The language of degeneration should be understood in relation to a long and complex process of political definition and redefinition in European culture and society. Whilst stressing the specificity of various key debates, my aim has also been to show the general shift from notions of the individual degenerate (as sustained by nosological models of dégénérescence) towards a bio-medical conception of crowd and mass civilisation as regression; the ‘individual’ was reconceived in relation to the mesh of evolutionary, racial and environmental forces which, it was now insisted, constituted and constrained his or her condition. With the institutional consolidation of socialism in European political parties and with continuing pressure for universal suffrage, the crowd, apparently, had to be recognised as a socio-political reality which was more than the sum of its individuals. To anxious commentators, both liberal and conservative, the crowd, the mass and the elite constituted the object of a new and urgent potential science.

‘Whence comes the feeling’, asked the Spectator in 1886 that the mob: