'The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind ' Summary

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a book authored by Gustave Le Bon that was first published in 1895.

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." 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."

However his work has been criticised, for example Stephen Reicher, a professor in crowd psychology, says: "there’s a clear racism, 19th century racism, and ageism, and elsewhere there is sexism which inhabits that view. In brief, it’s the mad mob view, it’s a view that you see every time you see collective behavioral riots, it’s the fact that these people aren’t protesting about anything, they don’t have any grievances, they don’t had any reason, they are ‘mad’, so we’ve got nothing to ask about ourselves, and the inequalities of our society, we can just point at them and say it’s just about them." Additionally more recent research has cast doubt on many of the work's conclusions such as a hypothesised loss of agency and the book's focus on individualism as a psychological paradigm.

"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."