What Is the Building Block of the Social? Episteme of the One and the Many

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century authors were not so wrong in their claim that crowds are the ‘raw matter of all civilisations’. Indeed, crowds place us before that undefined, floating, unstructured and unorganised nature that characterises our primary emotive human materials. However, contrary to what Le Bon and the other crowd theorists argued, such a floating entity is far from possessing any uniform determination, nor does it represent any alleged substantive ‘human nature’.