Showing results for "Gustave le Bon" in Literature & Fiction

In The Crowd - A Study of the Popular Mind, social theorist Gustave Le Bon gives historical insight into the political thinking of his era while offering timeless social commentary. Le Bon challenges the listener to contemplate how individual ideas change - often to a destructive end - when employed in a setting of groupthink. As technology and communications innovations make group formation easy and accessible for better or for worse, this book's message is certainly one that will not be lost in the crowd.

"It is barely a century and a half ago that certain philosophers, who, it should be remarked, were very ignorant of the primitive history of man, of the variations of his mental constitution and of the laws of heredity, propounded the idea of the equality of individuals and races... It is in the name of this idea that socialism, which seems destined to enslave before long the majority of Western peoples, pretends to ensure their welfare... The object of this work is to describe the psychological characteristics which constitute the soul of races, and to show how the history of a people and its...

"Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture — all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the ...

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (1841 - 1931) was a French polymath who wrote on anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’, which is considered a seminal work of crowd psychology. In the book, Le Bon identifies the primary characteristics of crowd psychology as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of critical judgement, and the exaggeration of feelings.

In seinem modernen Klassiker der Science-Fiction-Literatur Die Zeitmaschine wagt H.G. Wells einen Blick in die ferne Zukunft unserer Welt, und was sein Protagonist erlebt, ist nicht nur erfreulich, aber auch nicht hoffnungslos. Seit vielen Jahren zählt Woyzeck von Georg Büchner zu den meistgespielten Theaterstücken auf deutschsprachigen Bühnen, ebenso vielfach verfilmt und multimedial adaptiert – kein Wunder: Das Drama um einen von gesellschaftlichen Erniedrigungen gequälten einfachen Mann ist so zeitlos wie das Leben selbst.