Wilhelm Vleugels, Der Begriff der Masse. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Massentheorie (1926)

Wilhelm Vleugels’s German-language study, published in 1926, combines a history of crowd theory with an argument for delimiting its object. “Masse,” he contends, should designate a specific, temporary social formation rather than indiscriminately a population, an organized group, or a dispersed public. The problem begins with the contrast between ordinary linguistic flexibility and scientific precision:

Im gewöhnlichen Sprachgebrauche ergibt es sich aus dem Zusammenhange, aus irgendeinem erläuternden Zusatze, in welcher seiner zahlreichen Bedeutungen das Wort „Masse“ jeweils gebraucht wird.

English translation: In ordinary usage it follows from the context, from some explanatory addition, in which of its numerous meanings the word "mass" is being used in each case.

In theoretical writing, contextual cues do not adequately prevent shifts between the historical mass—the generality contrasted with influential individuals—and the psychological crowd. Such shifts allow claims about one phenomenon to pass as explanations of another. Conceptual discrimination therefore precedes the evaluation of crowd psychology’s history and findings.

Vleugels’s reassessment of Le Bon challenges the attribution of foundational originality. Important insights into unconscious processes and the resurgence of supposedly primitive dispositions were already present in Sighele and Tarde. Le Bon’s standing partly reflects his treatment of these predecessors:

Le Bon hat es sicher nicht zuletzt diesem seinem ungünstigen Urteil über seine Vorgänger, speziell über Sighele zu danken, daß man seine Erkenntnisse für durchaus originell hielt.

English translation: Le Bon surely owes it not least to this unfavourable judgment of his upon his predecessors, especially upon Sighele, that his findings were held to be thoroughly original.

The point concerns disciplinary authority as well as priority. Vleugels distinguishes the production of insights from their effective presentation and circulation, locating much of Le Bon’s achievement in the latter:

Die Erkenntnisse, die Le Bons „Psychologie des foules“ wiedergibt, sind vor allem in einer übersichtlicheren, gefälligeren Anordnung dargeboten als bei Sighele; überdies ist Le Bons Werk in einem glänzenden Stil äußerst lebendig geschrieben.

English translation: The findings which Le Bon's "Psychologie des foules" reproduces are above all presented in a clearer and more pleasing arrangement than in Sighele; moreover, Le Bon's work is written in a brilliant style and with the utmost liveliness.

This literary success also helped disseminate conceptual errors. Nevertheless, Vleugels defends Le Bon against Kelsen’s accusation that the “crowd soul” posits a collective individual. Properly understood, the expression describes a temporary transformation of individual participants through association, not a separate mind existing above them.

Vleugels locates the crowd’s central mechanism in the ascendancy of what participants share over their differentiated personal capacities. The more heterogeneous the gathering, the narrower—and, in his evolutionary vocabulary, more primitive—its common psychological basis becomes. More homogeneous gatherings can converge at a higher intellectual and affective level. Freud advances beyond description by explaining the restriction of personality through emotional ties to fellow participants and to a leader. Vleugels accepts this contribution without endorsing every psychoanalytic extension, particularly the speculative account of the primal horde.

His resulting conception makes the crowd a transient formation of physically co-present people oriented in the same direction, each participating through the common portion of personality that comes to predominate. This establishes boundaries against both organization and mere aggregation. Organization restores differentiated functions and capacities, transforming the crowd into a group; Freud’s inclusion of highly organized “artificial” masses thus remains terminologically problematic. Conversely, disconnected urban individuals, as in Sombart’s account, do not constitute a crowd merely through shared circumstances. Extending unfavorable judgments from crowd psychology to dispersed public opinion likewise risks unsupported generalization and political bias.

The later discussion tests the roles of proximity and number. Against Colm, Vleugels maintains that printed appeals cannot replace immediate reciprocal influence through voices, expressions, and gestures. Readers may imagine solidarity and experience crowd-like emotions without forming the social relationship characteristic of an actual crowd. Physical co-presence is constitutive, whereas large numbers are not: even a small gathering can exhibit the relevant transformation. Its effects may be less conspicuous where participants already share more developed capacities. Nor must a sense of irresistible power arise from numerical strength; access to instruments of power can also sustain it.

Finally, Vleugels defends crowd sociology against Vierkandt’s exclusion of formations lacking “objective spirit.” Although crowd formation activates existing human dispositions, it does so through a specific social relationship. Its sociological significance does not depend on durable organization or institutionalized culture. The study’s unifying contribution is methodological: explanations must distinguish the crowd’s actual relational process from imagined belonging, numerical aggregation, and organized collective life.