Conclusion - Assembly and the Agile Becoming-Subject

Summary

One might, with good reason, choose any one of many historical moments from which to take a baseline reading of political and other kinds of crowds. Democracy failed in Athens in 411 BCE, when the demos, under coercion, voted democracy out and an oligarchic constitution in. Urbanized forces of authority have always and everywhere demonstrated obsessive concern about the discipline and control of potent crowds. If crowds are ubiquitous and immemorial, why the dramatic moral panic and disruptive cultural anxiety around crowds, just at the turn of the twentieth century? What had changed since the multiple and numerous crowds of popular nineteenth-century movements, such as the Chartists or French Communards? Before what Lederer describes as the twentieth-century rise and quasi-triumph of the oceanic collective, humans were usually counted on as loyally inhabiting a variety of exclusionary identificatory allegiances, which nineteenth-century European liberal culture generally schematized as local or ancestral kinship-, place-, class-, and race-specified groups.