Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World

Hancox, Dan

ISBN 10: 1804294489 / ISBN 13: 9781804294482

Published by Verso, 2024

About this Item

LIKE NEW!!! Has a red or black remainder mark on bottom/exterior edge of pages.

Seller Inventory # 478328

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1804294489
• ISBN 13: 9781804294482
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

In pursuit of the liberating powers of the crowd

Despite what politicians, philosophers and the press have long told us, every peaceful crowd is not a violent mob in waiting. Dan Hancox argues it is time to rethink long-held assumptions about crowd behaviour and psychology, as well as the part crowds play in our lives. The story of the modern world is the story of multitudes in action. Crowds are the ultimate force for change: the bringer of conviviality, euphoria, mass culture and democracy.

Behind the establishment’s long war against crowds is the work of eccentric proto-fascist Gustave Le Bon. Having witnessed the revolutionary Paris Commune, he declared the crowd barbaric, the enemy of all that was civilized. In the twentieth century, his theory influenced Mussolini, Hitler and Freud alike. It moulded the policing of our communities and the new industry of public relations, shaping our cities and politics.

From raucous football matches and raves to rubber-bullet-riddled riots, Dan Hancox takes us into the crowd’s pulsating heart to pose the questions that will define our age. Is the madness of crowds real? What did the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill share with the Nuremberg rallies? What fresh dangers are posed to free assembly by the surveillance society? And how has a radical new generation of psychologists begun to change everything – even the policing of protests?

About the Author

Dan Hancox is a native Londoner who writes about music, politics, gentrification, social exclusion, protest and the margins of urban life, chiefly for the Guardian, but also the New York Times, Vice, The Fader, Dazed & Confused and XXL.