Product Description: This eclectic history of unusual crowd behavior describes a rich assortment of mass phenomena ranging from the amusing and quirky to the shocking and deplorable. What do fads, crazes, manias, urban legends, moral panics, riots, stampedes, and other mass expressions of emotion have in common? By creating a typology of such behavior, past and present, the authors show how common extraordinary group reactions to fear or excitement are...read more

Product Description: This book contains the products of work carried out over four decades of research in Italy, France, and the United States, and in the intellectual territory between social movements, comparative politics, and historical sociology...read more

Product Description: The history of the United States has been largely shaped, forbetter or for worse, by the actions of large groups of people. Rioters on a village green, shoppers lurching about a labyrinthine mall, slaves packed into the dark hold of a ship, strikers assemblingoutside the factory gates, all have their place in the rich and sometimes tragic history of the American crowd...read more

Anthropological archaeology and other disciplines concerned with the formation of early complex societies are undergoing a theoretical shift. Given the need for new directions in theory, the book proposes that anthropologists look to political science, especially the rational choice theory of collective action. The authors subject collective action theory to a methodologically rigorous evaluation using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies.

Unlike political or economic institutions, social movements have an elusive power, but one that is no less real. This study surveys the history of the social movement, puts forward a theory of collective action to explain its surges and declines, and offers an interpretation of the power of movement that emphasizes its effects on personal lives, policy reforms and political culture. While covering cultural, organizational and personal sources of movements' power, the book emphasizes the rise and fall of social movements as part of political struggle and as the outcome of changes in political opportunity structure. This second edition has an entirely new chapter, major additions to the bibliography, new illustrative materials in many of the chapters and a new conclusion. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book argues that although the mob and the people appear to be very separate concepts, they share a common ideological history. Hayes traces the developments undergone by the concepts of people and mob in modern European ideologies, and he examines Marx's depiction of the lumpenproletariat, Le Bon's analysis of the crowd, fascist depictions of the masses, and corporatist views of the political threat posed by the mob...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Age of the Crowd is at one level an historical account of the development of mass psychology, and at another an analysis of its implications for prevalent political and social life. It was the prophecy of Gustave Le Bon in 1895 that the twentieth century would be 'l'âge des foules' that gave Serge Moscovici the title for his book, and it presents a systematic exposition of Le Bon's ideas and those of Gabriel Tarde, demonstrating convincingly their influence on the theories of collective psychology advanced by Sigmund Freud...read more