When people talk about "the madness of crowds", as many have done recently, I suspect most are unaware of the politics they're invoking. Mostly without knowing it, they're drawing on the work of Gustave Le Bon, the French theorist who was a major influence on Hitler and Mussolini
His ideas about people in crowds losing their individuality and becoming impulsive, irrational and senselessly violent, succumbing to "a primitive racial unconscious", have been completely discredited, but they still strongly inform popular views of how people behave.
His theories exonerate external forces (such as the government or the police) for the way in which people behave en masse, decontextualising the situations crowds face, to make their actions look irrational. I wrote about it way back in 1996: monbiot.com/1996/06/20/why…
But, unaware that they are drawing on a reactionary and discredited thesis, we hear plenty of people at the moment blaming "the crowd" for decisions governments have taken, such as prematurely and incoherently ending the lockdown.
