This school is doing good service in leading us from the few or the many to the all, in preaching that the race contains within itself the power of its own advancement; but this power which the race contains within itself is not got through its being a crowd, “without guide or will or plan,” but just because it contains the potentialities of guide, will, plan, all within itself, through its capability of being a true society, that is, through its capability of adopting group methods. It is in the group that we get that complex interpenetration which means both modification and adjustment and at the same time cooperation and fulfilment. The group process, not the crowd or the herd, is the social process. Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and women surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which act and react on each other. This is the dialectic of life. But this upspringing of power from our hidden sources is not the latent power of the mass but of the group. It is useless to preach “togetherness” until we have devised ways of making our togetherness fruitful, until we have thought out the methods of a genuine, integrated togetherness. Anything else is indeed “blubbering sentimentality,” as Bismarck defined democracy.
But there are two sets of people who are victims of the crowd fallacy: those who apotheosize the crowd and those who denounce the crowd; both ignore the group. The latter fear the crowd because they see in the crowd the annihilation of the individual. They are opposed to what they call collective action because they say that this is herd action and does not allow for individual initiative. We are told, “Man loses his identity in a crowd,” “The crowd obliterates the individual mind.” Quite true, but these writers do not see that the crowd is not the only form of association, that man may belong to a group rather than to a crowd, and that a group fulfils, not wipes out his individuality. The collective action of the group not only allows but consists of individual initiative, of an individual initiative that has learned how to be part of a collective initiative.
Collective thought, moreover, is often called collective mediocrity. But the collective thought evolved by the group is not collective mediocrity. On the contrary there is always a tendency for the group idea to express the largest degree of psychic force there is in a group, ideally it would always do so. Herein lies the difference between the group idea and the mass idea. When we hear it stated as a commonplace of human affairs that combined action is less intelligent than individual action, we must point out that it all depends upon whether it is a crowd combination or a group combination. The insidious error that democracy means the “average” is at the root of much of our current thought.
The confusion of democratic rule and mass rule, the identification of the people with the crowd, has led many people to denounce democracy. One writer, thinking the collective man and the crowd man the same, condemns democracy because of his condemnation of the crowd man. Another speaks of “the crowd-mind or the state,” and therefore abandons the state. All these writers think that the more democracy, the more complete the control of the crowd. Our faith in democracy means a profound belief that this need not be true. Moreover this idea that the crowd man must necessarily be the unit of democracy has led many to oppose universal suffrage because they have seen it as a particularist suffrage, giving equal value, they say, to the enlightened and the unenlightened. True democracy frees us from such particularist point of view. It is the group man, not the crowd man, who must be the unit of democracy.
The philosophy of the all is supposed, by its advocates, to be opposed to the philosophy of the individual, but it is interesting to notice that the crowd theory and the particularistic theory rest on the same fallacy, namely, looking on individuals one by one: the crowd doctrine is an attempt to unite mechanically the isolated individuals we have so ardently believed in. This is the danger of the crowd. The crowd idea of sovereignty is thoroughly atomistic. This is sometimes called an era of crowds, sometimes an era of individuals: such apparent opposition of judgment need not confuse us, the crowd spirit and the particularistic spirit are the same; that spirit will continue to corrupt politics and disrupt society until we replace it by the group spirit.
The crowd theory, like the particularist doctrine, has been strengthened by the upholders of the imitation theory of society. Many of our political as well as our sociological writers have seen life as some exceptional individual suggesting and the crowd following without reasoning, without effort of mind or will. Even Bagehot, who did so much to set us in the right way of thinking, overemphasizes the part of imitation. What he says of the “imitative part of our natures” is indeed true, but by not mentioning the creative part of our natures more explicitly, he keeps himself in the crowd school.
It is true that at present the people are to a large extent a mass led by those who suggest. The suggestion and imitation of sociology are the leading and following of politics—the leadership of the boss and the following of the mass. The successful politician is one who understands crowds and how to dominate them. He appeals to the emotions, he relies on repetition, he invents catch phrases. The crowd follows. As long as the cornerstone of our political philosophy is the theory that the individual originates and society accepts, of course any man who can get the people to “accept” will
