Mass Violence and the Crowd: The Perception of Proletarian Community in Working-Class Writers of the 1930s

There have been two leading interpretations of the politics of the urban working-class crowd by political philosophers. One sees popular protest as occurring spontaneously, without prior organisation, as a reaction to immediate material deprivations such as food shortages or wage reductions. The other sees the crowd as an inchoate and unself-conscious mass that can be galvanised into activity, shown how to constitute itself as a potentially revolutionary class, only by an elite, usually of mi...