The Crowd
Gustave Le Bon · 1896
5.0 · 5 ratings
About the book
The first psychology of crowds: how sensible individuals fuse into something credulous, impulsive and led by images rather than arguments. Written after the Paris Commune, read by every demagogue of the next century — which is the best reason to read it first.
Try the short course
Part 1 · Why Le Bon thought crowds would rule. The first six slides, free.
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Look at the fall of Rome and you see invasions, burned cities, emperors deposed. Le Bon asks you to look behind all that. Beneath the apparent causes, he says, the real one is usually a deep change in the ideas of the people themselves.
The barbarians at the gate are the last scene, not the plot. What decides whether a civilisation stands is what its people still believe, and that shifts quietly, long before anything is set on fire. In his words: "The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought."
This is also why such upheavals are rare. Nothing in a people is as stable as the inherited groundwork of its thinking, so ideas move first, and events follow only when that groundwork finally gives way.
Inside the course
12 parts- The era of crowds — Le Bon's warning shotFree above
- The mental unity of crowds
- The sentiments and morality of crowds
- Ideas, reason and imagination in the mass
Questions
Is The Crowd free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
12 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Crowd is waiting in the app’s library.
