Gustave Le Bon
Charles-Marie-Gustave Le Bon (born May 7, 1841 – died December 13, 1931) was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behavior and crowd psychology.
Life
Gustave Le Bon was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, France, into a family of a mortgage agent. He studied at the College of Turns and obtained his madical degree in Paris in 1866. He first practiced medicine in Paris, but decided to tour Europe, Asia and North Africa in the 1870s and 1880s while writing on archaeology and anthropology, making some money from the design of a scientific apparatus.
In 1884 he returned from an anthropological expedition to India, where he was commissioned by France to study Buddhist monuments. He published his two books The World of Islamic civilization and The World of Indian Civilization, during this period.
His first great success was the publication of Les Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples (1894; The Psychology of Peoples), the first work in which he hit upon 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), followed soon after.
Le Bon enjoyed considerable security at the center of French intellectual life thereafter. In 1902, he launched a series of weekly luncheons (les déjeuners du mercredi) to which prominent figures from all the professions were invited to discuss topical issues. The strength of Le Bon's personal networks is apparent form the guest list: in subsequent years, participants included Henri and Raymond Poincaré (cousins, physicist and President of France respectively), Paul Valéry and Henri Bergson.
Le Bon was a professor of psychology and allied sciences at the University of Paris.
Le bon died in Marnes-la-Coquette, France, on December 13, 1931.
Work
Le Bon was a man with an extended field of interests. His writings range from studies of atomic energy, through physical anthropology and sociology, to the studies of the components of tobacco smoke. Because of this, many have regarded his works as superficial. Others, like Sigmund Freud or Gordon Allport, have acknowledged the importance of Le Bon’s work.
Le Bon made significant contributions to the area of social psychology, particularly in the study of crowd behavior. He believed that crowds exhibit a collective mind, different from the one that would be the summary of the individual persons. That new mind is predominantly unconscious in nature, reflecting racially inherited characteristics.
Le Bon believed that group mind is more primitive and instinctual, causing crowd to regress in behavior. Whereas individual acts in a rational way, crowd exhibits more irrational traits. That is because in the crowd one shows heightened state of suggestibility, falling under the influence of the feelings of omnipotence. In the crowd one also experiences the higher emotionality and is subjugated to the will of the crowd.
- "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. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and or which a man is scarcely capable, except when he (is) part of a crowd (The Crowd).
Le Bon also contributed to on-going debates in physics about the nature of matter and energy. His book The Evolution of Matter was very popular in France (going through 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 taken up favorably by physicists of the day (including Henri Poincaré), though his specific formulations were not given much consideration. In 1896 he reported observing a new kind of radiation, which he termed "black light" (not the same thing as a black light today), though it was later discovered to not exist.
Legacy
Le Bon was one of the great propagators of the theories of the unconscious at a critical moment in the formation of new theories of social action. It is arguable that the fascist theories of leadership that emerged in the 1920s owed much to his theories of crowd psychology. Indeed, Hitler's Mein Kampf largely drew on the propaganda techniques proposed in Le Bon's 1895 book.
The ideas put forward in La psychologie des foules played an important role in the early years of group psychology: Sigmund Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) was explicitly based on a critique of Le Bon's work.
Le Bon’s work on crowd psychology became important in 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.
Publications
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1909 (original published in 1907). The Evolution of Forces. D. Appleton and Co.
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1921. La psychologie politique. Bibliothèque de philosophie scientifique. Paris: E. Flammarion.
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1924 (original published in 1923). The World Unbalanced. Longmans, Green and Co.
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1974 (original published in 1902). The Psychology of Peoples: Perspectives in Social Inquiry. New York: Arno Press. ISBN 0405055099
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1974 (original published in 1900). The World of Indian Civilization. New York: Tudor Pub. Co. ISBN 0814805817
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1974 (original published in 1884). The World of Islamic civilization. New York: Tudor Pub. Co.
- Le Bon, Gustave. 1999 (original published in 1915). Psychology of the Great War: The First World War & Its Origins. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765804794
- Le Bon, Gustave. 2002 (original published in 1895). The Crowd. Dover Publications. ISBN 0486419568
- Le Bon, Gustave. 2006 (original published in 1912). Psychology of Revolution. Hard Press. ISBN 1406943231
- Le Bon, Gustave. 2007 (original published in 1896). The Psychology of Socialism. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1432528238
- Le Bon, Gustave. 2007 (original published in 1920). The World in Revolt: A Psychological Study of Our Times. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1432509233
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- BookRags.com. Encyclopedia of World Biography on Gustave Le Bon. Retrieved on June 9, 2007, <http://www.bookrags.com/Gustave_Le_Bon>
- Hubbard, Elbert. 2006. Gustave Le Bon – Pamphlet. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1428697934
- Marpeau, Benoit. 2000. Gustave Le Bon 1841-1931. CNRS Editions. ISBN 2271057043
- Nye, Robert A. 1991. The origins of crowd psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the crisis of mass democracy in the Third Republic. London: Sage Publications. ISBN 0803999038
External links
- The Crowd - The complete English text of The Crowd
- Evolution of Matter - The complete English text of the Evolution of Matter
- Gustave Le Bon – Biography on BookRags.com
- Gustave Le Bon – Gustave Le Bon page
- Gustave Le Bon's works: - Page on Gustave Le Bon with his works available in French and in English
- Online books by Le Bon – Two full-text works by Le Bon
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