science, society, and ideology in france: ii. the crowd

Science, Society, and Ideology in France: II. The CrowdDistorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France by SusannaBarrows; L'age des foules: Un traite historique de psychologie des masses by Serge MoscoviciReview by: Robert A. NyeIsis, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 568-573Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/232216 .

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ESSAY REVIEWS-ISIS, 74: 4: 274 (1983) ESSAY REVIEWS-ISIS, 74: 4: 274 (1983)

that such contemporary philosophers and scientists as Boutroux, Poincare, and Duhem actually exposed the limits of scientific conceptualization and thus chal- lenged the simpler forms of scientism. In fact, Bergson and others inspired a fairly broad movement against science and scientism around the turn of the century, a movement that interacted with socially and politically motivated attacks on the "mandarins" of the Sorbonne. Weisz further argues that the French min- istry of education never really had the means to impose its political preferences upon the professoriate. French academies in turn, as Weisz sees it, were both protected by acknowledged disciplinary standards and so narrow and divided in their professional concerns that little room was left for political and ideological influences.

I find this view too restricted in a variety of ways. Ideology in a scientific community cannot, in my opinion, be identified simply with the stated positions of the most reflective and articulate thinkers. Nor can the complex symbiotic relationship between a dominant scientific or intellectual orthodoxy and a political regime be reduced to the question of overt and direct intervention. We will never address these issues adequately, I also believe, if we insist that scientists are moved either by fully articulated scientific norms or by narrow, con- scious, and essentially material self-interests. Max Weber's concept of "ideal interests" may be problematic in certain respects, but we can surely agree that scientists, like other people, are powerfully moved by unconscious assumptions, and by the yen for a satisfying view of their place in the world, rather than by narrow self-interest alone. My sense that ideology must be taken seriously as ideology is reinforced by the impression that the French and German academic communities of this period differed profoundly in their attitudes toward the scientific and scholarly enterprise. Weisz himself serenely tells us at one point that "disciplinary boundaries were being broken down by increasing specialization and interdependence" (p. 86). But this quintessentially Durkheimian pronounce- ment would have struck many German academics as contradictory and almost perverse.

My intent in these critical observations has been to raise problems for further research and reflection, not to complain that Weisz has not solved them all. Indeed, I am grateful that Weisz has at last provided us with a foundation on which to build, and I predict that this book will have a long and fruitful life.

FRITZ K. RINGER Department of History

Boston University Boston, Massachusetts

II. The crowd

Susanna Barrows. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth- Century France. (Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany, 127.) ix + 221 pp., bibl., index. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1981. $20.

Serge Moscovici. L'age des foules: Un traite historique de psychologie des masses. 503 pp. Paris: Fayard, 1981. Fr 120.

Both the books under review cite the judgment the young Sigmund Freud made about the people of Paris on the occasion of his trip to France in 1885: "They are," he wrote Minna Bernays, "a people given to psychical epidemics,

that such contemporary philosophers and scientists as Boutroux, Poincare, and Duhem actually exposed the limits of scientific conceptualization and thus chal- lenged the simpler forms of scientism. In fact, Bergson and others inspired a fairly broad movement against science and scientism around the turn of the century, a movement that interacted with socially and politically motivated attacks on the "mandarins" of the Sorbonne. Weisz further argues that the French min- istry of education never really had the means to impose its political preferences upon the professoriate. French academies in turn, as Weisz sees it, were both protected by acknowledged disciplinary standards and so narrow and divided in their professional concerns that little room was left for political and ideological influences.

I find this view too restricted in a variety of ways. Ideology in a scientific community cannot, in my opinion, be identified simply with the stated positions of the most reflective and articulate thinkers. Nor can the complex symbiotic relationship between a dominant scientific or intellectual orthodoxy and a political regime be reduced to the question of overt and direct intervention. We will never address these issues adequately, I also believe, if we insist that scientists are moved either by fully articulated scientific norms or by narrow, con- scious, and essentially material self-interests. Max Weber's concept of "ideal interests" may be problematic in certain respects, but we can surely agree that scientists, like other people, are powerfully moved by unconscious assumptions, and by the yen for a satisfying view of their place in the world, rather than by narrow self-interest alone. My sense that ideology must be taken seriously as ideology is reinforced by the impression that the French and German academic communities of this period differed profoundly in their attitudes toward the scientific and scholarly enterprise. Weisz himself serenely tells us at one point that "disciplinary boundaries were being broken down by increasing specialization and interdependence" (p. 86). But this quintessentially Durkheimian pronounce- ment would have struck many German academics as contradictory and almost perverse.

My intent in these critical observations has been to raise problems for further research and reflection, not to complain that Weisz has not solved them all. Indeed, I am grateful that Weisz has at last provided us with a foundation on which to build, and I predict that this book will have a long and fruitful life.

FRITZ K. RINGER Department of History

Boston University Boston, Massachusetts

II. The crowd

Susanna Barrows. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth- Century France. (Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany, 127.) ix + 221 pp., bibl., index. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1981. $20.

Serge Moscovici. L'age des foules: Un traite historique de psychologie des masses. 503 pp. Paris: Fayard, 1981. Fr 120.

Both the books under review cite the judgment the young Sigmund Freud made about the people of Paris on the occasion of his trip to France in 1885: "They are," he wrote Minna Bernays, "a people given to psychical epidemics,

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historical mass convulsions, and they have not changed since Victor Hugo wrote Notre Dame." This statement about urban collective phenomena is illuminating for at least three reasons. It is a confirmation of certain unique features of French public life that destined France to be the birthplace of crowd psychology, as Susanna Barrows argues in her book. It is also, as Serge Moscovici maintains, an auguring of Freud's mature metahistorical theories of leadership and au- thority in social evolution. But it is also a typical example of the sort of evidence and thinking that have obtained in writing about crowds and crowd psychology. Freud anchors his observation of French character, after all, on the testimony of a novel, written in 1831, about events of the fourteenth century.

By its very nature the study of collective behavior cannot be confined to a laboratory setting; it requires the "natural" and spontaneous environment of the "real" world, in this case the political, social, and psychological events of modern urban civilization. But this requirement makes the systematic observations necessary for empirical science highly problematic. From its origin, as both these studies make clear, the science of collective behavior has been plagued by the elusive properties of its subject matter and by the thoroughgoing partisanship of its chief practitioners.

The history of a science of collective behavior presents, therefore, special problems to its would-be students. On the one hand, collective phenomena are "real," and by all accounts individuals in crowds behave differently than they do when isolated. On the other hand, the destructive and often terrifying actions of crowds, undertaken in circumstances of great political and social tension, have encouraged theoretical explanations of this behavior of a highly tenden- tious, indeed ideological variety. How, under these circumstances, do we write sound history of these theories, acknowledging the objective elements in them (and the scientific intentions of their authors), while providing an adequate account of the bias they so dramatically display? These two books undertake dif- ferent strategies in dealing with this important problem, each of which has its virtues and its liabilities.

In Distorting Mirrors Susanna Barrows presents an account of the develop- ment of crowd psychology that emphasizes its extreme opportunism and the tendency of its theorists to incorporate metaphors into their work drawn from a broad array of scientific and literary sources and from the social history of the period 1870 to 1895. By indicating the rise in labor militancy and feminism in this period and the perception of alcoholism as a major social problem, she can account for the power of the metaphors in crowd theory that stressed the "proletarian," "feminine," and "intoxicated" aspects of mass behavior. Bar- rows is particularly effective in showing how the May First labor demonstrations of the early 1890s precipitated a deep sense of anxiety within the French bour- geoisie. She cites police reports and contemporary observations to illustrate the profound sense of crisis that strikes, the May Day marches, and anarchist ter- rorism provoked between 1890 and 1895, when there was a veritable explosion of literature on crowd behavior.

Barrows also argues that there was a prehistory of "scientific" crowd psychology in the historical writings of Hippolyte Taine, the novels of Emile Zola, and the treatise on animal societies of the sociologist Alfred Espinas. A graceful chapter on Taine documents the role that irrational crowds played in his six- volume history of the French Revolution (1876-1894). And, to illustrate that conservatives had no monopoly on unfriendly characterizations of collective behavior, she underscores the images of uncontrollable female rage, drunkenness, and disorder that appeared in Zola's novel of 1885, Germinal. The concluding

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sections of her book attempt to illustrate how the "scientific" crowd psychology of the early 1890s was parasitical on these earlier works and must therefore be regarded as standing in a direct line of continuity with them.

There is a definite value to this kind of approach. Barrows argues at great length-successfully, I think-that the characterizations of insanity, "hyster- ical" feminity, and drunken excesses of collectivities in crowd psychology ex- pressed the class biases and anxious stereotypes of the bulk of property-owning Frenchmen in the early Third Republic. But including literary texts in a line of intellectual influence with works of a more scientific nature raises a question about proper boundaries. There is no finer literary treatment of crowds than that in Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (1827). And even Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities (1859) or Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris contain crowd scenes every bit as compelling as Zola's. Yet, by far the greatest problem of this approach is the risk of failing to take crowd psychology seriously as science.

Indeed, Barrows treats contemporary science throughout as a largely ideological construction, whose findings are shuffled in and out of the writings of crowd psychologists as if they were the images of novels or political speeches. She writes in her introduction, for example, that all the crowd theorists "adopted the imposing mantle of science" (p. 5) as though scientific legitimacy were a cloak one could put on at will. Indeed, she is not able to decide whether crowd psychology is a "genre" or a "science" or something in between. Taine and Zola, she says at one point, "documented and dramatized" crowd psychology but were not themselves scientists. Still, she calls them "crowd psychologists" throughout the book, as she does virtually anyone who writes on crowds, and at one point explicitly links them with Gabriel Tarde and Alfred Espinas as among the French "pioneers" on whom the Italian Scipio Sighele relied (p. 126). Taine was the most influential historian of the era and Zola its most widely read novelist, and it is not surprising that social scientists paid homage to their brilliant iconographies of collective behavior. But that does not make them theorists, any more than references to their imagery made literary men of those attempting to construct a science of collective behavior.

Crowd psychology was constructed, to be sure, partly out of the imaginative metaphors of hommes de lettres, but it was also built up out of the biological and medical science of its time. Barrows, perhaps because she regards Sighele, Tarde, and Gustave LeBon more as adroit rhetoricians than as scientists, provides an uneven account of this scientific background. There is a fine description of the rival schools of hypnosis-Nancy and the Salpetriere-from which crowd theory drew its inspiration about the suggestibility of crowds, but in general the medical and psychiatric tradition is misrepresented. Barrows does not acknowledge that there was a major conceptual reorientation in psychiatry during the 1870s from the "moral" perspective of Esquirol's generation to the "organic" one of Magnan, Charcot, and others. Taine belongs to the earlier generation of mental pathology, while the writers of the 1890s were influenced by the later synthesis, yet another argument against the continuity theme.

The central medical idea in the new model was that of degeneration. Barrows regards it as a wholly hereditary process of vital decline set in motion by alcoholism, and poses Zola's more subtle and "environmental" treatment against it. Yet Zola was merely faithfully reproducing the dogma of degeneration theory that any pathological influence in the environment-alcohol, poor nourishment and sanitation, or organic disease-could be inherited by succeeding generations and provoke a degenerational syndrome. The Neo-Lamarckian conception of heredity that underlay these views did not encourage hard and fast distinctions

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between inheritance and environment. There are thus several unilluminating ef- forts to explain the influence of evolutionary theory on Lombroso, Espinas, and the writers of the 1890s, and a vague and occasionally self-contradictory han- dling of the causes of social pathologies.

Oddly, for an approach that undervalues the scientific content of crowd psychology, Barrows spends an entire chapter on the uninformative debates between the crowd psychologists, particularly Tarde, Sighele, and LeBon, on the question of priority. This discussion makes no useful point save to diminish the originality of LeBon, who she asserts was less "sensitive" than his "betters," from whom he plagiarized. But this is to miss the point. As Barrows herself points out, LeBon's psychologie des foules of 1895 was the only text of crowd psychology to outlast the heroic period of the fin de siecle and figure as a cor- nerstone in the huge literature on twentieth-century mass psychology. Clearly LeBon was doing something right that the others did not do, and, despite his skill as a popularizer, LeBon's version also had a powerful appeal to those versed in the scientific culture of the late nineteenth century.

Barrows abruptly ends her history of crowd psychology in 1898, though all the principals lived beyond that date and continued to incorporate the theoretical presumptions of the new field into their later work. Tarde wrote on newspaper publics and opinion formation, and LeBon analyzed the syndicalist violence of the mid-1900s, discussed the rise of prewar nationalism, and composed a sig- nificant updating of Taine's outmoded history of the French Revolution. More- over, Barrows does not sufficiently address the important political dimension in all of crowd psychology, the clear evidence that this body of writing was a re- sponse to a major crisis of democratic political theory in the 1890s, the effects of which were fully evident after the turn of the century.

Serge Moscovici's account of the growth of crowd psychology takes the scientific status of crowd theory very seriously indeed. What is more, by locating early crowd psychology in its general political context, Moscovici is better able to explain why certain elements in crowd theory were absorbed into the twentieth-century literature on mass politics and why they proved so useful to Freudian group psychology.

It is Moscovici's aim to demonstrate that LeBon and Tarde were among the first exponents of the so-called theory of mass society. This now-venerable concept was invented to explain the evolution of traditional, hierarchical societies, characterized by deference and status, into mass democracies ruled by public opinion and popularly elected leaders. There were several versions of this theory in the late nineteenth century, of which Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) is perhaps the best known. But Moscovici makes an im- pressive case for considering the French variant of LeBon and Tarde as the most important because it asked the questions that had the greatest political utility: "Why crowds?" and "What to do about them?" LeBon's and Tarde's explanations of the nature of leadership and opinion formation and the practical sug- gestions they offered in their works constitute, in Moscovici's view, a funda- mental contribution to the theory and practice of twentieth-century politics.

In the first half of his book, Moscovici examines the major works of LeBon and Tarde for the "scientific" elements they contain. This section is a tour de force of textual explication that reveals clearly the logical and causal structure underlying the inflated political rhetoric in crowd theory. Moscovici then pro- ceeds to show how carefully LeBon and Tarde were read and understood by political and social theorists of their own and later generations, and by politi- cians from Aristide Briand and Georges Clemenceau to Hitler, Mussolini, and

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Charles DeGaulle. Moscovici's method is to juxtapose quotations from the pioneers and their descendants, or to quote successful leaders (Lenin, Stalin, Mus- solini) so that they may be shown to have discerned in their political praxis the theoretical principles underlying the leadership of crowds.

This method illuminates Moscovici's notion of crowd psychology as "true." It is, he writes, a "truth of an historical order" (p. 204), which, with political economy, is the only social science to have had a practical influence on the actual making of history. A scrupulous examination of the precise relation of cause and effect in collective behavior (if such a thing were possible) might re- veal, he admits, a certain empirical weakness in classical crowd theory, but it has been so successfully applied on so many occasions that "Se non e vero, e ben trovato" (p. 204). If we can overlook this rather vague, not to say insou- ciant, definition of social-science truth, we shall nonetheless find in Moscovici's account a comprehensive survey of the various ways crowd theory has been integrated into the fabric of twentieth-century social and political theory.

There is a rich yield here for historians of modern social-science theory. Mos- covici traces the impact of crowd theory on Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Alfred Vierkandt, Theodor Geiger, and other German sociologists, on the English social psychologist William McDougall, and on the political sociologists Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frank- furt school employed the work of both Tarde and LeBon in attempting to un- derstand the mass politics of the interwar years. In addition, Moscovici rightly draws attention to the curious intermediary zone between political theory and practice occupied by such figures as Georges Sorel and Antonio Gramsci, for whom crowd psychology had an unusually powerful attraction. Moscovici pays great attention in these sections to the late work of LeBon and Tarde, stressing in particular Tarde's work on newspaper publics and on the formation of opinion.

The chief contention Moscovici wishes to make, however, is that "the best disciple of LeBon and Tarde" is Sigmund Freud. Freud converted LeBon's "All that is collective is unconscious" into "all that is unconscious is collective" and then, Moscovici argues, generated from this formula the metahistorical work that took up the last twenty years of his life. This is a major effort to establish Freud's debt in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to these "laborers in the history of ideas," rather than to the more "noble" tradition with which he is generally linked.

But why LeBon and Tarde? Moscovici shows that despite his dissatisfaction with some of the political implications of their work, Freud was drawn to their characterizations of leader-follower relations, to Tarde's distinction between "organized" and "unorganized" crowds, and to LeBon's conviction that, despite appearances, crowds were essentially conservative in nature and re- sponded readily to traditional images ingrained in the "race" mind. Transposing the problem of leadership from the terrain of the family, Freud reasoned that leadership figures were ideal parents one could not have or love. The feelings of identification of the child with the parent, which are erotic at the individual level, are transformed in groups into mimetic bonds; for, as Moscovici sums it up, "One abandons the pleasure of being with someone for the satisfaction of becoming like him" (p. 355). The rigid homogeneity of a group is at once a consequence of the impossibility of any of its members monopolizing the affec- tions of the leader, and a glorious release from the feelings of rivalry that nor- mally dominate human (sibling) relations.

Liberally expanding on Freud's own account, Moscovici imagines that the

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cumulative memory traces of these emotionally charged crowd experiences have been "grafted on to a trunk of indestructible psychic reality" (p. 394), from which they may be "resurrected" in a manner similar to the "return of the repressed" in the individual subconscious. It is not surprising that Moscovici praises Freud's great "audacity" for theorizing that the event which laid down the first and most powerful memory traces of all was the slaying of the pri- mordial father by a horde of his jealous sons. The agony of guilt felt by his murderers prompted them to replace the "violence born of force with the violence of the law of the group" (p. 401). But the "divinization" of the father and his personal rule that inevitably occurred undermined these fraternal bonds, pre- figuring the rise of another hero and a repetition of the same cycle.

Moscovici does not insist on the "scientific" qualities of this scenario, but regards this whole set of speculations as important in view of the well-recog- nized existence of leader-crowd phenomena in the modern era. It is impossible to do justice to the range of psychoanalytic, historical, literary, and social scientific texts Moscovici employs in this imaginative restatement of Freud's metahistorical group psychology. But historians of social and political theory who prefer not to swallow the dubious theoretical presumptions in this book may still profit from the historical explanation Moscovici provides of Freud's debt to crowd theory. Crowd psychology may not have far outlasted the decade of the 1890s in the form given it by its pioneers, but in combination with other social science theories, and as a body of practical truisms for mass politics, it has survived to the present era.

ROBERT A. NYE Department of History

University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma 73019

III. Death

William Coleman. Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France. (Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine, 1.) xxi + 322 pp., illus., bibl., index. Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1982. $35.

William Coleman's monograph provides a reliable guide to public-health investigation in urban France between 1815 and 1848 and to the liberal ideological context in which such work took place. Written with elegance and lucidity, Coleman's well-crafted study is in many ways a synthesis, which, as the sub- stantial references indicate, builds upon secondary sources on the French public health movement (Ackerknecht, La Berge) and comparable recent books on the British counterpart (Eyler, Pelling), and draws freely on a voluminous literature in economic, social, and intellectual history of the period. At the same time, Coleman's richly detailed discussion of the work of the foremost hygienist of France, Louis-Rene Villerme (1782-1863), is the first full-scale study in any lan- guage of the publications of this seminal figure.

Coleman's decision to see Villerme as his "constant and articulate informant" proves fruitful, since Villerme's work epitomized what Coleman felicitously calls "sociomedical investigation"; Villerme and his colleagues demonstrated con- vincingly the thesis of this book, namely that death was intimately connected

cumulative memory traces of these emotionally charged crowd experiences have been "grafted on to a trunk of indestructible psychic reality" (p. 394), from which they may be "resurrected" in a manner similar to the "return of the repressed" in the individual subconscious. It is not surprising that Moscovici praises Freud's great "audacity" for theorizing that the event which laid down the first and most powerful memory traces of all was the slaying of the pri- mordial father by a horde of his jealous sons. The agony of guilt felt by his murderers prompted them to replace the "violence born of force with the violence of the law of the group" (p. 401). But the "divinization" of the father and his personal rule that inevitably occurred undermined these fraternal bonds, pre- figuring the rise of another hero and a repetition of the same cycle.

Moscovici does not insist on the "scientific" qualities of this scenario, but regards this whole set of speculations as important in view of the well-recog- nized existence of leader-crowd phenomena in the modern era. It is impossible to do justice to the range of psychoanalytic, historical, literary, and social scientific texts Moscovici employs in this imaginative restatement of Freud's metahistorical group psychology. But historians of social and political theory who prefer not to swallow the dubious theoretical presumptions in this book may still profit from the historical explanation Moscovici provides of Freud's debt to crowd theory. Crowd psychology may not have far outlasted the decade of the 1890s in the form given it by its pioneers, but in combination with other social science theories, and as a body of practical truisms for mass politics, it has survived to the present era.

ROBERT A. NYE Department of History

University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma 73019

III. Death

William Coleman. Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France. (Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine, 1.) xxi + 322 pp., illus., bibl., index. Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1982. $35.

William Coleman's monograph provides a reliable guide to public-health investigation in urban France between 1815 and 1848 and to the liberal ideological context in which such work took place. Written with elegance and lucidity, Coleman's well-crafted study is in many ways a synthesis, which, as the sub- stantial references indicate, builds upon secondary sources on the French public health movement (Ackerknecht, La Berge) and comparable recent books on the British counterpart (Eyler, Pelling), and draws freely on a voluminous literature in economic, social, and intellectual history of the period. At the same time, Coleman's richly detailed discussion of the work of the foremost hygienist of France, Louis-Rene Villerme (1782-1863), is the first full-scale study in any lan- guage of the publications of this seminal figure.

Coleman's decision to see Villerme as his "constant and articulate informant" proves fruitful, since Villerme's work epitomized what Coleman felicitously calls "sociomedical investigation"; Villerme and his colleagues demonstrated con- vincingly the thesis of this book, namely that death was intimately connected

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science, society, and ideology in france: ii. the crowd

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