The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Written by Gustave Le Bon

Narrated by Glen Reed

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (1841 –1931) was a French polymath who wrote on anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’, which is considered a seminal work of crowd psychology. In the book, Le Bon identifies the primary characteristics of crowd psychology as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of critical judgement, and the exaggeration of feelings. Le Bon claims that an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself in a special psychological state, which resembles the state in which a hypnotized individual finds himself under the influence of the hypnotizer. One of Le Bon’s disturbing insights is that a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author's Republic
• Release date: Oct 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982783365

Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon lebte von 1841 bis 1931 und wurde weltberühmt mit seinem Werk "Psychologie der Massen", mit dem er einen Standard in der Massenpsychologie setzte.

Reviews for The Crowd

[Evan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book. I didn't like his suggestion that groups of different races have inherent different ways of acting, and he was very condescending to the common man but still some interesting points