In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will. Gibbon was a sort of conservative radical—contemptuous of Christianity and attached to free-thinking Epicureanism, but fearful of social disorder—and by “the mob” he meant the lumpenproletariat of any big city, his own London as much as his remembered Rome. What do you do when two mobs are shouting at each other during a public election? So Mr. Pickwick is asked in Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers,” set in the eighteen-twenties. “Shout with the largest,” is Mr. Pickwick’s protective advice.
起初是暴民，而暴民是坏的。在吉本 1776 年出版的《罗马帝国衰亡史》中，罗马暴民经常出现，通常是在煽动者的唆使下，大声要求用免费食物和娱乐（“面包与马戏”）来安抚他们，虽然他们没有统治权，但有时他们可以选择谁来统治。吉本是一个保守的激进分子——蔑视基督教，依附于自由思考的伊壁鸠鲁主义，但害怕社会动乱——他所说的“暴民”是指任何大城市的流氓无产阶级，既指他自己的伦敦，也指他记忆中的罗马。当两群暴民在公共选举中互相叫喊时，你会怎么做？在狄更斯以 19 世纪 20 年代为背景的《匹克威克外传》中，匹克威克先生被问到这个问题。“和人多的一起喊，”匹克威克先生的建议是明哲保身。
In time, this fearful conception gave way to an image of the crowd that was, mostly, good, and when bad more comic than anything else. In Charles Mackay’s 1841 “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the people who swarm to buy tulip bulbs in Holland or shares in the South Sea Company in London are frantic and mutually reinforcing, but their victims are chiefly one another. In a capitalist society, the crowd turns inward, focussed more on making money than on extorting it from power. Indeed, the crowd could now be thought of as the “people”—a concept that might merit approval, as in “We, the People,” or abhorrence, as when the Nazis promoted the purity of the Volk, whose blood was being poisoned by outsiders. More recently, the crowd returned as a wholly positive force, full of collective savvy. We got books on the wisdom of crowds, while on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the best way of answering a specialized question was often to sample the audience, smarter as a group than any shrewd contestant alone. “Crowdsourcing” became a cheery thing. Then January 6th happened, and suddenly the twenty-first-century quiz-show crowd seemed to dissolve back into the Roman mob, violent seditionists instigated by a demagogue and aimed at the destruction of the very idea of law.
假以时日，这种可怕的概念让位于一种对大众的印象，这种印象大体上是好的，即使是坏的，也更多的是滑稽而非其他。在查尔斯·麦凯 1841 年出版的《非同寻常的大众幻想与群众的疯狂》一书中，那些蜂拥至荷兰购买郁金香球茎或在伦敦购买南海公司股票的人们疯狂且相互影响，但他们的受害者主要是彼此。在资本主义社会中，大众转向内部，更专注于赚钱而不是从权力中榨取钱财。事实上，大众现在可以被认为是“人民”——一个可能值得赞许的概念，就像“我们人民”一样，或者也可能令人憎恶，就像纳粹鼓吹其民族纯洁性，其血液正被外来者毒害一样。最近，大众作为一种完全积极的力量回归，充满了集体智慧。我们看到了关于群体智慧的书籍，而在“谁想成为百万富翁？”节目中，回答专业问题的最佳方式通常是抽样调查观众，因为群体比任何精明的个人参赛者都更聪明。“众包”成为了一件令人愉快的事情。
然后 1 月 6 日事件发生了，突然之间，21 世纪的智力竞赛观众群似乎退化成了罗马暴民，这些暴乱煽动者受煽动家的唆使，意图摧毁法律的理念本身。
Any such willfully succinct summary will, of course, be bound by a thousand quavers and qualifications, and by a larger question: Have crowds actually changed, or is it simply that the words we use to describe them have altered over time? Are crowds, in reality, only ever-shifting gatherings of rational individuals? Or do people, assembled together into a seething group, become, as the Bulgarian British writer Elias Canetti believed, a thing unto itself, acting in ways that none of the individuals in the group would have undertaken alone? The January 6th crowd was clearly composed of some who wanted to act and many who merely went along. Canetti distinguished between “closed” and “open” crowds: the open crowd, like the one that stormed the Bastille, is the kind in which many people of different allegiances come together for a common, if often ill-defined, cause; the closed crowd is an organized gathering for a predefined purpose. Whether you think the Trumpite mob was a closed crowd (an assembly of paramilitaries with a clear goal of creating enough chaos to end the electoral count) or an open one (a confused agglomeration that scarcely knew where it was going or what it would do until it got there) probably affects your degree of panic or fear about what another Trumpite mob might do.
任何如此刻意简洁的总结，当然都会受到无数细微差别和限定条件的限制，以及一个更大的问题：人群真的改变了吗，或者仅仅是我们用来描述它们的词语随着时间的推移而改变了？人群实际上只是一群理性个体的不断变化的聚集吗？或者，人们聚集在一起，形成一个沸腾的群体时，是否会像保加利亚裔英国作家埃利亚斯·卡内蒂所认为的那样，成为一个独立的事物，以群体中任何个体都不会单独采取的方式行事？1 月 6 日的人群显然由一些想要行动的人和许多只是随波逐流的人组成。卡内蒂区分了“封闭”和“开放”人群：开放人群，就像攻占巴士底狱的人群一样，是许多不同派别的人为一个共同的（即使通常不明确的）目标走到一起的人群；封闭人群是为了预先确定的目的而组织的集会。
无论你认为特朗普支持者的暴民是一个封闭的群体（一群准军事人员，目标明确，即制造足够的混乱以结束选举计票），还是一个开放的群体（一群混乱的聚集者，几乎不知道自己要去哪里或要做什么，直到到达那里），这可能会影响你对另一群特朗普支持者的暴民可能做什么的恐慌或恐惧程度。
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
发现值得关注的新小说和非虚构作品。
Closed or open, crowds persist as historical agents, and have become a field of study all their own. In his new book, “The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages” (Princeton), Shane Bobrycki, a medieval historian at the University of Iowa, describes a hinge moment in the way people have thought about crowds. It was a period when the rapid de-urbanization of society had reduced or eliminated the Roman vulgus, or mob, but when memories of Roman order and disorder lingered. Bobrycki has devoted himself to a blessedly old-fashioned kind of scholarship, digging through ever-finer shades of meaning, sifting through all the Latin terms that refer to crowds and mobs and gatherings. If you have long wanted to discern the subtle differences in medieval Europe between vulgus, plebs, turba, populus, and rustici, here at last is the book to assist you. And these differences do indeed have weight and significance. It’s fascinating to learn how, when the vulgus was forced out of the dying cities and into the countryside, it became the rustici—the peasants with pitchforks. Plebs, meaning, in classical Latin, “common folk,” came to mean, more neutrally, “the community.” Bobrycki assures us, “Even vulgus could be just another equivalent of the broad populus that was now the lodestar of all crowd words.”
无论封闭或开放，人群始终作为历史动因持续存在，并已成为一个独立的研究领域。在其新书《早期中世纪的人群》（普林斯顿大学出版社）中，爱荷华大学的中世纪历史学家 Shane Bobrycki 描述了人们思考人群方式的一个关键时刻。这是一个社会快速去城市化减少或消除了罗马“vulgus”（暴民）的时期，但罗马秩序和混乱的记忆依然挥之不去。Bobrycki 致力于一种值得称道的传统学术，深入挖掘含义的细微差别，筛选所有指称人群、暴民和集会的拉丁语词汇。如果你一直渴望辨别中世纪欧洲“vulgus”、“plebs”、“turba”、“populus”和“rustici”之间的微妙差异，那么这本书终于可以帮助你。这些差异确实具有重要性和意义。了解当“vulgus”被迫离开垂死的城市进入乡村时，如何变成了“rustici”——拿着干草叉的农民，这很有趣。“Plebs”在古典拉丁语中意为“平民”，后来更中性地指“社区”。
Bobrycki 向我们保证，“即使是 vulgus 也可能只是广义 populus 的另一种说法，而 populus 现在是所有人群词汇的指路明灯。
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Bobrycki has an ambivalent attitude toward the era of his attention. You would not take up medieval history as a subject if it held no appeal to you as an object. Gibbon’s take could be simple: life had been better, and then it was worse, and though the causes were complex—Christians and barbarians both playing a part—the result was clear. Bobrycki, by contrast, describes what looks like a catastrophe but labors not to characterize it as such. One day there were hot baths in Britain; the next there weren’t. The thinning of the population which attended what he does not call the Dark Ages, we are assured, “did not make for a better or worse society.” Yes, it did. Prosperous and library-bound Roman civilization—however lamed by cruelty, public executions, slavery—was clearly a better place to be than one where all those evils persisted, along with some new ones, and none of the good things did.
Bobrycki 对他所关注的时代抱有矛盾的态度。如果你对某个主题不感兴趣，你就不会把它作为研究对象，比如中世纪历史。吉本的观点可能很简单：生活曾经更好，然后变得更糟，尽管原因很复杂——基督徒和野蛮人都扮演了一定的角色——但结果是显而易见的。相比之下，Bobrycki 描述了看似一场灾难，但却努力不将其定性为灾难。某一天，英国还有热水澡；第二天，就没有了。他并没有称之为黑暗时代，但人口的减少伴随着这个时代，我们确信，“并没有使社会变得更好或更坏”。不，它确实产生了影响。繁荣的、藏书丰富的罗马文明——无论多么残酷，充斥着公开处决和奴隶制——显然比一个所有这些罪恶依然存在，同时又出现了一些新的罪恶，而所有美好的事物都消失了的地方要好得多。
In any case, early medieval Europe, noted for its de-urbanization, seems like the nadir of crowds, closed and open; Bobrycki notes, in a beautiful understatement, that it “was under-supplied with gatherings.” (On the other hand, he writes, monks and nuns were “crowd specialists,” too, in that they connected themselves to a community that encompassed the living and the departed—a lovely poetic point, though not really what we mean by crowds.) What he finds is the rise of the mini-mob: given that travel was dangerous, dignitaries on the move surrounded themselves with an entourage. This invention proved so potent that we still see it today, as in the history of American hip-hop, whose top men, too, are often uneasy travellers. At the same time, the macro-mob was demoted. In fact, the once powerful idea that crowds had a well-earned veto on rulers’ bad actions was anathema in medieval Europe, where crowds were often “gendered” and likened to hysterical women.
The closed crowds of the period, in turn, included all of the liturgical processions and staged gatherings designed to create at least an illusion of what Bobrycki calls “spontaneous unanimity.” In one memorable incident—after a municipal feud in Ravenna, around the year 700, ended in a Red Wedding-like murder of one clan by another under the pretext of breaking bread—the local archbishop “commanded the whole city to perform a three-day liturgical procession,” Bobrycki writes. Open crowds inclined to homicide could be turned to closed crowds performing penance.
Bobrycki ends with a series of questions. His purpose is to demystify the idea of a crowd as a single thing and instead make us feel it as ever changing and contingent, sometimes being exploited by the ruling class for its own ends—held responsible for acts the rulers want both to encourage and to disavow—and sometimes eerily amplifying the long echo of Roman ritual and literature. The New Testament, the holiest of texts at the time, is itself a Roman document, depicting circumstances of a bygone era, including the city mob crying “Give us Barabbas.” “Arguably the most important discursive function of the tumultuous crowd,” Bobrycki concludes, “was not to condemn its activities, but to obfuscate them. Crowds in discourse were, above all, a tool of plausible deniability.” Even in an uncrowded historical time, the idea of the crowd mattered, as a concept, a dream, a way of thinking about the forms of popular sovereignty when none that we would recognize as such quite existed.
In the past couple of centuries, speculations about the role of crowds have tended to center on the French Revolution—and yet the whirligig of classical and medieval terms remains relevant. Is the crowd merely a vulgus, the unlettered raving, or is it the populus—the community speaking? The French Revolution looms large in the philosophy of crowds because it was the first time that a “mob” or what looked like one was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was, as students of Samuel Adams have learned, very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest. But the French Revolution, though managed by an assemblage of grandees and ideologues, did involve a significant role for large groups of citizens acting on their own. Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.
Yet the nature and role of the crowd in the French Revolution have always been contested. For British conservatives of the late eighteenth century, Burke most memorably, the swarming humanity on display was a vengeful monster of bloodlust and violence. This idea, taken over by the reactionary Thomas Carlyle in his history of the French Revolution, and then even more memorably dramatized by the radical Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities,” was given a more scholarly treatment in the French historian Gustave Le Bon’s “The Psychology of Crowds” (1895). “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual,” Le Bon wrote. “In a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.”
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Against this view comes a counter-tradition that saw the crowd effectively as the people enacting choices. This line of French left-wing interpretation reached its apotheosis in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1960 account of the storming of the Bastille, in which Sartre introduces the notion of a “fused group” to indicate the power of a crowd to mobilize chaotic emotion into compelling action.
Sartre was too familiar with modern history not to see the fascistic potential of any street mob. But his is mainly a positive view of mob action, which could not only bring about political change but provide a kind of shared existential epiphany: in moments of decisive action, we reach as a community beyond our mortal despair. Sartre’s melodrama of the mob rather understates a larger truth: when the Bastille was at last stormed, there were perhaps seven confused prisoners left inside, the population having been reduced by reform over time. The existential epiphany, as so often with Sartre, was purely theatrical. (Camus once mocked Sartre for snoozing during the liberation of Paris, in a comfortable armchair at the Comédie-Française.)
In the British historian George Rudé’s classic book “The Crowd in the French Revolution” (1959), one gets a more nuanced view of the same gang-ups. Rudé breaks down the mobs of the Revolution into their elements, and shows that, far from being the kind of enraged, unitary monster of Le Bon’s fearful description, they were made of precise social kinds—not the true lower ranks of French society but what we could call the petite bourgeoisie, whose specific demands on the state seemed best answered by group action. Neither a bloodthirsty out-of-control monster nor an awakened community, the revolutionary mob was made of craftsmen, small traders, and so on—people who wanted highly specific things, such as more bread and better wages. Very much like their lower-middle-class inheritors among today’s French gilets jaunes, they wanted to protect their modest allotments from the vagaries of big government and the mercantile classes. The Bastille-busters would not, in truth, have been disappointed to find only seven prisoners in the hoosegow. They aimed to make a point, not a prison break.
And when the Revolution was turned into the Empire? There’s a sense in which the rabble was reassembled when the emperor’s Grande Armée arose. Indeed, as the military historian John Keegan says, “inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out,” and the single thing that commanders fear most is that their regimented forces will devolve back into a disorganized crowd.
The British journalist Dan Hancox, in his new book, “Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World” (Verso), goes much further than his scholarly forebears in the effort to defend the crowd from its defamers. He is an unstinting admirer of crowds and crowd action, not just as a means of social change but as a heady social experience of transcendence. He evokes “the thrilling energy generated by a political crowd,” in which one feels “the crackle of history in the air. It follows the realisation that your elected leaders will always fail you, to one degree or another, whether by accident or by design, and flows from the refusal to accept these failings, taking democracy into your own hands, indeed your own body, and letting it guide you out into the town square.” When you experience “crowd power,” he says, “you are lifted out of the present and commune with the eternal crowd, the Bastille crowd.” The crowd is how popular passion opposes power.
His book contains, to be sure, a few “to be sure” moments, in which he acknowledges that crowds may not have an unstained record. But he is reluctant to categorize the more unappealing gatherings as crowds at all. And the criterion for distinguishing virtuous crowds from vicious mobs turns out to be whether they share Hancox’s politics. His position can be defended only by a series of Humpty Dumpty-like equivocations, in which words mean what the speaker wants them to mean. The January 6th protesters who stormed the Capitol—were they not a crowd as confident of taking democracy into their own hands as any other street army? Well, Hancox explains, they were not really a crowd—they were “not a spontaneous, organic outpouring of mass popular resistance, but something instigated from the very top of American political life.” Even if one shares his horror at the Trumpian rhetoric that helped to set them off, no one can doubt that the massed protesters certainly understood themselves to be an outpouring of popular resistance, and, once unleashed, acted violently, incoherently, opportunistically, sometimes with a clear purpose and often without, and all about as “organically” as you could ever want.
The truth is that Dickens’s vision of the maddened mob is hardly a historical fiction. Simon Schama’s memorable history of the French Revolution, “Citizens,” though sympathetic to the republican cause, found much to vindicate the Carlylean view that there was at least latent evil in the revolutionary mob. Certainly, no one can whitewash the vengeful public rituals of the Jacobins, forcing whole families to watch the executions of their members, one by one, in the public square, while, yes, the mob cheered on the killings. Nor does anyone dispute that a Parisian crowd, having taken over a prison, murdered the helpless Princess de Lamballe, mutilated her body, stuck her head on a pike, and paraded with it in front of the Queen’s residence, hoping that she would see what had happened to her friend. The mob may well be manifold—made of many kinds with many purposes, some benign—and still prove murderous.
Hancox would direct our attention elsewhere, focussing his disapproval on the state forces that would contain mass action. And so he praises at length the British crowd that, in 2020, in the city of Bristol, tore down a statue of a slave dealer and philanthropist named Edward Colston, and threw it into the water, on the perfectly understandable grounds that the slave dealer had been responsible for the enslavement and death of enormous numbers of people. Yet, if a mob of morally enraged Thatcherites assembled to destroy the giant bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, on the grounds that his ideology contributed to the needless deaths of millions, Hancox would doubtless find much less to praise in their passionate commitment to their cause.
Nor would his admirable crowds be capable of action in the first place if they were innocent of orchestration. The sink-the-slaver crowd in Bristol was, if not controlled from on high, then certainly no less planned in advance than the stop-the-steal one—hashtagged at a distance, with the whole fuelled with encouragement provided via Twitter and Facebook. The rioters who attacked a mosque in the British town of Southport this past summer, after three children had been stabbed by someone described, wrongly, as a Muslim immigrant, were just as self-organized and spontaneous as the Bristol crowd—and in another way just as “mediated” by their own program of social-media encouragements. What difference would Hancox maintain exists between the two? Surely the Southport rioters felt exactly the same indignation at how badly their elected leaders had failed them as Hancox reports feeling in relation to his causes, and the same wild thrill at finally feeling free to act against perceived injustice.
When you are “taking democracy into your own hands,” what you have in your hands is not democracy, because democracy begins with the recognition that other people have hands, too. The violent Hindu mobs that periodically set upon Muslims in India—sometimes mobilized by an espoused cause no greater than the protection of cows—are just as spontaneous as any of the direct-action protesters whom Hancox celebrates. Everyone was saying “What about going through the official channels?!” Hancox writes scornfully about those who condemned the rioters in Bristol. But nobody was saying that. What they were saying—beginning with Keir Starmer, then the new head of the Labour Party—was: What about submitting our passions to a democratic procedure?
Believing in democratic procedures is not a way of rejecting popular sentiment; it is a recognition that popular sentiment is always dangerously divided. When two mobs confront each other, there is no saying which will yell louder. Starmer had to condemn the rioters’ action, if not their purpose, because he understood that what is actually the largest crowd—i.e., the governing community of citizens—was opposed to mob action even when it approved the rioters’ ends. (The Theodore Roosevelt monument, in front of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, with its subordinated Black and Indigenous figures, was taken down by peaceful action and institutional process, and has been remarkably unmourned.)
Tellingly, there is not a single reference in Hancox’s book to American Southern lynch mobs. Yet they were the very model of spontaneous and organic popular uprisings, street gatherings in defiance of the impotent local police. The absence of imposed state order is exactly what left the poor Black victims swinging. All the heady emotions that, for Hancox, signal the presence of a popular crowd on its spontaneously organic duty gripped those people, too, as they grinned at their hideous handiwork.
The eternal truth, from Rome to now, is that one man’s rampaging mob is another’s righteous protest, and the line between the open crowd and the closed—between Sartre’s fired-up activists finding meaning and Carlyle’s crazed mob seeking blood—remains ever changing. Crowds really are emergent entities, just as Canetti thought: people will do together what they might never do alone. This can be a positive and community-building emotion; crowds supply the reinforcing circles of mutual trust—and, often, the simple insulation of numbers—that keep the authorities at bay. In the carnivalesque spirit, we can be emboldened to laugh together at jokes at the expense of the powerful. But the permission granted by aggregation can also be a wholly cruel and destructive force. That Southern lynch mob brought together people who went to church on Sundays and lived in peace with their Black neighbors, most days.
The point of liberal democracy is to draw group emotions into peaceful contests and orderly exchanges, without trying to reduce the passions that produced the crowd in the first place. As in Dickens, we want to shout with the largest crowd, but first we want to make our crowd the largest, allowing us to shout. We live in fear of what a mob might yet do; we live in hope of what peaceful protest might yet obtain. This ambivalence is built into our social existence, and there’s no running away from it.
Can we speak of the wisdom of crowds? Sometimes. The madness of mobs? Sometimes, too. Perhaps, within the winningly minute range of terms that Bobrycki captures, vulgus and populus and the rest, lies a truth that resonates through centuries, even millennia. We see the shifting varieties of human assembly and search to give them meaning, when the meaning lies exactly in the mutability. To turn a crowd into a mob is always easy; nor should we be surprised when four days later, or four years later, the anarchic mob resisting power becomes the power to be resisted. A crowd can become a mob; a crowd can even become an army. To turn a crowd into a community? Ah, that’s the hard work. ♦
