Habit, suggestion and the paradox of the crowd

This chapter is concerned with ways in which notions of habit and suggestion have been deployed in discussions of the crowd in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social science literatures"”particularly as used by LeBon and Tarde. The chapter's purpose is to tease out the ways in which the adjacent terms"”habit and suggestion"”are mobilized in crowd discourses and in the theories of the subject on which they rely. In doing so, it explores tensions in the ways in which the two terms are related. On the one hand, they have been folded together in notions of habits of suggestibility, which establish physiological or psychic capacities for the 'imitative practices' constitutive of the crowd (and of the social more generally) (Tarde). On the other, the terms are counter-posed, where suggestibility disrupts habit in its appeal to the instinctual, which sees individuals act in the crowd in ways that are regressive and contrary to 'their habits and character' (LeBon). This chapter contends that the ways in which habit and suggestion are articulated in these discourses of the crowd are central to unravelling 'the paradox of the crowd', in which it is posited as an entity oscillating between a transformative potentiality and a pathological tendency, between the socially constitutive and the socially destructive.