Название статьи: «Crowd theory and the management of crowds: A controversial relationship»

Ссылка: http://csi.sagepub.com/content/current

When crowd psychology emerged in the European social sciences in the late 19th cen­tury it was above all as a concern with collective irrationality. Crowds were often described as veritable incarnations of ignorance that seemed to seize power in all soci­etal domains, thereby destabilizing the existing social order. This kind of problematization found its most famous expression in Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book, The Crowd. According to Le Bon, crowds are violent and destructive; they are characterized by an impulsive, barbarian, feminine nature and by the incapacity to reason. Gabriel Tarde, another key crowd theorist, largely subscribed to this image and portrayed the crowd as ‘a wild beast’ which is in a state of ‘delirium’.

This apparent irrationality did not preclude scientific scrutiny. Indeed, early crowd psychology was at pains to show how the constitution of crowds might be explained. One of the most popular theoretical notions employed for this purpose was that of hyp­notic suggestion: the reason why normally sensible people are captured by irrational, atavistic moods and acts is that they have become hypnotized by the crowd and more specifically by the leader’s suggestions. In the words of Le Bon, the hypnotized crowd subject ‘becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will’, meaning that the crowd member is reduced to a mere ‘autom­aton’.

By emphasizing suggestion crowd theorists such as Le Bon and Tarde demonstrated how, in a crowd, ‘order can exist without knowledge’, as NiklasLuhmann has put it about Tarde’s work. This had implications for political crowd control strategies. Since it was not knowledge, but rather ignorance that presumably characterized crowds, Le Bon pinned his faith neither on education nor on enlightenment. One could not govern the crowd by means of knowledge, Le Bon’s analysis implied; rather, if one were to lead crowds, one should apply seductive measures and try to appeal affectively to the crowd through rhetorical techniques. Specifically, Le Bon argued, leaders should make blunt, simple statements and repeat them over and over again; this would gradually mould the mind of the crowd.

The general image of crowds propagated by Le Bon and Tarde received widespread acclaim in industrialized and urbanized countries such as France and Germany in the late 19th century, but it was also soon adapted to the US American situation.While the French discussions of crowds echoed a century with recurrent insurrections and political turmoil, the American debates took a slightly different form. To be sure, the country had its own revolutionary past and experienced recurrent uprisings throughout the 19th century. Still, the main concern in the USA was not with revolutionary crowds per se, but rather with what was seen as their seedbed, namely the explosive urbanization of American society which took off in the late 18th century. The problematization of urbanization focused especially on the metropolitan way of life which, it was noted with anxiety, had seemingly cut itself loose from the moral ties governing the communitarian village, giving rise to all sorts of collective urban unrest.

Gradually, however, the problematization of this urban life became intertwined with the European discourse of crowds. A series of prominent scholars took part in the discussions of crowds, including William James, Robert E Park, Edward A Ross and Boris Sidis. In the following, I focus on Ross, not only because he was ‘probably the most widely read social scientist of his day’ (Leach, 1986: 102), but more importantly because he was the one who most powerfully incarnated the attempt, in the Progressive Era, to link the problematization of urbanization to that of crowds – and to derive strategic recommendations on that basis.

Much of the critique of crowd psychology revolved around its key explanatory concept of hypnotic suggestion which was deemed more and more problematic. In the present context, I am interested not so much in the specific critiques that were articulated but rather in the kind of theorizing that came to replace the suggestion-based crowd psychology. Although several alternatives to this tradition might be identified, the most unified body of substitute thinking transpired in the 1950s and 1960s when a series of more rational approaches to collective behaviour gained footing. The central claim propagated in this literature was that, rather than being emblematic of ignorance, crowds in fact emerge as a rational means through which specific goals can be achieved such as the rectification of perceived injustices. This view, which can be associated with scholars such as Clark McPhail, Neil J Smelser and Charles Tilly, found its most far-reaching expression in Richard Berk’s game-theoretical approach to crowd behaviour. According to Berk, ‘crowd participants exercise a substantial degree of rational decision-making and are not defined a priori as less rational than in other contexts’. So, to repeat, in contrast to the classical image of collective irrationality, this alternative position in effect held that, due to their foundation in rational, purposive individual action, crowds are anything but ignorant entities.

This rational alternative to classical crowd psychology remains the prevailing perspective in contemporary theorizing on crowds. According to Kevin Durrheim and Don Foster, this new approach has not just been confined to theoretical circles; it has also laid the foundation for new types of crowd management. Durrheim and Foster show this on the basis of a series of new measures that were introduced as part of the transition from Apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, which linked new modes of governing crowds with an ethics of peace. What happened here, the authors contend, was that rather than viewing crowds as eruptions of ignorance, irrationality and barbarism, crowd control strategies were reconfigured and adapted to the image of purposive assemblies. For example, crowds were now depicted as entities capable of self-government and as consisting of a differentiated body of crowd members, where some could speak on behalf of the others. Consequently, crowd management strategies ensued that advocated negotiations with crowds, just as ‘democratic strategies of self-policing, not repression’ were effected. This change in crowd management strategies from former repression to subsequent liberal democratic forms was made possible, Durrheim and Foster posit, by the new rational images of crowds that sociologists and social psychologists have propagated since the 1950s and 1960s.

A similar change can be identified in British crowd control strategies where, from the 1960s and 1970s on, the police gradually began to see crowd eruptions more as rational responses to particular socioeconomic problems than manifestations of collective irrationality, and where new means of dealing with crowds such as ‘dialogue, under-enforcement and negotiation’ have become more common. One recent materialization of this new approach appeared in 2010 when the British National Policing Improvement Agency published a Manual of Guidance on Keeping the Peace on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). This report, which was presented as ‘an essential reference for all officers involved in public order policing’ (and hence also during the 2011 riots), started out by noting that ‘The world of protest has changed and public order practice and training must change with it’. This was another way of saying that the perception of crowds had changed and that the strategies for managing crowds had to change accordingly.

The ACPO report was explicit in its reliance on crowd theory of a more rational bent than the Le Bon tradition. Thus, it referred to especially a paper by Reicher et al. as the theoretical platform on which its practical guidelines were developed Among other things, the paper by Reicher et al. had argued for a shift away from basing policing on the notion of irrational crowds to advocating a much more rational approach, focusing on issues such as the formation of social identity, establishing communication with crowd members, etc. This approach was adopted in the ACPO report. For example, it was argued that ‘Planning for public order and public safety events should never start from the premise that crowds are inherently irrational or dangerous’. It was further acknowledged that, by discarding the conception of irrational crowds, negative spirals of escalating violence might be prevented. Indeed, ‘By adopting policing tactics that take account of modern theory on crowd dynamics, the police may be able to create a crowd environment which is conducive to positive individual and group behaviour’. Further, and also resonant with the position advanced by Reicher et al., which emphasized ‘the centrality of [both visual and oral] communication with crowd members’, the ACPO report argued that ‘The key to policing a crowd depends on which voices within the crowd are given prominence’. This point inspired a comprehensive communications strategy which, similar to what Durrheim and Foster have demonstrated for South Africa, was based on the idea that some form of negotiation or (deliberative) communication with the crowd is actually possible.

Compared to the strategic recommendations that were identified in the work of Ross or in the ACPO report, the Crowd Control Technologies report does not show any obvious links to academic discourses on crowds. There is no definition of crowds in the report, nor does it contain any explicit reflections on the social dynamics in or behind crowds.

While Gorringe and Rosie are in no way in favour of basing strategies of crowd management on a return to classical crowd discourse, their analysis does indicate that, even if a more rational conception of crowds seems to have been adopted in policing manuals, competing ideas still flourish which exhibit a more ambiguous relation to the notion of rational crowds. Indeed, as I show below, the practical adaptation of a rational approach to crowds exists alongside other developments that tend to maintain, if only implicitly, a notion of the ignorant crowd. This becomes apparent in reports such as Crowd Control Technologies: An Appraisal of Technologies for Political Control, written in 2000 by the British Omega Research Foundation, and prepared for the Science and Technology.

As mentioned above, Gorringe and Rosie’s analysis of the 2011 London riots makes clear that in this particular event, managing the crowds on the basis of negotiation and communication turned out to be infeasible. Instead, it appeared (and resonant with a strategy of containment of irrational crowds), what worked when confronted with massive disorder was ‘the deployment of very large numbers of officers’ on the street. This observation is related to three intertwined points, all of which question the present calls for basing the government of crowds on state-of-the-art rationalist crowd theory.

First, as previous studies have demonstrated, there is no causal link between the guidelines presented in police literature and training programmes, on the one hand, and actual police behaviour, on the other. This is not to deny any relation between the two, but simply to emphasize that other factors may be no less important than what is stated in various manuals.

And once again returning to the London riots, Gorringe and Rosie differentiate between different types of rioting crowds. More specifically, they suggest that negotiation and communication strategies may only be successful when applied vis-à-vis crowds that articulate clear political demands, whereas crowds of looters may not be governable through such rationalist-based strategies. As Gorringe and Rosie put it,

This article has questioned the call for replacing, in strategies for the management of crowds, irrationalist conceptions of crowds with rationalist crowd theorizing. My argument has had two dimensions. First, I have demonstrated the tactical polyvalence of sociological crowd theory by showing how the same theoretical register (the theory of irrational crowds) has given rise to highly different practical strategies for the management of crowds, namely urban reform programmes and totalitarian mobilization programmes, respectively. Of course, other examples could have been analysed, adding further to the tactical polyvalence. The central conclusion to be drawn from this is that,since the irrational conception of crowds has triggered different strategic responses, it is quite likely that the rationalist approach may also lead to different – perhaps conflicting – strategies for crowd management. In other words, the tactical polyvalence may well apply to the rationalist approach too.

Second, I have argued that the rationalist framework fails to offer a fully convincing model for crowd management on both internal and external grounds, so to speak. Not only do analyses of the 2011 London riots suggest that rationalist strategies of negotiation and communication with crowds failed in practice; conceptions of irrational, ignorant crowds still thrive, which suggests that obstacles to the replacement of irrational with rational notions continue to exist. Finally, and more importantly, I have argued that the rational approach fails to adequately address how internal crowd dynamics may lead to emotional arousal, and that this ignorance may produce an important blindness in strategies for the proper management of crowds. The overall conclusion of this is not that the rationalist approach should be abandoned in crowd management strategies. However, it may not be as univocally applicable as some of its proponents would have it.