The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study — A Closer Reading

The Psychoanalytic Lens

Martin explicitly borrows from psychoanalysis, suggesting that revealing the unconscious wish can cure crowd-thinking much as it cures the neurotic. He writes that 'a conscious recognition of this desire' and its deliberate resistance would deliver us from compulsion. This is not a metaphor; the book treats crowds as symptomatic of repressed drives. The author argues that the mob lurks 'just under the skin of most of us, both ignorant and educated,' implying that crowd behavior is not a deviation but a latent potential in all individuals. The language of pathology—'cure,' 'neurotic,' 'unconscious wish'—pervades the analysis, making the book as much a psychological treatise as a social critique.

Revolution as Crowd Phenomenon

Chapter VII examines revolutionary crowds, which Martin calls the crowd-mind 'at its best and at its worst.' He distinguishes between gradual, constructive change—exemplified by scientific advance and cultural growth—and the 'fool thing, the insincere thing' that happens in politics. Revolution, he argues, is commonly a crowd-idea: thinking on the subject depends on 'which crowd we happen to belong to.' The text warns that the adjustment reached is often an unstable equilibrium among contending crowds, each inspired by 'the fiction of its own importance' and desire to rule. This section reveals Martin's skepticism toward both radical and conservative crowds, as he sees both as driven by ego-feeling rather than reason.

The Absolutism of Crowd-Mind

Martin devotes a chapter to the absolutism of the crowd-mind, arguing that crowds demand absolute solutions and reject nuance. He connects this to traditional systems of 'intellectualist, absolutist, and rationalist philosophy,' which he sees as reinforcing crowd-thinking. The remedy, he proposes in the final chapter, is a new educational method rooted in humanism—drawing on James, Schiller, and Dewey. This is not a detailed program but a philosophical suggestion: that breaking up the 'logical forms' in which the crowd-mind entrenches itself requires habits of thinking that resist absolutism. The book thus ends on a note of cautious optimism, though Martin admits the solution may seem vague to those seeking a formula.

Readers should note that Martin's argument is built on a series of dichotomies—reason versus crowd, gradual change versus revolution, education versus dogma—that reflect the intellectual climate of 1920. The book is less a systematic psychology than a polemic against what the author sees as the irrationality of collective action. Its value lies in its period-specific diagnosis of crowd behavior as a psychological disorder, a view that anticipates later work on groupthink and mass psychology.

Martin’s study of crowds always made me think of that other quiet distress, the one where souls huddle unseen in city shadows. Both books whisper of what we prefer to ignore, the stirring unease beneath respectable life. That old The Bitter Cry of Outcast London An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor — Background and Themes shares a similar ache, a patient sorrow for the forgotten many.