The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

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The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (French: Psychologie des Foules; literally: Psychology of Crowds) is a book authored by Gustave Le Bon that was first published in 1895. In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others". Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer." Influenced by Scipio Sighele's The Criminal Crowd (1891), the book had an impact in its turn on Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and on Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925–26).

Read on Wikipedia · Image Gustave Le Bon, Public domain