Then and Now: On the Crowd, the Subject, and the Collective

This collection of essays offers some novel reflections on the nature of the crowd, the collective, and the subject’s relation to the social link. Prompted mainly by Freud’s Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, the authors analyze crucial issues ranging from La Boétie’s late Renaissance theory of voluntary servitude to the early 20th-century Europe’s collapsed empires and revolutionary uprisings, to progressive South Africans’ turn to segregationism, to Bolsonaro’s adoption of Nazi rhetoric. How, in today’s climate of individual freedom and delusion of autonomy - a promise animating both progressive identity discourses and racist, supremacist, and totalitarian discourses - are we to relaunch a bond of community that respects differences and takes responsibility for social well-being?

Essays by Betty Berardo Fuks, Paola Mieli, Rosalind Morris David, Pavón-Cuéllar, Alain Vanier