Abstract

The article, referring to the texts about crowd by Le Bon and Maria Konopnicka, presents the history of the modern subject who discovers wildness surrounding him. Recognizing wildness, the authors of the end of the 19th century reached for evolutionary logic, to be precise to the parameter of biological races treating the phenomenon of “crowd” as a sign of wildness. According to this logic, crowd became a kind of “desocialized horde” (Konopnicka), social “heap”, which was subject to temporary “regress”. Modern mind was then defined by street crowd through the discourse of natural sciences falling into an impassable aporia: lower – higher.