Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965
The Rioting Crowd
By E.J. Hobsbawm
The Crowd in History, 1730-1848
by George Rudé
John Wiley, 281 pp., $5.95
The century of the common man calls for the history of the common man; the era of mass civilization for the study of the masses. It is all the more curious that it has taken the historians—and even the sociologists—so long to take a serious interest in this subject. Largely the product of the 1950s, its relative immaturity is obvious. It does not even possess that essential characteristic of any 'discipline' which wishes to establish university departments and raise money from foundations: an agreed brand name. The sociologists hover between two or three labels, of which 'Collective Behavior' seems to have the best chances until something more authentically Greek-sounding comes along. The historians of the common people still shelter under the wide umbrella of 'social history,' which is itself an extremely vague though increasingly popular category gradually emancipating itself from a modest existence as a euphemism for the history of radical organizations, an after-thought to 'economic history,' or another way of describing the history of such things as clothing and furniture. In the Anglo-Saxon world it still lacks even a specialist journal.
Review, 1756 words
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