­nates and (from him­self) receives abso­lu­tion. With his psalms, his speeches, his guar­an­tees of lib­erty, equal­ity and fra­ter­nity, he seeks to drown the noise of his machine guns.’ Or again, dif­fer­ently in 1950 Aimé Césaire would write in Dis­course on Colo­nial­ism:
勒邦引起我們的注意¹⁵到西方文明與野蠻殖民主義之間的連續性。他認定野獸般的行為是以理性的名義來進行的,但這種野蠻性並不是外在於理性,而是它的黑暗面。換句話說,群眾直覺到野蠻性實際上是文明的基本組成部分。如果人為了確保文明而表現得野蠻,如果文明是因為野蠻性而文明,那麼這兩者就是連續而非分裂的:文明和野蠻是在一條莫比烏斯帶上,前變成後,後再變前,無間斷地循環。文明就是/變成野蠻,野蠻就是/變成文明。然而,勒邦並未將此視為批判。也許勒邦自己也未完全意識到他所提出概念的輪廓。但這種文明與野蠻的連續性,日後將成為對歐洲"啟蒙"和殖民主義的激進回應的關鍵。例如,在 1932 年,超現實主義者¹⁶寫下了殺人的人道主義小冊:「殖民機器從自然優勢中榨取最後一文錢,以斧頭般的快樂規律砰砰作響。白人傳教,施藥,接種,刺殺,並(從自己身上)獲得赦免。憑藉他的詩篇、演講和自由、平等、博愛的保證,他試圖淹沒機關槍的聲音。」又或者,1950 年艾美·塞澤爾在《殖民主義演講》中寫道:

First we must study how col­o­niza­tion works to deciv­i­lize the col­o­nizer, to bru­tal­ize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to cov­etous­ness, vio­lence, race hatred, and moral rel­a­tivism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off in Viet­nam and in France they accept the fact, each time a lit­tle girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Mada­gas­can is tor­tured and in France they accept the fact, civil­i­sa­tion acquires another dead weight, a uni­ver­sal regres­sion takes place, a gan­grene sets in, a cen­tre of infec­tion begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been vio­lated, all these lies that have been prop­a­gated…, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encour­aged, all the boast­ful­ness that has been dis­played, a poi­son has been dis­tilled into the veins of Europe and slowly but surely, he con­ti­nent pro­ceeds toward sav­agery.¹⁷
首先,我們必須研究殖民化如何使殖民者去文明化,在真正意義上使其野蠻化,使其墮落,喚醒其被埋藏的本能,如貪婪、暴力、種族仇恨和道德相對主義。我們必須表明,每當越南和法國斬首一人,他們都接受這個事實;每當一個小女孩被強暴,他們都接受這個事實;每當一個馬達加斯加人遭到酷刑,他們都接受這個事實,文明就會增添另一個死亡的負重,一種普遍的倒退就會發生,一種溃疽就會開始蔓延;最後,在所有被違反的條約、被散佈的謊言之後,在所有被鼓勵的種族虛榮和被展示的自負之後,一種毒藥就被酿造進了歐洲的血管,慢慢而確定地,這個大陸走向野蠻。

He notes that Fas­cism was the result of a ‘boomerang effect’: ‘before they were its vic­tims, they were its accom­plices; that they tol­er­ated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legit­imized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peo­ples.’¹⁸
他指出,法西斯主義是一種"回旋效應"的結果:"在成為它的受害者之前,他們是它的同謀;他們容忍納粹主義在它被加諸於他們之前,他們原諒了它,閉上眼睛,合法化了它,因為在那之前,它只被施加到非歐洲人民身上。"¹⁸

As Laclau notes, The Crowd stands at a cross­roads, between the nine­teenth cen­tury ways of think­ing about crowds as an abber­a­tion and the mod­ern real­ity wherein they were des­tined to stay. In this, ‘they can­not be dis­missed and sum­mar­ily con­demned, but have to become the objects of a new tech­nol­ogy of power.’¹⁹ The life of the crowd must become the new polit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a more per­fect instan­ti­a­tion of biopol­i­tics. In fact the entire edi­fice of Le Bon’s thought is like a micro­cosm of an intense biopol­i­tics: The com­mon hered­ity (the bio­log­i­cal life and lin­eage) of a race deter­mines the uncon­scious of a par­tic­u­lar national group­ing. The racial hered­ity is fed back to the same group­ing as a process of val­oris­ing its power to over­come its den­i­gra­tion. This uncon­scious emerges in crowds which are, to be turned to the task of renew­ing west­ern civil­i­sa­tion. The sav­age crowd must be dis­ci­plined, but also it must be brought to bear on the declin­ing civil­i­sa­tion to drive its evo­lu­tion onwards. It is dis­ci­plined by the right sort of leaders.
正如拉克勞所指出的,《群眾》站在十九世紀將群眾視為異常現象與現代現實之間的十字路口,後者認為群眾注定會持續存在。在這裡,「群眾不能被輕易地否定和定罪,而必須成為新權力技術的對象」。群眾的生活必須成為新的政治技術,這完全體現了生政治學的概念。事實上,勒龐的思想體系就像是一個激烈的生政治學的縮影:種族的共同遺傳(生物學上的生命和系譜)決定了特定民族群體的潛意識。這種種族遺傳又回饋給同一群體,成為提升其力量以克服羞辱的過程。這種潛意識在群眾中浮現,並將其導向更新西方文明的任務。野蠻的群眾必須受到紀律約束,但也必須用來推動衰落的文明向前發展。它由適當的領導者加以約束。

With Le Bon, as I began, we have reached an ori­gin. The ori­gin of a think­ing of crowds, whose line runs from the colo­nial through to fas­cism and into cer­tain (para­mil­i­tary) police log­ics. It is not the den­i­gra­tion of the crowd that is the prob­lem. It is not his pol­i­tics, as many the­o­rists sug­gest. Rather it is his very ontol­ogy that is at stake. As we have seen from the var­i­ous recu­per­a­tions of Schmitt, one’s pol­i­tics can be under­mined if there is the germ of util­ity in your ontol­ogy. How­ever, Le Bon’s ontol­ogy is poi­son. When placed upon the racial reg­is­ter it becomes pre­cisely the stuff of fascism.
與勒邦一起,正如我開始時所說,我們已經到達一個源頭。群眾思想的源頭,其線條從殖民主義一直延伸到法西斯主義,並進入某些（半軍事性）警察邏輯。問題不在於對群眾的貶低。問題也不在於他的政治,正如許多理論家所建議的那樣。問題在於他的本體論本身。正如我們從施米特的各種復興中看到的,如果你的本體論中存在效用的種子,你的政治就可能受到破壞。然而,勒邦的本體論是有毒的。當它被置於種族登記冊上時,它正好成為法西斯主義的材料。

Details of the Crowded Sovereignty Project can be found here, along with all previous posts.
人群主權計劃的詳情可在此找到，以及所有先前的帖子。