Crowds and Power: Summary & Key Insights

Every crowd begins with a moment of discharge—a sudden release of difference. It is the moment when individuals, long bound by separation, shed the prickly armor of their solitude and become part of a single body. I call this event the discharge because it breaks down the barriers that usually divide one human being from another. The unease that defines ordinary life—the fear of being touched, the anxiety of distinction—gives way to an overwhelming sense of equality.

In this instant, the crowd no longer consists of separate figures but of one organism pulsing with collective energy. Joy and terror coexist. The person who moments ago feared proximity now craves it. This discharge can happen in the streets of a revolution, in the swirling masses of a religious procession, or even among spectators seized by the fervor of a game. It is the same force each time—the ecstatic erasure of boundaries.

From this moment onward, the crowd begins its life with new laws. It knows only its own mood and direction, and its growth becomes an end in itself. The discharge is dangerous because it abolishes self-control, yet it is also redemptive, for it grants the human being a brief taste of absolute equality. In the discharge lies both the seed of freedom and the germ of power.

As I observed crowds in different contexts, it became essential to distinguish their forms. Crowds can be open or closed, depending on whether they can grow endlessly or whether their membership is fixed. The open crowd strives continually to enlarge itself—it seeks new participants and new energies, drawing outsiders into its vortex. Revolutionary crowds, religious movements, and spontaneous demonstrations all belong to this type. They live through expansion, and their strength depends on the intensity of their inclusiveness.

The closed crowd, by contrast, guards its boundaries. Armies, hierarchical religious orders, and secret societies are examples. Their power lies not in growth but in preserving cohesion, in the clarity of belonging. Inside the closed crowd there is discipline and succession, a struggle to maintain form against decay.

In both types, the crowd’s desires mirror human needs. The open crowd offers ecstatic movement, a sense of unending possibility; the closed crowd offers stability, hierarchy, and the illusion of permanence. Societies oscillate between these states, never purely one or the other. The religious congregation that expands in prophecy becomes institutional and closed in its maturity; the disciplined army may dissolve into a revolutionary crowd. Understanding these types reveals how fluid and fundamental are the transitions between liberation and control, between the desire to merge and the necessity to command.