The Albanians are heading for a better place. One day they'll be proud

There are wild geese feeding, close to a road where I often walk. They are greylags, over for the winter from Svalbard or Siberia. When the sentry-geese see me, they shout their warnings. And then the whole flock rises clattering into the air.

At first they climb straight ahead, gathering height, honking in a chorus of alarm. But then they fall silent. The next decision must be taken: where should they go? And this is the moment to watch.

The flock is like a living cloud of smoke. It flattens out, streaming to the right, and then bunches together once more before it streams the other way. It curls right round, folding upon itself as it begins to return. Then, with a few isolated cries, the cloud changes shape yet again into a broad, flat wreath and heads across the marshes. It settles into an arrow-head formation, laggards trailing, and makes for its chosen pasture.

It is like watching the development of a human thought. But who is thinking? It is two hundred individual geese deciding in their individual brains, but it is also a single thing, a collective creature. Greylags have their sentries and their elders, but no commanders. The choices are made in hundreds of separate bird minds, each reacting in a minutely different way to a torrent of stimuli, but against a background instinct to find a common course of action. What the goose-crowd ultimately decides may be mistaken. But the decision is never random.

There have been human crowds surging about Europe these last few months. Before Albania, it was Belgrade and Sofia; it was Gorleben as Germans tried to stop the nuclear waste convoy, and in Bonn last week the miners poured into town and swirled round public buildings. Last Monday, an angry crowd besieged the City Chambers in Glasgow, as the council made pounds 80m worth of cuts and increased council tax by 22 per cent. "Mob Rule", proclaimed The Scotsman. But can a mob rule, and does it have a will?

Is it the sum of a thousand wills or just a mindless creature steered by a few agitators?

These are old-fashioned questions. But the explosion in Albania poses them all over again. The BBC news presenters fall back into venerable cliches: "pure chaos", or "anarchy in the true sense of the word". The Albanian uprising is certainly chaotic, wildly violent and therefore - as the foreign journalists out there know only too well - horribly dangerous to report. But it is not a blind eruption of lava, a natural calamity without any human purpose to be read into it. Like the wild geese, the Albanian crowds are whirling about, buffeted by a myriad impulses, before they find a common aim and head towards it.

Crowds burst on to the political stage at the time of the French Revolution. For the next century, those who ruled, or felt entitled to rule, put much energy into condemning "the mob" as a sort of collective cancer without any thoughts worth taking seriously - even when they themselves had been brought to power by the action of crowds. The machine gun, universal suffrage, the Gulag and the legalisation of trade unions were among the very different methods used to get crowds out of history again.

There are two ways of looking at crowds. The right-wing view is well put by Roger Scruton, in his Dictionary of Political Thought. "Crowds are more powerful than individuals, in that they are ... capable of generating a sense of release from all moral and social restraint; hence crowds show virtues of sacrifice and vices of cruelty which no individual can show... Crowds are also less powerful than individuals, in that they are without definite will or purpose until one is provided, and are open to irrational persuasion, influence and leadership..."

This is the version of the crowd as brainless brute: Burke's "swinish multitude". A different line is taken by radical historians such as the late George Rude, in his pioneering books on what he called "pre-industrial" crowds. Rude did not deny that they did, on rare occasions, commit atrocities. But by studying those who made up such crowds, he was able to show that they were mostly "ordinary" people, neither criminals nor political fanatics, who had definite ideas of what they wanted.

These ideas could be "a medley of seemingly ill-assorted beliefs and aspirations". People might want bread, justice, revenge on a tyrant. But they might also want the return of mythical lost rights and some imaginary golden age in the past - like the crowds in the 1780 Gordon Riots in London who burned houses in the name of "God and King". Slogans and leaders from the outside could give the crowd unity and direction. But often their leaders were unknown local figures who led only for hours and days, and then vanished back into obscurity.

Rude, as a Marxist, thought that the rise of capitalism had replaced those crowds by the "trade unionist, labour militant and organised consumer of the new industrial society". This reads oddly now. The revolution in Albania, although partly about poverty, is no proletarian struggle. Ever since 1989 - Leipzig, Prague, Bucharest - we have witnessed enormous crowd actions which have had little to do with class and everything to do with supposedly "pre-industrial" motives like liberty, justice, a return to half-remembered democratic times in the past. There are exceptions, like the German miners or the French truckers and rail workers: familiar mass demonstrations for pay and jobs. But most revolutions in our time are being attempted by a creature which is new and yet bears strangely recognisable traits of the past: the "post-industrial crowd".

The Albanian revolution - for that is what it is - is not really the end of civilisation, the lifting of a lid to release satanic hordes of misrule. For those caught in it, it must often feel like that. But in many ways it is a real old pike-and-musket eruption from the European past. The prisons are broken and disgorge all kinds of victim and villain; the looters trash every building and cart off anything movable; the armouries are stormed as their nerveless guards bolt and children fill the air with kalashnikov volleys. It was like that in the French Revolution, and the February Revolution in Russia in 1917. Civil war? That takes two sides, and those who are supposed to defend President Sali Berisha are melting away. Will the Ghegs of the north and the Tosqs of the south fight each other for the succession? God forbid - it's conceivable, but at the moment north and south seem to have made common cause.

The crowd always threatens to show up the pretensions of political leadership. Popular moods change direction; leaders must then scramble to catch up and resume their position in the front rank. Leaders hate that. This is why dictators strive for control of all the impulses which can affect a people's choice of direction. This is why elected rulers like to divide their subjects into "society" and "underclass". Here are the obedient stakeholders with something to lose. But over there are the poor and displaced who remain unpredictable. Their impulses cannot be reckoned, and so they must be excluded, patronised and kept in the dependency of urban ghettos.

Nobody is in charge in Albania, and yet something is happening. A regime is being overthrown, not a monarchy or a tsardom but a police state financed by organised crime and government-sponsored swindling in the name of the free market.

A people has risen like wild geese and their politicians are carried into the sky with them, swept this way and that, voices lost in the tumult as the flock hesitates over its final course. But when it has set that course, then it will choose which voices to listen to. The Albanians are heading for a better place, and - if they get there - they will one day be proud of what they are doing now.