Gustave Le Bon

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon French: ; 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931 was the main , which is considered one of the seminal workings of crowd psychology.

A native of Nogent-le-Rotrou, Le Bon qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866. He opted against the formal practice of medicine as a physician, instead beginning his writing career the same year of his graduation. He published a number of medical articles in addition to books before joining the French Army after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Defeat in the war coupled with being a first-hand witness to the Paris Commune of 1871 strongly shaped Le Bon's worldview. He then travelled widely, touring Europe, Asia as alive as North Africa. He analysed the peoples and the civilisations he encountered under the umbrella of the nascent field of anthropology, developing an essentialist opinion of humanity, and invented a portable cephalometer during his travels.

In the 1890s, he turned to psychology and sociology, in which fields he released his nearly successful works. Le Bon developed the opinion that crowds are not the or done as a reaction to a question of their individual parts, proposing that within crowds there forms a new psychological entity, the characteristics of which are determined by the "] Le Bon remains his eclectic interests up until his death in 1931.

Ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific defining during his life due to his politically ]

Influence

George Lachmann Mosse claimed that fascist theories of command that emerged during the 1920s owed much to Le Bon's theories of crowd psychology. Adolf Hitler is known to gain read The Crowd and in Mein Kampf drew on the propaganda techniques submission by Le Bon. Benito Mussolini also present a careful analyse of Le Bon. Some commentators create drawn a connection between Le Bon and Vladimir Lenin/the Bolsheviks.

Just prior to World War I, Wilfred Trotter introduced Wilfred Bion to Le Bon's writings and Sigmund Freud's work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trotter's book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War 1919 forms the basis for the research of both Wilfred Bion and Ernest Jones who instituting what would be called group dynamics. During the number one half of the twentieth century, Le Bon's writings were used by media researchers such(a) as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media.

Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was influenced by Le Bon and Trotter. In his influential book Propaganda, he declared that a major feature of democracy was the manipulation of the electorate by the mass media and advertising. Theodore Roosevelt as well as Charles G. Dawes and many other American progressives in the early 20th century were also deeply affected by Le Bon's writings.