At the end of the nineteenth century, the crowd emerged as a new political and academic subject in Europe. The invention of this concept was a response to the restructuring of modern society, which was marked by the "social question," urbanization, and the introduction of universal suffrage. Longestablished identities, based on traditional hierarchies, were questioned; still, a new democratic subject had yet to emerge. The notion of the crowd was a substitute: it attempted to describe new forms of social assemblages-forms that could be reduced neither to class, nor to ethnic identity, nor to older forms such as guilds. Anyone could become a member of the crowd; typically, crowd descriptions emphasize its heterogeneous composition. In this sense, the crowd represents a universal mode of inclusion, which was announced with universal suffrage, and came to represent a repulsive democratic subject. It was therefore not a far step for crowd theorists to denounce crowds and democracy simultaneously because of the threat they posed to the social fabric.The crowd, however, was not only a surrogate for a new, not yet fully fledged democratic subject, and the concept of the crowd was not only a reactionary right-wing polemic against the working class; crowd psychology also became a conceptual laboratory for deliberating social processes no longer rooted in traditional relations of power. While its sister discipline, sociology, was interested in determining what is social about the social, crowd

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