Cultures of the Crowd: The Idea and Image of the Masses in Modern European History

Abstract

This project analyzes the idea and image of the masses in modern European history. To write the history of the masses is at once to write the history of the political, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries that have been fabricated in order for a certain people, nation, or ethnicity to view itself as a unity, and this by rejecting certain segments of the population as “masses”. The problem at the heart of this research undertaking is thus central to the ways in which cultural and collective identities have been construed throughout European modernity. The project is completed and has resulted in two major monographs and a number of articles; the first one is “A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions”, published in Swedish in 2005, and in English in 2008; the second one is entitled “Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses in Europe between the Wars”, and is (2011) forthcoming.

Keywords

Ethnicity, Populism, Social exclusion/inclusion, Democracy, Crowd theory

Publications

BOOKS

Jonsson, Stefan (2013) Crowds and Democracy. The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism. Columbia University Press.

Jonsson, Stefan (2008) A Brief History of the Masses: Three revolutions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. (242pp) Translated into Korean and Turkish.

Jonsson, Stefan (2005) Tre revolutioner. En kort historia om folket. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2005.

ARTICLES

Jonsson, Stefan (2014) ?The Wisdom of Crowds?. TANK Magazine (London), vol. 8, no. 1 (2014): 62?65.

Jonsson, Stefan (2013) “After Individuality: Freud’s Mass Psychology and Weimar Politics”. New German Critique, vol. 40, no. 2.

Jonsson, Stefan (2012) ‘Total teater: Samhällsutopier på scen under Weimarrepubliken’. K&K – Kultur og Klasse 46, no. 114: 77?92.

Jonsson, Stefan (2012) ‘The Face of the Masses, the Gaze of the Masses: New Matrixes of historical consciousness in inter-war Europe’. Eurozine, 25 maj.

Jonsson, Stefan (2011) ‘Hannah Arendt i Weimarrepubliken’. In Konsten att handla – konsten att tänka: Hannah Arendt om det politiska, eds. Ulrika Björk and Anders Burman. Stockholm: Axl Books, 129-144.

Jonsson, Stefan (2010) ‘Neither Masses nor Individuals: Representations Of The Collective In Interwar German Culture’. In Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking The Political Culture Of Germany In The 1920s. Ed. Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin Mcguire. New York: Berghahn Books.

Jonsson, Stefan (2006) ‘The Invention of the Masses: The Crowd in French Culture from the Revolution to the Commune.’ In Crowds. Ed. Jeffrey Schnapp och Matthew Tiews. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 47-75.

Jonsson, Stefan (2003) ‘Masses Mind Matter: Political Passions and Collective Violence in Post-Imperial Austria’. In Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions. Ed. Richard Meyer. London: The Getty Research Institute Publications.

Jonsson, Stefan (2001) ‘Society Degree Zero: Christ, Crowds, and Communism in the Art of James Ensor’. Representations 75: 1-32.

Jonsson, Stefan (2001) ‘Wiener Blut: Leidenschaften und Gewalt im Zeitalter der Massen’, Lettre International (Berlin), no. 50.

Jonsson, Stefan (2001) ‘Demokratins ursprung: politiska lidelser och kollektivt våld i massornas tid’. Ord och Bild, no. 2-3: 19-42.