The origins of staged democracy. A history book that is also inherently topical for everyone who wants to preserve the autonomy of their individuality in democracy and who is trying to avoid becoming part of a crowd that cannot do without a master.
One of the most important Italian historians explores the main experiences of personalisation of power in modern times, from Napoleon to Kennedy.
The fundamental characteristic of the crowd – the protagonist of modern politics – is the need for a leader. Here is where the current personalisation of power and politics has its origins. In 2009 “Le Monde” listed among the twenty books that changed the world The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, published in 1895, translated in several languages and constantly republished to the present day. Le Bon taught leaders that «To know the art of impressing the imagination of the crowds is to know the art of governing them». Many different politicians, democratic, totalitarian or authoritarian, followed the teachings of the psychology of the crowd.
In the wake of Le Bon’s work, Emilio Gentile examines the relation with the crowd of leader as charismatic as Roosevelt, Mussolini, Lenin, Hitler, Ataturk, De Gaulle, Kennedy, and reveals the internal dynamics of the masses, the seduction of words and images, the personalisation of politics and their consequences on democracy. A historical analysis that can help understand the current tendency to transform the ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ in a staged democracy, founded on the rule of a leader acclaimed by the crowd.