ABSTRACT
One of the major points of origin of mass society theory is Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd which, though it lacks theoretical structure, is a work of some historical significance. Complementary to the theory of the crowd and the theory of the mass in Europe was the theory of elites. Pareto saw the only consequence of democracy or revolution as lying in a circulation of elites. Mosca saw a political ruling elite or class as inevitable in a democracy, and Michels in perhaps the best known study in political sociology, showed how the German Social Democratic Party had been dominated by oligarchies, despite the fact that, almost before all other parties, it claimed to be a party of the people. The crowd, in Le Bon's work, consists of an unstructured plurality of people who, because they live in unstructured situations, behave in an infantile and regressive way.
