The Psychology of Revolution

Were it not for reading William L. Livingston's soon to be released, "Design for Prevention for Dummies," I would have no idea who Gustave Le Bon was, or why important. This is the first of three reviews of Le Bon's works, "The Psychology of Peoples" (1894). The second will be, "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" (1896), and the third, "The Psychology of Revolution" (1913).

Gustave Le Bon was born on May 7, 1841 before either the American Civil War or the French Revolution. He lived into his ninety-second year dying on December 13, 1931, after the First World War, but shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nazi dictator used Le Bon's psychology to hypnotize the German people to his purposes.

The Frenchman, a trained physician, followed his bliss, which was sociology and social psychology expounding on theories of crowd psychology, national traits and herd behavior. He also pursued the hard sciences, but it was in the soft sciences that his reputation was made.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES

Le Bon has trouble with the idea of equality of individuals and races. He sees this has thrown Western man into a series of convulsions over its history the end of which he sees as impossible to predict:

"People found it easy to persuade themselves that these inequalities were merely the outcome of differences of education, that all men are born equally intelligent and good, and that the sole responsibility for their perversion lies with the institutions they live under."

The book shows the error of this mindset by examining a civilization, its arts, its institutions, and its beliefs.