Crowds and Economic Life : Bringing

While the notion of the crowd played a central role in the late 19th century sociology, today it is almost forgotten. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that it may be fruitful once again to take seriously the figure of the crowd. The paper in particular discusses the potential of the crowd tradition for economic sociology. The relationship between crowd and economic life is examined from three perspectives. On a semantic level, there is a long history of conceiving financial speculation and financial markets in terms of crowds. This is not only an interesting and often neglected history. It has broader consequences for economic sociology for if market participants in fact organize their activities according to the semantics, then this may affect how markets really work. On an analytical level, the paper draws upon Elias Canetti and demonstrates that inflation may be analyzed as a crowd phenomenon with far-reaching social and personal implications. On a theoretical level, finally, the paper argues that a reinterpretation of the basic assumption in early crowd theory, the idea of suggestion, opens for new theoretical horizons. First, it urges us to study how individuality, personality etc. are created and recreated in and by economic life. Second, it contends that suggestion refers fundamentally to a semiconscious state – a state in-between purposive and affective action. This notion of the semiconscious imitation-suggestion is contrasted the embeddedness approach in recent economic sociology.