“[Otto] Stoll’s book offered an extensive analysis of collective suggestive phenomena among various peoples, ranging in space from China, West India and Mexico to Egypt and in time from ancient Greece to post-1789 Europe. Most importantly for present purposes, Stoll applied the notion of suggestion to account for almost any collective phenomenon. Politics (revolutions, fanaticism), economics (speculation, manias, advertising), religion (mysticism, witch trials) as well as more general and everyday phenomena (panic, ecstasy, etc.) were all subject to hypnotic mass suggestion, he argued. Suggestion, for Stoll, amounted to a ‘psychological coercion’ which he likened to the effect a moving billiard ball has on another ball’s course (1904:701). This image entailed that suggestion was not seen as a pathological phenomenon. The coercion suggestion exercises on our minds was rather ‘an entirely normal quality’ (1894:491, italics in original). In a sense, therefore, Stoll reached the same conclusion as [Gabriel] Tarde [1843-1904] did (but without the latter’s theory of society): social life is characterized by the kind of hypnotic suggestion that is usually associated with crowd behavior, although in everyday life the suggestions are less intense than in crowds.”