The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol.

XXXIX, n° 1 – 2018

BEFORE AND BEYOND THE MASSES. SIMMEL,

BENJAMIN, AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF CROWDS

Vincenzo MELE

I - PREMISE
German social thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
considered the metropolis to be a miniature model of western
civilization. For thinkers such as Werner Sombart, Ferdinand
Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, it
represented the social formation in which modernity, in its most
extreme and paradoxical forms, is most clearly manifest, and is
therefore best understood from a sociological point of view. Simmel
(1858-1918) and Benjamin (1892-1940) both contributed to
interpreting and elaborating this new form of metropolitan culture,
albeit in different ways. The metropolis as a general social form of
modernity has fundamental importance in their work as well as in
their personal histories. Understanding how these authors theorized
and described the urban crowd is particularly meaningful from the
perspective of the history of social thought. Indeed, Simmel and
Benjamin belonged to two successive generations of thinkers and
cultural critics who formulated their ideas and worked externally and
internally, respectively, to that which has been defined as the “short”
twentieth century.1 Thus, their points of view on the urban crowd as
the typical social form of the modern metropolis represent two highly
significant lines of thought in the history of the twentieth century,
which at its beginning gave rise to a hope for the proliferation and
flowering of individuality, but later on deteriorated into the
conventionalism of mass culture and the “colonization of
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consciousness”2 brought about by totalitarianism. Beginning in the

nineteenth century the metropolis became the social setting where
“all that is solid melts into air” (Marx); the place where social
relationships tend to strip themselves of the burdens and
conditionings of tradition, where individuals abandon their affiliations
with concentric, hierarchically structured social circles (family, clan,
church, professional orders, the state, etc.). The metropolitan
crowd—with its depersonalized, leveling, and at times primitive
character—generally represented the opposite of the principium
individuationis, a cornerstone of western culture and which represents a
true case of a repressed ideal in the history of sociology.3 Thus, crowd
and individual became two, simultaneously opposite and
complementary poles: metropolitan individuality cannot be
interpreted without its efforts to establish itself against and despite the
crowd. Any reading of how Simmel and Benjamin construed the
crowd cannot be separated from their conception of modern
metropolitan individuality. As we will see, Simmel and Benjamin’s
perspectives also express their being respectively external to (or
rather, on the threshold of) the twentieth century, and (in the case of
Benjamin) fully involved in what Hannah Arendt would call the “dark
times” of that century.4 Inevitably, the perspectives of these two
thinkers on the question of the crowd would be influenced by the
political, historical, and social context in which they were formulated.
And in the case of Simmel, these thoughts would stem from a
perspective before the crowd, that is, so to speak, a defense against the
dangers that it represented for individuality as it existed from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The dynamics of this notion of
individuality are at the heart of Simmel’s work. Meanwhile, Benjamin,
witnessing the impotence and inadequacy of the principium
individuationis to withstand the reactionary regimes of the masses,
would find hope in the waning of this principle, though he would
soon be disappointed by a new era of the masses and an ill-defined
“new collective body” beyond the crowd.

II – SIMMEL AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE CROWD

Contrary to his coeval crowd theorists, Simmel did not devote a
specific study to crowds. He did, however, address a number of
specific critiques to some of the most important contemporary
authors that had addressed crowds, a sign that he was not indifferent
to the subject. Simmel reviewed Gabriel Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation
Before and beyond the masses 3

(1890), Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (1895), and Scipio

Sighele’s Psychologie des Auflaufes und der Massenverbrechen (1897).5 As was
typical of his style, Simmel was nonetheless careful not to quote any
of these authors directly in his work. Simmel’s critique of Gabriel
Tarde was quite favorable. He believed that Tarde, interestingly, had
revealed that imitation was “a type of hypnotic suggestion.”6 Even if
the crowd was not the main subject of The Laws of Imitation, Simmel’s
review of the book nevertheless showed that he had grasped the
central importance of the question of the “hypnotic suggestion,”
which Tarde focused on in his other subsequent studies devoted to
the crowd. As could be expected, Simmel also praises Tarde for
having made the distinction between the form and the content of
imitation. However, he criticizes Tarde for not dedicating his
attention to forms of opposition and antagonism, issues which the
latter would take up in subsequent writings.7
Simmel’s critique of Le Bon’s work, in contrast,specifically
addressed the subject of the crowd (though it should be noted that in
German the title of Le Bon’s study was translated as Psychologie der
Masse, generating a confusion between “mass” and “crowd,” which in
many languages are not equivalent). Briefly, after having premised
that the book does not adequately distinguish between the various
types of crowds, and having predicted (erroneously) that the book
would have little impact, he praises it as one of the rare attempts to
construct a psychology of human beings as “mere social creatures.”8
His critique notes the importance of the concept of suggestion and
the sociological value that it can have for political leaders. Moreover,
it accepts Le Bon’s idea that crowds are essentially characterized by
an intellectual and ethical level beneath that of its constituent
members when left to themselves, and nonetheless advances an
explanation based on his own evolutionist conceptions. According to
Simmel, such a phenomenon is due to the laws of evolution,
according to which the baser psychological traits are common to
everyone and are transmitted hereditarily. When a sizeable group of
people act as a unit, it is always the baser, primitive psychological
qualities (feelings and instincts), present in all members of the group
in equal measure, that prevail. Thus, the actions of the crowd reflect
the lowest common denominator of individual qualities, which are
consistently inferior to the average qualities of the crowd’s
components. Lastly, being part of a crowd also involves a decline in
4 Vincenzo Mele

each participant’s sense of responsibility. By way of example, he cites

the establishment of regulations that provide for the collective
assumption of administrative functions in American cities, with the
consequent effect of making every individual member feel less
responsible for the actions taken together (“the business of everybody
is the business of nobody”9). Simmel thus agrees with Le Bon’s view
that the crowd is a threat to civilization and reason. The
Enlightenment and intellectual education seem to have found their
limit in crowd actions.
With regard to the Italian researcher Scipio Sighele, Simmel was
disturbed by his recourse to the concept of “suggestion” as the main
explanation for crowd behavior. Although he had praised Tarde for
his use of this concept, Simmel did not consider it to be universally
applicable, believing that it should be limited to specific,
circumscribed events, situations in which the power of ideas and
feelings leads to the possibility that “one soul provokes the same
emotions in another soul.”10 For this reason, in his view Sighele’s
abuse of the concept made his work something less than a scientific
study, even if it could be applied to “a great number of the most
important problems in social philosophy” deserving of detailed
investigation. One problem is precisely the relation between the
physiological (or biological) and the sociological dimensions.
According to Sighele, “gentle, conciliatory, moral” feelings are
expressed and transmitted less forcefully than “bad, savage and
corrupt” ones.11 Because of these sociobiological factors, crowds tend
more readily to be violent and destructive rather than pacific and
moral.
Although these critiques contain some interesting seminal
thoughts on the subject, it is difficult to abstract a specific and
coherent “sociology of the crowd”12 from the rest of Simmel’s work.
This absence can be explained simply enough: while “The problem of
sociology” as Simmel entitled the first and most important (and most
widely translated) chapter of his 1908 Sociology: Inquiries into the
construction of social forms,13 develops from an awareness that individual
destiny is ever more influenced by the life of the masses, in this work
Simmel does not observe social reality precisely from the perspective
of the life of the masses. In Simmel’s metropolitan experience, one
concern precedes all others. It is a problem that he formulates at the
very beginning of the essay: “The most profound problems of
Before and beyond the masses 5

modern life spring from the individual’s presumption to preserve the

independence and uniqueness of his being as determined in the face
of the preponderant forces of society, historical inheritance, external
culture and technology.”14 From his earliest works, the problem of
individuality, the “concern for the survival of a differential
subjectivity in modern society,” represented a constant preoccupation
of Simmel’s.15 Indeed, his entire sociology can be read in light of this
constant focus. Moreover, for Simmel, “the individual is thematized
in his private sphere.”16 The presence of numerous essays devoted
throughout his productive life to that which we can define as
“intimacy”17—essays on “Shame,” “Ornament,” “Fashion,”
“Gratitude,” “Roses,” “Adventure,” “Secret,” “Sociability,” “Female
Culture”—demonstrates even more clearly that the modern individual
is both “Bridge and Door,” to recall the title of another important
1909 essay of his.18 This is to say that the individual is open to
relationships (the bridge), but at the same time he must by necessity
close himself off to them (the door), in order not to be swallowed up
by the “technical-social mechanism” that has produced differential
identity in the metropolitan context. On close examination, this
appears as a defensive stance against the overabundance of
relationships, encounters, and stimuli that originate in the crowd,
however it is conceived, and from the individual’s presence in the
public space. If this stance is not borne in mind—that is, the survival
of an independent, distinct individuality as a starting point and
fundamental concern of Simmel’s work—we risk distorting Simmel’s
entire sociological framework. As we have just seen, though he did
not put it at the center of his work as did his contemporaries Tarde,
Le Bon, and Sieghele, Simmel could not ignore the subject of the
crowd, which therefore makes an appearance episodically in his main
sociological works. It can be therefore prove profitable to trace the
main passages in Simmel’s work where he describes the crowd and
the fundamental features that he attributes to it as an object of social
study.

III – THE METROPOLITIZATION OF SOCIAL LIFE

Simmel’s sociology begins from the dissolution of society as a
solid entity, a conception from which he then develops his scientific
study. Indeed, he brought into question the very concept of society of
the time, which still adhered to classical nineteenth-century
sociological conceptions (those of Comte and Saint Simon) and was
6 Vincenzo Mele

oriented toward study of the forms assumed by the Wechselwirkung of

individuals. This image of society as the “sum of reciprocal
interactions” (as this key term in Simmel’s thought can be
translated)—including durable ones that take shape in configurations
such as the family or the state, as well as the more ephemeral,
transitory ones, such as a simple exchange of glances—can be set in
relation to the metropolitan milieu and the characteristic
“gaseousness” of its social relationships, amongst which those offered
by a crowd of numerous indistinct individuals. Beginning with his
1908 Sociology, the main question, the true “paradigm”19 toward which
Simmel’s sociology is oriented, becomes the question: “How is
society possible?” In the metropolitan setting, the fundamental
question in sociology changes sign and switches from “what is
society?” to “how is society possible?” Society ceases to be taken for
granted, and becomes a chance event, which could cease to be. It is,
but it could also not be. Simmel formulated this question in similar
terms to Kant’s: “How is nature possible?” The answer is however
radically different: while for Kant nature is possible because the
subject observes it and abstracts it through its categories, a priori, for
Simmel society is only possible because the “you” and the “other”
exist. Unlike our relationship with natural objects, in social
relationships we are faced with other “egos,” which for each party are
partially known and partially obscure. Thus, the main problem of
“association” (Vergesellschaftung) becomes a game of “representations
of the other”: the image which I (ego) have formed of an Other (alter)
interacts with the image which that Other has formed of me, in a
back-and-forth interplay that continues ad infinitum. In this way,
society proceeds in interiore homine, and its central “problem” becomes
one of the theory of knowledge. It is evident that this type of
sociology is possible only as long as meeting Others becomes a daily
experience, and not only reserved for exceptional moments as is the
case in the traditional context. The inhabitants of a metropolis are all
strangers to each other. The generalized Other, from the most
fleeting of encounters—gazes meeting and then lowered—to the
more lasting ones in large-sized social group settings, is the most
basic phenomenological experience of the crowd in daily life. Various
chapters in his 1908 große Soziologies contain references to the
sociology of the crowd. One particularly significant indication is
found in the second chapter, where he discusses some effects of the
size of social groups on individual life. After having studied small
Before and beyond the masses 7

groups, Simmel turns his attention to larger groups, including crowds.

When a mass of people is not spread out, but concentrated in space, a
peculiar situation develops as a result of physical proximity:
Here the ebb and flow of countless suggestions produce an
extraordinary strong nervous excitement that often carries the
individuals along unconsciously; every impulse swells up avalanche-like,
and allows the crowd to become the prey of the ever most passionate
personality in it… This fusion of masses into an emotion in which all
individuality and reservations of personalities are suspended is of course
so thoroughly radical in content, far from every negotiation and
deliberation, that it would lead to noisy impracticability and destruction
if it did not end up for the most part in inner weariness and set-back,
the consequences of that one-sided exaggeration. 20
The negative nature of the crowd is expressed above all in its de-
individualizing, irrational, and destructive character, which makes the
collective action arising from within it essentially sterile, the fruit of
mere emotional radicalism. It is clear that for Simmel the crowd
constitutes a regression of the process of “differentiation” from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous that constituted the fundamental
principle of the evolution of natural, as well as social organisms
according to the principles of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
Crowds are therefore anti-evolutionary and mark the return of the
homogeneous against the individual, who is born of the functional
differentiation of the social division of labor. Indeed, in his chapter
on “Domination and subordination,” Simmel refers to the “stupidity”
of the crowd:
Inside a physically proximal crowd there are countless suggestions and
nervous influences going back and forth, robbing individuals of their
repose and independence of thought and action, so that the most
fleeting stimulations often rise up in the crowd, avalanche-like, to the
most excessive impulses, and the higher, discriminating, critical
functions are as good as turned off… thus the countless observations
over the ‘stupidity’ of collectives.21
However, the crowd, just like every other unitary group whether
stable or transitory, cannot be considered an autonomous psychic
entity, one that carries on with life according to its own laws and
strengths independently of its individual components. In his
important Excursus on Social Psychology, Simmel maintains: “if a crowd
destroys a house, pronounces a judgment, or breaks out into
shouting, the actions of the individual subjects are summarized into
an event that we describe as one, as the realization of an idea”.22 This
8 Vincenzo Mele

interpretation, Simmel warns, exists only from the point of view of

the observer who confuses the result of the collective act with its cause:
the unitary character of the phenomenon does not imply unity of the
psychic cause. This is an important distinction that Simmel makes
with regard to so-called “collective psychology.” According to
Simmel “what is psychological in action nevertheless remains no less
individually psychological; the collective action consists no less of
purely individual contributions.”23 A group, like a mere collection,
cannot have a soul; the object of investigation always remains the
psychological individual. The homogeneity of behavior as the data to
observe in the context of the crowd “normally originates from the
individuals’ interactions; with its results of assimilation, of identical
influence, and of setting uniform purposes, it also belongs to social
psychology—which is revealed here also not as a counterpart
adjoining individual psychology, but as a part of it.”24 Psychology
“investigates the determination of mental processes through their
connection with the body, just as it investigates their determination
through their connection with other souls.”25 Sociology also studies
psychic processes, but it aims to describe and interpret the “objective
reality of the association supported by psychic processes and often
describable only through them,” and thereby to ask “how are possible
not only the particular formations that arise empirically, and that re-
enter within the general concept of society, but society in general as
an objective form of objective souls.”26
Accepting, contrary to Le Bon’s belief, that the crowd does not
exist as a unitary subject, but that, as Simmel’s sociology suggests, it is
rather no more than the sum of individual imitative interactions, it
makes sense to study the crowd as a form of association, or as a set of
forms of association: that is, as an “objective form of objective souls”
subjected to “countless suggestions and nervous influences going
back and forth.”27 Describing the experience of the crowd in this way
almost literally coincides, according to Simmel, with the experience of the
metropolis, as it could not but exist in this social context. In other
terms, the crowd coincides with the overall set of actions and
interactions, with the same “acting and undergoing,” as the
metropolis, even if the metropolis is characterized by possible
experiences that do not occur in a crowd.
Before and beyond the masses 9

Shame and sociability

However, at close inspection, as we will see, it can be said of
Simmel what Benjamin said of Baudelaire: “the masses had become
so much a part of [his work] that it is rare to find a description of
them in his works.”28 Many of the typical forms of metropolitan
association are perceptible in the context of a crowd, as they result
from the experience of being surrounded by a mass of strangers and
the spatial proximity of many individuals. Exhibitionism—like the
desire for intimacy, the sociology of the visible, shame, and
sociability—does not, however, figure among the features of a crowd.
Without suggesting too broad an equation between crowd and
metropolis, we can nonetheless examine two of the most significant
sociological concepts in Simmel’s analysis of the metropolis as
indicators of his wide-ranging sociology of the crowd in a general
sense: shame and sociability.
The psychological basis on which Simmel founded his concept of
the metropolitan personality is the “intensification of nervous life”
(Steigerung des Nervenlebens),29 the result of the continuous, rapid barrage
of external and internal stimuli. The result is that the individual
cannot react with the deepest layers of his psyche, but has to create a
sort of protective organ against them, namely the “intellect”
(Verstand). The intellect is the entire set of the conscious, transparent,
and superior faculties of the psyche, the furthest removed from the
deep layers of the personality. It is based essentially on calculation
and objective neutrality, which characterize its approach to things and
relationships. Intellectualism and the mastery of monetary economy
are most clearly evident in the characteristic psychological
metropolitan type: the blasé individual. Blasé means bored, indifferent,
and detached. Such an attitude is the culminated effect of the
concentration of contradictory nervous stimuli characterizing the
metropolitan milieu. The nerves are subjected to such strong
solicitations that in the end they cease to react to the stimuli with due
strength. The blasé attitude is thus an expression of the need for
protection, for greater distance from an excessively stimulating world;
this kind of world is typically represented by the masses of meetings
and relationships of the crowd.
10 Vincenzo Mele

Accordingly, a fundamental characteristic of the blasé metropolitan

personality delineated by Simmel—often not analyzed in all of its
sociological implications—appears in the form of “reserve”:
This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we may
designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve. If so many inner
reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with
innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows
almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive relation to
almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and
come to an unimaginable psychic state.30
Simmel’s metropolitan man thus protects himself from the crowd.
Reserve represents a negative human attitude, the tendency to escape
social relationships in order to survive. It is an expression of the
second a priori aspect of ego/alter interactions, the fact that that “life is
not entirely social.” Simmel develops this analysis along various lines
in the chapter on the “Secret” in his Große Soziologie and in his essay
on “Shame”: social life—especially that of a highly diversified
individual—could not exist without this giving into and renouncing
social life, establishing the confines of what is public (and therefore
social) and what is private or hidden. From this perspective, the
crowd remains, so to say, outside the “door” in the social
construction of individual personality. There is however a very
important essay in which Simmel’s individual overcomes the distance
and the barriers that it interposes between the ego and the alter: his
well-known essay on sociability. According to Cristian Broch, this essay
represents Simmel’s mature reflections on crowds, which, late in his
life, came to resemble Canetti’s musings in Crowds and Power. In
Broch’s view, even though Simmel never expressly refers to the
crowd, many of the ideas developed in this essay can be useful to
interpret crowd behavior.
But what is sociability for Simmel? Simmel defines the Geselligkeit
as a form of “association” in which, by principle:
whatever the personality has of objective importance, of features which
have their orientation toward something outside the circle, must not
interfere. Riches and social position, learning and fame, exceptional
capacities and merits of the individual have no role in sociability or, at
most, as a slight nuance of that immateriality with which alone reality
dares penetrate into the artificial structure of sociability. As these
objective qualities which gather about the personality, so also must the
most purely and deeply personal qualities be excluded from sociability.
The most personal things, character, mood, and fate have thus no place
Before and beyond the masses 11

in it. It is tactless to bring in personal humor, good or ill, excitement and

depression, the light and shadow of one's inner life.31
Sociability is thus “pure reciprocity,” being together with no end
other than the pleasure of simply being together. Within the
framework of such a relationship, any particularly accentuated
expression of individuality would be detrimental to sociability itself,
which is founded upon a particular ego/alter relationship: the ego does
not have to impose itself on the alter, and can afford him the same
capacity to express himself. In this sense, sociability is essentially
democratic and calls for extreme sensitivity and tact on the part of its
participants. Every form of unilateral imposition of the ego on the alter
changes the characteristics of the association, thereby upsetting the
equilibrium of reciprocity, the perfect balance of “give and take.” It is
precisely due to such characteristics that it is difficult to understand
how sociability can express the experience of the crowd tout court. On
the one hand, sociability expresses the superadditum of social life: it
frees the individual from the tragedy of daily life and its preset roles.
From this point of view it represents a sort of collective—albeit
temporary—state of intoxication, which can only be reached in
society. On the other hand, not only can sociability not obviate the
fact that individuals are not entirely social, but it also requires tact and
circumspection, at the limits of good manners. Thus, we cannot
concur with Borch when he states that “the fundamental feature of
the crowd is its sociability.”32 The question is: how is it possible, in
the context of the crowd (with its connotations of anonymity,
impersonality, and transgression) to realize that “ideal sociological
world” in which Simmel claims “the pleasure of an individual is
always contingent on the joy of others”?33 According to Borch “the
crowd gives vent to an affective cohesion of rare purity … as the
individual is here relieved of his or her loneliness and people are
brought together in multiplicity,” thereby creating an ideal social
order with “great democratic potential.”34 For Borch, the crowd is
therefore equivalent to a joyful, politically active gathering of
people—typically in the “town square”—though he fails to perceive
the risk of fascist manipulation symbolically expressed by the Nazi
concept of Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community), as subsequently
observed by Benjamin.
12 Vincenzo Mele

IV – IMAGES OF THE URBAN CROWD IN THE WORK OF WALTER BENJAMIN

The metropolis and images of the urban crowd assume analogous
theoretical and biographical importance in the work of Walter
Benjamin. He even devoted fourteen years to his incomplete work on
the Passages in Paris (1926-1940), the city which he (like Siegfried
Kracauer35) considered to be an emblem of modernity. He had
intended this study as a “primal history of modernity” (Urgeschichte der
Moderne) and, as such, revisited the events and culture of the French
capital between the ascent of the “bourgeois king” Louis Phillippe,
and the fall of the fragile republic with the empire of Louis
Bonaparte. The poetry of Charles Baudelaire, the first iron and glass
commercial structures (including the Passages themselves, city galleries
for the sale of luxury articles), urban fashion and culture, the art of
caricature, the gutting of the cityscape by the prefect Haussmann, the
history of sects and social movements: these and more were the
“finds” on the culture that for Benjamin represented the “dreams and
ideal” of the bourgeois century, destined for imminent
disenchantment and decline. This was the era of the “threshold”
(Schwelle), between wakeful consciousness and dreaming, between life
styles that still appeared pre-industrial and the advent of monopolistic
capitalism and mass consumption. What fundamentally characterized
Benjamin’s “primal history” was the attempt to build a critical
historiography able to decipher the events of the past as still
unfinished or incomplete. The task of the historian is to recognize the
utopian drive still preserved in past events and to update its critical
potentialities for the present. To rouse the modern collectivity from
its dreams was, according to Benjamin, the condition for realizing the
aspirations and compulsion that merchandise, as an “image of desire”
(Wunschbild), reawakens and postpones indefinitely. The aim of critical
thought is to open up a passage through this ambivalence, without
dissipating the dream images into thin air. It attempts to understand
the positive reasons for their power and to translate them from dream
language to that of consciousness. In other terms, it seeks to carry out
what in a fragment of the Passagenwerk Benjamin defines as the
“dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history.”36
In the first notes and annotations in the Passagenwerk, the
metropolitan population appears in the enigmatic and suggestive
form of the “dreaming collectivity” (Traumkollettiv). In the essay, as
well as in the fragments devoted to his book on Baudelaire, however,
Before and beyond the masses 13

this potentially benign vision of a sleeping, dreaming urban

collectivity vanishes, and is replaced by two other equally problematic
but surely more pessimistic formulations: those of the crowd and the
mass.37 In his essay “On some motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin writes:
“the crowd: no subject was more worthy of attention from
nineteenth-century writers.”38 His analysis of this subject fills many
pages of the essay and fragments devoted to Baudelaire, in which
Benjamin completes a detailed review of how it appears not only in
the writings of the Parisian poet, but also in those of the most
significant nineteenth-century writers in French, English, and
German, including Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A.
Hoffmann. A key passage for understanding Benjamin’s analysis of
the crowd can be found in the following fragment from Konvolut M,
devoted to the flâneur: “There is an effort to master the new
experiences of the city within the framework of the old traditional
experiences (Erfahrungen) of nature.”39 According to Benjamin’s
famous theory of experience, Erfahrung was the traditional community
setting. So when “experience” in the sense of Erfahrung is transmitted,
the contents of an individual’s past enter in conjunction with those of
the collective past through the passing on of traditions, legends and
myths. Technological progress and metropolitan modernization do
not exhaust man’s mythopoeic ability. The experience of the crowd is
thus an absolutely new and original phenomenon for the inhabitants
of the nineteenth-century metropolis, arousing the same responses as
legend and myth. Faced with such experience, the collectivity reacts
as it would to the powers and entities of organic nature, creating a
modern mythology in order to relate to the otherness of this “new”
nature in which mankind finds itself absorbed. Benjamin sometimes
interprets this mythology as strictly linked to the dynamics of
capitalist society as phantasmagoria, following the Marxian theory of
commodity fetishism. Before the advent of the modern metropolis,
mankind’s sensory apparatus had never been subjected to such
complex training as it was in such close proximity to masses of
individuals, constantly stimulated by encounters, contacts, and
clashes. This qualitative change in human experience provoked
vacillating responses in the literature of the time. The images of the
crowd that Benjamin gathers and highlights vacillate between the
individual’s primordial fear of being reabsorbed into an undiversified
mass, and at the same time, an exaltation of the new fusion between
individual and mass. Benjamin writes: “fear, revulsion, and horror
14 Vincenzo Mele

were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who
first observed it.”40 To illustrate the reaction that the appearance of
the crowd prompted in nineteenth-century observers, Benjamin
quotes two important authors: Friedrich Engels and Edgar Allan Poe.
As a critic of society, Engels’s reaction was indignant and
“patriarchal”: “the very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive
about it, something against which human nature rebels.”41 Hundreds
of thousands of people, of all classes and walks of life, cross each
other in the crowd “while it occurs to no man to honor another with
so much as a glance.”42 No less negative is the description offered by
Edgar Allan Poe; in his short story “The Man of the Crowd,” the
crowd is pictured as a group of individuals could be taken to be
automata. Although most of them had “had a satisfied, business-like
demeanor,” their behavior nonetheless suggested “something
barbaric”43:
By far the greater number of those who went by… seemed to be
thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows
were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by
fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but
adjusted their clothes and hurried on. If jostled, they bowed
profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with
confusion.44
Benjamin, however, affirms that “the man of the crowd is not a
flâneur.”45 Although the urban crowd is the milieu in which the flâneur
moves about the city, in Benjamin’s view, this character cannot be
likened to that of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” This man
“exemplifies, rather, what had to become of the flâneur after the latter
was deprived of the milieu to which he belonged,” that is, a colorful,
lively crowd from which to draw pleasure and inspiration.46 Poe’s
story is in fact set in London, where the crowd had already undergone
the transformation of the bourgeois crowd into one of outcasts and
asocials. The Parisian flâneur can therefore still walk with aristocratic
demeanor, before being crushed by the standardization of the
industrial metropolis and ensuing crime. According to Benjamin, it is
in Baudelaire’s work that the presence of the crowd in the metropolis
finds its most meaningful expression. In fact, his “masses” are not so
much the direct object of representation as the fundamental
perspective through which the city of Paris is viewed.47 His poetic
work would be inconceivable without his having encountered the
great city masses. Despite the inhuman nature of the crowd also
Before and beyond the masses 15

present in his work, Baudelaire was magnetically attracted to it. Or

rather, as underscored by Benjamin, the poetic “productivity” of this
eminently metropolitan presence was linked to an extremely
contradictory attitude: “he becomes their accomplice even as he
dissociates himself from them. He becomes deeply involved with
them, only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of
contempt.”48 This ambivalence can be explained by the fact that it is
the experience of the crowd alone that can give the metropolitan
flâneur the type of mystic “inebriation” afforded by the external spaces
of the great metropolis. In the heart of the crowd, he feels the shock-
Erlebnis, which provides the weight of Erfahrung: that is, the still
enchanted experience of myth and the inebriation of the feast in
which the principium individuationis allows him to melt into the
experience of the collectivity. The experience of the crowd, in other
words, reintroduces into the very core of modernity the collective
effervescence that Durkheim found at the origins of humanity when
he described the rituals of totemism and feasts with the stacking of
bodies.49 It is a primal experience of fusion with the collectivity, in
which the individual feels not only wholly part of the collective, but
also feels this collective flow within himself, thereby becoming a truly
omnipotent communal body. This type of archaic experience is
possible in the modern metropolis thanks to the crowd. The
ambivalence (Zweideutigkeit) of the crowd experience that Benjamin
sought to highlight—and whose maximum expression came from
Baudelaire—lies in the fact that the crowd is a return to the archaic,
where the original, lost categories of the social are still present. The
individual may be swallowed up by the primordial horde, but he can
also be reborn on new technological and collectivist grounds. In the
crowd, the flâneur feels like he is in the center of the world. The entire
life of the metropolis pulsates in his veins, offering an intoxication
that leads to a state of infantile narcissism.50 Every choice is
reversible, the sacrificial constitution of the adult Self has not yet
developed, the identical practical Self has not yet formed, and the thin
barrier between desire and the reality principle is annulled, so that
every drive for happiness seems realizable. To assume the identity of
all the people that you meet, to love and have all the men and the
women in the world, is in other words to break the “iron cage” of the
bourgeois principium individuationis:
The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that
of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the
16 Vincenzo Mele

crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer it

becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his
dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting
and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home
anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world,
and yet to be unseen of the world [...]. The observer is a prince
enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. [...] Thus the lover of
universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous
reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared
to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with
consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a
pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the
elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for the non-
ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than
life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.51
The crowd becomes the physical medium through which the
flâneur experiences the metropolis; it is the means and basis for his
expression. The metropolis comes to be “innervated” by the crowd,
and thereby becomes the “physical” body of the flâneur, the sensory
and bodily extension of the collective individual. The urban crowd
therefore represents the antecedent of the cinematic crowd, and the
“tactile” cinematic experience that Benjamin maintained would turn
out to be fundamental in creating that fusion of man and machine
able to transcend nineteenth-century individuality and bourgeois art.
In a very important essay dedicated on Surrealism Benjamin theorizes
this concept of a “new collective technoid body” as the basis of a new
“technological cosmopolitics”52:
The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized
for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality,
only be produced in that image sphere to which profane
illumination initiates us. Only when in technology and image so
interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily
collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the
collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended
itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.53
Art—in particular cinema, an art from and for the masses—can be
in this contest the educative mechanism through which the crowd as
“new collective technoid body” can begin to appropriate its own
political and technological potential.
The ambivalence and potential that Baudelaire sees in the crowd,
and which Benjamin celebrates, seems to be discarded in an
unequivocally negative judgment found in the notes to the
Before and beyond the masses 17

Passagenwerk. The crowd, which evoked the poet’s exultation and

excitement, contemporaneously mixed with terror and anguish, seems
to definitely reveal its archaic aspect. In Benjamin’s time, it would
reveal itself to represent the fabric in which fascist domination was
woven. This becomes evident in this fragment from the Convolutes:
A theater audience, an army, the population of a city comprise
masses which in themselves belong to no particular class. The free
market multiplies these masses, rapidly and on a colossal scale,
insofar as each piece of merchandise now gathers around it the
mass of its potential buyers. The totalitarian states have taken this
mass as their model. The Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community)
aims to root out from single individuals everything that stands in
the way of their wholesale fusion into a mass of consumers.54
The “crowd” that made its first appearance in the metropolis of the
second empire became the increasingly homogeneous, brutal and
indistinct “mass.” This transformation, facilitated by the spread of
large-scale consumption, was shrewdly exploited by totalitarian
regimes, which instrumentalized the so-called “solitary crowd” made
up of atomistically isolated individuals. Thus, in another fragment
Benjamin can affirm that “this ‘crowd’ in which the flâneur takes
delight, is just the empty mold with which, seventy years later, the
Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community) was cast.”55 These thoughts
seem consistent with Benjamin’s growing pessimism in the last years
of his life, apparent in his last essay in 1939, as well as in his Theses on
the concept of history. The concept of the “mass” therefore seems to
have tempered his earlier optimism regarding the nineteenth-century
collective, described as a “dreaming collective” (Traumkolletiv), which
Benjamin hoped to “reawaken.” These depictions instead present a
return to the inhuman, coercive aspect of “myth,” which European
fascism deftly appropriated.

CONCLUSIONS
We have reconstructed two interpretations of the experience of
the crowd, emerging respectively on the threshold of and during the
“short” twentieth century. Simmel’s work addresses the subject of the
crowd, albeit indirectly. It can be argued that according to Simmel,
sociology was born precisely of the awareness that the presence of the
masses played an ever greater role in the destiny of individuals.
However, the ever-present concern in the whole of Simmel’s work is
precisely the survival of differential subjectivity within the setting of
18 Vincenzo Mele

the modern metropolis. Contrary to some interpretations, it is risky to

speak of “the vitality of the crowd” in Simmel’s thought.56 Even his
essay on “sociability”—that which is most apparently oriented
towards the positive nature of the presence of the Other in human
relationships—on close examination, calls for the presence of an
exclusively individual art that does not impose itself on the Other,
something which only a fully developed subjectivity can attain and
sustain. This is completely the opposite of the crowd in which fusion
with Others is the fundamental experience. Benjamin, on the other
hand, nurtures greater interest in and enthusiasm for the creativity of
the crowd, which he dealt with specifically in many of his works
(namelyhis city images, essays on Baudelaire, fragments from the
Passages, and analysis of the cinema and the critical, politically active
crowd in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction).
Benjamin looks beyond the principle of bourgeois individualization,
and maintained a trust in the creativity of the revolutionary crowd.
His utopian thinking, however, is not without its critical doubt, as he
realized that his enthusiasm was shared by apologists of the
Volksgemeinschaft and National Socialism. Just how fragile and
manipulable crowds were would become painfully clear with the
signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Although quite aware of
these events, Benjamin he never lost his messianic hope that a new
collectivity would emerge and manage to “innervate” the second
technique and introduce nature as a player in the game. Benjamin’s
“primal history” (Urgeschichte) intended to study precisely the same
aesthetic-cultural modernity of which Simmel was an authoritative
interpreter. However, Benjamin—and this is the fundamental
difference—witnessed with his own eyes the collapse of the principium
individuationis, which Simmel considered a characteristic sign of
metropolitan social life. For Benjamin the metropolis is above all
mourning, or rather, the “mournful play” (Trauerspiel)57 of the
disappearance of the model of free, universal individuality that
Simmel had theorized. Whereas Simmel viewed the metropolis as the
fruit of the “necessary” transcendence of life—the highest point
attained through the differentiating “power” (Kraft) of evolution, of
which “absolutely unique” individuality is the perfect product—
Benjamin observed the same metropolitan scene from the perspective
of the death of the bourgeois subjectivity that was to be quickly
eclipsed at the turn of the twentieth century.
Before and beyond the masses 19

NOTES

[1] E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991,

New York, 1994.
[2] R. Bodei, Destini personali. L’età della colonizzazione delle coscienze, Milano,
Feltrinelli, 2002.
[3] C. Borch, The Politics of Crowds. An Alternative History of Sociology,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012; C. Borch, “Between
Destructiveness and Vitalism: Simmel’s Sociology of Crowds,”
Conserveries mémorielles [En ligne], #8 | 2010, mis en ligne le 25 septembre
2010, consulté le 10 janvier 2016. URL : http://cm.revues.org/744; A.
Mubi Brighenti, “Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on crowds and packs,” in
Journal of Classical Sociology, no. 10/2010, pp. 291-314, DOI:
10.1177/1468795X10379675; S. Curti, Critica della folla, Torino/Milano,
Pearson, 2017.
[4] H. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, San Diego/London/New York, Hartcourt
Brace & Company, 1970.
[5] G. Simmel, Tarde, G., Les lois de L’imitation, 1890, in Georg Simmel
Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 1, Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant’s Physischer Monadologie
[u.a.], ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1999,
pp. 248-250; G. Simmel, “Massenpsychologie [Le Bon, G., Psychologie
des Foules, 1895],” in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 1, cit., pp. 353-
361; G. Simmel, “Ueber Massenverbrechen: Sighele, S., Psychologie des
Auflaufs und der Massenverbrechen,” 1897, in Georg Simmel
Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 1, cit. pp. 388-400.
[6] Ibid., p. 248.
[7] C. Borch, “Between Destructiveness and Vitalism,” op. cit., p. 4.
[8] G. Simmel, “Ueber Massenverbrechen”, op. cit., p. 354.
[9] G. Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftlichung,
ed. Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1992 (English
trans. Sociology. Inquiries into the construction of social forms, Leiden/Boston,
Brill, 2009, p. 425).
[10] G. Simmel, “Ueber Massenverbrechen”, op. cit., p. 395.
[11] Ibid, p. 396.
[12] C. Borch, “Between Destructiveness and Vitalism: Simmel’s Sociology
of Crowds,” op. cit., p. 3.
[13] Also called also called “große Soziologie” to distinguish it from the
“kleine Soziologie”, which is the “Grundfragen der Soziologie.
Individuum und Gesellschaft,” in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, Bd.. 16, ed.
Gregor Fitzi and Otthein Rammstedt. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp,
1999, pp. 59-149
[14] G. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in D. Frisby, M.
Featherstone (ed.), Simmel on Culture, London, Sage, 1997, p. 174.
[15] K. Lichtblau, Georg Simmel, Frankfurt a. M., Reihe Campus, 1997, p. 83.
20 Vincenzo Mele

[16] O. Rammstedt, “Einleitung“, in O. Rammstedt, Georg Simmel, Schriften

zur Soziologie. Eine Auswahl. Frankfurt am Main, 1983, pp. 27.
[17] V. Cotesta, “Introduzione,” in G. Simmel, Sull’intimità, Roma, Armando,
1998, pp. 7-59.
[18] G. Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in D. Frisby, M. Featherstone (ed.)
Simmel on Culture, op. cit., pp. 170-173.
[19] G. Fitzi, “Comment la société est-elle possible? Développement et
signification du « paradigme épistémologique » de la Sociologie de
Simmel de 1908”, in L. Deroche-Gurcel and P. Watier (ed.), La
Sociologie de Georg Simmel (1908). Éléments actuels de modélisation sociale, L.
Deroche-Gurcel and P. Watier (a cura di), Paris, 2002, pp. 111-130.
[20] G. Simmel, Sociology. Inquiries into the construction of social forms, op. cit., pp.
58-59.
[21] Ibid, pp. 166-167.
[22] Ibid, p. 499.
[23] Ibid, p. 500.
[24] Ibid, p. 501.
[25] Ibid, p. 500.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] W. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. M.
J. Jennings, Cambridge, MA/London, England, The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 183.
[29] G. Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, op. cit., p. 174.
[30] Ibid, p. 179.
[31] G. Simmel, “Sociology of Sociability,” in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone
(ed.) Simmel on Culture, London, Sage, 1997, p. 122.
[32] C. Borch, “Between Destructiveness and Vitalism: Simmel’s Sociology
of Crowds,” op. cit., p. 7.
[33] G. Simmel, “Sociology of Sociability,” op. cit., p. 124.
[34] C. Borch, “Between Destructiveness and Vitalism: Simmel’s Sociology
of Crowds,” op. cit., p. 7.
[35] S. Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, New York, Zone
Books, 2002.
[36] W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA/London, England,
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 458.
[37] G. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, p. 139.
[38] W. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire, op. cit.,
p. 181.
[39] W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 447.
[40] W. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire, op. cit.,
p. 190.
[41] Ibid, p. 182.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid, p. 190.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid, p. 188.
Before and beyond the masses 21

[46] Ibid.
[47] “This crowd, whose existence Baudelaire is always aware of, does not
serve as the model for any of his works; but it is imprinted on his
creativity as a hidden figure”, Ibid., p. 180. “The masses had become so
much part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his
works”, Ibid., p. 183.
[48] Ibid, p. 188.
[49] É. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, London, Oxford
University Press, 2001. Durkheim coined the term “collective
effervescence” to indicate how communal gatherings intensify, electrify
and enlarge religious experience. Bringing people together in close
physical proximity “generates a kind of electricity that quickly transports
them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation” (Ibid., p. 162).
[50] M. Pezzella, Narcisismo e società dello spettacolo, Roma, Manifestolibri, 1996.
[51] C. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, London, Penguin Books, 2010,
pp. 27-28.
[52] H. Caygill, “Non-Messianic Political Theology in Benjamin’s On the
Concept of History,” in A. Benjamin (ed.) Walter Benjamin and history,
London, Continuum, 2005, p. 225.
[53] W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. H. Eiland & M. W. Jennings,
Cambridge, MA., & London, Harvard University Press, 1991-1999, pp.
217-218.
[54] W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 484.
[55] Ibid.
[56] C. Borch, “Between Destructiveness and Vitalism: Simmel’s Sociology
of Crowds,” op. cit.
[57] W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London, Verso, 1998.

ABSTRACT

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) belonged

to two successive generations of thinkers and cultural critics who formulated
their ideas on the urban crowd and worked externally and internally,
respectively, to the “short” twentieth century. Their points of view on the
crowd as the typical social form of the modern metropolis represent two
highly significant lines of thought in the history of the twentieth century,
which at its beginning gave rise to a hope in the proliferation and flowering
of individuality, but later deteriorated into the conventionalism of mass
culture and the “colonization of consciousness” brought about by
totalitarianism. The perspectives of these two thinkers on the question of the
crowd stemmed, in Simmel’s case, from a perspective before the crowd: a
defense against the dangers that it represented for seventh-to-nineteenth-
22 Vincenzo Mele

century individuality, whose dynamics are at the heart of his work. Benjamin,
witnessing the impotence and inadequacy of the principium individuationis to
withstand the reactionary regimes of the masses, would find in the waning of
this principle, find hope—soon to be disappointed—for a new era of the
masses and an ill-defined “new collective body” beyond the crowd.

Key words: Simmel, Benjamin, Individual, Crowd, Collective Body.