The Politics of Crowds

Christian Borch is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His PhD was on the history of modern crime semantics where he studied how notions of crime and criminals evolved in the twentieth century and what responses were launched to deal with crime. In his more recent research Borch has focused on crowds, architecture and urban theory. He has published widely on these issues as well as on key social theorists such as Gabriel Tarde, Niklas Luhmann and Peter Sloterdijk. He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory.

• Introduction: the crowd problem; 1. Setting the stage: crowds and modern French society; 2. Disciplinary struggles: the crowd in early French sociology; 3. Weimar developments: toward a distinctively sociological theory of crowds; 4. Liberal attitudes: crowd semantics in the USA; 5. From crowd to mass: problematizing classless society; 6. Reactions to totalitarianism: new fusions of sociological and psychological thinking; 7. The culmination and dissolution of crowd semantics; 8. Postmodern conditions: the rise of the post-political masses; Epilogue: the politics of crowds.

'There are over seven billion people on the planet, many of them crammed into cities. The result is that a politics of crowds is not a curio. It is a pivotal means of understanding how we are moved by the world. Christian Borch's book is the clearest and best guide you could possibly have to the opportunities as well as the risks.' Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick