In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, social theorist Gustave Le Bon gives historical insight into the political thinking of his era while offering timeless social commentary. Le Bon challenges the reader to contemplate how individual ideas change-often to a destructive end-when employed in a setting of groupthink. As technology and communications innovations make group formation easy and accessible for better or for worse, this book's message is certainly one that will not be lost in the crowd.
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Text: English, French (translation)
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About the Author
Gustave LeBon was a French physician who wrote widely on scientific subjects, including anatomy and physiology, anthropology, and history. Among his major works are The French Revolution, The Social Psychology of Revolution, and The Crowd, all available from Transaction.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
...the art of control,
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This review is from: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Paperback)
Some have argued the communist and fascist theories of leadership that emerged during the early 1900's owed much to Le Bon's theories of crowd psychology. Early Soviet, Germany's Third Reich, and the Liberal leadership of the West all drew from the propaganda techniques proposed in Le Bon's 1895 book. The "Progressives" of today still use his techniques to control a large portion of the electorate through a friendly national media.Edward Bernayss famous book "Propaganda" drew heavily from Le Bon and illustrates that a major feature of democracy is the manipulation of the mass mind by media and advertising. Viewing the recent political events in Egypt, Greece, France, Spain, and America in the light of increasing social media manipulation lends credence to all their theories. This book is written in the language of the 1890's so it can be a bit cumbersome to read but it is well worth the effort for those who wish to better understand the dynamics of groups, mobs, and the popular electorate.
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE CROWD: A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND by Gustave Le Bon -- A BOOK REVIEW,
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This review is from: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Paperback)
THE CROWD: A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND by Gustave Le Bon - A BOOK REVIEWJames R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. © February 16, 20012 This is the second of three reviews of Le Bon's works. The first was, "The Psychology of Peoples" (1894). Reviewed here is "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" (1896). The third will be "The Psychology of Revolution" (1913). Gustave Le Bon was born on May 7, 1841 before either the American Civil War or the French Revolution. He lived into his ninety-second year dying on December 13, 1931, after the First World War, but shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nazi dictator used Le Bon's psychology to hypnotize the German people to his purposes. The Frenchman, a trained physician, followed his bliss, which was sociology and social psychology expounding on theories of crowd psychology, national traits and herd behavior. He also pursued the hard sciences, but it was in the soft sciences that his reputation was made. THE CROWD: A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND You read this book in light of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street moment, the removal of the dictators in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, and the ensuing vacuum of instability and chaos that has followed, and you cannot help but realize nothing has changed regarding the crowd since the pondering of Gustave Le Bon. He says at the outset that as mentally inferior as crowds are it is dangerous to meddle with their construction, as social organisms are as complicated as any organism making it unwise to force it, attempt to transform it, or to interfere with it. He writes, "Nature has recourse at times to radical measures, but never after our fashion, which explains how it is that nothing is more fatal to a people than the mania for great reforms." The study of crowds must consider how they relate to practical reason and pure reason, and whether they take fictitious shapes or real shapes, and if they display theoretical values or practical values. Behind these, it is important also to assist whether they are guided by visible facts or invisible causes. Crowds are eerie in that they rise out of ancient mysterious forces such as destiny, nature and providence, as if the soul of the crowd comes from voices of the dead. Adding to the intrigue, Le Bon insists, the ideas that feed the frenzy of the crowd emanate from solitary minds. He asks the rhetorical question, "Is it not the genius of the crowds that has furnished the thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have sprung up?" Behind the societal upheavals are profound modifications in the ideas of the peoples. "The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes in human thought." Fundamental to this transformation is the destruction of those religious, political and social beliefs upon which the society is rooted and has become outmoded. This transformation is accelerated by modern scientific and industrial discoveries that upset the norms, change relationships and social contracts. Because the old still has relevance and is not totally destroyed, and the new has not yet been firmly established, it is a dangerous and chaotic period in transition of palpable anarchy. Evidence that society is in the "Era of the Crowd" is the crumbling of the pillars of institutional society seemingly without recourse. Nothing menaces the crowd in its senseless spread of chaos and disruption then not to be taken seriously. The crowd has no mind, no heart, or theoretical underpinning. It procures its ideas in an eclectic association of disparate interests like a rebel without a cause, an amorphous configuration without a leader stumbling forward with cries of desperation. The crowd stumbles forward with illusions of what science and economic transformation has destroyed. It was true in Le Bon's time as it is true today, as technological society struggles to adjust to a digital age. "Science promised us truth, or at least knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize. It never promised us peace or happiness." The power of crowds is demonstrated in the Arab Spring, but for Le Bon, some one hundred years ago, the advent to power of the masses marked the last stages of Western civilization. Societies become worn out with their moral forces losing strength along with convictions. He claims a small intellectual aristocracy, but never a crowd has always directed civilization through periods of history. Crowds are destroyers of civilizations, which is their only power. The leaders of crowds who become founders of religions, political movements and ideologies have always been, according to him, unconscious psychologists possessed of an instinctive but sure knowledge of the character of the crowd. Mao Zedong's "Long March" fits this description. In October 1934 over a period of 370 days and 12,500 miles, Mao marched his Red Army of the Communist Party from Jiangxi to Shaanxi, China. This ramshackle army was on the brink of annihilation by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's troops, and escaped with only one-tenth of its army at the end of the march. Mao had however formulated a strategy during this year that would unite China into a single communist nation. The rest is history. On the other hand, Napoleon had a marvelous understanding of the psychology of the French people, but completely misunderstood the psychology of crowds belonging to other races. Mao did something that no previous Chinese leader had ever done. He united a huge country with many dialects and cultures, as well as ethnicities into a nation. The psychology of crowds has little respect for laws and institutions, and is powerless to hold opinions other than those imposed upon them. Given this, crowds are best led by seeking what first makes an impression and then seduces them. Logic or rational thinking has no sway. What may be best is to champion crowds as victims displayed in a vision of how to destroy the victimizers. The mind of crowds is a sacrificial personality at the start as it is driven by the unconscious. It is a dumbing down of crowds' collective intelligence replaced by a pervasive sentiment so that crowds, "Can be as easily heroic as criminal." Once the conscious personality vanishes the collective mind is formed. This results in the crowd forming into a single being. This finds a number of individuals accidentally side by side with dissimilar socioeconomic status, education, interests and authority taking on the character of true believers. Thoughts and feelings are no longer theirs, but are now other-directed if a crowd is to be, but Le bon warns: "At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident." In the 1960s, Swiss mathematician Rudolf Starkermann expressed in mathematical physics how the psychology of a group of four or more changes, which corroborates Le Bon's theoretical hypothesis. Le Bon differentiates between heterogeneous and homogeneous crowds. He sees them merging into a common collective mind, first by the nature and intensity of the exciting causes, and then the uniformity of the environment creating a consistency of characters. Ultimately, this "makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation." He concludes, the psychological crowd is a provisional being, "which for a moment are combined exactly as the cells which constitute a living body." Le Bon then suggests that none of us can escape hidden motives and that "the most eminent of men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals." Ergo, crowds "can only bring to bear in common the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated." That said he adds, "An assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles." He makes this claim because: (1) the sentiment of responsibility that controls individuals disappears in a crowd: (2) individuals readily sacrifice their personal interests to the collective interests of the crowd; and (3) cause is a suggestive contagion that may be quite contrary to that of the individuals. The conscious personality gone, the magnetic influence of the crowd paralyzing the brain with hypnotic zeal, behavior is reduced, zombie like, to a hypnotic trance. In terms of morality and sentiment, the crowd is a retreat into the primitive as it is driven by unconscious motives subject to obeying generous or cruel dispositions to action, as self-preservation no longer dominates behavior. This finds the individual in the crowd vacillating between being a willing executioner or martyr. Crowds move by momentum and are as incapable of willing as thinking for any length of time. Crowds, Le Bon sees, are distinguished by feminine characteristics, but never more pronounced than among Latin peoples. It is why women often dominate the initial phases of crowds. Suggestibility and credulity are fundamental to crowds who are inattentive to detail and prefer easy explanations to their causes as they hover on the "borderland of unconscious," as the improbable does not exist for a crowd. Le Bon calls this the "imagination of a throng," as a crowd thinks in images. These images are often so incoherent to reason, "that they are almost always... Read more ›
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent study that still rings true.,
By David W. Turner "David T" (Virginia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Paperback)
This work may be over 100 years old, but it is still as true today as then. Characteristics of humans have not changed one bit. Most telling were the later chapters about Electoral and Parliamentary mobs. How he describes then is still disturbingly true. The English is sometimes hard to understand because word usage has changed since this book was written, something Le Bon actually discusses after a fashion, but once you remember some archaic definitions and usages it isn't a problem and does not detract from the work.
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