Скачать или смотреть Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. “Crowd Violence”—A Beneficial or Nostalgic Farewell?

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University, USA). “Crowd Violence”—A Beneficial or Nostalgic Farewell?

Presentation at 27th Bathhouse Readings (May 29, 2021): https://www.nlobooks.ru/events/konfer...

While socialist history writing and mythology used to hail “the masses” as agents of revolutionary disruption, “crowds” have been an object of regular intellectual condemnation ever since Gustave Le Bon's classic treatise on the topic from 1895—mainly due to their consistent (and empirically justified) association with violence. And yet it has remained largely unclear how the origin of such “crowd violence” can be explained sociologically and anthropologically. As long, however, as we do not know where “crowd violence” may come from, it will remain impossible to predict whether the vanishing of crowds under the dominant cultural conditions of our present may lead to a diminishing of violence. Or do we need to face a possible paradox according to which the disappearance of collective violence may make its omnipresence more likely and less controllable?