Anxiety in Politics

How does it happen that the masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the men have who accept leaders?

The extraordinary difficulty in the comprehension of group-psychological phenomena lies first of all in our own prejudices; for the experiences of the last decades have instilled in us all more or less strong prejudices against the masses, and we associate with “masses” the epithet “mob”—a group of men who are capable of every atrocity. In fact the science of group psychology began with this aristocratic prejudice in the work of the Italian Scipio Sighele, and Le Bon’s famous book is completely in this tradition. His theses are familiar. Man in the mass descends; he is, as it were, hypnotized by the leader (operateur) and in this condition is capable of committing acts which he would never commit as an individual. As the slave of unconscious—i.e. for Le Bon, regressive—sentiments man in the mass is degraded into a barbarian: “Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian-that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” Critics of Le Bon, among them also Freud, have pointed out that his theory, which rests on Sighele and Tarde, is inadequate in two aspects: the answer to the question, What holds the masses together? is inadequate, for the existence of a “racial soul” is unproved. In addition, in Le Bon the decisive problem—the role of the leader-hypnotist—remains unclarified. As is frequently true in socialpsychological studies, the descriptions of psychological states are adequate, the theoretical analyses inadequate.

From the outset, Freud sees the problem as that of the identification of masses with a leader; an identification which becomes of decisive significance particularly in an anxiety situation. And he sees in the libido the cement which holds leader and masses together, whereby—as is known—the concept of libido is to be taken in a very broad sense, to include the instinctual activities, which “in relations between the sexes … force their way toward sexual union,” as well as those which “in other circumstances … are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longings for proximity, and self-sacrifice).” The cement which holds the mass together and ties them to the leader is thus a sum of instincts that are inhibited in their aims.

Since the identification of masses with the leader is an alienation of the individual member, iden...