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Article Dans Une Revue Re-Visiones Année : 2013

The Imagination of Crowds

Résumé

Literature produced around the notion of charisma (attributed to the chief, the master, the leader, the Father, the guru, the boss, etc.) has supplied, in the past, arguments for Nazi and Fascist propaganda (Cohen 2013; De Felice 1968). This seems clear by Hitler and Mussolini's great interest for Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), translated in English one year later (Le Bon 2001). How does Le Bon describe the absence of control, the exceptional character and the radical alterity of this crowd or "multitude" (Le Bon, 2001: 68)? In his major book, Gustave Le Bon - father of social psychology, in late nineteenth century - builds a visual theory of the crowd and a visual politics of charismatic domination. Nevertheless, we can conclude that Le Bon formulated a false hypothesis, based on a false effective appearance. As we have seen, Le Bon explains throughout his treatise, what are the characteristics of the "crowds", why do they need to be commanded by a charismatic chief, and how shall this chief behave, purposely using the visual to give a political form to the crowd, and to maintain the multitude under his control. The efficacy of visual representation is the means through which the dominant class can maintain his power. My hypothesis is that, following the use made after The Crowd by early twentieth century men of industry, liberal western statesmen, and European dictators -, Le Bon's thesis has worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Le Bon produces a strange relationship between belief and behaviour, where the content of the first shapes the second. Making Le Bon's theory of charismatic leadership a self-fulfilling prophecy, means not distinguishing between from one side, the political and visual imagination of a crowd, and, from the other side, the shaping of a crowd. Formulating clearly this distinction seems to be a necessary act of critique. Le Bon captures the fact that an affective dynamics constitutes the charismatic relationship between a chief and a crowd, but then denies the very same fact: if, according to the sociological observation, crowds are strongly imaginative and imagining, and the leader projects images, why the nature of this relationship, as a power relationship, is occulted? Not distinguishing between imagination of crowds and crowd moulding: this is how Le Bon's argument fulfils itself, as if it were the formula of a prophetic authority. It has already been said how Le Bon's theory has been used for purposes of propaganda, but it has not been explained why and how his hypothesis have been so successful, why it really has produced charismatic regimes, despite the fact that Le Bon denies, in fact, the heart of the very same hypothesis he carries on. Actually, there is an opposition between the political interest undermined by Le Bon's argument, and the fact that it is a hypothesis, an observation. The hypothesis is false, and the political interest denied, that's why it is so important to stress on the distinction raised by Yves Cohen. In Le Siècle des chefs, he immediately points the political effect of not distinguishing, in producing a naturalization of hierarchy. Therefore, Cohen suggests distinguishing between the interest for the chief and the need for a chief. How do Le Bon's visually produces this ambiguity, between " the way the observation is formulated (vocabulary) " and the way the same observation is " elaborated (sociological thesis) "?
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Dates et versions

hal-00908445 , version 1 (23-11-2013)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00908445 , version 1

Citer

Francesca Martinez Tagliavia. The Imagination of Crowds: The efficacy of a false hypothesis. Re-Visiones, 2013, n°3. ⟨hal-00908445⟩

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