Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon

Picture of Gustave Le Bon, by Truchelut, 1888
Born Charles-Marie-Gustave Le Bon
7 May 1841
Nogent-le-Rotrou
Died 13 December 1931 (aged 90)
Marnes-la-Coquette
Nationality French
Fields Social psychology
Known for Crowd psychology

Gustave Le Bon (French: [lə bɔ̃]; 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a French social psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, inventor, and amateur physicist. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. His writings incorporate theories of national traits, racial and male superiority, herd behavior and crowd psychology.

Le Bon began his writing career working in the new field of anthropology. In the 1870s he invented a pocket cephalometer, or as he called it, a "Compass of Coordinates", which was an instrument that allowed one to quickly measure the head's various angles, diameters, and profiles. In effect, the instrument was able to reproduce the measurements of any 3-D solid figure. Because it was small and portable the device was easily incorporated into the research programs of anthropologists. Le Bon himself, in 1881, used the cephalometer to measure the heads of 50 inhabitants of the remote Tatras Mountains region of southern Poland. His paper, "The Pocket Cephalometer, or Compass of Coordinates" is written in the style of a user's manual, and stands as an important historical document that details how 19th Century anthropologists initially practiced their science.

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 money from the design of scientific apparatus. His first great success was the publication of Les Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples (1894); English edition The Psychology of Peoples). And his best selling work was, La psychologie des foules (1895); English edition The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896).

In 1902, Le Bon 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 his 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 not the first sociologist to diagnose his society and discover a new phenomenon: 'The Crowd'.[1] Other contemporary or ‘first generation’ theorists of crowd behavior included: the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, the Italian lawyer and criminologist Scipio Sighele and the German sociologist Georg Simmel. All three of these writers were familiar with each other's works and drew similar conclusions about mass crowds at a critical time during the formation of new theories of social action. “The first debate in crowd psychology was actually between two criminologists, Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde, concerning how to determine and assign criminal responsibility within a crowd and hence who to arrest (Sighele, 1892; Tarde 1890, 1892, 1901).” [2]

Scipio Sighele’s book, “La Folla Delinquente” was published in Italian in 1891 and in French under the title, “La Foule Criminelle,” the same year. However, his book was not accessible to the German sociologist Georg Simmel until 1897, when the German edition appeared under the title, “Psychologie des Auflaufs und der Massenverbrechen”. The English edition was published in 1894 as “The Criminal Crowd,”.

Le Bon and France witnessed three major mass events: the Paris Commune, the rise of Georges Ernest Boulanger, and the Dreyfus Affair. Each of these events galvanized a large segment of the population. Paris, in the 19th century, was one of the largest industrialized cities in Europe and was in the forefront of rising forces of anti-Semitism and far right politics. In particular, the German conquest of Alsace and Lorraine had fueled nationalist and right-wing sentiments in the country. It is in this context that Le Bon creates his concept of 'The Crowd.’

This new entity that emerges from incorporating the assembled population not only forms a new body but also forms a collective “unconsciousness.” As a crowd gathers together and coalesces there is a ”magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant” that transmutes every individual’s behavior until it becomes governed by the ’group mind'. This model treats 'The Crowd' as a unit in its composition and robs every individual member of their opinions, values and beliefs. As he says in one of his more pithy statements, “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”.

Le Bon detailed three key processes that create ‘The Crowd’: Anonymity, Contagion and Suggestibility. Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to ‘yield to instincts’ and to accept the instinctual drives of their 'racial unconscious'. For Le Bon this means that the crowd inverts Darwin’s law of evolution and becomes atavistic or regressive, proving Ernst Haeckel's embryological theory: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviors (e.g. rioter's smashing windows) where individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved. As the crowd coalesces into a singular mind suggestions made by strong voices in the crowd create a space for the ‘racial unconscious’ to come to the forefront and guide its behavior. At this stage ‘The Crowd’ becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. “The leaders we speak of," says Le Bon, "are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight... They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.

A backlash against Le Bon’s conception of a ‘collective mind’ led other social scientists to put forward the opposite viewpoint that crowd behavior is the consequence of the individuals that compose it. Floyd Allport was in the vanguard of this attack, asserting that there is no such thing as a ‘group mind’ and that no crowd is more than the aggregate of its individual responses. He considered any reference to a mind that was separate from the psych of individuals as a meaningless abstraction or even as “a babble of tongues" (Allport, 1933), and in his seminal text on social psychology (Allport, 1924) he asserted, “there is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals” (p. 4).

George Lachmann Mosse, former History professor in University of Wisconsin-Madison has claimed that fascist theories of leadership that emerged during the 1920s owed much to Le Bon's theories of crowd psychology. Adolf Hitler is known to have read The Crowd[3] and in his Mein Kampf he drew largely on the propaganda techniques proposed by Le Bon.[4] Benito Mussolini also made a careful study of Le Bon's crowd psychology work, frequently rereading the book.[5]

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. Theodore Roosevelt, as well as many other American progressives in the early 20th century, were also deeply affected by Le Bon's writings.[6]

Just prior to World War I Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon of University College Hospital, London introduced Wilfred Bion, an employee at the same hospital, to Le Bon's writings and Sigmund Freud's work Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; English translation Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922). Trotter's book, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War forms the basis for the research of both Wilfred Bion and Ernest Jones who established what would be called group psychology. Their association with the Tavistock Institute also places them in the new field of group dynamics. During the first half of the twentieth century Le Bon's writings were used by media researchers such as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media.

Controversy

Le Bon's physical theories generated some mild controversy in the physics community. In 1896 he reported observing a new kind of radiation, which he termed "black light".[7] Not the same as what people nowadays call black light, its existence was never confirmed and it is now generally understood to be non-existent.[8] His theory of the nature of matter and energy was expanded upon in his book The Evolution of Matter. The book was popular in France, going through 12 editions. The major premise of the book is matter is an inherently unstable substance and slowly transforms into luminiferous ether. One major supporter was Henri Poincaré,[9] however by 1900 physicists had rejected his formulation.

In 1879, Gustave Le Bon put forth many essentialist arguments to promote negative views of women, in particular that “there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to gorillas than to the most developed male brains”, that “they represent inferior forms of human evolution” and that “they excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.” He concluded that it would be dangerous to provide the same education to girls as boys.[10]

Selected works

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ↑ McClelland, J. S. (2010). "Crowd Theory Make its Way in the World: the Le Bon Phenomenon," in The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, Routledge, pp. 151-181.
  2. ↑ Reicher, Stephen (2003). “The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics”, in Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, ed. Michael A. Hogg & R. Scott Tindale. Blackwell Publishers. Malden, Mass. p. 185.
  3. ↑ Eley, Geoff; Jan Palmowski (2008). Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-century Germany, Stanford University Press, p. 284.
  4. ↑ Gonen, Jay Y. (2013). The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler's Utopian Barbarism, University Press of Kentucky, p. 92.
  5. ↑ Ginneken, Jaap van (1992). Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871-1899, Cambridge University Press, p. 186.
  6. ↑ p. 63 ff., Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin, New York: Basic Books, 1996.
  7. ↑ Nye, Mary Jo. (1974). "Gustave Le Bon’s Black Light: A Study in Physics and Philosophy in France at the Turn of the Century," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Vol. 4., pp. 163-195.
  8. ↑ Kragh, Helge (1999). Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press): 11–12.
  9. ↑ Crosland, Maurice (2002). Science Under Control: The French Academy of Sciences 1795-1914, Cambridge University Press, p. 347.
  10. ↑ Stephen Jay Gould (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton. p. 104–105.

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