Mob

From Hobson's Choice

Often used in the USA as a colloquialism for organized crime, presumably owing to the Usonian experience of the hired mob used to commit some outrage. This, in turn, refers to the experience of mob militancy in which angry crowds would attach businesses accused of hoarding products to drive up prices. Thus was born the custom of hiring crowds by the hour to demolish stores that had not paid "protection money" to a gangster.

This entry, hower, does not deal with organized crime, but with the concept of the mob as a political actor. In particular, we are dealing with Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1949), in which the mob is identified as the most important stepping stone to political triumph for totalitarian movements.

Definition of the Mob

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By this word mob I mean not so much the indigent as the vicious, hot-headed, and inconsiderate part of the community, together with that numerous host of tools which knaves do work with called fools. These folks form the majority of all empires, kingdoms, and commonwealths, and, of course, when not restrained by political institutions or coerced by an armed force, possess the efficient power.
Letters of Gouverneur Morris, II.45.830

Hannah Arendt's primary work addresses the connection between the political events of the late 19th century, and the rise of totalitarianism in the first half of the 20th. She accepts only two historic examples of totalitarianism, the regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.^[1] Arendt begins the formation of mob politics, but avoids explicitly defining who the mob is. On p.37, she suggests one class alliance:

Many of these bankers were Jews and, even more important, the general figure of the banker bore definite Jewish traits for historical reasons. Thus the leftist movement of the lower middle class and the entire propaganda against banking capital turned more or less antisemitic, a development of little importance in industrial Germany but of great significance in France and, to a lesser extent, in Austria. For a while it looked as though the Jews had indeed for the first time come into direct conflict with another class without interference from the state. Within the framework of the nation- state, in which the function of the government was more or less defined by its ruling position above competing classes, such a clash might even have been a possible, if dangerous, way to normalize the Jewish position. To this social-economic element, however, another was quickly added which in the long run proved to be more ominous. The position of the Jews as bankers depended not upon loans to small people in distress, but primarily on the issuance of state loans. Petty loans were left to the small fellows, who in this way prepared themselves for the more promising careers of their wealthier and more honorable brethren. The social resentment of the lower middle classes against the Jews turned into a highly explosive political element, because these bitterly hated Jews were thought to be well on their way to Rolitical power. Were they not only too well known for their relationship with the government in other respects? Social and eco- nomic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely. Friedrich Engels once remarked that the protagonists of the antisemitic movement of his time were noblemen, and its chorus the howling mob of the petty bourgeoisie. This is true not only for Germany, but also for Austria's Christian Socialism and France's Anti-Dreyfusards. In all these cases, the aristocracy, in a desperate last struggle, tried to ally itself with the conservative forces of the churches…

The following page, she suggests a strikingly different one:

The followers of Prussian Court Chaplain Stoecker did not organize the first antisemitic parties in Germany. Once the appeal of antisemitic slogans had been demonstrated, radical antisemites at once separated themselves from Stoecker's Berlin movement, went into a full-scale fight against the government, and founded parties whose representatives in the Reichstag voted in all major domestic issues with the greatest opposition party, the Social Democrats. They quickly got rid of the compromising initial alliance with the old powers; Boeckel, the first antisemitic member of Parliament, owed his seat to votes of the Hessian peasants whom he defended against "Junkers and Jews," that is against the nobility which owned too much land and against the Jews upon whose credit the peasants depended.

Gradually it becomes clear what Arendt has in mind when she speaks of a mob. She is interested in the phenomenon of large numbers of people, unknown to their neighbors and hence absolved of social responsibility. It's difficult to imagine a mob in the world of Breugel paintings because all the figures in them know each other. In the large city of the 18th century, mobs became a significant political force, greatly worrisome to everyone who wasn’t among them (except, in some cases, just that particular part of that particular elite class that hoped to exploit the masses) As perceived by Arendt, the mob has two sides: from the point of view of an external obserer, the mob is a congerie of the dregs of one's neighbors—violent, amoral, savage, stupid, and wild. But from the point of view of individuals in the ranks of the mob, the formative experience is isolation:

But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely associated with uprotedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the [19th] century and the break-down of the political institutuions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted measn to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others…
Origins of Totalitarianism, p.425

Of course, for centuries before there had been major cities where mass migrations of "superfluous," or physically displaced, peasants moved to the city. Most frequently this occurred in the wake of plagues, when the decimation of manorial villages and mass flight led to a breakdown of agriculture. Both output and population would fall, the former more than the latter. In many port cities, the result was a desperate influx of hungry peasants hoping for paid labor and imported food.^[2] But totalitarianism did not rise in Renaissance Europe, possibly because of the immensely complex structure of vocational regulations there. The authorities resisted massive movements of workers most effectively by restricting economic roles. Centuries later, with the development of classical economics in England and France, this was decried as folly.

Another important event in the development of the mob, however, was successive waves of mass mobilization of the population. During the 18th century, soaring crown revenues were sunk by European leaders into wars for territory and (later) colonial privileges such as the right to import slaves to the Spanish colonies. Mobilization in Northern European countries such as England and Sweden reached astonishing levels (about 35% of all men 20-44 in Sweden)^[3] Such militarization of European life, with its frequent and sudden mass discharges, appears to have steadily eroded the complex patina of social strictures and mores until human behavior was assumed to be as hydraulic as the classical economists assumed it was.

Notes

1. ↑ On numberous occasions in the book, such as on p.307 of the 1973 paperback edition, she denies the existence of other examples of totalitarianism. At this site, we use a different definition of totalitarianism that is vastly broader, and includes many regimes she would have dismissed out of hand.
2. ↑ David Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture, Oxford University Press (2005), esp. p.101. It's usually assumed that the massive loss of life caused wages to rise, but the rural job structure of Medieval societies was quite complex, with very different movements in pay scales for different classes of workers in the aftermath of the Black Death. Stone refers to buoyant towns and their high wages in late 14th century (p.244), where one would indeed expect money wages to rise; because of the patchy impact of the Black Death, and the development of grain shipping during previous centuries, it stands to reason that for them, food prices did not keep pace with wage hikes. But in the countryside, the opposite was almost certainly true for tenant farmers.
3. ↑ Charles Tilly Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, Blackwell Publishers (1993); p.79, which includes a table of men under arms in selected European states through the years. The all-time historic peak was 1700, one of the most violent years in world history (relative to the population of the time). Then, Sweden hit 7.1% of its total population in arms, which probably was the result of an anomalous and sudden monopolization of revenue property by the king (reduction of nobile franchises). Sweden's rate would presumably translate to about 35% of all men of that age cohort.

James R MacLean (17:42, 1 October 2007 (PDT))