Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Lange’s line has the chilly confidence of someone who’s watched parliaments, rallies, and diplomatic conferences up close and come away less enchanted with “the people” than with the fragile machinery that keeps them from tearing itself apart. He’s not describing a mysterious hive mind; he’s issuing a political warning dressed in the authority of “accepted commonplace,” a phrase that smuggles his judgment in as settled science. The rhetorical move matters: by grounding the claim in psychology, Lange shifts the debate from ideology to diagnostics. If crowds predictably sink below the average person’s intelligence and morality, then the real question becomes how to design institutions that don’t require crowds to be wise.

The subtext is a rebuke to romantic mass politics. He’s pushing back against the era’s swelling faith in plebiscites, street movements, and the electrifying theater of nationalism. “Spiritual level” is a telling choice: not education or IQ, but a moral altitude. In Lange’s framing, collective action doesn’t just simplify thought; it cheapens conscience. The crowd isn’t merely mistaken, it’s lowered.

Context sharpens the edge. Lange’s lifetime spans the cresting of mass parties and propaganda, the First World War’s mobilized publics, and the anxieties that followed about demagoguery and herd behavior. A Norwegian politician steeped in internationalism, he had reasons to distrust the emotional logic of national crowds. The intent isn’t to sneer at ordinary people in private life; it’s to argue, implicitly, for elite restraint, procedural safeguards, and diplomacy as antidotes to the crowd’s gravitational pull toward the crude and the cruel.