ABSTRACT
79There is an intellectual strategy, easily as old as that associated with psychoanalysis, that has sought to explain Fascism in terms of the collective psychological characteristics possessed by “mass-man.” The traits associated with “mass -man” are not conceived of as the summated product of many individual Oedipal dramas, but rather the unique consequence of some special series of events transpiring in society. Under such special circumstances men in the aggregate evince “mass behavior”—behavior distinct from any that might manifest itself under any other circumstances. Long before the advent of Fascism, the effort to explain revolution by appealing to the properties of “mass-man” was popular.
