![]() | The Leader and the Crowd: Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880-1941 Subjects: Political leadership -- United States -- History; Collective behavior -- United States -- History; United States -- Politics and government -- 1865–1933; United States -- Politics and government -- 1933–1945; Democracy -- United States -- History; Daria Frezza covers six tumultuous decades of transatlantic history to examine how European theories of mass politics and crowd psychology influenced American social scientists' perception of crowds, mobs, democratic "people," and its leadership. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the development of an urban-industrial mass society and the disordered influx of millions of immigrants required a redefinition of these important categories in American public discourse. Frezza shows how in the Atlantic crossing of ideas American social scientists reelaborated the European theories of crowd psychology and the racial theories then in fashion. Theorists made a sharp distinction between the irrationality of the crowd, including lynchings, and the rationality of the democratic "public." DARIA FREZZA is a professor of U.S. history in the history department, faculty of literature, at the University of Siena in Italy. |
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