Gustave Le Bon

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Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) was a French social scientist and philosopher. Although he was originally trained as a physician, Le Bon's primary contribution was in sociology, where he developed major theories on crowd behavior.

The electric interests and abilities of Gustave Le Bon led to a full and productive life. Studies ranging from components of tobacco smoke, through physical anthropology, to atomic energy and structure describe the broad range of scholarly interests Le Bon maintained until his death. Because of this wide range, many have thought of Le Bon's work as shallow and dilettantish. No one in the course of a lifetime could possibly master all the disciplines observed in Le Bon's scholarly work. Nevertheless, men such as Sigmund Freud and Gordon Allport acknowledged the vital importance of Le Bon's work.

While Le Bon made contributions to theories of social evolution and political revolution, probably his most widely known work concerned the psychology of crowd behavior. He stated that crowds maintained a collective mind and that the group mind was not simply a summary of the individual persons. Instead, a new distillation of traits emerged, primarily unconscious in nature, which reflected racially inherited characteristics.

The consequence of these innate traits was a regression in the direction of more primitive, instinctual determinants of behavior, in contrast to more rational intellectual determinants. Le Bon also believed in the contagion of ideas in a crowd such that individual members, in a heightened state of suggestibility and with feelings of omnipotence, are subjugated to the will and emotion of the crowd mind. He also indicated that crowds are capable of engaging in positive social actions as well.

Le Bon's ideas about social evolution and political revolution were related again to racial stock. History, for Le Bon, is a consequence of racial temperament; to understand the history of a people, one must look to the soul of the people. Just as a people cannot choose its appearance, it cannot freely opt for its cultural institutions.

Le Bon's beliefs with respect to political behavior consistently revealed a basic mistrust of the masses. On the last day of his life he repeated the theme that where the common people continue to maintain, or gain, control of government, civilization is moved in the direction of barbarism. It was this view that earned Le Bon the occasional label of antidemocrat and elitist.

An interesting incident attributed to Le Bon concerns his return in 1884 from an anthropological expedition to India, where he was commissioned by France to study Buddhist monuments. Marie François Sadi Carnot, then the minister of public works, was given an opportunity to choose for himself an artifact from a group Le Bon had brought back. Carnot chose a statuette which Le Bon quickly indicated was not appropriate because it carried a curse. Le Bon told Carnot that the owner of the statuette would be killed upon reaching the highest office in France. The warning was disregarded, and on June 24, 1894, Carnot, the fourth president of the French Republic, was assassinated by an Italian anarchist at Lyons.

Le Bon was a physician, anthropologist in the field, and finally professor of psychology and allied sciences at the University of Paris. His best-known book is La Psychologie des foules (1895; translated as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1897). He died on Dec. 13, 1931, at Marnela-Coquette near Paris.

Further Reading

A good review of Le Bon's career is in the introduction by Robert K. Merton to Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1960). Le Bon's work is discussed in its historical context in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 1 (1954; rev. ed. 1968). Also useful is Edward Ellsworth Jones and Harold B. Gerard, Foundations of Social Psychology (1967).

1841-1931

Gustave Le Bon, a French physician and philosopher, was born in 1841 in Nogent-le-Rotrou and died on December 24, 1931, in Paris. Le Bon's name has for years been associated with The Crowd (1895/1995), which made him one of the founders of group psychology. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the book's phenomenal success—it has been translated into several languages and was reprinted many times—Le Bon has been disparaged and misunderstood by the scientific community. He has been reproached for the summary, polemical, even reactionary nature of his analysis. A prophet and harsh critic of mass society, he ushered in the "age of the crowd," "the most recent sovereign of the modern age."

The son of a civil servant, this country doctor developed an early interest in anthropology, then sociology and psychology. A tireless worker, he made a living as a writer and editor. Although he was never an academic, he was well known, much more so than someone like Emile Durkheim. Government officials, writers and scientists attended his "lunches": Théodule Ribot, Bergson, Valéry, Henri and Raymond Poincaré, Aristide Briand, and Marie Bonaparte, who introduced him to the work of Sigmund Freud and who remained Le Bon's friend until his death.

In 1902, Le Bon began editing a collection of scientific works for Flammarion, the "Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique," intended for the lay reader. The series had considerable success. He published the majority of his own writings as part of the collection, as well as Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse and Marie Bonaparte's Guerres militaires et Guerres sociales.

Taine's influence on Le Bon was considerable, but so was that of Ribot and Charcot. All of Le Bon's work bears the mark of the intellectual climate of fin-de-siècle France: an attraction to the irrational, the primacy of feeling over reason, and the role of heredity and race.

Freud read Le Bon and was directly inspired by him in writing Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). Like Le Bon he sought to explain the phenomena of collective life through individual psychology. But Freud eliminated the notions of heredity, mentality, and suggestion and replaced them with a model of unconscious identification. Le Bon's idea of the unconscious as an archaic heritage of the human soul was closer to Jung than to Freud. Their ideas of the social also diverged. Freud wanted to clarify the irrationality of the group in order to reduce it, while Le Bon appeared to systematically cultivate it.

Bibliography

Le Bon, Gustave. (1910). La psychologie politique et la défense sociale. Paris: Flammarion.

——. (1980). The French Revolution and the psychology of revolution. With a new introduction by Robert A. Nye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. (Original work published 1912) ——. (1995). The crowd. With a new introduction by Robert A. Nye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, c1995. (Original work published 1895)

Freud, Sigmund. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.

—ANNICK OHAYON

Quotes:

"Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them."

Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon
Born	May 7, 1841 (1841-05-07) Nogent-le-Rotrou
Died	December 13, 1931 (1931-12-14) Marnes-la-Coquette
Nationality	French
Fields	social psychology
Known for	crowd psychology

Gustave Le Bon (May 7, 1841 – December 13, 1931) was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behavior and crowd psychology.

His work on crowd psychology became important during the first half of the twentieth century when it was used by media researchers such as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media.

He also contributed to controversy about the nature of matter and energy. His book The Evolution of Matter was very popular in France (having twelve editions), and though some of its ideas — notably that all matter was inherently unstable and was constantly and slowly transforming into luminiferous ether — were used by some physicists of the time (including Henri Poincaré), his specific formulations were not given much consideration. During 1896 he reported observing a new kind of radiation, which he termed "black light" (not the same as what modern people call black light today), though it was later discovered not to exist.^[1]

Contents 1 Life 2 Influence 3 Bibliography 4 References 5 See also 6 External links

Life

Le Bon was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, France (near Chartres), and died in Marnes-la-Coquette. He studied medicine and toured Europe, Asia, and North Africa during the 1860s to 1880s while writing about archeology and anthropology, making some money from the design of scientific apparatus. His first great success however was the publication of Les Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples (1894; The Psychology of Peoples), the first work in which he used a popularizing style that was to make his reputation secure. His best selling work, La psychologie des foules (1895; English translation The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896), was published soon afterward.

During 1902, he began a series of weekly luncheons (les déjeuners du mercredi) to which prominent people of many professions were invited to discuss topical issues. The strength of Le Bon's personal networks is apparent from the guest list: participants included Henri and Raymond Poincaré (cousins, physicist and President of France respectively), Paul Valéry and Henri Bergson.

Influence

Le Bon was one of the great popularizers of theories of the unconscious at a critical time during the formation of new theories of social action.

Wilfred Trotter, a famous surgeon of University College Hospital, London, wrote similarly in his famous book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, just before the beginning of World War I; he has been referred to as 'Le Bon's popularizer in English.' Trotter also introduced Wilfred Bion, who worked for him at the hospital, to Sigmund Freud's work Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; English translation Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922), which was based explicitly on a critique of Le Bon's work. Ultimately both Bion and Ernest Jones became interested in what would later be called group psychology. Both of these men became associated with Freud when he fled Austria soon after the Anschluss. Both men were closely associated with the Tavistock Institute as important researchers of the topic of group dynamics.

It is arguable that the fascist theories of leadership that emerged during the 1920s owed much to Le Bon's theories of crowd psychology. Indeed, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf drew largely on the propaganda techniques proposed in Le Bon's 1895 book^[2][3][4][5]. In addition, Benito Mussolini made a careful study of Le Bon's crowd psychology book, apparently keeping the book by his bedside.^[6] 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.

Bibliography

• The civilisation of Arabs 1884,
• Les Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples (1894; The Psychology of Peoples),
• La psychologie des foules (1895; English translation The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896),
• L'homme et les sociétés (1881; Man and Society),
• Psychologie du socialisme (1896; Psychology of Socialism)

References

1. ^ Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999): 11-12.
2. ^ Brilliant at Breakfast at blogspot.com
3. ^ Twelve hours of Anna Freud under a Nazi interrogation lamp at www.thevillager.com
4. ^ Wagner & Hitler at solomonsmusic.net
5. ^ Men Behind Hitler - The Führer Appears at www.toolan.com
6. ^ Alex Steiner, "Marxism Without Its Head or Heart", 2007

See also

• Crowd psychology
• Wilfred Trotter
• Wilfred Bion
• Sigmund Freud
• Edward Bernays

External links

• Works by Gustave Le Bon at Project Gutenberg
• Gustave Le Bon's works: Page on Gustave Le Bon with his works available in French and in English
• the complete English text to The Crowd (PDF)
• English translation of 'The Psychology of Socialism' (PDF)
• PDF-books from Gustave Le Bon, several titles and languages

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