The man of the crowd

The behaviour of people in crowds is rather different from that of the same people in the privacy of their own homes; so much is obvious. But it was the French doctor, writer, and all round intellectual Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) who was the first to consider the difference at book length. His Psychology of Crowds, published in 1895, was a founding text of social psychology.

Le Bon is usually said to have qualified as a doctor in Paris in 1866, though some have disputed whether he ever passed his baccalaureat, let alone his doctorate. Be that as it may, he practised for a time and published widely on such medical matters as premature burial, venereal disease, and the composition of tobacco smoke. He also published Anatomical and Mathematical Researches on Variations in the Volume of the Brain and their Relation to Intelligence.

He gave up the practice of medicine to write travel books and histories of several ancient civilisations. He was also an amateur physicist, claiming to have discovered the theory of relativity before Einstein. There are few doubts about the range of his interests; he was known and respected by all the leading French intellectuals of his day.

But it is on his study of crowd psychology that his fame now rests. Freud read it; Le Bon popularised the concept of the unconscious before Freud did. Both Lenin and Hitler read the book closely, and it is strange indeed that Hitler did not recognise himself in the less than admiring portrait of the leader of crowds that Le Bon paints:

“Leaders are generally not men of thought but of action. They are not lucid, and cannot be, for lucidity leads to doubt. They are recruited among the neurotics, the hotheads, the semi-psychotics who are on the fringes of madness. All reasoning is blunted by their conviction, however absurd the ideas that they promote or the ends that they pursue. Contempt and persecution only strengthen their determination. Personal and family interests, all are sacrificed. The survival instinct itself is absent in them, to the point at which the only reward that they seek is martyrdom. The sheer strength of their conviction lends a suggestive power to their words.”

Le Bon’s populariser in Britain was also a medical man, Wilfred Trotter, professor of surgery at University College Hospital, whose Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War was inspired by the Psychology of Crowds.

According to Le Bon, prejudice and gusts of emotion have a greater influence on crowds (in which he includes juries and electorates) than evidence, reason, and logic, which are weak weapons indeed.

A pall of unrespectability has always hovered over Le Bon, not only because he spread himself intellectually thin over a wide range but because—undoubted racist as he was—he is suspected of being a forerunner of fascism. This is not quite fair, however; he was describing reality as he saw it, not approving or extolling it. Indeed, he lamented it. But could anyone who has listened to successful modern politicians deny that they use unsupported assertion and repetition more than reason and evidence, just as Le Bon says? And who could gainsay his advice to all public speakers: that the most, the only, effective defence against calumny is to calumniate the calumniator?