Brad's Reviews > The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 work, The Crowd, portrayed the massed public as pathologically irrational, its members incapable of thinking or acting as individuals: “…by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation” (12). While acknowledging that crowds are sometimes virtuous and heroic, Le Bon emphasized their destructive capacity and their threat to the hierarchies of established order. The Crowd was used as a guide by Hitler and Mussolini to develop strategies of propaganda and mass control, (Mussolini reportedly kept a copy of The Crowd at his bedside, see Alex Steiner), and Le Bon’s work laid the groundwork for theories of media and advertising. Le Bon identified the imagination of crowds as the source of their susceptibility to fanaticism and violence, in that in the crowd mind, the hallucinatory flow of images displaced what he assumed were otherwise purely rational processes of deliberation.

Reacting to revolutionary movements, Le Bon saw the rise of the crowd in historic terms: “it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society. But may this result be prevented!” (xviii). Lamenting the end of the entitlements of the aristocratic class, Le Bon made clear that he opposed mass power not simply because it is disorderly, but because it is destructive of the established order of elite control. While an affect of disgust towards the aesthetics of the crowd is at play, Le Bon’s core concern is power. One can also discern from the foregoing quote and Le Bon’s emphasis on the role of imagination that the gathering crowd also forms a sort of heterotopia implicated in the founding of a new transcendent entity, a new society.