The heroic figure is a human fiction of the wholly singular. In the hero, discourses about ideals and exemplariness, extra-ordinariness and exceptionalness, agonality, transgressivity, or good and evil become condensed into a single individual. Thus, the hero is the opposite of the masses. As it is argued in this article, the answer to the question of what distinguishes a hero lies in the supererogatory moment, the reference to the hero’s quality of more than can be expected: the heroic figure does more than he or she has to, more than duty requires of an ordinary person, and this is the reason they are heroized. However, this also points to a dialectic moment of the heroic in which the opposition between the hero and the many seems to be suspended. Following Niklas Luhmann, the hero represents the paradox of conformity through deviance, because through the example of their abnormality they produce in others a desire to imitate them. In the end, there is a collective appeal of the heroic that affects even the conceptual complement of the hero: the crowd which is characterized by the disappearance of the individual within it. Inspired by Luhmann’s sociological reflections on the heroic as well as Elias Canetti’s anthropological perspectives on the phenomena of the crowd, this article traces the rhetoric of the hero along its path from the singular to the plural. Against the backdrop of the analysis of the heroic in revolutionary Iran, a generalizable typology is proposed that distinguishes between the hero, the collective of heroes, the heroic collective, and collective heroism. This order reflects a progression that is analogous to the conjunction of the one and the many, moving qualitatively from the distinct figure of the hero to the indistinguishable masses.

英雄人物是完全单一的人类小说。在英雄身上，关于理想与典范、超凡与例外、痛苦、违犯或善与恶的话语被浓缩为一个个体。因此，英雄是群众的对立面。正如本文所论述的那样，英雄的区别在于什么的问题的答案在于超级时刻，即英雄的品质超出预期：英雄人物做得比他或她必须做的更多，更多不是普通人的职责，这就是他们被英雄化的原因。然而，这也指向了一个英雄的辩证时刻，英雄与多数人的对立似乎暂停了。继尼克拉斯·卢曼之后，英雄代表了通过越轨从众，因为通过他们异常的例子，他们在别人身上产生了模仿他们的愿望。最后，英雄的集体吸引力甚至影响了英雄的概念补充：以个人在其中消失为特征的人群。受卢曼对英雄的社会学反思以及埃利亚斯·卡内蒂对人群现象的人类学观点的启发，本文追溯了英雄修辞从单数到复数的路径。在分析伊朗革命英雄的背景下，提出了一种可概括的类型学，以区分英雄、英雄集体、英雄集体，和集体英雄主义。这种顺序反映了一种类似于“一”与“多”结合的过程，从本质上从英雄的独特形象到难以区分的群众。