A crowd’s unity arises from the leader’s look that objectifies its members.

Evidence

The problem involves here again multiple individual projects of men in the crowd; the crowd has been constituted as a crowd by the look of the leader or the speaker; its unity is an object-unity which each one of its members reads in the look of the Third who dominates it, and each one then forms the project of losing himself in this object-ness, of wholly abandoning his selfness in order to be no longer anything but an instrument in the hands of the leader. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1031

Categorization

• XREF: This dovetails with mob psychology and Boulangism mentioned just above, and connects to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of mass movements and leadership — worth cross-referencing when building the Beauvoir backdrop on freedom and servitude. — connects to: Crowds arouse sub-individual instincts while organized groups transcend individuals — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 345; A charismatic leader can give isolated youth the sense of existing through group power. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 376
• DEFINE: Clarifies the ontological mechanism behind ‘object-unity’: the crowd qua crowd is constituted from outside, by the look of the leader, not from within.

Broader Connections

• Crowds arouse sub-individual instincts while organized groups transcend individuals #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 345