Treating the mob as the people is a shared error of rival leadership theories

Evidence

IF IT is the common error of our time to imagine that propaganda can achieve all things and that a man can be talked into anything provided the talking is sufficiently loud and cunning, in that period it was commonly believed that the “voice of the people was the voice of God,” and that the task of a leader was, as Clemenceau so scornfully expressed it, to follow that voice shrewdly. Both views go back to the same fundamental error of regarding the mob as identical with rather than as a caricature of the people. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 307

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key distinction between the mob and the people, which frames Arendt’s whole analysis of totalitarian mass politics.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”