During the pandemic lockdowns, the writer (veteran raver, protester, and football fan) Dan Hancox watched videos of football chants on loop, moved by the footage of thousands of people coming together to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, or “Sunshine on Leith”. He realised how much he missed not only the companionship of his friends but the feeling of being among strangers, dancing at raves or festivals, beer in hand, commiserating with his fellow AFC Wimbledon supporters, or shouting at a political demo. When we dissolve into the crowd, he argues, we are answering a primal desire to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Before we became “atomised, self-interested individuals with Netflix accounts and no mates”, we were herd animals; we sang and danced together; we understood that when we come together as a group, we are greater than the sum of our parts.
Even before the coronavirus forced us into self-isolation, British communal life had been shrinking for decades, Hancox writes. Many urban public spaces have become privatised, and austerity politics has forced the closure of thousands of community centres, libraries, youth groups, playgrounds, leisure centres and parks. A series of laws, from the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, which criminalised the free rave sDcene, to the introduction of Asbos, public dispersal orders and the 2023 Public Order Bill, have challenged our right to self-assembly.
In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World, a book that grew out of an essay Hancox wrote during the first lockdown, he argues that crowd membership transforms the individual – our self-understanding and sense of agency is enlarged when we act as part of a bigger group – and that crowds change the course of history. Crowds are “the most direct and physical expression of democracy that we have”, he writes, and they have the power to bring an issue to a head, to catalyse and accelerate change, as when the Arab Spring uprisings toppled decades-old dictatorships in the early 2010s, or, closer to home, when Bristol protesters toppled the statue of the enslaver Edward Colston and dumped it in the harbour in 2020.
Crowds are also unfairly maligned as violent and mindless. “We never speak of ‘crowd joy’, ‘crowd care’ or ‘crowd comfort’,” Hancox observes. “There is no ‘gentle mob’ in the English language. No friendly pack. No thoughtful herd.” And yet he believes a crowd can be all these things. When you consider, for example, that the aggregate attendance during the 2021-22 English football season was 30 million, with only 2,198 arrests made, football fans – who don’t exactly have a reputation for gentility – appear to be a surprisingly well-behaved group.
The idea that crowds are inherently dangerous – that they make us lose ourselves and can turn otherwise upstanding people violent – can be traced to the work of Gustave Le Bon, a French polymath whose 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind may be one of the best selling science books in history. Le Bon was read by Hitler and Mussolini and his work inspired the heavily orchestrated mass rallies still popular among authoritarian regimes today. His arguments have been thoroughly debunked by modern social scientists, who have studied how, for instance, crowd violence is often a response to violent policing, rather than vice versa, and how crowds often moderate themselves. And yet, his legacy endures, both in police crowd-control tactics (although this is slowly changing, Hancox hopes) and in how commentators – politicians and journalists especially – often think and write about demonstrators.
During the 2011 Tottenham riots, for instance, many people tried to contain the looting. Footage emerged of the so-called Hackney Heroine, Pauline Pearce, who stood, clutching her walking stick, among broken glass and burned cars admonishing the crowd: “Black people, get real. Do it for a cause.” The newspaper headlines the following day spoke of “yob rule”; David Cameron dismissed the riots as “criminality, pure and simple”; and the Labour MP Glenda Jackson declared it “time to send in the army and water cannons”. Politicians and the media seemed largely incurious about the motivations behind the riots, or whether some of those involved had legitimate grievances. In this atmosphere, Keir Starmer, as head of public prosecutions, oversaw the shockingly punitive sentencing of the rioters: one person received a four-year sentence for incitement, for a Facebook post that no one acted on. Hancox saw Tottenham as a “challenge, albeit a nihilistic one, by the powerless to the class who hold a monopoly on power” and the kind of collective expression of anger you can expect in a country where so many channels for collective action – community centres, youth clubs, trade unions – have been shut down.
Hancox’s is a deeply humane perspective. He quotes the Welsh socialist Raymond Williams, who wrote that “there are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses”. If your starting point is that most people are fundamentally rational and good, and remain so even when they gather en masse, then it becomes clearer that the priority in a democracy shouldn’t be protecting people from crowds, but rather enabling people to gather safely. That means responsive, light-handed policing that prioritises public safety over public order. In the aftermath of deadly crushes, such as the Hillsborough football disaster of 1989, in which 97 fans were killed, the victims are often blamed – for being rowdy or violent or panicking – when ultimately the authorities are responsible for poor planning. As one safety expert tells Hancox, people don’t die because they panic, they panic because they are dying.
While Hancox criticises the common tendency to lump all protesters together – thereby circumventing the need to interrogate a crowd’s varied demands and motivations, while also letting individual bad actors off the hook – he is himself prone to making similar sweeping generalisations about the establishment or the political classes or the media, the latter surely a relatively ideologically diverse group, of which he is a member. Hancox writes scathingly of how the “right” and “liberal centre” worry unnecessarily about Twitter mobs. “Pundits like Tom Chivers… take it in turns to deliver sermons with titles like “How the Mob Can Silence You”, without ever identifying who the collective subject of that sentence is. One polite critic, or a handful of abusive, anonymous Twitter users, does not a crowd make,” he writes. But while it is true that many “Twitter mob” fears are overblown, sometimes people – of all political persuasions, and often women, or members of minority groups – are inundated by abusive, threatening online messages. Surely, we aren’t supposed to pretend that this doesn’t happen, and doesn’t shape how people talk online?
Crowds are not always a force for good, or intent on creating a more egalitarian society. Hancox acknowledges this, and makes a distinction between the revolutionary crowd and the authoritarian one. The latter is directed from the top and works obsequiously for their master. The 6 January US Capitol rioters, he argues, were an authoritarian crowd. But not all history-making crowds seem to fall obviously into either category (how would Hancox define the Muslim Brotherhood protesters who gathered at Rabaa Square following the military-led ouster of Egypt’s Mohammed Morsi, I wondered?). Sometimes democratic values are best served by answering the demands of popular protests, and sometimes they are served when democratic institutions resist them, and it is helpful to be able to distinguish between the two.
Hancox argues that the Bristol protesters were justified in toppling the Colston statue because efforts to remove the statue via official channels had failed. I believe they were right that a multicultural modern democracy shouldn’t be keeping statues of slaveholders on public pedestals. But Hancox’s rationale becomes less appealing if you apply it to an example of a crowd doing something you disapprove of. If a group of far-right misogynists found that their formal efforts to remove statues of famous women were frustrated, most people would feel less comfortable with them taking direct action.
Still, Hancox is an elegant and persuasive writer. Some of the most enjoyable passages are those in which he expounds on the pleasures of dancing at Notting Hill Carnival, or moshing at a gig, or swearing at the sidelines of a football match. You might come for the assured, and very leftist, political analysis and stay for the lively diatribes against corporate festival sponsors and people who don’t appreciate London. There is no arguing with his central insight that individual health and the political health of a country depend on people feeling able to come together to create fellowship and community with their neighbours.
Hannah Arendt described totalitarian movements as “mass organisations of atomised, isolated individuals”, Hancox notes, a quote that serves as a timely reminder that a socially isolated citizenry is vulnerable to manipulation. “One of the greatest mistakes we have made in recent decades is to accept the idea that freedom is a quality that can be found and enjoyed only by the individual acting alone,” Dan Hancox concludes. And if by this point he hasn’t persuaded you to switch off the dross you’re binge watching on Netflix and hotfoot it to a festival or football match, nothing will.
Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World
Dan Hancox
Verso, 272pp, £20
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[See also: The combat zone]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone