Meena, a sociology student, reads accounts of food riots in an English town in the early 1800s. Poor labourers and artisans who had left their villages to find work in the town gathered in the market and seized grain from traders' stores. Officials and wealthy residents called them a mob and asked the government to put the riots down, fearing for the established order. Meena finds that two scholars who studied such protests wrote about them in very different ways.
Which view of such crowds did historians like E. P. Thompson put forward?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → The crowd had its own shared understanding of right and wrong
Option (1) The crowd was a force that led to disorder in society — Incorrect. Seeing social movements as forces that led to disorder was the view reflected in Durkheim's work. Thompson argued against this view.
Option (2) The crowd was stirred up by elites anxious about social order — Incorrect. The elites were anxious about social order, but they did not stir up the crowd. The crowd was made up of poor labourers and artisans protesting their own living conditions.
Option (3) The crowd's protest was the violent culmination of several movements — Incorrect. The violent culmination of several movements describes the French Revolution, which aimed at overthrowing the monarchy. Thompson's work was about the urban crowd and its own sense of right and wrong.
Option (4) The crowd had its own shared understanding of right and wrong — Correct. Thompson, influenced by Marx's ideas, showed that the crowd was not a band of anarchic hooligans. It had a 'moral economy', its own shared understanding of right and wrong that guided its actions.
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