Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), French writer and social psychologist best known for his theories on crowd psychology. Born in Nogent-le-Rotron, Le Bon wrote on a wide range of topics and had a great influence on his contemporary public.

Le Bon addressed one of his central themes in his Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (1894; Psychology of Peoples, 1898 and 1924) and his La Révolution française et la psychologie des révolutions (1912; The Psychology of Revolution, 1913). In brief, he argued that the institutions created by the human will do not direct the destinies of humanity and that the dream of rebuilding society on rational principles cherished by the philosophers and legislators of the French Revolution (1789-1799) was naive. A related theory found expression in the many editions of Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules (1895; The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896). Every people, he asserted, has a kind of collective soul or mind that finds expression in its life, arts, and institutions. This crowd mind, however, is not an intellectual or rational entity but a sentimental and emotional one through which irrational ideas spread as if by a process of contagion. Once these ideas are widespread they become difficult to dislodge and tend to hold sway regardless of their absurdity. Progress is therefore uncertain, and reform is useless. Predictably, Le Bon was an uncompromising foe of socialism and of the great illusion of rational equality on which he felt socialism was based.

Le Bon’s other works include Psychologie du socialisme (1898; The Psychology of Socialism, 1899), Enseignements psychologiques de la guerre Europeene (1915; The Psychology of the Great War, 1916), La psychologie des temps nouveaux (1920; The World in Revolt, A Psychological Study of Our Times, 1921), and Le desequilibre du monde (1924; The World Unbalanced, 1924).