Gustave Le Bon

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Gustave Le Bon : biography

7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931

Scipio Sighele’s book, “La Folla Delinquente” was published in Italian in 1891 and in French under the title, “La Foule Criminelle,” the same year. However, his book was not accessible to the German sociologist Georg Simmel until 1897, when the German edition appeared under the title, “Psychologie des Auflaufs und der Massenverbrechen”. The English edition was published in 1894 as “The Criminal Crowd,”.

Le Bon and France witnessed three major mass events: the Paris Commune, the rise of Georges Ernest Boulanger, and the Dreyfus Affair. Each of these events galvanized a large segment of the population. Paris, in the 19th century, was one of the largest industrialized urban cities in Europe and was in the forefront of rising forces of anti-Semitism and Far Right politics. In particular, the German conquest of Alsace and Lorraine had fueled nationalist and right-wing sentiments in the country. It is in this context that Le Bon creates his concept of ‘THE CROWD.’

This new entity that emerges from incorporating the assembled population not only forms a new body but also forms a collective “unconsciousness.” As a crowd gathers together and coalesces there is a ”magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant” that transmutes every individual’s behavior until it becomes governed by the ’group mind’. This model treats ‘THE CROWD’ as a unit in its composition and robs every individual member of their opinions, values and beliefs. As he says in one of his more pithy statements, “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”.

Le Bon detailed three key processes that create ‘The Crowd’: anonymity, contagion and suggestibility. Anonymity provides an individual a feeling of invincibility and the sense loss of responsibility. With the lost of autonomy an individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self restraint allows individuals to ‘yield to instincts’ and to accept the instinctual drives of their ‘racial unconscious’. For Le Bon this means that the crowd inverts Darwin’s law of evolution and becomes atavistic or regressive, proving Ernst Haeckel’s embryological theory: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviors (e.g. rioter’s smashing windows) where individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved. As the crowd coalesces into a singular mind suggestions made by strong voices in the crowd create a space for the ‘racial unconscious’ to come to the forefront and guide its behavior. At this stage ‘THE CROWD’ becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. “The leaders we speak of," says Le Bon, "are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen forsight… They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous exciteable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. [two classes of leader, the energetic whose will is intermittent, and the rarer group whose will is enduring] the world belongs to the crowd leader who possesses a persistent will-force."

A backlash against Le Bon’s conception of a ‘collective mind’ led other social scientists to put forward the opposite viewpoint that crowd behavior is the consequence of the individuals that compose it. Floyd Allport was in the vanguard of this attack, asserting that there is no such thing as a ‘group mind’ and that no crowd is more than the aggregate of its individual responses. He considered any reference to a mind that was separate from the psych of individuals as a meaningless abstraction or even as “a babble of tongues" (Allport, 1933), and in his seminal text on social psychology (Allport, 1924) he asserted, “there is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals” (p.4).

George Lachmann Mosse, former History professor in University of Wisconsin-Madison has claimed that fascist theories of leadership that emerged during the 1920s owed much to Le Bon’s theories of crowd psychology. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf also drew largely on the propaganda techniques proposed in Le Bon’s 1895 book. at blogspot.com at www.thevillager.com at solomonsmusic.net at www.toolan.com Benito Mussolini made a careful study of Le Bon’s crowd psychology book, apparently keeping the book by his bedside.Alex Steiner, "Marxism Without Its Head or Heart", 2007

Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was influenced by Le Bon and Trotter. In his famous book Propaganda, he declared that a major feature of democracy was the manipulation of the mass mind by media and advertising. Theodore Roosevelt, as well as many other American progressives in the early 20th century, were also deeply affected by Le Bon’s writings.p. 63 ff., Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin, New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Just prior to World War I Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon of University College Hospital, London introduced Wilfred Bion, an employee at the same hospital, to Le Bon’s writings and Sigmund Freud’s work Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; English translation Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922). Trotter’s book, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War forms the basis for the research of both Wilfred Bion and Ernest Jones who established what would be called group psychology. Their association with the Tavistock Institute also places them in the new field of group dynamics. During the first half of the twentieth century Le Bon’s writings were used by media researchers such as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media.