Beyond Crowd Psychology: The Power of Agoral Gatherings

Adam Biela (Ed.) Beyond Crowd Psychology: The Power of Gatherings Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2013Whenever more than three loose and disorderly were spotted coming together in a group, the authorities suspected that a plot might soon be afoot. Whenever a gang of ten or twenty was detected, the elites feared an impending riot. And, should dozens or hundreds gather in one without proper supervision or an appointed task, it was expected that an incipient rebellion would soon ensue. For this reason, control was and remains one of the major responsibilities of the state and its law enforcement agencies.Crowds (more commonly known as mobs) have been feared since ancient times. In order to defuse potential expressions of popular distress, the poet Juvenal famously tells us that the Romans provided the people, with panem et circensus. We seem to prefer pub grub and beer to accompany professional sports on a large flat-screen, but the motive and the effects are the same. Gluttony and spectacle combine to leave the otherwise insurrectionist rabble flabby and docile.Longstanding patrician fear of plebian uprisings has also been incorporated into contemporary social science where, as academic adjuncts to the ruling classes, social researchers have poked and prodded the subaltern masses in search of the triggers of action. Armed with this intelligence, the rulers have been able to discover the most effective means to silence dissent. Apart from the production of mass entertainment as a distraction (television and the twitterverse) and the occasional use of brute force (successful when used sparingly, but prone to backfire if applied too frequently), one of the best ways to deal with the disaffected is to marginalize them by psychologizing the discussion of them and their grievances.By psychologizing, I mean redefining political protest and economic discord as manifestations of mental disease or disorder. The old Soviet Union did this with the desired results in the post-Stalin era when dissidents were routinely carted off to mental health facilities for treatment. In the West, however, the tradition of rendering opposition impotent by consigning it to a category of abnormal social has a much longer background. Adam Biela and his associates aim to correct that.The subtitle of Biela's collection may raise an eyebrow or glaze over an eye. For many of us, the term Agoral Gathering may seem odd and unfamiliar. As a noun, agoral refers to a powerful laxative but, I am pleased to say, we're dealing here with the adjective the central public space in the city-states of ancient Greece.The direct translation is meeting place or assembly. It was where politics and public business was conducted. It was in the Athenian agora, we may presume, that Socrates was sentenced to death. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that those people who were disgusted by democracy and who feared the mob in more recent times traced back and justified their antipathy to gatherings of ordinary citizens by referencing the taking of hemlock by that antique philosopher, sometime soldier and certified stone mason. From Martin Luther's early sixteenth-century cry for the brutal repression of peasant revolts (Pelikan and Oswald, ??: 50-51) to the disgust felt by gentler twentieth-century citizens at the popularity of lynchings in the American South, we have commonly understood to be irrational, violent and extremely difficult to control.Our disdain for the dangers posed by crowd psychology and collective behaviour results in an important ambiguity and a dilemma for inhabitants of modern liberal democracies. On the one hand, at least since Western societies came reluctantly to embrace formal democratic procedures and to accept the legitimacy of elected representative governments, it has been hard to maintain overt opposition to popular sovereignty and the principle that governments should be elected by and be responsible to the people. …

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