“Man of the Crowd” and “Man of Mass” as Different Conceptualizations of Identical Social Phenomena

The article compares various conceptualizations of what played an essential role in the European socio-cultural reality of the 18th — 20th centuries, the phenomenon of public life, which, since the end of the Enlightenment, has filled the words “crowd” and “mass of people” with new meanings. The text does not highlight separate paragraphs. However, it consists of two approximately equal parts. In the first part, the author draws on the chapter of V. Benjamin’s work “Baudelaire” called “Flâneur” as an additional source that helps better understand the main subject. Further, on the example of E. Poe “The Man of the Crowd” and O. de Balzac, he examines reflection on the phenomenon of the crowd in fiction and criticism of the first half of the 19th century. In this period, the “crowd” as a particular phenomenon of reality acquires opposite value characteristics. On the one hand, the images of the crowd express a lifeless, sinister bourgeois commercialism. On the other, they depict a dynamic, sublime “spirit of modernity” that destroys any habituality, appearing as a phenomenon of the birth of a new industrial world, the world of megacities. The philosophical-cultural and sociopsychological conceptualizations of the end of the century before last follow these early versions of understanding the “crowd” in fiction and criticism. At first glance, the concept of “mass man” in F. Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” and the concept of “crowd man” in the social psychology of G. Le Bon and G. Tarde seem to be almost identical. However, an analysis of these concepts shows that their authorscreators inscribed them in absolutely different contexts, again expressing polar assessments of modernity. The concepts-antipodes of “man of the mass” and “man of the crowd”, which are, respectively, “superman” and “public” testify to this difference in the first place.