Friedrich von Wieser, Masse (1925)

Friedrich von Wieser’s encyclopedia entry Masse develops a general account of collective action through the relationship between masses and leaders. Its three sections move from a critique of mass psychology to the organizational requirements of cooperation and finally to the mass’s distinctive social function. The central argument is that collective life cannot be understood primarily through crowds in states of excitement. Stable institutions, economic cooperation, and cultural transmission also depend on masses, whose following gives leadership its effective social force.

The opening section distinguishes psychological connection from organization. Shared impulses or experiences bring individuals into reciprocal psychological influence, but they do not necessarily produce an ordered association. Panic is Wieser’s counterexample: it constitutes a powerful collective phenomenon precisely where organization cannot resist contagion. He therefore prefers the designation “social mass” to Le Bon’s potentially misleading identification of psychological and organized masses.

Wieser situates the established literature through Sighele’s criminal crowds, Tarde’s imitation, and Le Bon’s broader classification of collective formations. His principal objection is to the prominence given to pathological excitement and revolutionary politics. Le Bon recognizes both cruelty and heroic sacrifice, both volatility and conservatism, but does not integrate these contrasts into an adequate account of ordinary collective life. The enduring functions of relatively undisturbed masses remain largely outside his field of vision. Leadership is similarly reduced to conspicuous rulers and revolutionary agitators, leaving the innumerable lesser leaders of everyday cooperation unexplained.

The second section replaces this exceptionalism with Massentechnik: the organizational conditions under which many people act effectively together. Economic analysis has recognized the gains from cooperation and division of labour, Wieser argues, but has insufficiently examined the structure that makes coordinated activity possible. Leadership is indispensable even if participants possess equal abilities; a multitude of brave, well-equipped soldiers does not thereby constitute an effective military unit.

Eine Masse ist organisiert, wenn sie sich einer Führung untergeordnet hat, der sie vertrauensvoll Folge leistet.

English translation: A mass is organized when it has subordinated itself to a leadership that it trustingly follows.

Organization thus involves more than mutual influence: it establishes a relationship of direction and trusted following. Yet leadership need not mean formal office or explicit command. Wieser’s economic example extends the concept to successful producers whose methods become models for others. Separate private enterprises form a social process not only through their complementary activities but also through learning from exemplary practice. This broad conception allows leadership to encompass both centralized coordination and decentralized adaptation.

The distinction also grounds Wieser’s criticism of Tarde. Imitation cannot explain who supplies the model, and it does not encompass every form of following:

Die Erfüllung des Führerbefehls ist Nachfolge, aber sie ist nicht Nachahmung.

English translation: Carrying out the leader’s command is following, but it is not imitation.

The conceptual move is from resemblance between actions to a differentiated social relationship. Command, instruction, advice, and example can all connect leaders and followers without operating through the same psychological mechanism.

The third section accordingly narrows the meaning of “mass.” Initially it designated everyone participating in a collective relationship; now it denotes the many who follow, distinguished from those who lead. This distinction does not make the mass socially inert. Leaders’ initiatives acquire general validity only through collective adherence:

Erst das Gewicht der beitretenden Masse gibt den Bestrebungen der Führer ihre allgemeine Geltung.

English translation: Only the weight of the mass that joins in gives the leaders’ endeavours their general validity.

Wieser illustrates this constitutive role through language and money: general usage incorporates a poet’s expression into the language, while habitual acceptance gives money its general circulability. Even coerced submission confirms a ruler’s power, but active following is more productive. It alone can generate a genuinely shared conviction about law, true morality, and popular freedom. The account therefore contains an important tension: subordination is indispensable to organization, yet the quality of collective achievement depends on how actively the mass participates.

Power relations vary with both the practical demands of a common task and historically established distributions of social strength. They range from leaders’ extreme coercive power to the mass’s power of freedom. Political, religious, economic, and social constitutions rest on these historically consolidated relationships rather than on one invariant form of command.

Wieser finally reconstructs mass psychology from this social function. Collective participation requires a sacrificium voluntatis: personal feeling recedes before what participants feel together. In effective organization, the surrender of individual will is compensated by participation in increased collective strength. Intellectual deterioration, however, is not inevitable where society advances. The mass’s resistance to innovation can itself perform a selective function:

Das Gewicht der Masse ist nicht so leicht in Bewegung zu setzen, sie ist ihrem Wesen nach konservativ und das eben gehört zu ihrer gesellschaftlichen Funktion.

English translation: The weight of the mass is not so easily set in motion; it is conservative by its very nature, and that is precisely part of its social function.

By awaiting demonstrated success, the mass helps determine which innovations become durable common values. This argument also carries explicit normative commitments: Wieser invokes racial instinct and national authenticity, and accepts that collective attachment may demand sacrifice of welfare or life. His conclusion attributes modern mass psychology’s one-sidedness to a transitional age in which older leadership structures have weakened and replacements remain unsettled. The entry’s significance lies in shifting attention from crowd pathology to the institutional relationship between initiative, collective acceptance, and enduring social power.