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Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) was a French amateur physician who wrote extensively on scientific subjects, including anatomy and physiology, anthropology, and history.
Some of the author's observations maybe questioned in our era of crowd-sourcing and social networks, but for investors there are nevertheless interesting parallels to be drawn with financial markets and with the current social mood.
| Introduction: |
The Era of Crowds
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Book I |
The Mind of Crowds |
| Chapter I |
General Characteristics of Crowds—Psychological Law of Their Mental Unity |
| Chapter II |
The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds |
| Chapter III |
The Ideas, Reasoning Power, and Imagination of Crowds |
| Chapter IV |
A Religious Shape Assumed By All the Convictions of Crowds |
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Book II |
The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds |
| Chapter I |
Remote Factors of the Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds |
| Chapter II |
The Immediate Factors of the Opinions of Crowds |
| Chapter III |
The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion |
| Chapter IV |
Limitations of the Variability of the Beliefs and Opinions of Crowds |
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Book III |
The Classification and Description of the Different Kinds of Crowds |
| Chapter I |
The Classification of Crowds |
| Chapter II |
Crowds Termed Criminal Crowds |
| Chapter III |
Criminal Juries |
| Chapter IV |
Electoral Crowds |
| Chapter V |
Parliamentary Assemblies |
Excerpts:
"When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.”
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“Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase”
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“A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them—that is becoming a very difficult matter—but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.”
“What constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view—A numerically strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form a crowd—Special characteristics of psychological crowds—The turning in a fixed direction of the ideas and sentiments of individuals composing such a crowd, and the disappearance of their personality—The crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious—The disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of medullar activity—The lowering of the intelligence and the complete transformation of the sentiments—The transformed sentiments may be better or worse than those of the individuals of which the crowd is composed—A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal.”
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“The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes”
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“It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.”
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“In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest”
“The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.”
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"At the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation”
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“Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity”
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“How is the imagination of crowds to be impressed?”
“Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole, and their genesis must never be indicated.”
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“It is not, then, the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice. It is necessary that by their condensation, if I may thus express myself, they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind”
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“The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.”
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“As soon as a new dogma is implanted in the mind of crowds it becomes the source of inspiration whence are evolved its institutions, arts, and mode of existence. The sway it exerts over men's minds under these circumstances is absolute. Men of action have no thought beyond realising the accepted belief, legislators beyond applying it, while philosophers, artists, and men of letters are solely preoccupied with its expression under various shapes.”
“Above the substratum of fixed beliefs, whose power we have just demonstrated, is found an overlying growth of opinions, ideas, and thoughts which are incessantly springing up and dying out”
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“Become a mere agency for the supply of information, the press has renounced all endeavour to enforce an idea or a doctrine."
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“At the present day, as the result of discussion and analysis, all opinions are losing their prestige; their distinctive features are rapidly worn away, and few survive capable of arousing our enthusiasm. The man of modern times is more and more a prey to indifference.”
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"It is certain that men of immense, of almost supernatural insight, that apostles, leaders of crowds—men, in a word, of genuine and strong convictions—exert a far greater force than men who deny, who criticise, or who are indifferent..."
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“We have seen that intelligence is without influence in collectivities, they being solely under the sway of unconscious sentiments.”
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“A French crowd lays particular weight on equality and an English crowd on liberty.”
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“The general characteristics of criminal crowds are precisely the same as those we have met with in all crowds: openness to suggestion, credulity, mobility, the exaggeration of the sentiments good or bad, the manifestation of certain forms of morality.”
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“The general characteristics of crowds are to be met with in parliamentary assemblies: intellectual simplicity, irritability, suggestibility, the exaggeration of the sentiments and the preponderating preponderating influence of a few leaders.”
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“Dogmatic and logical to a man, and their brains full of vague generalities, they busied themselves with the application of fixed-principles without concerning themselves with events.”
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“With the aid of the very simple dogmas that served them as guide, they imagined they could recast society from top to bottom, and cause a highly refined civilisation to return to a very anterior phase of the social evolution.”
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“The crowd that obeys a leader is under the influence of his prestige, and its submission is not dictated by any sentiment of interest or gratitude.”
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“The theories of M. X—— have cost us more territories than the disasters of Napoleon I.”
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“A leader is seldom in advance of public opinion; almost always all he does is to follow it and to espouse all its errors.”
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“It is all to the interest of the leaders to indulge in the most improbable exaggerations. The speaker of whom I have just cited a sentence was able to affirm, without arousing violent protestations, that bankers and priests had subsidised the throwers of bombs, and that the directors of the great financial companies deserve the same punishment as anarchists. Affirmations of this kind are always effective with crowds. The affirmation is never too violent, the declamation never too threatening. Nothing intimidates the audience more than this sort of eloquence. Those present are afraid that if they protest they will be put down as traitors or accomplices.
As I have said, this peculiar style of eloquence has ever been of sovereign effect in all assemblies. In times of crisis its power is still further accentuated”
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“The great leaders of crowds of all ages, and those of the Revolution in particular, have been of lamentably narrow intellect; while it is precisely those whose intelligence has been the most restricted who have exercised the greatest influence.”
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“It is terrible at times to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige”
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“Crowds instinctively recognise in men of energy and conviction the masters they are always in need of.”
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“The work of a crowd is always inferior, whatever its nature, to that of an isolated individual.”
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“Moreover, in reality they only present two serious dangers, one being inevitable financial waste, and the other the progressive restriction of the liberty of the individual.”
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“It is evident that the continued growth of expenditure of this kind must end in bankruptcy. Many European countries—Portugal, Greece, Spain, Turkey—have reached this stage, and others, such as Italy, will soon be reduced to the same extremity.”
“April 6, 1895, the Economist”
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“Herbert Spencer has shown, in a work already old, that the increase of apparent liberty must needs be followed by the decrease of real liberty”
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“This progressive restriction of liberties shows itself in every country in a special shape which Herbert Spencer has not pointed out; it is that the passing of these innumerable series of legislative legislative measures, all of them in a general way of a restrictive order, conduces necessarily to augment the number, the power, and the influence of the functionaries charged with their application. These functionaries tend in this way to become the veritable masters of civilised countries. Their power is all the greater owing to the fact that, amidst the incessant transfer of authority, the administrative caste is alone in being untouched by these changes, is alone in possessing irresponsibility, impersonality, and perpetuity. There is no more oppressive despotism than that which presents itself under this triple form.”
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“This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely.”
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“The personality and intelligence of the individual may increase, but at the same time this collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the individual, accompanied by a weakening of character and a lessening of the capacity for action. What constituted a people, a unity, a whole, becomes in the end an agglomeration of individualities lacking cohesion, and artificially held together for a time by its traditions and institutions”
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