![]() Original French language edition Psychologie des Foules (Psychology of Crowds, 1937 edition) | |
Author | Gustave Le Bon |
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Original title | Psychologie des Foules |
Language | French |
Genre | Social psychology |
Publication date | 1895 |
Publication place | France |
Published in English | 1896 |
Pages | 130 |
Text | The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind at Internet Archive |
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The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (French : Psychologie des Foules; literally: Psychology of Crowds) is a book authored by Gustave Le Bon that was first published in 1895. [1] [2]
In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others". [1] Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer." [3]
Influenced by Scipio Sighele's The Criminal Crowd (1891), the book had an impact in its turn on Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and on Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925–26).
Fin de siècle |
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The book has a strong connection with Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). In this book Freud refers heavily to the writings of Gustave Le Bon, summarizing his work at the beginning of the book in the chapter Le Bons Schilderung der Massenseele ("Le Bon's description of the group mind"). Like Le Bon, Freud says that as part of the mass, the individual acquires a sense of infinite power allowing him to act on impulses that he would otherwise have to curb as an isolated individual. These feelings of power and security allow the individual not only to act as part of the mass, but also to feel safety in numbers. This is accompanied, however, by a loss of conscious personality and a tendency of the individual to be infected by any emotion within the mass, and to amplify the emotion, in turn, by "mutual induction". Overall, the mass is "impulsive, changeable, and irritable. It is controlled almost exclusively by the unconscious." [4]
Freud extensively quotes Le Bon, who explains that the state of the individual in the crowd is "hypnotic", with which Freud agrees. He adds that the contagion and the higher suggestibility are different kinds of change of the individual in the mass. [5]
The book, translated into German as Psychologie der Massen in 1908, is suggested by the editor of the Polish critical edition of Mein Kampf to have been Adolf Hitler's main prison reading in 1924 as he prepared to write his extensive propaganda tract. Hitler would have taken time to study The Crowd along with some brochures on the techniques of influencing mass behaviour while serving his sentence in the Landsberg Prison for having led the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 with Erich Ludendorff. [6] [7] Influence of Le Bon's contemptuous ideas about the essential destructive stupidity of the masses, their supposed "femininity" and manipulability, and about the effectiveness of propaganda through simple repetition, leading to a belief in the viability of "mass suggestion", has been noted throughout Hitler's book. [8] The editors of the German critical edition of Mein Kampf say it remains unclear whether Hitler actually knew Le Bon's writings first-hand, [9] and suggest that he may have encountered Le Bon's ideas (shared by various contemporary German medical scholars [10] ) through the Munich neurologist Julius R. Rossbach's brochure Die Massenseele of 1919, [11] but they point to The Crowd as one of the most likely sources for the chapter on War Propaganda. [12] Nonetheless, in at least one instance Le Bon's view is argued to have been more optimistic and nuanced about the ethical capacities of the masses than Hitler's. [13] Le Bon is said to have taken many of his notions about the violent tendencies of the masses and their susceptibility to negative influence, primarily through the medium of the press, from Scipio Sighele's The Criminal Crowd (1891). [9]
In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti analyzes the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber with an implicit critique of Sigmund Freud as well as Gustave Le Bon.
Journalist Dan Hancox writes that the misconception of senseless participation, as articulated by Le Bon, is still often used by politicians today to describe public gatherings and marches that they disagree with. [14]