Modernity and crowds: solidity, liquidity and order

Abstract

The revival of crowd theory has reignited interest in the meaning of mass society in late modernity. By discarding the old stereotype of crowds as aimless, irrational, and violent, theorists are now researching different types of collectivities as instances of dynamic communicative and micro-organizational action. Yet, the refocus on crowds has not been properly situated in a context that has shifted, as Zygmunt Bauman alleged, from solid to liquid modernity. Ostensibly, the perception of crowds as amorphous and fluid coincided with the solid phase of modernity. In the current phase that is defined as liquid, crowds are being reconsidered as social formations imbued with the potential for mobilization and power reconfiguration. It implies that the element of solidity provides a key to understanding new forms of sociality emerging from crowd actions, thereby challenging Bauman's idea that the liquid has irreversibly replaced the solid.

Keywords:

• Bauman
• crowds
• liquidity
• masses
• modernity
• order
• solidity

Notes on contributor

Raymond Lee was previously associate professor in sociology at the University of Malaya.

Notes

1. For instance, Rose (1982, vii) observed that in the early 1980s many American colleges stopped offering courses on collective behaviour. But its decline was partly arrested by the redefinition of the collective in symbolic interaction (Hewitt 1979, 197–206). At the metatheoretical level, crowd theory was entwined in the paradoxes besetting the specialty of collective behaviour. The question of whether the crowd was indeed an entity unto itself or an outcome of individualist action associated with system reproduction shifted the focus of the entire specialty to the micro-macro debate in social theory (see Lee 1990).