We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

A medievalist and defender of the notion of Christian philosophy, Étienne Gilson had a lifelong interest in the philosophy of art. He questioned whether what is reproduced as art in contemporary society is art at all. This is not a simple issue. A cheap version of a novel is still a novel. A picture of a statue is not a statue, nor indeed is a photograph of a painting a painting. Recorded music has particular complications. The organizer of an industrial assembly line is neither an artist nor an artisan. Yet, thanks to such mass production, a much broader population has knowledge of artworks than would otherwise be possible. Religions must minister to mass societies and provide appropriate liturgies. But in the process, there is a danger of misrepresenting complex religious teachings. At the end of his own life, Henri Gouhier, Gilson’s first doctoral student, prepared three essays on Gilson. The first, on Bergson, gives a sense of Gilson’s formation in early twentieth-century French philosophy. The second reconstructs the development of the notion of Christian philosophy and the heated controversy it provoked. Finally, Gouhier presents Gilson’s general philosophy of art and gives a helpful framework to Gilson’s comments on art in a mass society.

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The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society is the first collection in English of writings by Italian jurist, sociologist, and cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913). In post-unification Italy and internationally Sighele was an important figure in contemporary debates on such issues as popular unrest, the problematic borders between individual and collective accountability, the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, and the emancipation of women. This volume draws an intricate portrait of a provocative thinker and public intellectual caught between tradition and modernity in fin de siècle Europe. It features new English translations of Sighele's seminal work, The Criminal Crowd, along with a selection of his later studies on criminality and on individual and group behaviour. Nicoletta Pireddu's introduction and annotation provide valuable context and insights on Sighele's contribution to the emerging field of collective psychology, on his relationships with his predecessors Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri and with his French rivals Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, and on the significant scientific, literary, and cultural developments of his time.