The book by Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Crowds, is the most well-known of his many works and has significantly influenced perceptions of collective behavior. Predicting the social and political disasters of the 20th century, this essay seems to have been created to explain how easily crowds can fall into the traps of dictators and manipulators.
According to Le Bon, within a crowd, the individual human being, as if subjected to hypnosis, is lost and completely succumbs to a collective mind, whose behavior ceases to be rational. In this way, the combined psychology of individuals lost in the crowd leads to a collective behavior that becomes uniform, emotional, immoral, and devoid of critical thinking.
Rather than admiring them, Gustave Le Bon feared crowds, and through The Psychology of Crowds, he raises issues for reflection since 1895 for both future generations of sociologists and psychologists, as well as for those who wish to avoid any collective impulse.
