Introduction: History as Innovation: The Work of Iain McCalman

The Mob is an abbreviation of the Latin mobile vulgus, meaning excitable crowd’, and by the late eighteenth century the term had become invariably associated with the lower classes and the emerging working class. When the London Corresponding Society (LCS) first appeared, some Londoners would have held vivid memories and lingering fears of the disorderly crowd action in 1780 known as the Gordon Riots. To make the LCS analogous to the mob was much more than hollow name-calling. One can understand the mob club’ portrait and similar representations of reformers as part of a cathartic process. Sociologists have devoted much attention to social polarisation and the construction of deviance, the forces and processes that divide society into the moral and amoral, the civilised and uncivilised, the respectable and unrespectable. The democratic structures of the LCS provided the organisation with organic management, but it also had a normative capacity.