In his mid-nineteenth-century prose poem Crowds, the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire declared that it ‘is not given to everyone to take a bath among the multitude’. More than this, he elaborated in the same poem:

[E]njoying the crowd is an art; and he only can make, at the expense of the human race, a lively feast of it, in whom a fairy instilled, in his cradle, the taste for disguise and the mask, a hatred of home, and a passion for travel.

Baudelaire’s knotted lyric summary of crowds, and how to appreciate them, underlines what a fiendishly complex phenomenon they are. How can we, how should we, consider something as varied and elusive as the modern crowd from a moral and political standpoint? Are crowds an expression of a positive mass consciousness, or, as Baudelaire seems to suggest in his poem, merely an excuse for paradoxical feelings of anonymity and misanthropy — the ideal refuge for privileged flâneurs and flâneuses wandering across the modern cityscape in search of aesthetic kicks?

Most of us on the Left would tend to give crowds the benefit of the doubt and celebrate their emancipatory potential. But to be brutally honest, there is often a shade of Baudelairean kink in the leftist habit of valorising a certain kind of mass gathering (the radical protest, the grassroots football match, the Charli XCX arena set) while downplaying other less savoury examples (the far-right march, the anti-immigrant riot, tragedy chanting at Premier League football games). Perhaps, indeed, there is a sense in which our romanticisation of collective experience is born out of estrangement rather than familiarity, given that many of us maintain a mostly atomised existence for a large portion of our daily lives. To put it bluntly, in our lonely, hyper-individualised twenty-first century do we really deserve to love crowds?

Dan Hancox’s Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World answers this timely question with an eloquent and soulful ‘yes’. A writer of great passion and versatility, Hancox has been a determined chronicler of diverse examples of left populism over the last decade, from the experiment in socialist government in the Andalusian municipality of Marinaleda (explored in his 2013 book The Village Against the World) to the London grime scene that was the main focus of his 2018 study Inner City Pressure (one of the few truly non-nostalgic mainstream music books of the twenty-first century).

Now, Hancox has expanded his interest in the ecstatic and the utopic to cover the more abstract matter of multitudes. But though its subject is broad and potentially ethereal, Hancox’s study is no esoteric, Agamben-esque work of high theory — indeed, far from it. In a series of erudite, well-researched chapters, Hancox follows the development of the modern crowd from the broadly Baudelairean moment of the later nineteenth century (the time of both the Paris Commune and a reactionary response to it in the form of Gustave Le Bon’s influential anti-collectivist polemic The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) to a more contemporary backdrop of music festivals, urban protest, and — ultimately — the contested social landscape of the Covid period.

This chronological approach means that Multitudes is above all a highly readable primer for crowd history and theory. But there is also a polemical thread running through it. While being careful to acknowledge that crowds aren’t for everyone (especially non-neurotypical people and those with specific health conditions), Hancox makes it clear from the beginning that he is — with one or two subtle caveats — an enthusiastic crowd partisan.

In taking this position Hancox has clearly been influenced by certain key developments in recent British and European history, for all the valuable digressions into deep-time modernity we get in his study. Like many 2020s polemics, the starting point for Multitudes is lockdown and its experience of radical social deprivation. Hancox describes how quarantine made him yearn for the ‘tingling mixture of anxiety and vertigo the moment you first step out into a carnival or football or protest crowd, the feeling of bug-eyed overstimulation, the undulating ripples of noise and colour leaping and competing for your attention’.

In other, more gullible, hands this euphoric strain might have descended into accelerationist onanism. But Hancox is reliably good at moving quickly from the epicurean pleasures of collectivity to more grounded political contexts. As he puts it, ‘realising how vital crowd experiences have been to me has also meant realising how much they are in jeopardy, and how crucial it is that they be defended’.

Delving back into the pre-Covid period, we learn that Hancox is a veteran of the radical protests of the early 2010s, and before that of the countless grime raves of the 00s ruined by racist policing. His view of an endangered contemporary political (rather than purely aesthetic) crowd culture and the need to defend it has evidently been provoked into being by the memory of encounters with what was essentially a sustained, sinister, and, sadly, rather effective establishment campaign to smother the rise of millennial leftism as an effective social force in the 2008 to 2019 period. As such, there is a sense in which Multitudes should be viewed as an oblique howl of anger at what might have been if all those shut-down raves, kettled student protests, and ridiculed Corbyn rallies had been better able to reach their potential.

But in the end, this is a work of Benjaminian optimism about the potential of mass populism and collective epiphany to enrich and expand the radical future, not an elegy for a lost activist milieu. Though Hancox is not able to predict what sort of sequel to the protest culture of the long 2010s Generation Z will discover over time, he is persuasive and inspiring in arguing that the tides of modern history all point to one prognosis for the coming years. As he puts it simply and powerfully at one point, ‘This is the crowd’s moment.’ Few of us will know exactly how to make good on this realisation right now, but this upbeat, sparklingly written book does a wonderful job of encouraging us to want to find out.