The Politics of Crowds
Professor: Noga Rotem
T/Th 2:30-4:20
Three major political moments in the last five years revolved around political crowds: the pandemic has deprived us of (and presumably made us miss) the company of other people, in concert halls, marches, sports games, in crowded streets, festivals, movie theaters, etc. The racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 have displayed the great democratic promise of crowds; and the January 6th insurrection brought home the undemocratic and violent potential of crowds.
In this selective survey of Modern Political Thought we will try to make sense of these multiple faces of crowds by reading and discussing political thinkers who studied crowds as either a problem to worry about, or as democracy’s greatest asset, or as both.
Modernity is certainly, among other things, the age of the crowd. The 19th century saw the emergence of the new science of “mass psychology” which responded to the emergence of the masses since the French and Haitian revolutions. Crowd theorists saw the crowd as dangerous, hysterical, as dissolving individuality, as unruly, or, alternatively, as given over to the leader. While these theorists saw in the crowd a great threat to democracy and to the rule of law, others (or sometimes the very same thinkers, in different contexts), however, saw miraculous moments in these spontaneous gatherings – instances of public joy, and sources of democratic and revolutionary hope. How can we account for that disparity?
We will ask, further: what distinguishes the violent mob from the democratic crowd? What drives people to take to the streets (or: what does the crowd want)? What kind of emotions (also known as affects) do the people of the crowd share (rage? sympathy? pity? joy?) and why does it matter? What is the bodily experience of being in a crowd? What happens to the agency of subjects in crowds? What do actual historical events and movements in modernity (such as the American, French, Haitian, Iranian and Egyptian revolutions, the Algerian War, the feminist movement) teach us about the political promises and dangers of crowds?
We will read canonical modern texts by Hannah Arendt, C.L.R James, Frantz Fanon, Michele Foucault and others. The class consists of two main units: the first, “The Phenomenology and Choreography of Crowds” will focus on the bodily experience of being in a crowd and on the crowd’s form and movement and their political importance. And the second unit, “From Crowd to People: The Age of Revolution” will look at the major historical revolutions that took place in modernity, focusing on the revolution as a moment of founding where the crowd or the mob becomes a people.
This class focuses on modernity in two complementary levels: it reads modern (and some contemporary) political thinkers, and, it also discusses works that respond to modern historical events. This is thus an opportunity not only to read modern political thought, but also to see how political theory is very much grounded in the world and responds to the political events of the time.