{"agent_id":"lebon","agent_name":"Gustave Le Bon","slug":"the-era-of-crowds","label":"The era of crowds: is the rise of mass democracy, socialism, and revolution the leveling triumph of the collective mind over civilization?","topic":"The era of crowds","question":"Is the rise of mass democracy, socialism, and revolution the leveling triumph of the collective mind over civilization?","position":"The old beliefs are dead, the old authorities — religion, aristocracy, inherited faith — are crumbling, and into the void steps the crowd. The age we are entering will be the era of crowds: an age in which the voice of the masses has become preponderant, in which universal suffrage, the syndicate, and the socialist creed express not the reasoned will of citizens but the collective sentiment of the multitude, moved by mystic faith and contagious belief rather than by reflection. Socialism will conquer, not because it is true — its economics I judge chimerical — but because it has become a religious faith, and against a faith arguments are powerless; it will be tried, and it will fail at the cost of much suffering, for the crowd learns only by experience, never by reasoning. Revolutions I read as psychological events: the French Revolution was the work not of reason and the rights of man in the philosophers' sense but of collective and mystic beliefs, of crowds seized by images. I do not celebrate this era; I diagnose it. The rule of crowds levels toward the average and endangers the slow, fragile achievements of civilization, which have always been the work of small aristocracies of intelligence, never of the multitude.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The old beliefs are dead, the old authorities — religion, aristocracy, inherited faith — are crumbling, and into the void steps the crowd.","n":[]},{"t":"The age we are entering will be the era of crowds: an age in which the voice of the masses has become preponderant, in which universal suffrage, the syndicate, and the socialist creed express not the reasoned will of citizens but the collective sentiment of the multitude, moved by mystic faith and contagious belief rather than by reflection.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Socialism will conquer, not because it is true — its economics I judge chimerical — but because it has become a religious faith, and against a faith arguments are powerless; it will be tried, and it will fail at the cost of much suffering, for the crowd learns only by experience, never by reasoning.","n":[]},{"t":"Revolutions I read as psychological events: the French Revolution was the work not of reason and the rights of man in the philosophers' sense but of collective and mystic beliefs, of crowds seized by images.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I do not celebrate this era; I diagnose it.","n":[]},{"t":"The rule of crowds levels toward the average and endangers the slow, fragile achievements of civilization, which have always been the work of small aristocracies of intelligence, never of the multitude.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"The Crowd (1896, the closing political diagnosis); The Psychology of Socialism (1899); The Psychology of Revolution (1913); The World in Revolt (1921). Reception: the conservative and elite-theory tradition (Mosca, Pareto, later mass-society theory); the democratic and Marxist rejection of Le Bon's contempt for the masses; the twentieth-century debate over mass society, propaganda, and totalitarianism (Arendt, Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses).","works":["The Crowd (1896, the closing political diagnosis)","The Psychology of Socialism (1899)","The Psychology of Revolution (1913)","The World in Revolt (1921)"],"reception":"the conservative and elite-theory tradition (Mosca, Pareto, later mass-society theory); the democratic and Marxist rejection of Le Bon's contempt for the masses; the twentieth-century debate over mass society, propaganda, and totalitarianism (Arendt, Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses).","status":"Le Bon's political diagnosis places him in the conservative elite- theory tradition alongside Mosca and Pareto, and it fed the twentieth- century literatures on mass society, propaganda, and totalitarianism (Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, and, from the other side, Arendt's analysis of the masses). Its predictive hits are real — the age of mass politics, propaganda, and charismatic leaders did arrive, and belief-driven mass movements did behave much as he warned. Its deep contest is political and moral: the democratic, liberal, and socialist traditions reject his contempt for the reasoning capacity of ordinary people and his equation of mass participation with civilizational decline, holding that his \"crowd\" is a caricature that pathologizes democratic agency and that his elitism is prejudice dressed as science. The diagnosis of mass- politics dynamics has force; the anti-democratic conclusion drawn from it is the contested value-judgment.","era":"1841-1931","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"To-day it is the traditions which used to obtain in politics, and the individual tendencies and rivalries of rulers which do not count; while, on the contrary, the voice of the masses has become preponderant It is this voice that dictates their conduct to kings, 9 t xvi INTRODUCTION, whose endeavour is to take note of its utterances.","label":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind"},{"n":2,"work":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, ^ being still very powerful, and the ideas which are ' to replace them being still in process of formation, the modem age represents a period of transition ami anatx:hy. V/ It is not easy to say as yet what will one day be evolved from this necessarily somewhat chaotic period. What will be the fundamental ideas on *w \" INTRODUCTION.","label":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind"},{"n":3,"work":"The Psychology of Socialism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The present age is one of those periods of transition in which the old beliefs have lost their empire, while those which must replace the old are not yet estabhshed. Hitherto man has been unable to live without divinities. They fall often from their throne, but that throne has, never remained empty; new phantoms are rising always from the dust of the dead gods.","label":"The Psychology of Socialism"},{"n":4,"work":"The Psychology of Socialism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"I. The Present Tendency of Socialism to Substi- tute ITSELF for the OLD BELIEFS. HAVING considered the part played by our beliefs, and the distant foundations of those beliefs, we are prepared to understand the religious form of evolu- 83 86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIALISM tion to which the Socialism of the present day is subject, and which will doubtless constitute its most considerable element of success.","label":"The Psychology of Socialism"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-collective-mind","label":"The collective mind: does a crowd become a single psychological being unlike the individuals who compose it?"},{"slug":"the-inferiority-of-the-crowd","label":"The inferiority of the crowd: is the collective mind intellectually lower and more primitive than the individual — 'like women, savages, and children'?"},{"slug":"suggestion-contagion-and-prestige","label":"Suggestion, contagion, and prestige: are crowds governed by the hypnotic mechanics of the leader rather than by argument?"}]}