Table of Contents
The Crowd.
Gustave Le Bon
The age we are about to enter will, without a doubt, be an age of crowds.
Preface
Two Starting Points of Le Bon's Study
- What caused traditional society to undergo its transition into modernity.
- Racial characteristics.
The Crowd Mentality
- The psychological law of the mental unity of crowds.
The Psychology of Crowds
General Characteristics
- When a psychological crowd reaches an advanced stage of organization, it exhibits a collective mental unity.
- The explanation offered is that intellectual activity contains unconscious elements that make up the inherited dispositions of a race.
- New characteristics emerge because individual responsibility disappears, feelings and actions spread contagiously through the crowd, and individuals become receptive to suggestion.
The Feelings and Morality of Crowds
- Impulsive and changeable.
- Suggestible and credulous.
- Exaggerated and simple emotions: the intensity of collective feeling is especially likely to be amplified in heterogeneous crowds by the disappearance of individual responsibility.
- Intolerance, authoritarianism, and conservatism: instinctive tendencies.
- Morality.
Ideas, Reasoning, and Imagination
- Ideas: crowds accept ideas only in simple, clear forms; once those ideas take root, they are difficult to change.
- Reasoning.
- Imagination.
The Religious Forms Taken by Crowd Beliefs
The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds
Chapter 1: Indirect Factors Behind Crowd Opinions and Beliefs
Chapter 2: Direct Factors Behind Crowd Opinions and Beliefs
Chapter 3: Crowd Leaders and Their Methods of Persuasion
Chapter 4: The Range Within Which Crowd Beliefs and Opinions Can Change
The Classification and Characteristics of Crowds
Chapter 1: Classifying Crowds
Chapter 2: Crowds Described as Criminal
Chapter 3: Criminal Juries
Chapter 4: Electoral Crowds
Chapter 5: Parliamentary Assemblies
✳