Title:	The Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations
Authors:	Andrea Mubi Brighenti
Keywords:	Cluttered Social Formations
Issue Date:	2014
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	At the end of the nineteenth century, two famous predictions were advanced for the twentieth century: while Le Bon prophesied that the coming century would have been the age of crowds, Tarde replied that the new century would have been the age of publics. Even in retrospect, it is not easy to tell who was right, and which collective formation actually became predominant. At the end of the nineteenth century, in France two famous predictions were advanced for the twentieth century: the publicist in psychology and politically conservative Gustave Le Bon (1895), traumatised by the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune in 1871 and galvanised by General Georges Boulanger’s charismatic leadership, prophesied that the coming century would have been the age of crowds, while the jurist and social theorist Gabriel Tarde (1901), apparently more worried by the Dreyfus affaire and the way in which it split the opinion of a whole nation into two, replied that, instead, the new century would have been the age of publics. Soon after, the American sociological founding figure Robert E. Park (1903) sided himself with Tarde. In a subsequent article Park (1940: 686) added a further item: ‘Ours, it seems, is an age of news’. Even in retrospect, it is not easy to tell who was right, and which collective formation actually became predominant. For his part, for instance, the Italian positivist scholar Scipio Sighele (1899) proclaimed in a Solomonic way that our age is simultaneously one of publics and of crowds
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53088
ISBN:	978-1-137-38499-7
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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