The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Gustave Le Bon · translated by an unnamed translator (T. Fisher Unwin edition)
Le Bon argues that crowd members lose their conscious personality and follow whoever supplies images and faith, but he supports the case mostly with anecdote and assertion.
Editorial review. Written from the complete text of Project Gutenberg eBook #445.
Crowds are open to conviction; castes never are.
What it is
Gustave Le Bon argues that a gathering becomes a psychological crowd with a collective mind, and that each member's conscious personality vanishes inside it (Book I, Chapter I, lines 586-598). The book opens with an introduction on the era of crowds. Its three books cover the mind of crowds, their beliefs, and their classes: criminal crowds, juries, electoral crowds and parliamentary assemblies.
The mechanism is suggestion and contagion. Numbers give each person a feeling of invincible power, and anonymity removes responsibility, so he yields to instincts he would otherwise restrain. His first example is St. George at Jerusalem. One of those present saw the vision first, and suggestion and contagion carried it to every Crusader.
What holds up
The strongest section is on words. Le Bon says a word's power comes from the images it evokes rather than its exact sense. He names democracy, socialism and equality as terms vague enough to absorb a crowd's hopes, and likens a word to the button of an electric bell that calls an image up. A reader can test that against any slogan.
Repetition is the second point. A claim repeated often enough, he writes, is remembered without its source and ends up believed. He illustrates with advertisements for chocolate and flour.
Leadership is the third. Faith in a person or idea multiplies a follower's strength tenfold, and leaders supply it.
What does not
Race is the weakest part, and the argument leans on it. He places race first among the factors of crowd belief, then says he studied it in another work and will not repeat it. The reader gets the verdict without the argument. A footnote on English deference to peers says respect for nobility is in their blood, citing an unnamed travel book.
The race claims carry no evidence here. Latin crowds are the most feminine of all. A French crowd puts weight on equality and an English crowd on liberty, and crowd faults fade as a race's spirit grows strong. He generalises about educated Hindoos and calls the Baboos irreconcilable enemies of English rule.
The dated science is clear. He writes that children invariably lie and that brain disorders, like madness, are themselves contagious. His arithmetic is also off: a rise from 227 to 552 per 100,000 is called 133 per cent, but it is about 143.
The two passages conflict. The introduction says crowds are powerful only for destruction, while Book I, Chapter I says crowds are often heroic and that history is made of such heroism.
Cruelty appears as wisdom. He concedes that intolerance can be criticised philosophically, then calls it one of the most necessary virtues a people has, citing burnings at the stake and the war dead as its cost.
Proof is thin. The sweeping line "The masses have never thirsted after truth." has no source. Much of the rest is anecdote, accounts taken from Taine and newspaper citations.
Who should read it
Read Books I and II for the mechanism: the mind of crowds, suggestion and contagion, words and images, repetition, and leaders who supply belief. Skip the race passages or read them only as period evidence. Book III's chapters on juries and electoral crowds are the most concrete about institutions.
Readers working on propaganda, advertising, political speech or jury practice will get the most from it, if they treat each claim as a hypothesis. The book offers examples, not tests.
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