ABSTRACT
Few are the themes that Kierkegaard has been unabashedly consistent about throughout his entire oeuvre. The passionate rebuttal of the crowd in all of its embodiments, including the public, is by far the most cogent. From the first volume of Either/Or1 to the very last journalistic piece in 1855,2 Kierkegaard proved tireless in acerbically attacking the collective in all its forms. His anti-collectivist assaults are to some degree contextual insofar as they envisage the modern advent of the mass man onto the scene of history. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard’s unambiguous rejection has more profound roots, which emanate from the soteriological crux of Christian spirituality. In other words, the monstrosity of crowds is not a specifically modern phenomenon; the collective monster is at work from the dawn of Christianity as one can see in the brutal end of Jesus Christ.3 That is why Kierkegaard’s pugnacious individualism cannot be separated from the theological-that is, creationistic, salvific, and personalist-foundation and postulates of his thought.
