Who Is Afraid of Group Agents and Group Minds?

The heyday of the ideas of group mind and group agent seems to be well over. Why dig up these corpses that seem to have been buried ages ago? I will try to give at least a partial answer to this question in this chapter. Yet the main task below is to clarify these notions when viewed from a naturalistic point of view and compatibly with current theorizing in the collective intentionality literature. The idea of a group mind (collective mind or collective soul) has been employed to account for the kind of mental unity that has been seen in a nation, an army, or in a culture, etc. The term esprit de corps (“group spirit”) has been used in this context. Typically, it is not only the mental unity in certain kinds of collectives or groups that is at stake but the refl ective self-consciousness of a group. For instance, “we the French people are the bravest in the world” could express this kind of selfconsciousness in a group, involving its group spirit and we-feeling. The notion of group mind has a rather long history. It goes back thousands of years, as ancient myths and tales indicate . 1 These myths are from various parts of the world, especially Asia. Second, there is some discussion in the history and philosophy of law and, more generally, political philosophy and theory. This discussion started in the ancient world (Greece and Rome) and has continued through the medieval times up to now—or in any case until the early decades of the past century. The ancient Romans built into their law the idea of corporate responsibility, speaking of organized collectives that were also referred to by the terms universitas , corporatio ,