XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

634

Mass and Democracy: Two Sociological Concepts in Tension

RC35 Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (host committee)

Language: Spanish and English

Since the beginnings of sociology, the concept of mass has been deeply linked to reflections on democracy. Along with other terms such as crowd, multitude, mob or mass society, conceptualizations on the masses are inseparable from the analysis of the conditions and features of modern democracies, as well as the dangers and authoritarian tendencies that can be related to the masses in urban, industrial and capitalist societies. Thereby, an analytical and normative ambiguity in the relationship between masses and democracy is highlighted: masses and processes of massification can both democratize and endanger democracy. This gives shape to different definitions of democracy itself from the study, for example, of the nexus between leadership and elites in respect to masses in the ever recurring debate on “populism”.

This conceptual, normative and political link between masses and democracy is singularly productive to deepen the possibilities of comparative approaches, since it cannot be confined to certain areas of intellectual production. On the contrary, such connection has been deployed in the most diverse social spaces and latitudes, in dissimilar and heterogeneous ways. Therefore, this session calls for proposals which are specially concerned with comparative analyzes of different kinds, focusing on debates, appropriations or simultaneities, between perspectives of dissimilar social spaces (e.g. in the broad and unspecific denominations of “South” and “North”).