SOURCE: "Mass Minds and Modernist Forms: Political, Aesthetic, and Psychological Theories," in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 21-47.

In the following, Tratner links Sorel with Gustave Le Bon, author of The Crowd, to examine the modernist works of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats.

Two French political theorists set the terms for most analyses of the mass mind in the early twentieth century: Gustave Le Bon, in The Crowd (1895), and Georges Sorel, who extended Le Bon's ideas into a method for inciting mass movements in Reflections on Violence (1906). Sorel's theory became the basis of syndicalism, which powerfully influenced such diverse movements as the International Workers of the World in the United States and the Fascists in Italy. (Mussolini began his career as a syndicalist.)

Much of the power of Le Bon's and Sorel's theories...