Abstract

The essay reconstructs the representations of the crowd in the works of Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin, which are at odds with the representations offered by the social psychology literature of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The essay intends to depict an ‘experience’ of the metropolis that, as a consequence of the radical shift of perspective produced in the late modernity, is characterised by a vision focused on d ‘ultra-individual’ or ‘impersonal’ relational dynamism.