Gustave Le Bon

1841-1931 · French · Social and Collective Psychology

The age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds.

Gustave Le Bon was a French physician, amateur physicist, and — in the work for which he is remembered — the founder of the psychology of crowds. His slim, aphoristic *The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind* (1895) became one of the most widely read and consequential books of social science ever written: it argued that when individuals gather into a crowd they cease to be themselves, sink their conscious personality into a collective mind, and descend to a lower, impulsive, credulous mode of being governed not by reason but by images, contagion, and the prestige of leaders.

Topics Gustave Le Bon addresses

• crowd psychology
• the collective mind
• the law of the mental unity of crowds
• suggestion
• contagion
• prestige
• the leader (meneur)
• the racial soul
• the era of crowds
• mass society
• propaganda and the crowd
• the psychology of peoples
• the psychology of revolution
• the psychology of socialism
• affirmation, repetition, contagion
• the crowd as primitive and feminine
• mystic beliefs and mass movements
• the leveling of civilization
• charismatic leadership
• the mental constitution of a race
• illusions and the masses
• the unconscious in the crowd
• universal suffrage and the multitude
• the psychology of the great war

Converse with Gustave Le Bon on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Gustave Le Bon's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.