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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Gustave Le Bon's "The Crowd & The Psychology of Revolution" is a seminal work that delves into the dynamics of collective behavior and the psychological underpinnings of revolutions. Written in the late 19th century, it employs a blend of social psychology and historical analysis to explore how individuals in a crowd can be transformed by the group experience. Le Bon's literary style is characterized by its clarity and erudition, making complex psychological concepts accessible to a broader audience. This book serves as a pivotal text in understanding not only the fervor of political movements but also the inherent mechanisms that drive societal change and collective action. Le Bon, a pioneer in social psychology, was influenced by the tumultuous political climate of his time, notably the social upheavals that marked the Age of Revolution. His extensive study of human behavior, paired with a keen awareness of sociopolitical structures, allowed him to dissect the anatomy of crowds and revolutions. Through his keen observations, Le Bon positioned himself as a voice that could articulate the interplay between individual psychology and mass movements, framing the discourse around social dynamics for decades to come. This book is highly recommended for scholars of sociology, psychology, and political science, as well as anyone interested in the mechanics of human behavior in groups. Le Bon's insights remain profoundly relevant, offering a foundational understanding of modern-day populism and the power of collective sentiment in shaping societal outcomes. Engage with this work to gain a deeper appreciation of the intricate relationship between the individual and the collective in times of profound social change. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Crowd & The Psychology of Revolution
Table of Contents
Introduction
A solitary mind dissolves into a many-headed will. From that arresting transformation, Gustave Le Bon constructs a study of mass behavior whose shadows still fall across modern politics and culture. The Crowd & The Psychology of Revolution brings together two companion inquiries that trace how individuals, when gathered, acquire new impulses, beliefs, and capacities, and how those forces erupt in periods of upheaval. The result is neither a celebration nor a condemnation alone, but a stark anatomy of collective energy—its volatility, suggestibility, and power to overturn settled orders. Reading these works today means meeting the crowd not as spectacle, but as a decisive actor in history.
This book endures as a classic because it helped craft the very vocabulary with which we discuss mass society. Le Bon’s synthesis shaped early social psychology and influenced debates in sociology, political theory, and the study of public opinion. Its themes—contagion, leadership, myth, and the emotional tenor of crowds—proved foundational for later thinkers tracking the rise of modern democracies, propaganda, and mass media. As a literary artifact, it exemplifies the incisive fin-de-siècle essay: lucid, provocative, and aphoristic. Its status rests not on unchallenged truth, but on provocation—on framing questions that subsequent generations felt compelled to wrestle with, refine, or resist.
Gustave Le Bon, a French physician and social observer, wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895 and The Psychology of Revolution in 1913. Composed during the Third Republic, these texts reflect a period marked by rapid urbanization, widening suffrage, and intense ideological conflict in France and beyond. The first volume analyzes how crowds form and act; the second examines revolutionary dynamics through historical examples, with particular attention to France. Together they offer a panoramic view of collective behavior in everyday assemblies and in extraordinary upheavals, aiming to explain how social cohesion, belief, and passion can rapidly reorder public life.
The Crowd outlines mechanisms by which individuals, gathered into assemblies, acquire a shared mental complexion. Le Bon describes how anonymity, emotion, and imitation can override personal restraint, producing phenomena he terms suggestibility and moral contagion. He emphasizes the role of imagery, symbols, and simple ideas in guiding mass attention, and the capacity of leaders to crystallize diffuse sentiment into decisive action. The argument is not purely descriptive: it warns of the volatility of collective moods while acknowledging their creative potential. The book’s enduring interest comes from the clarity with which it names dynamics that readers recognize in rallies, trends, and waves of opinion.
The Psychology of Revolution turns from the general to the historical stage where collective forces climax. Here Le Bon considers how revolutions emerge, gather momentum, change institutions, and transform beliefs. He explores the interplay of material conditions, psychological predispositions, and the mythic narratives that sustain action under uncertainty. Revolutions, in his account, are not solely logical outcomes of grievances; they are also accelerations of belief, hope, and fear that reorganize society’s memory and expectation. Rather than offering a single master cause, the book maps recurring patterns and moments, inviting readers to see upheaval as an unstable choreography of ideas, leaders, crowds, and opportunity.
Across both works, Le Bon’s purpose is diagnostic rather than programmatic. He seeks to reveal the typical impulses, credulities, and intensities that arise when people act together, and to delineate how those impulses shape political outcomes. His method blends observation, anecdote, and historical synthesis into a portable framework: identify the crowd’s mental unity, trace the channels of suggestion, follow the images and slogans that fix attention, and watch the leaders who focus force. While his tone can be alarmed, his ambition is explanatory—to equip readers with concepts that make otherwise bewildering episodes legible without claiming to predict every turn.
The book’s impact radiated widely. Sigmund Freud engaged directly with crowd psychology when developing his account of group dynamics. Wilfred Trotter’s work on herd instinct, José Ortega y Gasset’s reflections on mass society, and later studies of collective behavior and propaganda all reckon with problems Le Bon formulates. In the realms of public relations and political persuasion, Edward Bernays drew on crowd psychology to analyze opinion formation. Even critics who reject Le Bon’s conclusions acknowledge his influence, treating his categories as unavoidable reference points. The durability of this conversation signals a classic: it sets a stage on which diverse arguments must perform.
Part of the book’s literary force lies in its style. Le Bon writes in concentrated strokes, mounting clear, often polemical claims that invite assent or rebuttal. He compresses observations into vivid generalizations, using historical vignettes to anchor theory without dissolving into narrative. This fusion of essayistic sharpness and analytical reach made his works accessible beyond academic circles, ensuring their circulation among journalists, statesmen, and readers curious about the new power of mass politics. As a result, the texts inhabit literary history as models of the engaged social essay—works that catalyze thought not by exhaustive evidence, but by framing experience in suggestive patterns.
To regard the book as a classic is not to ignore its limits. Some assertions are sweeping, reflecting assumptions and classifications common in its era that later scholarship has criticized. Its skepticism toward mass democracy can appear categorical, and its emphasis on uniform crowd psychology has been challenged by research highlighting diversity within groups and contexts. Yet precisely because its claims are bold, they have drawn empirical tests, revisions, and counter-theories. The text endures as a productive foil: it gives readers a set of strong hypotheses about collective behavior that subsequent thinkers have refined, qualified, or overturned, thus keeping its arguments alive in debate.
For contemporary audiences, these works illuminate familiar phenomena with unsettling clarity. The mechanisms Le Bon underscores—attention, imitation, emotional contagion, leadership, and symbol—are visible in modern assemblies, from street demonstrations to online swells of opinion. While the media that carry suggestion have changed, the dynamics of shared fervor, accelerated belief, and rapid mood shifts still challenge institutions and individuals. Readers find in Le Bon both a caution and a toolkit: a language to describe what they witness, and a reminder to distinguish intensity from understanding. The books’ diagnostic lens thus remains serviceable where crowds gather, whether physically or within networks of communication.
Thematically, The Crowd & The Psychology of Revolution turns on several linked ideas. It tracks how identity reshapes under collective pressure; how persuasion operates through image and repetition; how leaders concentrate diffuse impulses; how myths generate cohesion and endurance; and how revolutions reorder memory, expectation, and authority. It considers the tension between reason and passion without denying the creative energies that movements unleash. Its sensibility is neither purely tragic nor celebratory, but attentive to ambivalence: the crowd can emancipate and enthrall. Readers are invited to hold complexity in view, recognizing power and peril braided together whenever many act as one.
This union of conceptual audacity, historical reach, and lucid prose explains the book’s lasting appeal. It offers a framework capacious enough to travel across eras, yet sharp enough to provoke fresh questions each time a collective rises to prominence. By situating the psychology of the multitude at the heart of political change, Le Bon enlarges the reader’s sense of causality and responsibility. The works remain relevant because they clarify how belief becomes force and how moods become events. Engaging them today is less an exercise in nostalgia than a practical education in the dynamics that still shape public life.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Crowd (1895) and The Psychology of Revolution (1913) present Gustave Le Bon’s attempt to explain collective behavior and political upheaval through social psychology. Drawing on historical episodes, contemporary observations, and comparative examples, he outlines the mental laws governing groups and applies them to revolutionary periods, with special attention to France. The first book defines what constitutes a psychological crowd and the mechanisms by which it thinks and acts. The second traces how beliefs, institutions, and circumstances combine to produce revolutions, their phases, and typical outcomes and aftermaths. He favors concise typologies and illustrative anecdotes to convey general principles and a continuous, cumulative argument.
Le Bon begins The Crowd by distinguishing a physical gathering from a psychological crowd. A crowd, in his sense, arises when individuals become psychologically unified, submerging conscious personality and critical judgment in a collective mind. This mental unity, he argues, lowers deliberative reasoning while amplifying emotion, imagination, and impulsivity. Anonymity fosters a sense of irresponsibility, and suggestibility increases receptivity to simple ideas. He notes that heterogeneous individuals, once organized by shared stimuli or beliefs, behave as a homogeneous entity. The crowd’s traits are not merely additive; the group produces emergent properties that differ from those of its members considered separately.
Next, he describes mechanisms governing crowd action: suggestion, contagion, and imitation. Affirmations, repeated with confidence, spread rapidly, while emotional tones transmit more readily than arguments. Crowds think in images and formulas; vivid symbols and concise slogans carry persuasive power. Complex ideas are simplified into extremes, and moral ambiguity gives way to categorical judgments. Credulity grows, and the attitude toward leaders or doctrines often takes a quasi-religious form. The same mechanisms, he contends, can lead to heroism or violence depending on stimuli and milieu. Education and institutions that rely on rote formulas can reinforce these tendencies by supplying ready-made images.
He then examines leadership and prestige. Leaders of crowds tend to be determined, dogmatic, and convinced, communicating certainty more than proofs. Prestige—either personal (charisma) or acquired (office, tradition)—is the principal source of influence. Techniques include affirmation, repetition, and contagious example. He classifies crowds: criminal mobs, juries, electoral crowds, sects, and parliamentary assemblies, noting how institutional rules alter but do not abolish crowd psychology. Rhetoric, ceremonial, and symbols become tools for mobilization. The press and oratory serve as intermediaries that translate abstract programs into accessible cues, enabling leaders to guide masses through simple appeals rather than extended reasoning.
From these features he draws social implications. Modern political life multiplies circumstances where crowds decide—elections, demonstrations, and opinion movements—so understanding their psychology is essential for governance. He emphasizes the enduring role of collective temperament shaped by heredity, traditions, and institutions, which sets limits to what policies or reforms can achieve. Crowds, he argues, can be conservative in instincts yet destructive toward existing structures when beliefs are undermined. Rational persuasion has limited reach; authority and prestige often prevail. The concluding chapters stress that durable change depends on gradual modifications of common beliefs rather than abrupt impositions crafted solely by reason.
Turning to The Psychology of Revolution, Le Bon defines revolutions as political and social transformations that follow profound, slow alterations in beliefs, catalyzed by crises. He distinguishes three broad phases: a preparatory period in which old convictions lose authority; an outbreak marked by crowd ascendancy, improvisation, and the displacement of legal norms; and a consolidation where new authorities centralize and codify outcomes. He surveys economic grievances, administrative failures, and ideological conflicts but underscores the primacy of collective mental states. Words and myths—liberty, equality, people—mobilize adherents, while institutions disintegrate when their moral foundations no longer command confidence or obedience.
He focuses extensively on the French Revolution as a case study. Pre-revolutionary France is presented as a society where monarchical prestige faded and traditional beliefs eroded. Clubs, assemblies, and Parisian crowds shaped events through pressure, demonstrations, and insurrections. Temporary authorities emerged—committees, tribunals, and representatives—exercising summary powers as legal procedures yielded to exceptional measures. He describes the Terror as an outcome of fear, doctrinal certainty, and crowd justice operating under existential threat. The period’s language and rites assumed a civic-religious form. Throughout, he highlights how leadership, symbols, and the psychology of the masses determined the speed and direction of change.
In assessing outcomes, Le Bon argues that revolutions often replace old elites with new ones while preserving deep-seated national characteristics. Centralization and strong executive power frequently follow chaotic episodes as restoration of order becomes paramount. Economic disruption and institutional experimentation give way to more stable arrangements that retain some reforms and discard impractical schemes. Durable achievements stem from ideas that have gradually permeated the populace; measures imposed before beliefs evolve tend to be reversed. He generalizes that lasting social transformations result from slow mental evolution, with abrupt upheavals accelerating destruction but less effective at constructing enduring, coherent systems.
Across both works, the central message is that collective life obeys identifiable psychological laws: masses are moved more by images, prestige, and belief than by analysis. Leaders translate doctrines into symbols that mobilize action, while revolutions showcase these dynamics under extreme stress. Understanding how crowds form, think, and are led clarifies why certain policies succeed, why institutions sometimes collapse, and why post-revolutionary regimes consolidate power. Le Bon’s sequence links the micro-psychology of group behavior to the macro-patterns of political upheaval. The combined study aims to provide readers with tools to interpret modern public opinion, mass movements, and revolutionary outcomes.
Historical Context
Gustave Le Bon wrote The Crowd in 1895 and The Psychology of Revolution in 1912, works anchored in the political and social climate of the French Third Republic. Paris, the city where Le Bon lived and published, had become a laboratory of modern mass politics after the upheavals of 1870–1871. Rapid urban growth, the expansion of universal male suffrage, and mass-circulation newspapers created new forms of collective action and opinion. France’s colonial empire expanded, economic modernization accelerated, and anxieties about nationalism, socialism, and anti-parliamentarism sharpened. Le Bon, trained as a physician and anthropologist, drew on this environment to anatomize crowds and revolutionary convulsions.
The period saw the institutional stabilization of the Third Republic after 1875, yet its legitimacy constantly faced tests from the street, the press, and plebiscitary temptations. The intellectual milieu combined positivist science, criminology, social statistics, and emergent psychology, encouraging attempts to quantify behavior and opinion. Political scandals and polarizing trials dramatized the volatility of public sentiment. The capital’s boulevards, clubs, meetings, and barricade memories preserved a living archive of collective passions. Le Bon’s Paris thus offered abundant material and cautionary examples for his theories: how leaders hypnotize multitudes, how myths displace facts, and how crises accelerate the transfer of sovereignty from individuals to crowds.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 shattered the Second Empire and inaugurated the Third Republic. Napoleon III was captured at Sedan on 1 September 1870; Paris endured a siege from September 1870 to January 1871, ending with armistice and the cession of Alsace-Lorraine in the Treaty of Frankfurt (10 May 1871). The trauma of defeat, hunger, and humiliation fostered radicalization. Le Bon’s analysis of crowds reflects this matrix: the collapse of traditional authority under pressure, the rise of rumor during siege, and the public’s susceptibility to leaders promising national redemption. The Crowd reads these events as laboratories for understanding rapid opinion shifts under stress.
The Paris Commune (18 March–28 May 1871) created a revolutionary government in Paris opposing the Versailles-based national authorities. Policies included municipal autonomy, secularization, and social reforms; the conflict ended in Bloody Week (21–28 May) with thousands killed and mass deportations. The Commune furnished vivid examples of improvisational governance, symbolic politics, and crowd militarization. Le Bon’s later reflections treat the Commune as a case of collective contagion and the dynamics of revolutionary minorities steering mass sentiment. The Psychology of Revolution mines this episode to illustrate how revolutionary ideals are concretized through rituals, martyrs, and myths that galvanize disparate groups into unified action.
The French Revolution of 1789–1799 provides the core historical template for The Psychology of Revolution. The Estates-General met in May 1789; the Third Estate proclaimed the National Assembly; the Tennis Court Oath followed on 20 June; and the Bastille fell on 14 July. The October Days (5–6 October 1789) forced the royal family from Versailles to Paris. These events unfolded amid fiscal crisis, grain shortages, and Enlightenment critiques of privilege. Le Bon treats 1789 as the archetype of a psychological regime change: authority disintegrates, new symbols gain force, and crowds acquire the sovereignty to redefine legitimacy. His narrative dissects how slogans simplify complex grievances.
Between 1792 and 1794, the Revolution radicalized. The monarchy fell on 10 August 1792; the September Massacres followed; the Republic was proclaimed; Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793. The Committee of Public Safety, with figures like Robespierre and Saint-Just, oversaw the Terror. The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) streamlined convictions, while revolutionary festivals and civic cults sacralized politics. Le Bon analyzes this period as a clinical demonstration of crowd suggestibility, the authority of doctrinaire minorities, and the emotional economy of fear, virtue, and sacrifice. He argues that ritual, oratory, and exemplary punishment remolded perceptions faster than institutions could stabilize them.
Thermidor (9 Thermidor Year II, 27 July 1794) toppled Robespierre; the Directory (1795–1799) struggled against royalists and Jacobins; and Bonaparte’s coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) ended the revolutionary decade. Plebiscitary consolidation replaced factional terror. Le Bon reads these transitions as phases in crowd fatigue and recolonization of authority, where exhaustion with extremes primes acceptance of a decisive leader. He highlights how myths of order and glory displaced egalitarian fervor, and how the psychology of expectation switched from virtue to victory. The Revolution, in his account, demonstrates recurrent sequences: utopian outbreak, coercive purification, stabilization, and charismatic militarization.
Napoleon I and, later, Napoleon III exemplified plebiscitary rule harnessing mass legitimacy. Bonaparte’s plebiscites in 1800 and 1802 ratified constitutional changes; the 1804 vote legitimized the Empire. Louis-Napoleon’s coup of 2 December 1851 dissolved the Assembly; a December plebiscite sanctioned it, and the Second Empire was proclaimed in 1852. These regimes combined popular consultation with centralized power. Le Bon links this tradition to the predisposition of crowds to respond to prestige, ceremony, and clarity of purpose. The Crowd interprets plebiscites not as deliberation but as collective assent to symbols of authority, a mechanism repeated in later mass democracies.
The July Revolution of 1830 and the Revolution of 1848 punctuated France’s century with further mass mobilizations. In 1830, Parisian uprisings ousted Charles X and brought Louis-Philippe to power. In February 1848, protests toppled the July Monarchy and inaugurated the Second Republic; universal male suffrage was introduced. The June Days (23–26 June 1848) witnessed a bloody clash between workers and the state. For Le Bon, 1848 epitomized how new electoral rights coexisted with street politics, and how socioeconomic grievances could rapidly crystallize into barricade conflict. The Psychology of Revolution cites these cycles to show the recurrent interplay of suffrage, social distress, and insurrectionary crowds.
The Boulangist movement (1886–1889), led by General Georges Boulanger, mobilized nationalists, monarchists, and disaffected republicans against parliamentary elites. Mass rallies, cheap newspapers, and slogans like Revision of the Constitution propelled him to near-power in 1889 before he fled to Brussels. Boulangism used plebiscitary tactics and personal charisma to channel diffuse resentments. Le Bon considered such phenomena exemplary of crowd magnetism and the danger of demagogues who simplify complex policy into emotive binaries. The Crowd explicitly analyzes how prestige, uniform, and rumor can transform a general into a vessel of collective desire, prefiguring twentieth-century populisms.
The Panama Canal Scandal (1892–1893) implicated Ferdinand de Lesseps and a network of intermediaries in bribing deputies to conceal financial collapse. The exposure fueled anti-parliamentary and antisemitic agitation as figures like Baron de Reinach and Cornelius Herz were vilified. Public outrage was amplified by the mass press, accelerating distrust of institutions. For Le Bon, this crisis displayed the volatility of public opinion under scandal conditions and the role of moral panic in mobilization. The Crowd’s emphasis on sensational narratives, suggestibility, and scapegoating finds a concrete backdrop in Panama, where complex financial failures became simplified into demonology suitable for crowds.
The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) split France into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards after Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was wrongfully convicted for espionage. Key moments included Émile Zola’s J Accuse in January 1898, the 1899 Rennes retrial, and Dreyfus’s rehabilitation in 1906. Mass demonstrations, street violence, and press campaigns turned a legal case into a national plebiscite on justice, army honor, and republicanism. Le Bon used the Affair to illustrate how crowds form around moral symbols, how bias overrides evidence, and how leaders and newspapers orchestrate collective emotions. His analysis underscores the fragility of rational deliberation under partisan mobilization.
The rise of mass-circulation newspapers and visual propaganda transformed political life. Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien reached millions by the 1890s; posters by Jules Cheret and serialized scandals shaped attention. New venues such as public meetings, cafés, and the Bourse du Travail facilitated opinion aggregation. Le Bon’s work, particularly The Crowd, describes how repetition, striking images, and slogans compress complexity into memorable cues that steer behavior. He posits that the modern press acts as both mirror and molder of the collective mind, creating synchronized emotional waves that substitute vicarious experience for direct knowledge.
Syndicalism and strike waves tested republican order. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was founded at Limoges in 1895; the Charter of Amiens (1906) affirmed union autonomy and the general strike as a tactic. The Courrières mine disaster on 10 March 1906, killing roughly 1,100 miners, spurred unrest. Major strikes included the 1909 postal workers’ action and the 1910 railway strike, which the government countered by militarizing labor. Le Bon interpreted syndicalist mobilization as evidence of how shared grievances, rituals, and disciplined minorities can catalyze vast collective action. The Psychology of Revolution draws analogies to earlier revolutionary networks and committees.
The 1905 Law on Separation of Churches and State capped decades of anticlerical conflict. The Combes ministry had expelled many religious congregations since 1902; by 1905, mass rallies, counter-marches, and parish inventory confrontations polarized towns and regions. The secular republic faced Catholic mobilization in streets and press. Le Bon treated these mobilizations as examples of how sacred symbols, whether religious or secular, underpin crowd cohesion. He argued that civic cults and laïcité campaigns, no less than ecclesiastical rites, rely on ritual, myth, and emblems to bind followers, reinforcing his thesis that political movements inherit the psychological structures of faith.
Beyond France, the Russian Revolution of 1905 offered a contemporaneous case of mass upheaval. Bloody Sunday on 22 January 1905, the formation of soviets, mutinies like the Battleship Potemkin, and the October Manifesto revealed how urban crowds, strikes, and propaganda could force concessions. Le Bon referenced such events to generalize his claims about crowd contagion, the power of revolutionary minorities, and the rapid oscillation between fear and audacity. He used Russia to argue that modernization without robust institutions magnifies the emotional intensity of collective action, yielding outcomes shaped less by programs than by psychological momentum.
Taken together, The Crowd and The Psychology of Revolution function as a social and political critique of mass democracy’s vulnerabilities in fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Europe. Le Bon contends that class antagonisms, national humiliations, scandals, and confessional conflicts create fertile ground for demagogic simplification. He criticizes parliamentary corruption, judicial miscarriages, and elite irresolution as triggers for crowd intervention. By exposing how symbols override facts and how leaders exploit prestige and fear, his books warn that suffrage and publicity, absent civic education and institutional ballast, can incubate new forms of tyranny legitimated by the very crowds that seek redress.
Author Biography
Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a French physician turned social psychologist, best known for The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Active from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, he explored how groups think, feel, and act, shaping debates on mass politics, propaganda, and culture. His writings bridged anthropology, sociology, and psychology, written in accessible prose that reached a wide readership beyond academia. While many of his historical and biological generalizations have been criticized, his formulations about suggestion, contagion, and leadership became influential touchstones. Le Bon stands as a progenitor of crowd psychology and a key observer of modernity’s mass publics.
Le Bon studied medicine in Paris and earned a medical degree in the 1860s, training in physiology and clinical practice before turning to research and writing. His intellectual formation reflected the positivist climate of the Second Empire and early Third Republic, and he engaged with evolutionary ideas circulating in France and Britain. Readings of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Hippolyte Taine helped shape his interest in how collective mentalities arise and persist. Rather than pursuing a long clinical career, he gravitated toward empirical observation, public lecturing, and synthesis across disciplines, seeking broad principles to explain social stability, change, and conflict.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Le Bon traveled through North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, publishing widely read works that popularized archaeological and ethnographic knowledge for a lay audience. He presented comparative portraits of civilizations and argued that institutions rest on underlying “psychological” dispositions of peoples. Among his notable publications from this period are La Civilisation des Arabes and Les Civilisations de l’Inde. He also embraced the measurement practices then current in anthropology, though many of his typologies reflected assumptions about race and culture that later scholarship has rejected. These studies gradually oriented him toward questions of collective behavior.
Le Bon’s most influential social-psychological writings appeared in the 1890s. The Psychology of Peoples proposed that historical development springs from durable mental habits transmitted within groups. The Crowd (Psychologie des foules) advanced a stark portrait of crowds as impulsive, suggestible, and prone to contagion, arguing that anonymity dissolves individual judgment and that “prestige” enables leaders to sway masses. The book combined case anecdotes with sweeping generalization, framed in an aphoristic style that invited both praise and controversy. It quickly circulated across Europe and beyond, establishing Le Bon as an interpreter of mass society at a time of expanding suffrage and urban demonstrations.
Extending these themes, Le Bon wrote on politics, education, and revolution around the turn of the century. In Psychologie du socialisme he criticized egalitarian programs he believed disregarded the dynamics of crowd emotion and leadership. The Psychology of Revolution examined upheavals in France with the same lens, highlighting how slogans, symbols, and prestige organize collective action. He advocated cautious governance by experienced elites and warned that democracies could be steered by demagogic appeals. Such positions made him a prominent conservative commentator and a frequent reference in debates about mass politics, even as scholars disputed his determinism and the breadth of his claims.
Le Bon’s ideas resonated across disciplines and political camps. Psychologists and social theorists, including Sigmund Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and the surgeon Wilfred Trotter, engaged his account of suggestion and group mind. Writers such as José Ortega y Gasset and numerous journalists and publicists drew on his vocabulary of prestige and contagion. Politicians and propagandists in the early twentieth century—across authoritarian and democratic settings—studied his analyses of persuasion. At the same time, critics faulted his racialist assumptions and pessimism about the masses. His work thus became both a toolkit for influence and a touchstone for critical rebuttal.
Le Bon remained an active essayist into the interwar years, commenting on war, economic turmoil, and education for a broad readership. He died in France in the early 1930s. Subsequent scholarship has largely discarded his anthropological hierarchies and biological speculations, while continuing to debate and refine his propositions about crowd behavior, leadership, and belief. Today, The Crowd is read as a foundational, contested text in social psychology and media studies, informing research on public opinion, rumor, propaganda, and collective action. His legacy endures in the language of prestige, contagion, and suggestion—concepts still mobilized to describe mass society’s powers and perils.
The Crowd & The Psychology of Revolution
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Table of Contents
Preface
The following work is devoted to an account of the characteristics of crowds.
The whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows the individuals of a race constitute the genius of the race. When, however, a certain number of these individuals are gathered together in a crowd for purposes of action, observation proves that, from the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological characteristics, which are added to the racial characteristics and differ from them at times to a very considerable degree.
Organised crowds have always played an important part in the life of peoples, but this part has never been of such moment as at present. The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.
I have endeavoured to examine the difficult problem presented by crowds in a purely scientific manner—that is, by making an effort to proceed with method, and without being influenced by opinions, theories, and doctrines. This, I believe, is the only mode of arriving at the discovery of some few particles of truth, especially when dealing, as is the case here, with a question that is the subject of impassioned controversy. A man of science bent on verifying a phenomenon is not called upon to concern himself with the interests his verifications may hurt. In a recent publication an eminent thinker, M. Goblet d'Alviela, made the remark that, belonging to none of the contemporary schools, I am occasionally found in opposition of sundry of the conclusions of all of them. I hope this new work will merit a similar observation. To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices and preconceived opinions.
Still I should explain to the reader why he will find me draw conclusions from my investigations which it might be thought at first sight they do not bear; why, for instance, after noting the extreme mental inferiority of crowds, picked assemblies included, I yet affirm it would be dangerous to meddle with their organisation, notwithstanding this inferiority.
The reason is, that the most attentive observation of the facts of history has invariably demonstrated to me that social organisms being every whit as complicated as those of all beings, it is in no wise in our power to force them to undergo on a sudden far-reaching transformations. 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, however excellent these reforms may appear theoretically. They would only be useful were it possible to change instantaneously the genius of nations. This power, however, is only possessed by time. Men are ruled by ideas, sentiments, and customs—matters which are of the essence of ourselves. Institutions and laws are the outward manifestation of our character, the expression of its needs. Being its outcome, institutions and laws cannot change this character.
The study of social phenomena cannot be separated from that of the peoples among whom they have come into existence. From the philosophic point of view these phenomena may have an absolute value; in practice they have only a relative value.
It is necessary, in consequence, when studying a social phenomenon, to consider it successively under two very different aspects. It will then be seen that the teachings of pure reason are very often contrary to those of practical reason. There are scarcely any data, even physical, to which this distinction is not applicable. From the point of view of absolute truth a cube or a circle are invariable geometrical figures, rigorously defined by certain formulas. From the point of view of the impression they make on our eye these geometrical figures may assume very varied shapes. By perspective the cube may be transformed into a pyramid or a square, the circle into an ellipse or a straight line. Moreover, the consideration of these fictitious shapes is far more important than that of the real shapes, for it is they and they alone that we see and that can be reproduced by photography or in pictures. In certain cases there is more truth in the unreal than in the real. To present objects with their exact geometrical forms would be to distort nature and render it unrecognisable. If we imagine a world whose inhabitants could only copy or photograph objects, but were unable to touch them, it would be very difficult for such persons to attain to an exact idea of their form. Moreover, the knowledge of this form, accessible only to a small number of learned men, would present but a very minor interest.
The philosopher who studies social phenomena should bear in mind that side by side with their theoretical value they possess a practical value, and that this latter, so far as the evolution of civilisation is concerned, is alone of importance. The recognition of this fact should render him very circumspect with regard to the conclusions that logic would seem at first to enforce upon him.
There are other motives that dictate to him a like reserve. The complexity of social facts is such, that it is impossible to grasp them as a whole and to foresee the effects of their reciprocal influence. It seems, too, that behind the visible facts are hidden at times thousands of invisible causes. Visible social phenomena appear to be the result of an immense, unconscious working, that as a rule is beyond the reach of our analysis. Perceptible phenomena may be compared to the waves, which are the expression on the surface of the ocean of deep-lying disturbances of which we know nothing. So far as the majority of their acts are considered, crowds display a singularly inferior mentality; yet there are other acts in which they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which the ancients denominated destiny, nature, or providence, which we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them. What, for instance, can be more complicated, more logical, more marvellous than a language? Yet whence can this admirably organised production have arisen, except it be the outcome of the unconscious genius of crowds? The most learned academics, the most esteemed grammarians can do no more than note down the laws that govern languages; they would be utterly incapable of creating them. Even with respect to the ideas of great men are we certain that they are exclusively the offspring of their brains? No doubt such ideas are always created by solitary minds, but is it not the genius of crowds that has furnished the thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have sprung up?
Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength. In the natural world beings exclusively governed by instinct accomplish acts whose marvellous complexity astounds us. Reason is an attribute of humanity of too recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of the unconscious, and still more to take its place. The part played by the unconscious in all our acts is immense, and that played by reason very small. The unconscious acts like a force still unknown.
If we wish, then, to remain within the narrow but safe limits within which science can attain to knowledge, and not to wander in the domain of vague conjecture and vain hypothesis, all we must do is simply to take note of such phenomena as are accessible to us, and confine ourselves to their consideration. Every conclusion drawn from our observation is, as a rule, premature, for behind the phenomena which we see clearly are other phenomena that we see indistinctly, and perhaps behind these latter, yet others which we do not see at all.
Introduction. The Era of Crowds
The evolution of the present age—The great changes in civilisation are the consequence of changes in National thought—Modern belief in the power of crowds—It transforms the traditional policy of the European states—How the rise of the popular classes comes about, and the manner in which they exercise their power—The necessary consequences of the power of the crowd—Crowds unable to play a part other than destructive—The dissolution of worn-out civilisations is the work of the crowd—General ignorance of the psychology of crowds— Importance of the study of crowds for legislators and statesmen.
The great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the Arabian Empire, seem at first sight determined more especially by political transformations, foreign invasion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But a more attentive study of these events shows that behind their apparent causes the real cause is generally seen to be a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples. The true historical upheavals are not those which astonish us by their grandeur and violence. The only important changes whence the renewal of civilisations results, affect ideas, conceptions, and beliefs. The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought. The reason these great events are so rare is that there is nothing so stable in a race as the inherited groundwork of its thoughts.
The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.
Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.
The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.
It is not easy to say as yet what will one day be evolved from this necessarily somewhat chaotic period. What will be the fundamental ideas on which the societies that are to succeed our own will be built up? We do not at present know. Still it is already clear that on whatever lines the societies of the future are organised, they will have to count with a new power, with the last surviving sovereign force of modern times, the power of crowds. On the ruins of so many ideas formerly considered beyond discussion, and to-day decayed or decaying, of so many sources of authority that successive revolutions have destroyed, this power, which alone has arisen in their stead, seems soon destined to absorb the others. While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the Eraofcrowds.
Scarcely a century ago the traditional policy of European states and the rivalries of sovereigns were the principal factors that shaped events. The opinion of the masses scarcely counted, and most frequently indeed did not count at all. To-day it is the traditions which used to obtain in politics, and the individual tendencies and rivalries of rulers which do not count; while, on the contrary, the voice of the masses has become preponderant. It is this voice that dictates their conduct to kings, whose endeavour is to take note of its utterances. The destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.
The entry of the popular classes into political life—that is to say, in reality, their progressive transformation into governing classes—is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition. The introduction of universal suffrage, which exercised for a long time but little influence, is not, as might be thought, the distinguishing feature of this transference of political power. The progressive growth of the power of the masses took place at first by the propagation of certain ideas, which have slowly implanted themselves in men's minds, and afterwards by the gradual association of individuals bent on bringing about the realisation of theoretical conceptions. It is by association that crowds have come to procure ideas with respect to their interests which are very clearly defined if not particularly just, and have arrived at a consciousness of their strength. The masses are founding syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; they are also founding labour unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages. They return to assemblies in which the Government is vested, representatives utterly lacking initiative and independence, and reduced most often to nothing else than the spokesmen of the committees that have chosen them.
To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalisation of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims.
Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.
The writers who enjoy the favour of our middle classes, those who best represent their rather narrow ideas, their somewhat prescribed views, their rather superficial scepticism, and their at times somewhat excessive egoism, display profound alarm at this new power which they see growing; and to combat the disorder in men's minds they are addressing despairing appeals to those moral forces of the Church for which they formerly professed so much disdain. They talk to us of the bankruptcy of science, go back in penitence to Rome, and remind us of the teachings of revealed truth. These new converts forget that it is too late. Had they been really touched by grace, a like operation could not have the same influence on minds less concerned with the preoccupations which beset these recent adherents to religion. The masses repudiate to-day the gods which their admonishers repudiated yesterday and helped to destroy. There is no power, Divine or human, that can oblige a stream to flow back to its source.
There has been no bankruptcy of science, and science has had no share in the present intellectual anarchy, nor in the making of the new power which is springing up in the midst of this anarchy. Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.
Universal symptoms, visible in all nations, show us the rapid growth of the power of crowds, and do not admit of our supposing that it is destined to cease growing at an early date. Whatever fate it may reserve for us, we shall have to submit to it. All reasoning against it is a mere vain war of words. Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society. But may this result be prevented?
Up to now these thoroughgoing destructions of a worn-out civilisation have constituted the most obvious task of the masses. It is not indeed to-day merely that this can be traced. History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history.
Is the same fate in store for our civilisation? There is ground to fear that this is the case, but we are not as yet in a position to be certain of it.
However this may be, we are bound to resign ourselves to the reign of the masses, since want of foresight has in succession overthrown all the barriers that might have kept the crowd in check.
We have a very slight knowledge of these crowds which are beginning to be the object of so much discussion. Professional students of psychology, having lived far from them, have always ignored them, and when, as of late, they have turned their attention in this direction it has only been to consider the crimes crowds are capable of committing. Without a doubt criminal crowds exist, but virtuous and heroic crowds, and crowds of many other kinds, are also to be met with. The crimes of crowds only constitute a particular phase of their psychology. The mental constitution of crowds is not to be learnt merely by a study of their crimes, any more than that of an individual by a mere description of his vices.
However, in point of fact, all the world's masters, all the founders of religions or empires, the apostles of all beliefs, eminent statesmen, and, in a more modest sphere, the mere chiefs of small groups of men have always been unconscious psychologists, possessed of an instinctive and often very sure knowledge of the character of crowds, and it is their accurate knowledge of this character that has enabled them to so easily establish their mastery. Napoleon had a marvellous insight into the psychology of the masses of the country over which he reigned, but he, at times, completely misunderstood the psychology of crowds belonging to other races;1 and it is because he thus misunderstood it that he engaged in Spain, and notably in Russia, in conflicts in which his power received blows which were destined within a brief space of time to ruin it. A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them—that is becoming a very difficult matter—but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.
It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how slight is the action upon them of laws and institutions, how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them, and that it is not with rules based on theories of pure equity that they are to be led, but by seeking what produces an impression on them and what seduces them. For instance, should a legislator, wishing to impose a new tax, choose that which would be theoretically the most just? By no means. In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses. Should it at the same time be the least obvious, and apparently the least burdensome, it will be the most easily tolerated. It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted by the crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions of a farthing on objects of consumption, it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest. This arises from the fact that a sum relatively high, which will appear immense, and will in consequence strike the imagination, has been substituted for the unperceived fractions of a farthing. The new tax would only appear light had it been saved farthing by farthing, but this economic proceeding involves an amount of foresight of which the masses are incapable.
The example which precedes is of the simplest. Its appositeness will be easily perceived. It did not escape the attention of such a psychologist as Napoleon, but our modern legislators, ignorant as they are of the characteristics of a crowd, are unable to appreciate it. Experience has not taught them as yet to a sufficient degree that men never shape their conduct upon the teaching of pure reason.
Many other practical applications might be made of the psychology of crowds. A knowledge of this science throws the most vivid light on a great number of historical and economic phenomena totally incomprehensible without it. I shall have occasion to show that the reason why the most remarkable of modern historians, Taine, has at times so imperfectly understood the events of the great French Revolution is, that it never occurred to him to study the genius of crowds. He took as his guide in the study of this complicated period the descriptive method resorted to by naturalists; but the moral forces are almost absent in the case of the phenomena which naturalists have to study. Yet it is precisely these forces that constitute the true mainsprings of history.
In consequence, merely looked at from its practical side, the study of the psychology of crowds deserved to be attempted. Were its interest that resulting from pure curiosity only, it would still merit attention. It is as interesting to decipher the motives of the actions of men as to determine the characteristics of a mineral or a plant. Our study of the genius of crowds can merely be a brief synthesis, a simple summary of our investigations. Nothing more must be demanded of it than a few suggestive views. Others will work the ground more thoroughly. To-day we only touch the surface of a still almost virgin soil.
1. His most subtle advisers, moreover, did not understand this psychology any better. Talleyrand wrote him that "Spain would receive his soldiers as liberators." It received them as beasts of prey. A psychologist acquainted with the hereditary instincts of the Spanish race would have easily foreseen this reception.
Book I. The Mind of Crowds
Chapter I. General Characteristics of Crowds.—Psychological Law of Their Mental Unity.
What constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view—A numerically strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form a crowd—Special characteristics of psychological crowds—The turning in a fixed direction of the ideas and sentiments of individuals composing such a crowd, and the disappearance of their personality—The crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious[1q]—The disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of medullar activity—The lowering of the intelligence and the complete transformation of the sentiments—The transformed sentiments may be better or worse than those of the individuals of which the crowd is composed—A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal.
In its ordinary sense the word "crowd" means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression "crowd" assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to theLawof the mental unity of crowds.
It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of individuals finding themselves accidentally side by side that they acquire the character of an organised crowd. A thousand individuals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way constitute a crowd from the psychological point of view. To acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is necessary of certain predisposing causes of which we shall have to determine the nature.
The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions—such, for example, as a great national event—the characteristics of a psychological crowd. It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. 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. On the other hand, an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.
A psychological crowd once constituted, it acquires certain provisional but determinable general characteristics. To these general characteristics there are adjoined particular characteristics which vary according to the elements of which the crowd is composed, and may modify its mental constitution. Psychological crowds, then, are susceptible of classification; and when we come to occupy ourselves with this matter, we shall see that a heterogeneous crowd—that is, a crowd composed of dissimilar elements—presents certain characteristics in common with homogeneous crowds—that is, with crowds composed of elements more or less akin (sects, castes, and classes)—and side by side with these common characteristics particularities which permit of the two kinds of crowds being differentiated.
But before occupying ourselves with the different categories of crowds, we must first of all examine the characteristics common to them all. We shall set to work like the naturalist, who begins by describing the general characteristics common to all the members of a family before concerning himself with the particular characteristics which allow the differentiation of the genera and species that the family includes.
It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness, because its organisation varies not only according to race and composition, but also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting causes to which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty, however, presents itself in the psychological study of an individual. It is only in novels that individuals are found to traverse their whole life with an unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal character of quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his most docile servants.
It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of organisation of crowds, we shall concern ourselves more especially with such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organisation. In this way we shall see what crowds may become, but not what they invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase of organisation that certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning already alluded to of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity in an identical direction. It is only under such circumstances, too, that what I have called above thePsychological law of the mental unity of crowdscomes into play.
Among the psychological characteristics of crowds there are some that they may present in common with isolated individuals, and others, on the contrary, which are absolutely peculiar to them and are only to be met with in collectivities. It is these special characteristics that we shall study, first of all, in order to show their importance.
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which 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. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.
Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the aggregate which constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an average struck between its elements. What really takes place is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact—bases and acids, for example—combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.
