The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd?

• Published in: Critical inquiry Vol. 36; no. 4; pp. 697 - 727
• Main Author: Mazzarella, William
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago The University of Chicago Press 01-06-2010; University of Chicago, acting through its Press
• Subjects: Capital surplus; Critical theory; Crowds; Democracy; Desire; Heteronomy; Humans; Liberalism; Mimesis; Pathology; Political discourse; Political freedom; Political science; Sociology; Theory
• ISSN: 0093-1896; 1539-7858
• DOI: 10.1086/655209

Crowds belong to the past of the (neo)liberal democracies of the global North. By the same token, they also mark the present of non- or insufficiently liberal polities in the global South. To simplify somewhat, crowds are the dark matter that pull on the liberal subject from its past, whereas multitudes occupy the emergent horizon of a postliberal politics. Here, Mazzarella answers the question regarding whether why some people remain afraid of crowds. He explores from the apparently antithetical opposition between crowds and multitudes in current social theory and emphasizes how these figures represent radically different approaches to the emergent energies of groups. Through a close analysis of the respective figures of crowds and multitudes, he reveals an impasse at the heart of each and then suggests that the relationship between these two impasses suggests an unacknowledged negative intimacy between crowd theory and multitude theory.