ABSTRACT
Using Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, this chapter traces how the lineages of crowd psychology were drawn on, altered, and rejected in the constitution of propaganda and public relations. This chapter looks at many crowd psychologists referenced in the propagandists’ archives including Gustave Le Bon, Henry Fournial, Gabriel Tarde, William McDougall, William Trotter, and Walter Lippmann. The chapter is organized around three points of intense transfer and transformation between crowd psychology and public relations. First, the shift from viewing the subject to be governed as an individual to viewing it as a crowd or public. Second, the idea that the public is fundamentally suggestible and craves its own domination. The question, as propagandists framed it was not whether or not the public was going to be dominated, but by who? They presented themselves to their clients as a governmental force to be executed on the side of corporations and the business elite. Third, the basic techniques for governing the crowd came from crowd psychology: affirmation, repetition, prestige, and contagion. The success of these techniques was taken as further evidence of the irrationality, fickleness, unconscious motivation, and unintelligence of the publics, which in turn amplified the urgent need to govern the public. While these lineages can be traced to crowd psychology they were redrawn and redeployed to speak to the context and problems of early twentieth-century American businesses.
