Still, the word crowd has taken on an entirely different meaning and political valence in our century. Crowdsourcing and crowd funding have created new kinds of crowds, of the sort that Le Bon never could have imagined.

Historically, an important spur toward corporatist thinking was Gustave Le Bon s 1895 book The Crowd, which coined the terms crowd psychology and collective mind. For Le Bon, An individual in a crowd not only angry mobs on the street, but also other psychologically interconnected groups of people is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.