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WENDY BROWN

oppose these to childishness, primitivism, unchecked impulse, instinct, and barbarism.
This is the alignment and opposition that makes its way into contemporary tolerance
discourse.
Yet Freud’s contrast between primitive groups and civilized individuals is not a
straightforward story of emergence from an undifferentiated mass to self-reflective indi-
viduality. As is well known, it is the repression ofindividual instinct, and not the disaggre-
gation of a group, that animates the drama ofCivilization and Its Discontents, in which
human happiness, satisfaction, and self-love are all sacrificed on the altar of civilization.
It could even be said that for Freud there is only ever the individual, that is, the individual
is both the ontological a priori and the telos of civilization; groups are not primary or
natural, nor are they stable. To the contrary, Freud’s insistence upon our ‘‘primary mutual
hostility’’ and natural ‘‘sexual rivalry’’ makes associations of any sort an achievement,
whether they are relatively permanent and organized structures arrived at through the
complex covenant of the totemic system depicted inTotem and Tabooor more contingent
and unstructured, as with those diagnosed inGroup Psychology.^16 Man is not a ‘‘herd
animal’’ but a ‘‘horde animal,’’ Freud writes at the conclusion of his lengthy critical dis-
cussion of other theorists of group psychology.^17 A herd animal has an instinctual affinity
for closeness, a primary gregariousness, while the horde animal is constituted by an exter-
nal organizing principle that brokers a complex need for, rivalry with, endangerment by,
and aggression toward others.
Still, Freud, like other nineteenth-century European thinkers, conceives ‘‘primitive’’
peoples as organized by principles of tribalism rather than individualism. Individuation
is both the agent and sign of civilization for Freud, while groups signify a condition—
whether temporary or enduring—of barbarism. Organicist orders, in other words, denote
not simply pre-civilized social relations and subject formations butde-civilizedones, in
which the demands of civilization have been loosened or shed. This is why, despite his
quarrel with their analyses of the source ofMassenpsychologie, Freud allows fellow psy-
chologists Gustav Le Bon and William McDougall to characterize the problem he joins
them in wishing to understand, namely, that the mental life of ‘‘unorganized’’ groups is
comparable to that of primitive peopleandof children.^18 For Le Bon, ‘‘by the mere fact
that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of
civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that
is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity,
and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.’’^19 McDougall says the behavior
of the group ‘‘is like that of an unruly child or an untutored passionate savage in a strange
situation, rather than like that of its average member; and in the worst cases it is like that
of a wild beast, rather than like that of human beings.’’^20
So we have in Freud the paradox of an analytical a priori individualism (the lone
savage) and a colonial historiography of the emergence of modern individualized man
out of organicism (the primitive tribalist). Savage man is a nonhuman animal, lacking

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