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

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

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

© February 20, 2012

This is the third of three reviews of Le Bon’s works.  The first was, “The Psychology of Peoples” (1894), the second, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896), and now 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 REVOLUTION

OVERVIEW

Gustave Le Bon does the reader a service by probing the undercurrents of social-political revolutions in psychological and historical terms.  Society is never static.  It may seem so but is evolving in imperceptible tectonic shifts not unlike the shifting plates of the earth that periodically rupture enough to produce devastating earthquakes.  In the case of social-political systems, the ruptures produce revolutions.

Writers, philosophers, historians and thinkers record these impressions and project them as omens of which none have prescient knowledge.

Ancestral influences are always pressing against current events and the rule of law and action to “disaggregate the collective personality of its mental and social contagions into the unconscious formation of new beliefs.”  Le Bon calls this phenomenon the “genesis of beliefs.”  He says, “so long as psychology regards beliefs as voluntary and rational, they will remain inexplicable.”  But he adds, “Beliefs are usually irrational and always involuntary.”

This gives rise to the fact that beliefs, which have no reason to justify them, come to be accepted by the most enlightened without difficulty.  We see this in the absurdity of the mysteries of the Christian religion, which despite the fact that they defy logic and natural law, are embraced by men of great intellect.

Logic, he says, has to be viewed therefore in terms of affective logic (feelings), collective logic (social) and mystical logic (religion) in order for it to overrule reason. 

It is precisely because of the progression of logics incomprehensible to people that they never suspect the invisible power forced upon them to act.  “They were the masters neither of their fury nor their weakness.”

When there is a violent contradiction of opinions, they invariably belong to the powers of beliefs and not to knowledge. 

Revolution is always the work of believers without the calming intervention of rational logic.  Never was this truer than in the French Revolution.  “At no period of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore the past, and so poorly divine the future.”  But the past never dies, as we all know.  It is even more truly with us than without us.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF REVOLUTION

“A revolution is not productive of results until it has sunk into the soul of the multitude.”  The multitude is the agent of revolution, but not its point of departure.  “The crowd represents an amorphous being which can do nothing, and will nothing, without a head to lead it.” 

Scientific revolutions, Le Bon claims, are the most important but the least attentive of revolutions.  It is as if these scientific wonders can be absorbed without consequences when they change the structure of society radically in a “cut and control” phenomenon. 

Science cuts existence away from the way it was into a new reality, a reality in which something is gained, but at the expense of something lost forever.  The cost benefit argument is obliterated in the fascination with the new.

Galileo’s discoveries in astronomy revolutionized our perception of the universe demonstrating that invariable laws of nature, and not the caprices of the gods, rule us.  The same is true of the evolutionary studies of Darwin in zoology and botany, Pasteur’s discoveries in medicine and Lavoisier’s in chemistry.  These men mounted revolutionary movements that have changed perceptions as well as behavior of man.  “Without them men would still be living in caves.”

REVOLUTIONS IN POLITICS & RELIGION

Beneath scientific revolutions are religious and political revolutions.  “While scientific revolutions derive solely from rational elements, political and religious beliefs are sustained almost exclusively by affective and mystic factors.” 

By the insistence of absolute truth a belief necessarily becomes intolerant.  This explains the violence, hatred and persecution that are habitually associated with the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.

Political revolutions result from beliefs established in the minds of men.  The word discontent sums this up.  Discontent, for whatever reason, must accumulate over time to product the effects of revolution.  People can withstand a great deal of discomfort before they are willing to leave their comfort zone for something unknown.  They can be badgered and bullied, ridiculed and castigated, but if they have a modicum of comfort they will remain docile. 

Once comfort is shattered completely, Le Bon says, it is not the liberally high minded that are the most vindictive and violent, but the more conservative.  Still, revolution is not seeded until comfort at the top is shattered.  “All great revolutions come from the top, not the bottom.”  Once the top sets off the spark the people become an incendiary force.  

That said discontent is not sufficient to bring about revolution.  It is necessary for those at the top to use exaggeration to persuade the discontented that the government or the church (or whatever) is the sole cause of the people’s agony. 

Usually, it is not enough for a revolution to be triumphant.  It must reject the old laws and persecute supporters of the previous regime.  The Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia of 1989, led by poet Vaclav Havel, was an exception.  The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia routinely persecuted dissidents before the Velvet Revolution, but Havel and his cohorts felt no need to do so to defend their beliefs in democratic principles.

Le Bon contrasts revolutions:

“In religious revolutions no experience can reveal to the faithful that they are deceived, since they would have to go to heaven to make the discovery.  In political revolutions experience quickly demonstrates the error of a false doctrine and forces men to abandon it.”

The Protestant Reformation was first a simple struggle against abuses of the clergy.  Luther turns out to be a mild reformer compared to Calvin who was as intolerant as Robespierre in the French Revolution.  The Reformation set out to replace the sovereign dictates of the Pope in Rome.  Far from diminishing the absolution rules of the church, it exaggerated them in the new faith. 

Le Bon sees reason has little place in revolution, but leaders of the Reformation considered themselves rational men.  Yet, doctrine eclipsed rational values as the movement “overturned all Europe, and came near to ruining France, of which it made a battlefield for a period of fifty years. Never did a cause so insignificant from the rational point of view produce such great results.” 

The mind and morality of the times was more concerned with salvation than life, more in fear of the devil than any priest could allay, more aroused by passions than interested in rational logic. “Luther sough the surest means of pleasing God that he might avoid Hell.  Having commenced by denying the Pope the right to sell indulgences, he presently entirely denied the authority and that of the Church, condemned religious ceremonies, confession, and the worship of the saints, and declared that Christians should have no rules of conduct other than the Bible.  He also considered that no one could be saved without the grace of God.” 

Calvin took Luther’s vague definition of predestination to certain heights with his “elected,” which were those who excelled economically, and thus changed the course of history, leading the West by implication of the work ethic for the next five hundred years to economic, political and military and world dominance. 

Calvin rather than Luther developed the assertions of St. Augustine of an all-powerful God, which ruled a white and black world with no iota of gray.  The new faith was propagated by the influence of affirmation, repetition, mental contagion and prestige.

History is replete with the autodafes of the Inquisition, but little is written about the heroics of persecuted Protestants by the church where the condemned were burned alive “by attaching the victims to an iron chain, which enabled the executioners to plunge them into the fire and withdraw them seven times in succession.  But nothing induced the Protestants to retract, even the offer of amnesty after they had felt the fire.”

Intolerance for the new faith and violent persecution seeded the spread of Protestantism as persecution had the early Christians.  Reason is powerless to affect the brain of the convinced, whatever the religion.  It was a matter of mystic (religious) logic.  Toleration is difficult between individuals, but impossible between collectivities.

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Historians treat political and religious revolutions separately, but they have a lot in common such as fear, paranoia and mistrust.  The massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 ordered by Catherine de Medicis and Charles IX was based on the believed plot of Protestant leaders to topple these regimes.  Soldiers entered these leaders’ homes and killed everyone, the massacre followed. 

“Pope Gregory XIII had a medal struck to commemorate the happy event, ordered joy-fires to be lit and cannon fired, celebrated several masses, and sent for the painter Vasari to depict on the walls of the Vatican the principal scenes of the carnage.”

The Jacobins’ “Reign of Terror” of the French Revolution led by Robespierre had a mentality very like that of Gregory XIII.

The Christian religion as the Roman Catholic Church evolved to dominance over a period of 1500 years.  Now, with the Protestant Reformation, religious faith was again triumphing and in the process transforming Western civilization.

Le Bon develops an enchanting picture of how faint-hearted governments fare in revolution, no matter how violent or timid the response they invariably prove counterproductive.  When the animosity and antagonism fade, the new is customarily the reestablishment of a more autocratic theology or constitution that departs little from the previous system.  People cannot choose radically different institutions until the collective mind of has been changed.

Le Bon doesn’t have much faith in the “great man” theory.  “Bismarck singled-handed created the unity of Germany, yet his master had only to touch him with his finger and he vanished.  A man is as nothing before a principal supported by opinion.”

The directing forces of a country are its impersonal bureaucratic elements, which never seem to be affected by the changes of government.  Those who occupy the anonymous state in the invisible government are always more powerful than the official State, despite the fact that they are never seen and therefore never ridiculed.  The elected and the prominent suffer the blunt force trauma for them.

FRAGILITY OF THE COLLECTIVE MIND

The stability and malleability of the national psyche is as much in question as that of the individual.  Le Bon sees revolutions occurring when there is a collective sickness of the collective mind.  Due to internal stress and accelerating and unanticipated demands made on it by change, it is unable to cope successfully.  Sentiments, traditions and prejudices constitute this national mind, always ripe to project its missteps to others. 

When elements within society not only clash but also take on the character of half-castes, Le Bon sees the situation ungovernable and vulnerable to open rebellion. 

“From the moment when the Revolution descended from the middle to the lower classes of society, it ceased to be a domination of the instinctive by the rational and became the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational.”

The social climate festers and boils then become increasingly chaotic and phlegmatic, but will go nowhere until it finds a leader.

Ideas, leaders, armies and crowds constitute essential elements of revolution.  Rarely does the crowd understand the revolution.  Its action is comparable to a shell penetrating an armor plate by the momentum of a force it did not create.  The crowd is unhinged from meaning.  It shouts because others are shouting, it revolts because others are revolting, it crashes into police barriers because others are, having no idea why or what caused it to be unhinged. 

Once the crowd has prevailed, the governmental ideal “is always the very simple, something very like dictatorship.  This is why, from the times of the Greeks to our own, dictatorships has always followed anarchy.”

The irony is that the crowd breaks the chains of the established order only “to see the reestablishment of an autocratic organization with an appearance of constitutionalism practically (the same as) the old system, once again.”  Le Bon adds, “A people cannot choose its institutions until it has transformed its mind.”

The predominant characteristics of the revolutionary spirit reflected in the collective personality are race, religion, traditional hatreds, customary fears, vanities, ambitions and envies.  Out of this grows the temperament of the mystic mentality that is moved by idols, fetishes, words and formulas.  It flatters itself that it alone is in possession of absolute truth and meaning.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The French Revolution, Le Bon shows, lost its relevance as soon as the cry, “liberty, fraternity and equality,” was reduced to equality.  “Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and turgidity.”

The Jacobins, the party of Robespierre, had no sense of the mystical mentality that marched them onward in all sincerity, but blindly while the phantom reason was left behind.  Robespierre was like a leader of a procession of imaginary followers.  He believed beliefs could be molded to reason so there would be reason to the beliefs.

“Passion supports convictions, but hardly ever creates them.  The Jacobin is a mystic who has replaced the old divinities by new gods.  Imbued with the power of words and formulae, he attributes to these a mysterious power. . So that although the Jacobin is a great reasoner, this does not mean he is in the least guided by reason.  When he imagines he is being led by reason it is really his passions and his mysticism that lead him.  Like all those who are convinced and hemmed in by the walls of faith, he can never escape there from.”

THE REVOLUTIONARY MENTALITY

Le Bon gets inside the weak character endemic to revolutionaries who are “incapable of mastering themselves sufficiently to resist the impulses that rule them.”  The exception, he points out, is the revolutionary spirit that is sufficiently independent to be intellectually revolutionary.  Then society escapes the yoke of its entrapment and realizes real progress as in the case of the Scientific Revolution.

Even in the case of science, revolutions fail to produce their full effect until they penetrate the soul of the multitude.  The crowd is a manifestation of the mystic personality where the conscious individuality of man vanishes in the unconscious personality of the crowd.

Here the collective mind dominates the unconscious in what Le Bon calls “collective logic,” which is marked by infinite credulity, exaggerated sensibility, shortsightedness, and a capacity to slavishly respond to affirmation, contagion, repetition and prestige.  The revolutionary becomes a veritable non-person as personal characteristics vanish in the crowd.  “The miser becomes generous, the skeptic a believer, the honest man a criminal, the coward a hero.”

The crowd is on automatic pilot with unconscious forces dominating their collective soul, doing and saying what they would not say or do in other circumstances.  “A crowd is in reality inaccessible to reason; the only ideas capable of influencing it will always be sentiments evoked in the form of images.”  This is as true in any mass movement.

With this foundation, Le Bon gives the reader a detailed history of the French Revolution, its personalities, its high and low points, and the circumstances that have made it important to peoples across the globe to this day.

As in his other books reviewed here, he has a fascination with the anatomy and psychology of the crowd.  Likewise, he explores and exposes the central touchstones of instinct and reason as they relate to revolt, and how civilization invariably retrogresses to the primitive and barbaric when it launches revolution.  “In normal times, we are guided by the various forms of logic-rational affective, collective and mystic – which more or less perfectly balance one another.  During seasons of upheaval, they enter into conflict, and man is no longer himself. 

He has some harsh words to say about socialism while being committed to natural law. 

“Socialism, the modern synthesis of hope, would be a regression to lower forms of evolution, for it would paralyze the greatest sources of our activity.  By replacing individual initiative and responsibility by collective initiative and responsibility mankind would descend several steps on the scale of human values.”

Think of his final words in this volume with our current struggles:

“If we continue to shatter our cohesion by intestine struggles, party rivalries, base religious persecutions, and laws which fetter industrial development, our part in the world will soon be over.  We shall have to make room for peoples more solidly knit, who have been able to adapt themselves to natural necessities instead of pretending to turn back upon their course.  The present does not repeat the past, and the details of history are full of unforeseen consequences; but in their main lines events are conditioned by eternal laws.”

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