THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES by Gustave Le Bon -- A BOOK REVIEW

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES by Gustave Le Bon – A BOOK REVIEW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 15, 20012

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.  Each people, he insists, possesses a mental constitution as constant as its anatomical character, a constitution that is the source of its sentiments, thoughts, institutions, beliefs and arts.

While admitting institutions have the power to control a people’s destiny, he sees them of only slight importance with regard to the evolution of a civilization. 

“They are most often effects and but very rarely causes.”

Moreover, he considers it pure folly to class Spaniards, Englishmen and Arabs into the same group.  He wonders why the distinct differences that exist between them and their histories are not apparent.  He reasons it may be the inclination to see peoples as we see ourselves, which causes the fractures between peoples. 

“It is the whole of these characteristics that form what may be called the soul of a race.”

Le Bon claims an isolated individual of a given race may seem inexact, but applied to the majority of individuals of that race a perfect description. 

“The physical and mental type of a people is identical in its essence with the method by which a naturalist classifies species.”  He goes on to say, “We are the children at once of our parents and our race.  Our country is our second mother for physiological and hereditary as well as sentimental reasons.”

This implies that to attempt to democratize a people with our culture, ideals and history is not only facetious but also counterproductive. 

“A people,” he says, “possess at once their own personal life and a collective life, that of the being of which they form the substance. . . a people is guided far more by its dead than by its living members.  It is by its dead, and by its dead alone, that a race is founded.”

A psychological species is formed of a small number of irreducible and fundamental characteristics around which is grouped accessory characteristics that can be modified and changed by environment, circumstances, and education.  But a people’s mental constitution is immutable as is its anatomical characteristics. 

Le Bon would run into strong opposition by the politically correct for his views on general psychological characteristics of races.  He divides peoples into primitive races, inferior races, average races and superior races. 

Australian aborigines are seen as a primitive race, Africans as an inferior race, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, Semitic peoples and Arabs as an average race, and Indo-Europeans as a superior race.

These divisions are based on:

(1)   The capacity or incapacity of a race to reason with great credulity,

(2)   The capacity or incapacity to associate ideas drawing meaningful conclusions from these associations,

(3)   The inclination to originality or imitation,

(4)   The capacity or lack of capacity for observation and foresight,

(5)   The inclination to independent resolve at all cost or retreat into servitude for survival,

(6)   The tendency to be guided by the power of reason or instinct,

(7)   The importance or lack of importance of discipline, and

(8)   The level of energy demonstrated by the people to establish the will to power, and therefore greatness.

Superior races are further differentiated by the characteristics of perseverance, self-control, morality, and respect for the rule of law.  Le Bon sees the early Greeks and Romans in this category, northern Europeans of Anglo-Saxon origin, which includes Anglo-Americans. 

Although a Frenchman of Latin origin, Le Bon finds the Nordic races superior in the superior category to the Latin peoples (i.e., Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France).  Complicating his differentiation further, he finds those of the Nordic nations as well as northern Germans superior to southern Germans.  It is as if a line could be drawn to define levels of superiority.  .

Then he says something that resonates with today:

“The conditions of modern industrial evolution condemn the inferior classes of civilized peoples to a highly specialized labor which, far from increasing their intelligence, merely tends to lessen it.” 

We know the truth of this statement.  We have moved out of modernity into post-modernity, from industrial society to the information age, yet have one hundred years of workers trained in assembly line work that no longer applies to the majority.  Le Bon continues:

“A hundred years ago, a workman was a veritable artist capable of executing all the details of any piece of mechanism, of a watch for example.  Today, he is a mere toiler, who never produces more than one specialty, who spends his life boring the same holes, polishing the same portion of an article, driving the same machine.  The result is that the atrophy of his intelligence is soon complete”

Society has created a problem that it attempts to solve now by throwing money at education rather than systematically redefining and retooling education, raising awareness and competence to the level of engineers, who direct workman, and are obliged to discover and compete in an increasingly competitive environment. 

The brain, Le Bon says, must be exercised as it conforms to the same laws of all the other organs that atrophy if not developed. 

The Psychology of Peoples is for that reason as current today as when it was written. 

Le Bon’s interest is in showing how economies, religions, political systems and ideologies of peoples have an inclination to peak then fade then die.  The peak is followed by rapid decline, which is seldom apparent despite all the indicators.  Le Bon believes it is because civilizations reach a degree of power that provides the narcotic of safety, security and a sense of affluence.  At that point, he says, military virtues decline, excesses create new needs and dependencies, and egoisms increase.  Complacency becomes the new social norm. 

Another indicator is men lose confidence in the worth of the principles that serve as their foundation.  Only leadership can right the ship of state by penetrating the soul of the multitude to eradicate its sickness.  To Le Bon this means understanding the peoples’ dreams while renouncing philosophic abstractions and speculations that compromise the will to prevail. 

Calamity is likely to follow if a people lose its initiative, energy, and capacity to mount the crises it has created, when material wants become the sole expression of the organizing ideal, when families break up and the unity of community identity is tabled, when the societal compass is lost, and commands are shallow or without direction. 

Le Bon ends by saying the greatest threat to a people is socialism as it leads to a regime of degrading slavery that ultimately destroys all initiative and independence.  He concludes:

“The life of a people and all the manifestations of its civilization are merely the reflection of its soul, the visible signs of something invisible, but very real.  Exterior events are only the apparent surface of the hidden framework by which they are determined.  It is neither chance nor exterior circumstances, and still less political institutions that play the fundamental role in the history of a people.  It is more especially the character of a people that fashions its destiny.”

In that sense, his warnings provide council for us today.  I would highly recommend anyone interested in the psychology of peoples read this book.

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