Stir Up

follower

masses

is a degeneration of humanity, humanity going the wrong way.

Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way.

is a people without a leader. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob.

A leader is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob. Frank Herbert

is a pitiful in that, in a mob, men don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob... that's what an army is--a mob... they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Mark Twain

is a superfluous, helpless, passive, uprooted, disoriented people who no longer have any clear sense of reality or self-interest because the world they had inhabited has been destroyed by the upheavals of unemployment, inflation, war, and revolution.

Arendt maintained that most of the recruits to totalitarian movements belonged to the 'masses': uprooted, disoriented people who no longer had any clear sense of reality or self-interest because the world they had inhabited had been destroyed by the upheavals of unemployment, inflation, war, and revolution. But their condition was only one facet of a more widespread experience of 'superfluousness.' If these helpless, passive people were ideally suited to mass membership of totalitarian movements, the leaders and activist came from an older group of 'superfluous' people whom Arendt calls 'the mob': a criminal and violent underworld generated by the unsettling dynamism of economic growth.34 Imperialism had exported unscrupulous adventurers like these across the globe and offered them 'infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play.'35 This nihilism and its practices, reimported into Europe by movements seeking to emulate imperialism, was one of the sources of totalitarian violence.' (Canovan in Villa 2000: 31) . . . .'Hanna Pitkin maintains that totalitarianism-as-subject represents the first appearance in Arendt's work of what she calls 'the Blob,' a kind of monstrous force that seems to take over human beings and use them as its instruments. H. F. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)' Canovan in Villa 2000: 42)

is approached through the stampeding of its passions, as through a demagogue.

Following Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt notes a crucial distinction between a people and a mob. A mob is approached through the stampeding of its passions, as through a demagogue. A mob is but a collection of individuals, animated not by their autonomous capacities for making choices through reflection and reasoned discourse, but rather by their unformed passions swayed by whatever winds may blow.

is but a collection of individuals, led not by critical reflection but by their unformed passions swayed by whatever winds may blow.

mob, n.Definitions

mob