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Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules”: A commentary and evaluation

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 Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules”: A commentary and evaluation

John Drury

University of Sussex

1. Introduction

Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules” (in English, “The Crowd: A Study of the
Popular Mind”) has been called “perhaps the most influential book ever written in social
psychology” (G. Allport, 1968, p. 25). It was certainly a best-seller in its time; it was
translated into at least 17 languages (Barrows, 1981), and the English edition alone was
reprinted 16 times by 1926 (McClelland, 1989). The book was apparently useful to both
Hitler and Mussolini, and provided key assumptions in the guidance and training on crowd
control employed by police and armies around the world. Can any other text in the discipline
claim such popularity and significance? Not only this, but the book’s images of the
transformation of rational individuals into mindless “barbarians” through immersion in
crowds resonates with long-standing representations of the crowd, in both high and popular
culture – from the labile mob in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” to countless newspaper
headlines on “mob mentality” – suggesting perhaps that Le Bon’s book was a formal
systemization of what “common sense” already knows, a full explanation of what is self-
evidently true.

And yet “Psychologie des Foules” has been found subsequently to be profoundly incorrect in
multiple ways – including in terms of its premises (what needs to be explained), its evidence
(or lack of), and its hypothesized psychological mechanisms. It has been described more as a
work of ideology, for its purpose is to provide justifications for a highly hierarchical society,
based on hereditary privilege, racism, and sexism (McClelland, 1989; Reicher & Potter,
1985). Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules” is classical (meaning “old”), but the verdict of
contemporary social science is that it is not a classic (meaning “high quality”).

It is a further measure of the impact of Le Bon’s little book that every crowd psychologist
writing since “Psychologie des Foules” was published, whether they agreed or disagreed
with him, has had to refer to Le Bon’s ideas. The fact that “Psychologie des Foules”
articulated the ideas, and the fears, of many others writing at the time only emphasises the
importance of properly considering the arguments of the book – not least in order to
understand exactly what is wrong with them.

1
In brief, the problems are not his claims that crowds change people, that crowds exhibit
“extreme sentiments”, as he puts it, or that that they have an extraordinary sense of power.
Decades of research has demonstrated that participating in crowds can indeed be a very
emotional experience; and sometimes crowds are extremely violent – certainly people in a
crowd are capable of greater violence than they are alone. The real questions are why and
how. A theory (such as Le Bon’s) which understands emotionality as primitive and which
sees base violence as inherent in the crowd “mentality” cannot adequately explain why it is
that most psychological crowds, even when angry, are not violent, and it cannot explain the
specifics of their acts when they are violent.

This commentary and evaluation chapter first provides some context for Le Bon’s
“Psychologie des Foules”. It overviews the book, and shows how others in the classical
tradition responded to its claims. Next, the chapter reviews the research and theory that has
attempted to transcend the classical tradition, and which has served to provide the most
damning evidence against Le Bon’s arguments. These reactions against Le Bon are described
first in relation to sociology and then in psychology, reflecting Le Bon’s dual legacy.
Contemporary accounts of crowd psychology do not simply stand as alternatives to Le Bon’s
account, however; they also help explain why a model whose popularity is based on its
supposed practical usefulness actually creates the danger it purports to solve.

2. Le Bon in historical and intellectual context 1

“Psychologie des Foules” needs to be understood in historical context (Nye, 1975). Despite
Le Bon’s claims to have invented crowd psychology, 2 and later statements by others who
believed his hype (van Ginneken, 1992, p. 8), he was in fact only one among several early
“crowd scientists”. Indeed, both at the time and later, many of his ideas were shown to be
highly derivative. What prompted the sudden explosion in writings on the psychology of
crowds in late nineteenth-century Europe (in particular France but also Italy and Germany)
was the crowd itself. Le Bon refers to the “age of crowds” because of a number of social
developments in which the crowd – or more specifically the (perceived) problem of the
crowd – was central. Workers were becoming organized in unions, and there were a number
of high-profile strikes, some of which were associated with violence, although most of these

1
This section draws in particular on the historical studies by Nye (1975), Barrows (1981), and van Ginneken
(1992), and the reader is recommended to read these for further contextual information.
2
He also claimed to have invented the theory of relativity before Einstein (Barrows, 1981, p. 178)

2
labour disputes and actions were peaceful. More dramatically, France had seen revolutions in
1789, 1830, and 1848, in which the crowd was prominent. The architecture of Paris today is a
monument to the authorities’ fear of the crowd (van Ginneken,1992). After 1848, the streets
were transformed by Baron Haussmann from narrow alleys to long, straight boulevards; this
made it easier to dismantle the crowd’s barricades as well as to charge at and shoot the crowd
from distance.

From the perspective of the gentlemen scholars, the most shocking of all these tumultuous
events – the worst “crowd horror” – was the Paris Commune of 1871. In these events, Paris
constituted itself as an independent socialist republic, led by workers. The commune was
armed, and ruthless against its enemies. During the commune, Le Bon organized a body of
volunteer ambulances. He subsequently produced a number of autobiographical accounts of
his experiences of the events (Barrows, 1981, p. 163). These were among the numerous
writings he produced before the publication of “Psychologie des Foules”, which itself also
makes references to the events of 1871.

A number of scholars agree that Hippolyte Taine was the first crowd psychologist (e.g., van
Ginneken, 1992). Horrified by the events of the Paris Commune, he began work on a
monumental history of France that traced what he saw as the decline of civilization to the
1789 revolution with its ideas of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Taine was anti-egalitarian and
conservative and viewed modern history as decadence (Barrows, 1981; Nye, 1975, p. 63). He
depicted the crowd as a primitive being. What was original in his work was the attempt to use
psychology to understand history (hence his “psychohistory”), for Taine explained the
“bestial” behaviour of the crowd with “psychological” concepts.

The heyday of the new crowd psychology came a few years later, in the period 1885-1895,
and was again prompted by a further wave of crowd events, including strikes,
demonstrations, and anarchist terrorism, as well as the “street politics” surrounding the
demagogue General Boulanger (Barrows, 1981, p. 8) – the latter is mentioned by name more
than once in “Psychologie des Foules”. Fournial, Tarde and Sighele were the other crowd
psychologists, each of whom published their own work shortly before the appearance of
“Psychologie des Foules”.

While the apparent threat of the crowd to “civilization” formed the material context for the
new crowd psychology, there was also an intellectual context. This included a number of
elements that became ingredients of the new theories. First, via Hobbes and Darwin, crowd

3
scientists drew upon a version of evolutionary anthropology according to which different
human “races” were hierarchically related, from primitive to advanced (Nye, 1975). Second,
ideas from zoology were appropriated. For example, while Taine (1876) was the first crowd
scientist to refer to “contagion”, apparently borrowing from medicine, a version of the same
concept can be found in the work of Espinas on sociality in animals (Barrows, 1981;
Mitchell, 2012, p. 67). Third, the different schools of hypnosis that were fashionable at this
time offered a model (“suggestibility”) for understanding influence and transformation. These
were therefore a further key source for the early crowd psychologists (Nye, 1975, pp. 64-5).
Fourth, the “mass society” thesis - the idea that society was developing into two sections, a
“mass” and an “elite” (Giner, 1976) - offered a way of understanding some of the social
processes that accompanied industrialisation. Workers moved from villages to live in the
cities to work in the new mills, and the “gentlemen scholars” observing this assumed that in
villages order was maintained because everyone knew everybody else and hence could
monitor each other’s behaviours. In the crowded city, by contrast, people became an
anonymous “mass” (Carey, 1992) and therefore hence beyond control, whether internal or
external (Reicher, 1987).

All these different elements came together in Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules”.

3. “Psychologie des Foules”: Overview of the book

Gustave Le Bon wrote a large number of books on science and politics, but “Psychologie des
Foules” was the book that made him famous, and is the only one of the books on crowds
written in the late nineteenth century that is remembered today. Despite the fact that Le Bon
claims repeatedly to present a “scientific” account, the style of “Psychologie des Foules” is
unlike contemporary scientific texts. It contains frequent sweeping statements and
assertions. 3 The writing is repetitive and sometimes seems to be rambling. There is a lack of
systematic evidence; instead, there are frequent anecdotes. There are no examples of studies
using research methods that would be recognized today in psychology. There are uncredited
extracts and no proper referencing.

Most of the key ideas of the book are to be found in in Chapter 1, “General characteristics of
crowds – psychological law of their mental unity”, and students who want to understand Le
Bon’s crowd psychology can focus on this chapter. Here we find the central role of “race”

3
In making his case through affirmations he was perhaps following his own advice to those who seek to
manipulate crowds (McClelland, 1989, p. 202)

4
heredity/evolution as the key factor in crowd psychology, the “law of the mental unity”, and
the three psychological mechanisms: submergence (loss of personality through “immersion”
in the crowd), suggestibility (like a hypnotic state, which follows from submergence), and
contagion (uncritical social influence or any passing sentiment or behaviour, which is an
effect of suggestibility. According to “Psychologie des Foules”, the fundamental feature of
the psychology of crowds is their stupidity, for the mechanisms Le Bon lays out explain why
in crowds people – even the most intelligent and civilized – regress to the stage of barbarians,
incapable of meaningful thought. The later material on leadership (Chapter 3) builds on the
arguments of Chapter 1; much of the leadership model is based on the assumption of the
stupidity of crowds.

Large sections of the book do not seem to be about the psychology of crowds at all. In the
first place, Le Bon’s object is psychological collectivity more broadly, which he calls the
“psychological crowd”, and which might be thought of as the popular mentality (hence the
subtitle of the English edition). Thus individuals dispersed across different locations, where
they share a common purpose and hence mentality, can be subject to the psychological
degradation involved in being part of a “crowd”. In the second place, Le Bon’s emphasis on
the role of the fixed “racial” character (or “racial unconscious”) means that the political
structure of each society is also fixed (according to Le Bon), and gives him licence to discuss
politics. The same logic is behind Le Bon’s argument that educating the public leads only to
discontent and frivolity, and that an apprenticeship model – preparing people for their place
in society – is preferred (McClelland, 1989).

Le Bon is at pains to emphasize that, though they are useful only for destruction and tend
towards violence (reflecting the contents of the “racial unconscious”), crowds can also be
heroic, idealistic and altruistic in their behaviour. This is a point he repeats, and it follows
from two key ideas. The first is that individual self-interest disappears in the crowd (hence
people can die for the cause), and the second is the concept of contagion (i.e., any idea or
sentiment can sweep through the crowd, including altruistic impulses). However, in this
account such heroism and self-sacrifice is both meaningless (it reflects passing fancies in
essentially “fickle” crowds, and has no impact subsequently) and subordinate to the innate
destructiveness of the “racial unconscious” (such that impulses consonant with the contents
of the “racial unconscious” are those most likely to be influential). Thus the “evolutionary
model”, as summarized in the final paragraphs of the book again re-iterates that “race” is
more important than anything.

5
“Psychologie des Foules” has been called a “synthesis” (Nye, 1975, p. 60), a work that
popularized existing ideas (Mitchell, 2012, p. 65). More bluntly, Le Bon has been called a
vulgarizer (Mitchell, 2012; van Ginneken, 1992, p. 380) and a plagiariser (McClelland,
1989). Sighele claimed Le Bon “pirated” his own work (van Ginneken, 1985), and indeed
van Ginneke details how ideas of all the other crowd psychologists of the time appear in Le
Bon’s book yet with little acknowledgement. Certainly, the references to the “criminal
crowd” in “Psychologie des Foules” seem to relate to the work of Sighele, who is never
mentioned by name. The notion of crowd mentality as primitively “spinal” rather than
operating through the brain (Le Bon, p. 23) is arguably that of Fournial (see van Ginneken,
1985, p. 378). Imitation was proposed first by Tarde, and contagion as mentioned was first
used in a crowd psychology context was Taine, though Le Bon’s version is much more
elaborate than Taine’s. Taine is in fact much cited in “Psychologie des Foules”, but for his
historical examples not his psychology (van Ginneken, 1992, p. 31).

Commentators suggest that there were two factors that explain why Le Bon’s book was such
a success compared to these others. The first is the popularizing already mentioned. Le Bon
rendered others’ ideas into an accessible format, shorn of the academic style of his rivals. The
second factor is the fact that, while all the other crowd scientists described the horrors of the
crowd, only Le Bon’s book offered practical solutions (Barrows, 1981, p. 184). His model of
how leaders can manipulate crowds, and his specific advice on rhetoric, operate as tools for
those in authority on how to harness the power of the crowd. The claim in “Psychologie des
Foules” of the inherent malleability of the crowd is a crucial part of the leadership model.

So what is wrong with “Psychologie des Foules” as psychological theory? Numerous

criticisms have been made since the book was first published, and numerous empirical
examples have contradicted its claims. Most of these will be described below in relation to
the theorists that proposed alternatives to Le Bon’s account. For now, however, four
fundamental problems can be mentioned.

First, there is the issue of Le Bon’s use of evidence (or lack of it). He relied on fragmentary,
selective, secondary examples, rather than systematic studies of crowd events. Second,
because the use of evidence was so poor, Le Bon was able to sustain his view of the arbitrary
violence and fickleness of the crowd. He described incidents of crowd violence shorn of their
historical and intergroup context (Reicher, 1987). Thus while we know that the crowds Le
Bon was referring to were revolutionary crowds, or crowds involved in industrial disputes,

6
and we know that where there was violence most of this was meted out by the forces of the
state on the crowd, and that crowd violence – even the most brutal – was often in response to
a long sequence of attacks (Barrows, 1981), all this disappears in Le Bon’s account, and the
violence appears instead as appearing from nowhere except the supposed “racial
unconscious”, as a meaningless spasm.

Third, we have seen that while Le Bon acknowledges the “heroic” crowd, he saw crowd
violence and stupidity as emblematic of crowd psychology, and therefore does not have the
concepts (beyond meaningless “contagion”) to explain the fact that the vast majority of
crowds in conflict are not violent, including those who remain peaceful even when provoked.

Fourth, linked to this inability to conceptualise the non-violent crowd is an inability to

explain the meaningful limits of behaviour in those crowds that are violent. A prediction
easily derived from “Psychologie des Foules” is that the violence of the crowd would
indiscriminate. Some of the best evidence against this claim came from historians of the
crowd, who were critical of Le Bon’s accounts of the French Revolution (Rudé, 1964) or who
offered an alternative to irrationalist explanations of food riots as instinctual explosions. E. P.
Thompson’s (1971) account of the moral economy of the crowd in the eighteenth century
food riot is perhaps the best example of this, showing that for all the anger and violence,
targets of the crowd were highly selective (the millers and merchants who transgressed
against local customs) and constrained (for example the crowd sold the grain for a fair price
and returned the folded sacks to the merchant). A theory relying on the contents of a
hypothesized primitive “racial unconscious” and arbitrary “contagion” cannot explain why
the targets of the food rioters were consonant with their values (their “moral economy”), why
these differed systematically from the targets of the crowd in the French Revolution, which in
turn reflected existing common values. A different kind of psychology was needed to explain
these cases. Unfortunately, that new psychology was a long way off, and for several decades
crowd psychologists repeated the assumptions and errors of Gustave Le Bon, even when they
set out to challenge him.

4. Extensions and critiques of Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules” in the “classical”

tradition

We can call the “classical” tradition (or sometimes the “irrationalist” tradition) those
approaches to crowd psychology that shared with Le Bon the fundamental assumption that
the “mentality” of the crowd is more primitive than that of the individual. In the early

7
twentieth century, there were a number of theorists in this tradition that followed
“Psychologie des Foules” in this and other assumptions, but who also added other emphases
to the basic approach. Wilfred Trotter’s (1919) “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War”
pursued the Le Bonian themes of primitive instincts and sacrifice for the cause which he used
to explain altruistic phenomena such as young men dying for their country in the first world
war (see Van Ginneken, 1992). William McDougall’s (1920) account of the “Group Mind”
was more sophisticated than that of Le Bon. He suggested that only organized groups had
“minds”, and the greater the “group mind” the less likely were crowds to give in to primitive
impulses (see Turner, 1987). Freud (1921) devotes a considerable amount of space to Le Bon
in his “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” – both praising him effusively
(“brilliant” p. 109) and setting out their differences. The Le Bonian “racial unconscious” is
more like Jung’s “collective unconscious” than the individual dynamic unconscious of Freud,
but it is the ideas on leadership that Freud singles out for criticism. He argues that if the
process of becoming suggestible is like hypnosis, then there must be a hypnotist. What is the
process whereby someone plays this role? Freud’s answer is parental identification (Freud,
1921, p. 101).

In this period, the major challenge to Le Bon’s position as the leading crowd psychologist
came from Floyd Allport (1924a, 1924b). Like all the others in the “classical” tradition,
Allport shared Le Bon’s fundamental assumptions: that the psychology of crowds is more
primitive and instinctual than that of the lone individual; that because of this stupidity and
brutishness, crowds tend to be characteristically and arbitrarily violent; that social influence
in crowds was mindless; and that therefore the crowd was a problem, a threat to individual
rationality. Where he disagreed with Le Bon was in the location or origin of this primitive
psychology. Allport’s ideas reflected the developing behaviourist zeitgeist, particularly when
he argued that the “group mind” was unobservable and therefore speculative and
unnecessary. Allport’s starting point for the study of crowds was the observation that only
nervous systems can support minds; since only individuals have nervous systems the
individual should be the proper unit of analysis in the study of crowd psychology. As he put
it, “There is no psychology of groups which is not essentially a psychology of individuals.”
(F. Allport, 1924a, p. 4). The arbitrary violence of people when they were in crowds, he
argued, reflected a combination of individual predispositions (both innate and learned) and
simple stimulation of other co-present individuals. This simple stimulation causes
“fundamental (individual) drives” (self-protection, hunger, sex) to overcome the civilized

8
values that normally control behaviour. Thus, according to Allport, social influence was not a
matter of “contagion” – people were not influenced by just any passing emotion; rather,
others’ actions stimulated existing dominant tendencies within each individual. The
differences between Allport and Le Bon echoes an earlier difference of emphasis among
crowd psychologists: that between Sighele, who emphasised the pre-existing dispositions of
“criminal” individuals in the crowd, and Tarde, who like Le Bon emphasized qualitative
“transformation” of individuals into a crowd.

Group mind approaches disappeared after the 1920s (G. Allport, 1968, p. 53), and crowd
psychology itself disappeared from the textbooks for a number of years. Its salience in social
psychology seems to have fluctuated with the perceived importance of “the crowd” as a
social issue – hence there was a resurgence of interest in the USA in the late 1960s and in the
UK in the 1980s. New responses to Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules”, both critical and
less critical, first appeared in the 1950s, however. Sociological developments will be covered
in the next section. The key psychological development was “de-individuation” theory (or,
more accurately, theories, since the term covers a variety of related models).

From the beginning, “de-individuation” theorists expressed their debt to Le Bon (see
Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952). However, while they retained key features of his
framework – anonymity/submergence, loss of self, loss of behavioural control, reduction in
critical judgement, and antisocial behaviour – they dropped the notion of a group mind or
racial unconscious (see Diener, 1980; Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1989; Zimbardo, 1970). The
most obvious departure from “Psychologie des Foules” was the use of the laboratory
experiment, which was now long-established as the preferred research method for scientific
psychology. What turned out to be useful about this was that it allowed for the systematic
testing and clear debunking of two of the foundational claims of both Le Bon and “de-
individuation” theory. The first was the idea that anonymity had the generic effect of
increasing tendencies to antisocial behaviour, and the second was that the mechanism behind
this supposed effect was the loss of self. For a number of years, evidence for the first of these
claims (the second was harder to test) was contradictory: sometimes anonymity led to more
prosocial behaviours, for example (Gergen, Gergen & Barton, 1973; Johnson & Downing,
1979). This pattern was explained, and “de-individuation” theory killed off, by a
comprehensive meta-analysis (Postmes & Spears, 1998) which found little evidence for a
generic effect of anonymity (the content of behaviour depends more on which identity and
norms is salient) and little evidence for loss of self. In a reframing of previous results

9
combined with conceptual replications of well-known “de-individuation” experiments,
Reicher, Spears, and Postmes, (1995) demonstrated that “immersion” in a group leads not to
abandonment of norms but more conformity to those norms, particularly where the means of
“immersion” itself (such as most of the manipulations used in “de-individuation”
experiments) served to reduce cues for personal identity and made salient the group context.
Thus, where people did use the cloak of anonymity to carry out actions they normally felt
constrained from doing, these actions were found to be in line with their identities and values
rather than arbitrary.

Overall, classical reactions to “Psychologie des Foules” not only repeated Le Bon’s
assumptions, but also were guilty of the same profound errors indicated earlier: reliance on
selective evidence; decontextualization; inability to explain both patterns of non-violence and
violence in crowds. The major contributions – Allport’s theory and “de-individuation” were
guilty of most of these problems. They each represented an advance insofar as they dropped
the baggage of the “group mind”; but in the posited content of behaviour in crowds, their
suggestions were little different than Le Bon’s “racial unconscious”. 4 Allport advocated the
experimental method, and despite being relying on this more scientific approach, “de-
individuation” theory continued to perpetuate a distorted crowd psychology. Sociological
critics, however, introduced new concepts that created the basis of transcending the
limitations of Le Bon’s book.

5. Striving to escape “Psychologie des Foules”: Social norms and rationality in sociology

From the late 1950s onwards, the major alternative theory in sociology to that expressed in
Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules” was R. H. Turner and Killian’s (1957) emergent norm
theory. For them, the issue was not the threat of the crowd to civilization, but the variety of
different forms of crowd behaviour, from the less to the more organized, and from the
mundane to the dramatic, that took shape in “extraordinary” situations. In order to
comprehend this variety, and in particular to explain what they saw as the gradual
development of social structure in a crowd, Turner and Killian drew upon two intellectual
sources. First was the collective behaviour approach of their supervisor Herbert Blumer (e.g.,
Blumer, 1951), who himself took elements from Le Bon’s book alongside ideas from George
Herbert Mead, thereby combining primitive psychology with symbolic interactionism, which

4
In fact, Allport’s predictions for the content of behaviours in crowds were even more narrow than Le Bon’s,
because he found no place for “heroic” behaviours.

10
was a more sophisticated process of meaning-making. The second key source for emergent
norm theory was the small group Gestalt psychology of Muzafer Sherif (1936), whose
experimental work had suggested that in conditions of uncertainty norms (shared rules for
conduct) emerged gradually through interpersonal interaction.

Turner and Killian agreed with Le Bon that “suggestibility” played a role in crowds, but
conceptualised this as an individual difference (see McPhail, 1991, pp. 78-79). Their
arguments that crowds arose in social breakdowns and were initially “normless” also owed
much to the classical tradition. But in introducing the concept of social norms to the study of
crowd behaviour, their work represents a vital break from the classical past; for the first time,
crowd behaviour was understood as structured by shared understandings of the upper limits
of behaviour. Thus, there was no “spiral of contagion” (Turner, 1964). Rather, interaction and
social influence was to an important degree a shared sense-making process (operating
through milling, rumour, and key-noting).

The introducing the concept of social norm to the explanation of crowd behaviour was
significant; contra “Psychologie des Foules”, it suggested that normal social life and crowd
behaviour operated by the same principles. As well as providing conceptual parsimony, the
concept of norm helped make sense of the variety of patterns of crowd behaviour – from
urban riots to hippy festivals (Turner & Killian, 1972).

For others in (North American) sociology, “breakdown” or “strain” theories like emergent
norm theory kept alive the spirit of Le Bonian irrationalism, which could only be exercised
by embracing forms of rationalism (Mueller, 1992). Thus in resource mobilization theory,
there was an equation of “psychology” with Le Bonian crowd psychology; and the solution to
the latter was therefore to expunge psychology from their models. Resource mobilization
theorists argued that “grievance” (which they linked to emotion and breakdown) was a much
weaker predictor of mobilization than organization. They pointed out, for example, that
native Americans, Black people and women had suffered strain and discontent (disadvantage)
constantly for many years, but they only mobilized in the 1960s and 1970s, when they had
the organizational capacity (Mayer, 1991). Far from being inherently stupid, therefore,
collectives were as rational as individuals.

Other rationalist revolts against Le Bonianism in sociology did allow for a psychology of
collectives, though one which sounded like the rational-actor mirror-image of Le Bon’s
barbarian. Thus Berk (1974) drew upon game theory to suggest that targets in riots reflected

11
each rioter’s judgement of costs and benefits. Thus Berk and Aldrich’s (1972) analysis of
riots in 15 US cities found that patterns of looting and damage were selective, not random
and indiscriminate (personal gain and anti-White establishment) which they suggested
reflected conscious interests. And Myers (2000), in his event history analysis of the spread of
rioting, is careful to argue that “contagion” is certainly not Le Bon’s mindless and
indiscriminate social influence, but rather is “a rational form of inter-actor influence in which
potential actors observe and evaluate the outcomes of others’ behaviours and then make a
decision for themselves about whether or not to adopt the behaviour” (Myers and Przybysz,
2010, p. 64). In each of these cases, the individual determines whether or not to smash a shop
window to steal a TV based on cost-benefit analysis.

Students encountering these rationalist approaches to the crowd often comment that one
important element that appears to be missing is the role of emotion. The individual of game
theory and the other approaches is cold and calculating; s/he has no passion. Here Le Bon has
an advantage over the rationalists, for despite all his errors and distortions he at least
foregrounds the crucial emotional dimension of experiences in many crowd events (Neville &
Reicher, 2011).

Moreover, from a social psychological perspective, what unites these sociological

approaches, and indeed what prevents them from transcending one of the key limitations of
Le Bon is their failure to properly theorise the self or identity. Le Bon argues that self is just
the individual self and it is either present (the lone rational bourgeois individual) or absent
(lost in the crowd). He argues that the self-sacrifice of the crowd member for the cause
evidences the irrationality of the crowd, because it involves the individual acting “contrary to
his most obvious interests” (p. 21). As a narrow rationalist, Berk (1974) logically should
agree: someone helping strangers in an emergency, for example, risking their own personal
safety, is not acting in their own interests. Indeed, they would only be acting in their own
personal interest in such cases if we define those interests in a completely circular way (i.e.,
whatever they do is rational and in their self-interest).

Emergent norm theory and forms of rationalism are two possible solutions to the problem of
Le Bonian irrationalism in crowd theories. Emergent norm theory was surely right to
highlight meaning-making, but didn’t say enough about the processes or constraints in the
interaction process that led to “emergent norms”: why this social norm rather than another
one? Rationalist approaches like game theory do not say where “interests” and “tastes” come

12
from, or explain how our “tastes” vary across different group contexts. Both approaches
ultimately suffer from the same individualism as Le Bon and the classical tradition in
psychology. What was needed to properly transcend “Psychologie des Foules” was a theory
of the “social individual” – to explain why some behaviours (not others) become normative,
and how interests become collective. That theory is described in the next section.

A final point here, however, is that the most important contributions of these traditions in
sociology were not just theoretical but rather were methodological. Le Bon’s view of science
borrowed narrowly from zoology and medicine; accordingly, he viewed the crowd like an
alien object on a petri dish. Allport’s (1924a, 1924b) behaviourism continued this trend. With
studies like Berk’s (1974) fine-grained analysis of a study protest we start to hear the voices
of people in the crowd. This kind of development reflected not only methodological trends
but also changes in society. Whereas Le Bon and his contemporaries largely observed the
crowd from the comfort of their armchairs, Berk and others were in the anti-Vietnam protests
alongside their students – they could see, therefore, that Le Bon’s concepts of racial
unconscious, contagion and so on did not make sense of what was happening. New methods
as well as new concepts were necessary to develop an adequate theory.

6. Eclipsing “Psychologie des Foules”: The social identity approach in social psychology

In his critique of irrationalist explanations for rioting, Henri Tajfel (1978) argued, “the
dichotomy in the explanations of mass intergroup phenomena is not … between the rational
and the irrational, but between the irrational and the social-cognitive” (p. 420). In
developing the social identity approach, he and John C. Turner therefore situated their theory
as a counterpoint to that tradition that emphasized emotion and primitive psychology as the
driver of intergroup relations - not only Le Bon but also F. Allport, Freud, frustration-
regression, and others they regarded as individualist and reductionist (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).
Social identity is defined as “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his
[sic] knowledge of his [sic] membership of a social group (or groups) together with the
emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel, 1974, p. 69). Social identity
theory was a social-cognitive theory, in the sense that it explained phenomena such as
ingroup preference in relation to our knowledge of our group membership(s); as each
individual had multiple social identities, this would explain why “rationality” (group interest)
could vary across group contexts. Turner further developed the concept of social identity into

13
a theory of group processes, arguing that “social identity is the cognitive mechanism which
makes group behaviour possible” (Turner, 1982, p. 21).

The fundamental idea in the social identity approach, that we have multiple identities that
each provide a basis for collective coordination, was central to the model of crowd behaviour
developed by Reicher (1982, 1984, 1987). Thus, against “Psychologie des Foules”, Reicher
argued that people do not lose their sense of self in the crowd; rather they shift from personal
identity to the identity they share with others. This means, therefore, not loss of control, but
rather a shift to collective definitions of appropriate conduct – group norms.

Reicher’s social identity model thus developed explicitly as a critique of “Psychologie des
Foules” and others in the irrationalist tradition, particularly the work of F. Allport and “de-
individuation” theory. Against the Le Bonian notion that crowd behaviour in a riot would be
mindless and therefore indiscriminate, Reicher’s (1984, 1987) study of the 1980 St Pauls riot
found that even the most violent crowd displayed behavioural limits, and these limits
reflected the definition of social identity shared by those in the crowd: in St Pauls, there were
limits to targets (the crowd attacked the police, not passers-by; they targeted properties
associated with their continued powerlessness and poverty, not local homes or shops),
geographical limits (they remained within the St Pauls district), and limits in terms of who
joined in (only those who identified with St Pauls). Contra “contagion” not everyone was
influential and not every behaviour spread (cf. Milgram & Toch, 1969). The most influential
people were those who were prototypical of the shared identity in this context (in this case,
older Rastafarians); and while the crowd joined in with throwing missiles at police the
opposite was the case for throwing missiles at a bus. In addition, this detailed study of the
contours of a riot contradicted the most basic assumption of Le Bon and the “de-
individuation” family of theories – that people are anonymous in the crowd. In fact, most
participants were among people they knew (Reicher & Potter, 1985).

While this early version of the social identity model of crowd behaviour provided a
compelling alternative to “Psychologie des Foules” in terms of the limits of crowd
behaviour, it was a static account that said little about the dynamics of crowd events. And yet
change was evident in the very St Pauls riot data; there was a process of becoming conflictual
over time that was described and not explained. For all its faults, Le Bon’s account addressed
something phenomenologically important about many crowd events – that they change
people, they imbue them with a sense of power, and that this individual transformation

14
operates alongside changes in the actions of the crowd over the course of an event. The
question was how to theorise these psychological changes without falling back into the Le
Bonian notion that they were essentially meaningless – “ripples” in a “deep lake” (Le Bon, p.
99) that would soon be forgotten and have no bearing on subsequent thoughts or feelings?

Methodological as well as conceptual development was required. The study of the St Pauls
riot lacked two elements that now needed to be added to subsequent studies. The first was the
temporal dimension already mentioned. The second grew from the criticism that Le Bon’s
account of the crowd de-contextualized crowd violence; crowd violence occurred in an
intergroup as well as an historical context, and could not be properly understood outside of its
relationship with other agents such as the police or troops. Thus it was necessary to include in
the analysis the perspective and actions of the police as a possible contributor to the events.

By including these two elements in research designs, a similar pattern of intergroup

interaction between crowd and police was identified across a variety of conflictual crowd
events, including student protests (Reicher, 1996a), an anti-poll tax riot (Stott & Drury,
2000), and a series of football crowd conflicts (Stott & Reicher, 1998b). The observation of
this pattern of interaction led to the development of the following theses that together
constitute the elaborated social identity model (ESIM) of crowd conflict (Drury & Reicher,
2009).

First, the ESIM suggests that the conditions necessary for the emergence and development of
conflict between a crowd and others outside the crowd (such as the police) are two-fold: (1)
an asymmetry of categorical representations between crowd participants and this outgroup
(for example, where crowd members understand their protest behaviour as legitimate
expression of traditional rights, police might define it as a threat to “public order”) and (2) an
asymmetry of power-relations such that the police outgroup is able to physically impose its
definition of legitimate practice on the ingroup of crowd participants (for example, by
forming cordons or making baton charges). Second, there is a dynamic. If outgroup action is
experienced by crowd participants as illegitimate (e.g., “an attack on our rights”), it
legitimizes crowd action against it (e.g., “self-defence”). Where that outgroup action is also
experienced as indiscriminate (i.e., as an action against “everyone” in the crowd), then crowd
participants adopt a more inclusive ingroup self-categorization, superseding any prior internal
divisions. The formation of a single large ingroup social category, along with the feelings of
consensus and the expectations of mutual ingroup support that are thereby engendered,

15
empowers members of the crowd ingroup actively to oppose the police outgroup. Such crowd
action against the police may confirm police fears of the inherent threat of the crowd, leading
to an escalation of riot-control behaviours. Further based work on the ESIM showed that
psychological change in crowd events is indeed not a “ripple” but has meaningful
psychological consequences subsequently, changing people’s understandings, relations and
practices in other areas of their lives (Drury & Reicher, 2000; Vestergren, Drury, & Hammar
Chiriac, 2018).

These social identity concepts and the associated body of research evidence are in most
respects diametrically opposed to the ideas expressed in “Psychologie des Foules”. Where
Le Bon saw psychological crowd membership as a source of weakness (vulnerability,
gullibility, lack of self-control), the social identity approach sees it as a source of strength –
including empowerment (Drury & Reicher, 1999), resilience (Drury, Cocking, & Reicher,
2009), and self-regulation (Stott, Adang, Livingstone, & Schreiber, 2007). The utility of the
social identity approach, and the ultimate failure of “Psychologie des Foules” and classical
crowd psychology more generally, is evident in the wide range of crowd phenomena that the
social identity approach has been applied to in the past 20 years beyond crowd violence,
including mass emergency behaviour (Drury, 2018), pedestrian movement (Templeton,
Drury, & Philippides, 2018), religious mass gatherings (Hopkins & Reicher, 2017; Alnabulsi,
Drury, & Templeton, 2018), crowding (Novelli, Drury, & Reicher, 2010), and computer
simulation of crowds (Von Sivers et al., 2016). The supersession of classical crowd
psychology and the ascendance of the social identity approach is also evident in trends in
recent social psychology textbooks, especially in Europe (e.g., Hewstone Stroebe, & Jonas,
2016; Hogg & Vaughan, 2018; Sutton & Douglas, 2013).

7. “Psychologie des Foules” in practice

A remaining question is how it is that a book that is so profoundly wrong can apparently be
so useful. Thus for example there is an obvious tension in Barrows’s (1981) insightful
historiography when she both demonstrates the ideological basis of Le Bon’s ideas (hence
suggesting “Psychologie des Foules” comprises distortions and falsehoods), but also argues
that the book’s popular success was due to the practical usefulness of Le Bon’s advice on
leadership (implying very strongly that the effectiveness of the advice on leadership is
evidence of its truth-value). Le Bon’s ideas informed French army (Nye, 1975; Van
Ginneken 1985 p. 380) as well as US military thinking in world war II: “Army writings and

16
officer training on morale, leadership, and battlefield psychology rested substantially on his
theory of crowds, particularly regarding races and panic” (Bendersky, 2007, p. 257). Via the
work of Herbert Blumer (e.g., Blumer, 1951), the assumptions and concepts of “Psychologie
des Foules” also informed the “escalated force” model of policing in the United States from
the 1960s onwards (Schweingruber, 2000). In the penultimate section of this commentary and
evaluation chapter, I summarize the research on the use of “Psychologie des Foules” in two
contexts – rhetorical strategies used by fascist political leaders to influence crowds and the
crowd control approaches used by police. In the first case I question the extent to which
adoption of Le Bon’s ideas or other, different, factors were significant in Hitler and
Mussolini’s political speeches; in the second case I question whether the adoption of Le
Bon’s ideas by police has been effective in minimizing public disorder.

Chapter 3 of “Psychologie des Foules” is devoted to the topic of leadership. Le Bon’s advice
to leaders was to keep the message simple, to use assertion and repetition, and to assume
contagion. This advice on leadership is consistent with the basic claims of his crowd
psychology as a whole, that crowds are incapable of logical or complex thought, and that they
are stupid and easily influenced. Famously, both Hitler (e.g., van Ginneken, 1992 p. 186) and
Mussolini (Barrows, 1981, p. 179) thanked Le Bon for the use they made of his ideas,
suggesting at least anecdotally that the advice was useful.

On the 100-year anniversary of the first English translation publication of “Psychologie des
Foules”, Reicher (1996b) tested the idea that Mussolini and Hitler’s speeches, and hence
their influence over the “masses”, were shaped by Le Bon’s recommendations by closely
examining a large number of their speeches. He found that, while some of the form of the
speeches did reflect the advice – the speeches included the rhetorical devices of repetition and
assertion – the specific content of these speeches was crucial:

Thus for Hitler, perhaps even more than for Mussolini, the form of rhetoric may be
assertive and repetitive, but form cannot be dissociated from content. Indeed, the very
ability to condense Nazi ideology into such a simple form is a feature of the ideology
itself. Thus, the slogan and the ritualized exchange represent the culmination rather
than the antithesis of ideological construction. Like Mussolini, Hitler defines his
audience in terms of a particular identity. He also provides a particular definition of
what this identity means. Finally, he seeks to obscure the controversial nature of these
definitions and thereby render them necessary rather than contingent. The ultimate

17
 achievement of this ideological rhetoric is to deny its ideological basis. (Reicher,
1996b, p. 549)

Indeed, there were crucial qualitative differences between the contents of the two leaders’
speeches, in addition to the commonality of their fascist themes. These differences reflected
the different social identities evoked by the two leaders. Thus while Mussolini referred to the
mythologized Roman past, Hitler referred to a “fatherland” of “blood and soil”. Thus, far
from relying simply on simplicity and repetition, both leaders “rooted their rhetoric in a
particular construction of social categories through which the audience was defined and by
reference to which actions were legitimated” (p. 535). Clearly, therefore, each speaker rightly
judged their audience to be knowledgeable and discriminating enough to respond to their
specific references and images, which were carefully crafted. The critical point here,
therefore, is that crowds cannot simply be manipulated to do “anything”, that the projects
they are persuaded to follow must be consonant with their existing identities and values; the
effective leader is able to persuade their audience that his/her project embodies these
identities and values (Reicher, Haslam, & Hopkins, 2005).

On the use by the police of “Psychologie des Foules” in their crowd control approaches, first
of all there is plenty of evidence that the ideas expressed in that book are reflected in police
thinking and practices – at least historically in the UK and other countries in Europe
(Waddington & King, 2005). Undoubtedly, police assumptions that in crowds people become
mindless and liable to violence simply because they are in a crowd in large part reflect the
long-standing prevalence in popular discourse of anti-crowd ideas going back many years,
independent of Le Bon (e.g., McClelland, 1989). However, there is also evidence in a number
of places of a clear practical link to “Psychologie des Foules”.

Thus some of the guidance produced by the UK police for public order policing quotes the
words of Martin (1920) a follower of Le Bon, who states that “All psychologists seem to
agree, that membership of a crowd results in the lessening of an individual's ability to think
rationally, whilst at the same time his/her more primitive impulses are elicited in a
harmonious fashion with the emerging primitive impulses of all the other crowd members’
(cited in Reicher et al., 2007) – a good summary of key claims of “Psychologie des Foules”.

A programme of work beginning in the 1990s has analysed police perceptions of crowds.
Thus interviews with public order (riot) trained UK police found widespread endorsement of
the views that crowds consist of a gullible majority who are easily manipulated or “hi-jacked”

18
by a powerful violent minority, which in turn meant that all in a crowd are liable to become
irrational and violent (Stott & Reicher, 1998a). This pattern of qualitative findings has been
replicated and quantified in surveys of police in the UK and Italy (Drury, Stott, & Farsides,
2003; Hoggett & Stott, 2010a, 2010b; Prati & Pietrantoni, 2009).

Of course, it is not just police who hold these kinds of views, and a number of studies
demonstrate that members of the public commonly hold similar views of crowds (Drury,
2002; Goodman, Price, & Venables, 2014; Reicher & Potter, 1985). However, while public
opinion may be of academic interest, the views of police have practical consequences. Unlike
members of the public, police have the capacity (physical and legal powers, organization) to
translate their ideas about crowd psychology into reality. Thus the question here is: what are
the effects of police using these ideas in their practice?

The interview and survey studies mentioned previously found a link between ideas about
mindless, gullible crowds and endorsement of coercive policing practices. Specifically, the
Le Bonian-type crowd psychology was used to rationalize police tactics that were
experienced by crowd members as both illegitimate (i.e., unfair, disproportionate) and
indiscriminate – for example, baton (truncheon) charges against a whole crowd in response to
missile-throwing from a minority and cordons (or “kettles”) of a whole crowd (Drury et al.,
2003; Stott & Reicher, 1998a). Significantly, as we have seen earlier, these two features of
perceived illegitimate and indiscriminate action by police are crucial elements of the dynamic
process whereby a peaceful crowd becomes violent, as described in the ESIM (Drury &
Reicher, 2009; Reicher 1996a; Stott & Reicher, 1998a). Consistent with this analysis, for
example, a multimethod study of a peaceful protest that became a riot found precisely that the
senior police officer who first sent riot police into the crowd explained this decision in terms
that sound distinctly Le Bonian:

“I don’t know, it’s always hard. I think there were 2000 people causing us problems.
Some of those, I am sure, the vast majority were good law abiding people under normal
circumstances. But, when you are in a group like that, I am sure that, the fever of the
cause, the fever of the day, the throwing and everything else, they get locked together
and think ‘oh we are part of this’. Something disengages in their brain. I am not a
medical man or an expert in crowd behaviour, but something goes and they become part
of the crowd.” (quoted in Stott & Drury, 2000, p. 260).

19
It was after this intervention that a largely peaceful crowd event, in which only a minority
were conflictual, escalated into collective violence in which the majority supported violence
against the police. The numerous research examples like this support the conclusion that the
form of policing rationalized by “Psychologie des Foules” – in which force against the
crowd as whole was prioritized and the crowd is treated as incapable of rational discussion –
is not only ineffective and dangerous but in effect producing the very angry violent “mob”
that the police feared, thus operating as a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.

While this critical analysis existed for a number of years, and while some European police
forces were willing to adapt their methods in response (Stott et al., 2007), it wasn’t until the
UK police were faced by a highly damaging crisis of public order policing that Le Bon and
his followers began to be removed from the official guidance and training materials. At a G20
protest in London in 2009, riot police killed Ian Tomlinson, a passer-by, through violently
assaulting him in the course of controlling the crowd. In the reform agenda that followed,
new principles of “education, facilitation, communication, and differentiation”, based on the
social identity approach (Reicher et al., 2007), were recommended at the highest level (Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 2009; Stott, 2009). This is not to say that everyone in
the UK police then agreed to reject the Le Bonian “mob mentality” view of crowds (Hoggett
& Stott, 2012); but now the new and diametrically opposed principles were being written into
key official public-order guidance manual, Keeping the Peace, in College of Policing training
modules, and even in European Union legislation (Official Journal of the European Union,
2010), weakening Le Bon’s grip in this domain.

8. Conclusion: Strengths and weaknesses of Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules”

One of the strengths of Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules” is that he foregrounds
emotion and empowerment as experiences in crowds. In this regard, those who responded
against him by downplaying emotionality lost something vital from their account. The
problem was, of course, that Le Bon equated emotion and subjective power with irrationality,
meaninglessness, primitive psychology, and delusion. More recent research has restored
emotionality to social movements (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2000), crowds (Neville &
Reicher, 2011), protests (van Zomeren, Leach, & Spears, 2012) and group life more generally
(Parkinson, & Manstead, 2015) but without the taint of irrationality, by showing that
cognition and affect are not counterpoised but mutually implicative.

20
Another strength is that “Psychologie des Foules” puts the crowd at the centre not only of
social science but of politics and society itself. More recently, Reicher (2011) argued that the
crowd is a context where so many of the key phenomena of social psychology can be studied
– including leadership and power, conformity and minority influence, identity expression and
creation – and therefore it should be the centre of the social science (Reicher 2011). Sadly,
for many years the crowd was neglected, an “elephant man” on the periphery of mainstream
psychology, and the dream of the early crowd scientists of a new social science of the crowd,
between sociology and psychology, was never realised. There is a very strong case for
arguing that it was precisely the irrationalist approaches of Le Bon, Allport, “de-
individuation” theory and other that served to relegate the crowd to an oddity or anomaly on
the margins of the discipline of social psychology. How could the crowd be integrated with
the standard group psychology topics while it was claimed that the latter could be explained
in terms of normative and informational processes (Asch, 1952), but the former was a
completely different kind of group that had to be explained by a reversion to “primitive
instincts”?

The weaknesses of “Psychologie des Foules” are both profound and manifold. They begin
with the lack of evidence and include the erroneous assumptions and concepts, captured in
Reicher and Potter’s (1985) distinction between two sorts of biases: political bias (anti-
collectivist premises) and bias of perspective (outsider viewpoint according to which, because
one cannot see the reasons behind crowd members’ actions, they are assumed to have no
reasons). They end with the application of Le Bonian ideas to the practical question of
controlling crowds, which research has shown to be as dangerous as it is misleading.

In summary, contra the claims of “Psychologie des Foules”, the overwhelming conclusion of
research is that crowd behaviour, including crowd violence, is not mindless but mostly
selective, reflecting shared norms and definitions of identity. Crowds are not stupid or
irrational but act on the basis of social logics, or “rationalities”, based on their social
identities. What makes collective behaviour possible is not a common “racial unconscious”
and contagion, but again a shared social identity and the common norms associated with it.
Emotion and empowerment are indeed important, but these are meaningful and cognitive, not
primitive and delusional. Politically, change in crowd events is meaningfully related to
context and may have both psychological and social consequences – the crowd is not useful
only for destruction but is also an agent in history (Drury & Reicher, 2018). Finally,

21
behaviour spreads not through mindless contagion, but through self-relevance based on
shared identity (Drury, 2016).

A number of scholars have argued that Le Bon’s famous book is more ideology than
scientific psychology, reflecting the fears, hopes and partial perspective of a certain section of
society at a certain time in history (McClelland, 1989, p. 200; Reicher & Potter, 1985). It is
no coincidence that Le Bon’s ideas found favour with fascists – he has been called the
architect of the New Right (Barrows, 1981) – because his distortions, particularly on “race”
hierarchy, reflected and justified their world-view.

Le Bon’s “Psychologie des Foules” is an extremely important book. But this importance, and
its interest today, lies in its place in history, as a reference point, not for the insights it can
provide on crowd psychology.

Acknowledgements

The work in writing this chapter was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social
Research Council (“Beyond contagion: Social identity processes in involuntary social
influence”, grant number ES/N01068X/1) to John Drury, Stephen Reicher, and Clifford Stott.
I would like to thank Sanjeedah Choudhury for assistance in preparing this chapter.

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