The Crowd and Society

The mass dissolves and rules

• Le Bon (lebon) — in a crowd the individual disappears: the crowd is a new being in which stupidity accumulates; history is made by the soul of the masses. Grounding: v-tolpe-lichnost-ischezaet, tolpa-eto-novoe-sushchestvo, istoriyu-tvorit-dusha-mass.
• Nietzsche (nietzsche) — herd morality calls evil everything that elevates the individual; greatness is the capacity to stand apart. Grounding: stadnaya-moral, velichie-v-otdelnosti, pafos-distantsii.
• La Rochefoucauld (larochefoucauld) — society is a theatre of masks: from mask to mask, down to disguising ourselves from ourselves. Grounding: teatr-obshchestva, teatr-obshchestva-ot-maski-k-maske.
• Montaigne (montaigne) — custom is a tyrant, the "barbarian" is merely the stranger; keep a back shop — a room wholly your own. Grounding: tiraniya-obychaya, varvar-eto-chuzhoy, sokhrani-zadnyuyu-lavku.

Community as criterion and form

• Adler (adler) — social feeling is the sole criterion of a person's worth; health means contribution to the common good. Grounding: chuvstvo-obshchnosti, chuvstvo-obshchnosti-edinstvennyy-kriteriy, zdorove-est-vklad.
• Confucius (confucius) — society is held together by ritual, names, and relationships: harmony (he) is neither sameness nor conformity. Grounding: li, he, otnosheniya, zhengming.
• Tolstoy (tolstoy) — seek meaning among the people, who make life, not in the parasitic educated circle. Grounding: narod, smysl-ishchi-u-tekh-kto-delaet-zhizn.
• Franklin (franklin) — civic usefulness is built by club and project: the Junto, the library, "put yourself out of sight" — and the business will go through. Grounding: junto, tsepochka-grazhdanskoy-polzy, put-yourself-out-of-sight.
• Smiles (smiles) — a nation's freedom derives from the character of its citizens, not from institutions; help from without enfeebles. Grounding: ot-samopomoshchi-k-svobode-nacii, nebo-pomogaet-tem-kto-pomogaet-sebe.

The people as the foundation of power

• Machiavelli (machiavelli) — rest on the people, not on the nobles: the people ask only not to be oppressed. Grounding: operetsya-na-narod, narod-i-znat.

Axis of dispute: Le Bon against Adler and Confucius — the dissolution of the
individual against community as criterion and form; Nietzsche against Tolstoy —
the herd against the people as the source of meaning; Montaigne against Le Bon —
the back shop as the answer to the contagion of the crowd.