SUL GOVERNO DELLE MASSE
Gianni Trimarchi

This essay examines the theme of social manipulation analyzed in some texts written when the phenomenon was at the origins. These texts have recently been published in Italian, with a good success of public. The forefather of these works is Le Bon’s Psychology of the crowds published in 1895, which is mentioned in all later elaborations. In this book of Darwinian inspiration, the French psychologist distinguishes the behavior of a single isolated person, from that of an individual who regresses in a collective context. This behavior can be defined as an expression of the archaic life that survives giving rise to puzzling results for those people who consider evolution as a unilinear result. The following authors (Freud, Lippmann, Bernays and others) draw the consequences of this first statement in different forms, developing a few axioms that are in many ways still active and operating in our contemporary social context.