Abstract
THE MATHEMATICIAN is tossing fitfully in his bed, talking in his sleep. He was up late talking with his friend the philosopher, and now he is dreaming. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse watches him, worried. In the morning she calls in Doctor Bourdeu for a consultation. She has noted down her friend’s ravings and, looking for reassurance, reads them to the doctor. “Have you ever seen a swarm of bees leaving their hive? … Have you seen them fly away and form at the tip of a branch a long cluster of little winged creatures, all clinging to each other by their feet? This cluster is a being, an individual, a kind of living creature.” To Mlle. de l’Espinasse’s dismay, instead of trying to help the delirious patient, Doctor Bourdeu takes the ball and runs with it (Fig. 1.1). “Do you want to change the cluster of bees into one individual animal?” he asks. “Soften the feet with which they cling to one another, that is to say make them continuous instead of contiguous. Obviously there is a marked difference between this new condition of the cluster and the preceding one, and what can this difference be if not that it is now a whole, one and the same animal, whereas before it was a collection of animals? All our organs… are only distinct animals kept by the law of continuity in a state of general sympathy, unity, identity.” (Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, pp. 168–170).
Puisque ces mystères nous dépassent, feignons d’en être les organisateurs.
Jean Cocteau
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Notes
- 1.
Or possibly Alexander Hamilton; the authorship of this one of the Federalist papers remains uncertain, according to some scholars.
- 2.
It was during these riots that the phrase “King Mob” was used for the first time, scrawled on the walls of Newgate Prison.
- 3.
Tarde’s investigations were not limited to crowds, but to all of society; he suggested that there is a continuum from a loosely affiliated crowd to what he called a “corporation”, a well-defined, durable, organized social structure. The crowd-corporation transition has an important structural resonance with another idea we will explore later: the transition from MLS1 to MLS2 selection.
- 4.
Herbert Spencer had proposed that the simple spread of human populations led to specialization of social roles according to the local environment in which people lived: those who live near the sea make their living as fishermen, etc. (This process can be compared to niche specialization in evolution.) Durkheim argued that this certainly occurs, but not to a sufficient extent to explain the degree of actual division of labor present in human society.
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Bahar, S. (2018). Crowds. In: The Essential Tension. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1054-9_1
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