ABSTRACT
Both Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde approached the theory of crowds from the direction of criminology. Their original interest was in the problem of the degree of criminal responsibility of individuals who had taken part in collective crimes. The range of collective crimes could be stretched very wide, from pairs of burglars to street gangs to conspiracies like the Mafia all the way up to aggressive wars. Both Sighele and Tarde knew the mob passages in Taine’s account of the French Revolution, and both saw the Paris Commune through Taine’s eyes as a crowd event. Their problem as criminologists was to locate crowd crimes somewhere on the scale of collective crime, and then to decide who was, and by what degree, responsible. Sighele and Tarde are remarkable for the theoretically imaginative way they follow clues into territory which lies outside the field of criminology narrowly conceived. I emphasize this theoretical persistence for two reasons: first, to point out that, in the years following the Commune, the crowd was not only a ‘law and order’ problem but was, on the contrary the starting point for the construction of genuinely new and wideranging theories of society; and second, to do something to rescue Sighele and Tarde from Le Bon’s strictures on them as plodders trapped within the confines of their specialism so that crowd theory had to wait for Le Bon himself to see its wider implications.
