ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the fullest analytical understanding of the power/knowledge relation in the specific domain of crowd theory. It determines the historical circumstances and the various personalities who shaped it, of whom Gustave LeBon was far and away the most colorful and effective. Historians and sociologists have developed research methods aimed at reconstituting the "moral economy" of episodes of past collective behavior. Crowds have played an important, even honored, role in the history of popular protest in Western societies. In LeBon's account, ideas and images spread through a crowd by means of contagion, an automatic process that produced a state of transitory madness in its victims, extinguishing reason and will. Mussolini, Hitler, and other European fascists had learned crowd psychology directly from LeBon or one of his many acolytes or admirers, and at the very least believed themselves to be in its debt.
