Mob rule

Mob rule is government or collective decision-making dominated by an unruly crowd, often overriding law, minority rights, or established institutions.

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Crowd psychology: The study of how people think and behave in groups, especially under conditions of anonymity and shared emotion. Shared emotion and anonymity can intensify pressure for collective action.
Democracy: A system of government in which political authority derives from the people, directly or through representatives. Democracy can empower majorities while relying on procedures that mob rule bypasses.
Aristotle: An ancient Greek philosopher whose writings shaped Western traditions in logic, ethics, politics, and natural philosophy. His classification of regimes helped establish the idea of crowd-dominated rule.
French Revolution: A period of political upheaval in France beginning in 1789 that ended the monarchy and transformed European politics. Its popular mobilizations and episodes of coercion shaped lasting fears of crowd rule.
Minority rights: Legal and political protections for groups that lack numerical or political power. Crowd-dominated decisions can put these protections at risk.
Group polarization: The tendency for discussion among like-minded people to shift a group toward more extreme positions. Discussion within a crowd can harden demands beyond members’ initial views.
Deliberative democracy: A model of democracy that grounds legitimate decisions in inclusive, reasoned public discussion. It contrasts impulsive crowd pressure with decision-making shaped by deliberation.
Politics (Aristotle): A work by Aristotle examining political communities, constitutions, and forms of rule. It analyzes democracy’s corruption into rule serving the poor majority’s interests.
September Massacres: The mass killing of prisoners in Paris in September 1792 during the French Revolution. The killings exemplify violence carried out amid revolutionary panic and weak authority.
Separation of powers: A system that divides government authority among distinct branches to limit concentrated power. Divided authority makes it harder for a crowd to command the whole state at once.