The Crowd

Gustave Le Bon wrote the book in the late 19th century, in a Europe watching its cities grow, labor unions organize, mass-circulation newspapers multiply, and popular uprisings shake governments. The memory of the Paris Commune of 1871 was still fresh for the French.

For him, the world was entering the age of crowds, in which the opinion of large groups would weigh more than that of rulers. The question driving him is practical: how does a person behave in the middle of a lot of people, and how can anyone deal with that phenomenon?

The book was a worldwide success and became required reading for politicians, advertisers, and scholars. But you have to read it carefully: it's an opinion piece, written with a great deal of class bias and the prejudices of its time.

The book's first idea is that a crowd is not just any gathering. A hundred people waiting for the bus don't form a crowd in the author's sense. He means a group in which people, under a shared emotion or goal, start acting in ways they wouldn't alone.

In that state, according to Le Bon, each person's conscious personality fades and a kind of collective soul emerges. The individual comes to feel, think, and act differently from how they would in isolation, and the crowd takes on an identity of its own, which is not the simple sum of its parts.

Think of a championship final in a stadium. Calm people who never raise their voices day to day sing, curse, and cry along with thousands of strangers. That's the kind of transformation the author tries to explain.

The author points to three mechanisms that would help explain the change. The first is anonymity: in the middle of a lot of people, individuals feel that no one knows who they are and that responsibility gets diluted. They gain a sense of strength that helps them give in to instincts they would suppress alone.

Think of the rioting after a game, or of aggressive comments from people who would never talk that way in real life. Distance and the feeling of not being identified loosen the brakes, especially when the group seems to be on the same side.

Later social psychology took up this idea under the name deindividuation, with mixed results. There are situations in which anonymity increases aggression, and others in which the group reinforces positive norms. The book presents only the first side.