Crowd theory’s insights only failed due to rigid dichotomies

Evidence

Why, however, did crowd psychologists ultimately fail? It is not difficult to find the reason: because of their ideological anti-popular bias; because they framed their discourses within stark and sterile dichotomies – the individual/the crowd; the rational/the irrational; the normal/the pathological. It is enough, however, to introduce some souplesse into these rigid oppositions, to let each of their two poles partially contaminate the other, for an entirely different picture to emerge. For in that case the mass behaviour described by crowd theorists will be a catalogue not of social aberrations but of processes which, in different degrees, structure any kind of socio-political life. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes Laclau’s stated technique of ‘letting off’ rigid categories that also drove the earlier dichotomy-talk in chapters 2-3; applies his method to reading social theory itself. — connects to: Suggestion was an unexplained mechanism that supposedly explained everything about crowds — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 86