urgent social problems of his time. In fact,LeBon’sdescription of socialism as a
mass movement containsin nucethe main elements of mass discourse and, as
an introduction to the topic, deservesto be quotedinfull:
Socialism, whose dream isto substituteitself for the ancient faiths,proposes butavery low
ideal, andto establish itappeals but to sentimentslowerstill. What,ineffect,does it prom-
ise, morethan merely our dailybread, and that at the price of hard labour?With what lever
does it seek toraise the soul?With the sentimentsofenvyand hatred which it creates in the
hearts of multitudes?Tothe crowd, no longersatisfied with political and civic equality,it
proposes equality of condition, without dreamingthat social inequalities are born of those
natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change.⁵Outside the socialist movement,two distinct ways of thinking about the proletar-
iat can be distinguished: masspsychological studies that treat the masses as a
new social phenomenon beyond class distinctionsand sociological studies
that see the proletariat asanew social formationwithin the class structure.
While the formerdrawonthe languageofemotions in describingand evaluating
mass phenomena, the latter aspire to scientific objectivity in offering structural
analyses of modern society.Intheirrelationship to the subjectmatter,both lines
of inquiry are sometimes difficultto distinguish, with the masses treated as the
origins of the workingclass and the proletariat seen as the vanguard of social-
ism. But giventhe ubiquityofthe specterofsocialism as the hidden reference
point,the methodologicaldifferences separating mass psychologyand modern
sociologybecome ultimatelyless relevant thantheir shared preoccupations, if
not obsessions.
The earliest empirical studies onradicalized workers playedakey role in es-
tablishingsociologyand anthropology as new academic disciplines duringthe
mid-nineteenth century;mass psychology, to be discussed in the chapter’ssec-
ond part,did the same for the more elusive connection between social sciences
and culturalcriticism. In the German context,the first scholarlyexcursions into
what was oftendescribed as unknown territory took place duringthe 1860s, well
before the publication of LeBon’sbook,and continued as an integralpart of
largerGerman(and Austrian)discussions about empire, nation, capitalism,
and modernity.Aswill be shown, LorenzvonStein’sstudyofsocial movements
in France establishedamodel for the social sciencesthat included comparative
transnationalperspectivesand offered concrete recommendations for social re-
Gustave Le Bon,ThePsychologyofSocialism(Kitchener:Batoche,2001), 8.Anote on the
translation of non-English book titles:whenthe books have been translated into English, the
titles aregiven in italics;inall other cases, onlythe standardrules of capitalization areapplied.
The Threat of the Proletariat and the Discourseofthe Masses 35