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simple epiphenomenon, in itself inefficacious and inactive. Nor is there any profession, be it small or
large, that does not want its own newspaper or review as well, as each corporation in the Middle
Ages had its chaplain or its habitual preacher, and each class in ancient Greece its regular orator. Is
not the first concern of a new literary or artistic school to have its newspaper, and would it think
itself complete without one? . . .
This transformation of any and all groups into publics can be explained by an increasing need for
sociability, which necessitates the regular communication of the associates by a continual current of
common information and enthusiasms. It is therefore inevitable, and it is important to seek the
consequences that it has, or in all probability will have, on the destiny of the groups thus transformed,
on their duration, their solidity and strength, their battles and alliances. . . .
The relative force of existing social aggregates is also singularly modified by the intervention of
the press. First of all, note that the press is far from favoring a preponderance of professional
classifications. The professional press, the one dedicated to the interests of the judicial, industrial, or
agricultural worlds, is the least read, the least interesting, the least active, except when dealing with
strikes or politics in the guise of work. What does visibly emphasize and give preponderance to the
press is social division into groups by theoretical ideas, aspirations, and feelings. Interests are only
expressed—and this is to its credit—when disguised or sublimated into theories and passions; even
when it arouses excitement over these ideas, the press spiritualizes and idealizes them; and however
dangerous this transformation may sometimes be, it is basically a fortunate one. Ideas and passions
may foam up when they clash, they are still less irreconcilable than interests.
Religious or political parties are those social groups over which the newspapers have the greatest
hold and to which they give the most prominence. Mobilized into publics, parties come apart, reform
and transform themselves with a rapidity that would have stupefied our ancestors. And it must be
agreed that their mobilization and mutual interlacing are hardly compatible with the regular
functioning of English-type parliamentarianism. This is a small misfortune, but one which forces a
profound modification of the parliamentary system. Sometimes the parties are reabsorbed and
destroyed in a few years. Sometimes they grow to unheard-of proportions, in which case they acquire
enormous, but only temporary, force. They take on two characteristics not previously seen in them:
they become capable of interpenetration and internationalization. They interpenetrate easily because,
as we said above, each of us does or can belong to several publics at once. They become
international because the winged words of the papers easily cross borders which were never crossed
by the voice of the famous orator or party leader. 3
Thus, whatever the nature of the groups into which a society is fragmented, be they religious,
economic, political, or even national, the public is in some way their final state and, so to speak, their
common denominator. Everything is reduced to this entirely psychological group of states of mind in
the process of perpetual mutation. It is remarkable that the professional aggregate, based on the
mutual exploitation and adaptation of desires and interests, has been affected most deeply by this
civilizing transformation. In spite of all the dissimilarities that we have noted, the crowd and the
public, those two extremes of social evolution, 4 have in common the bond between the diverse
individuals making them up, which consists not in harmonizing through their very diversities, through
their mutually useful specialties, but rather in reflecting, fusing through their innate or acquired
similarities into a simple and powerful unison (but with how much more force in the public than in
the crowd!), in a communion of ideas and passions which, moreover, leaves free play to their
individual differences. . . .
After having shown the birth and growth of the public, noted its characteristics, similar or not to