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

Quality of the writing: 5
Quality of the content/organisation/research: 4
Impact on my perspective: 2
Resonance: 2
Rereading potential: 5
Overall score: 3.5

The reason I read it: Researching mass movements for work. I came across this book by chance on Goodreads. 

Review: Published in the late nineteenth century, The Crowd is a work that helped give rise to the field of mass psychology. It is reported to have served as an inspiration for such figures as Freud, Mussolini, Roosevelt, and Hitler. In it, Gustave Le Bon examines the question of why groups of people with a shared purpose become something more than the sum of their parts. Le Bon believed that we cannot comprehend either history or economics if we do not understand the psychology of crowds.

According to Le Bon, crowds possess attributes that the individuals within them do not. When we join with other people, we are more influenced by our basic instincts than our usual personalities. We become more similar to those around us. As a result, crowds are incapable of organizational feats requiring their regular intelligence and are more adept at destruction. A feeling of invincibility makes people risk-tolerant, emotional, and pliable. They sacrifice themselves with glee for the whole. 

I bought a cheap print-on-demand version with messy typesetting and typos which didn't improve my comprehension of it. Irrelevant. This is a good book in terms of the poetic quality of the writing, the incisive nature of Le Bon's insights, and the seeming accuracy of some of his observations on crowd behaviour. 

Le Bon's views are conservative and elitist. I, personally, still see a lot of value in the book. It's valuable if you want to understand how you might be manipulated when you're part of a group. And it's valuable if you're able to sift out the sociological and psychological observations that still hold true. 

Interesting tidbits:
- 'An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.'
- 'Institutions and laws are the outward manifestation of our character, the expression of its needs.'
- 'Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength.'
- 'The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in the process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.'