I. Social Sciences and Ethics

The term the masses (or the crowd) is a peculiarly modern, strongly normative designation for a great number of human beings thought of as an amorphous whole. Since antiquity there have been references to disorganized groups of people, uneducated and hence susceptible to demagoguery (óchlos, plebs), but the modern use of the term presupposes specific processes of deracination in industri…