ABSTRACT
By the 1890s it had become fashionable to express pessimism and doubts about historical ‘progress’. The fin de siècle witnessed a revolt against the heritage of the Enlightenment, with its optimistic worship of reason as the key to human liberation. Above all, the rationalist belief in the infinite perfectibility of man gave way to the conviction that civilisation could never be more than a highly precarious achievement, and that its supposedly guiding principle, ‘reason’, often served as no more than a mask for brutish passions. In philosophy, there was a new emphasis on ‘intuition’ as the way to truth and even – as in the case of Nietzsche – a denial that any sort of ‘truth’ could exist in an inherently meaningless universe. In the arts, playwrights such as Strindberg tried to get behind man’s rational façade, to explore hidden needs and impulses that distort human relationships; while expressionist painters sought to depict inner states – human beings stripped down to their most basic emotions. Students of psychology, most notably the young Sigmund Freud, became obsessed by primitive motivational complexes, including the realm of the ‘unconscious’. Projecting these concerns on to groups of individuals, the new discipline of social psychology was founded on the assumption of collective irrationality. To take a prominent example, Gustave Le Bon, drawing on current theories of pathological susceptibility and hypnotism, developed a theory of ‘crowd psychology’. A crowd, as he conceived it, was more than an aggregate of individuals. Rather, it was a generic creation, a collective mentality, dominated by crass sentiments, open to hypnotic suggestion, and capable of thinking only in images. Controversially, Le Bon argued that a crowd need not involve the gathering of individuals in one location. Even isolated individuals could acquire the characteristics of a ‘crowd’ when engaging in a collective endeavour,
such as ‘democratic’ elections, which allow demagogic politicians to take advantage of the ignorance and credulity of the masses.1
