Le Bon’s turn from physics back to the study of peoples and politics
What the Work Is
La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale is a French-language work of political psychology by Gustave Le Bon, published in 1910. It belongs to the cluster of psychological and sociological books Le Bon produced after he set aside his physics research in 1908 and returned to the study of mind and society. It appeared in the same remarkably productive stretch as Les Opinions et les croyances, La Révolution Française et la Psychologie des Révolutions, Aphorismes du temps présent, and La Vie des vérités, issued in back-to-back years between 1910 and 1914. Le Bon was a French polymath whose interests spanned anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics, and who is best known for his 1895 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
What the Book Is About
The work sets out Le Bon’s views on affective and rational thought, the psychology of race, and the history of civilisation. Its title names its two poles: a psychology of political life, and the idea of social defence — the protection of a society and its inherited character against forces that would dissolve or destabilise it. In it, Le Bon expounds his conviction that human actions are guided by eternal laws, and he attempts to synthesise the thought of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer with that of Jules Michelet and Alexis de Tocqueville. The book thus belongs to his broader effort to place politics and social order on what he took to be a scientific, psychological footing.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central distinction running through the work is between affective and rational thought — the claim that feeling and inherited disposition, rather than reasoned calculation, are the primary drivers of human conduct, including political conduct. This is the same premise that underlies Le Bon’s better-known crowd theory, where assembled people are described as becoming primitive, unreasoning, and emotional, governed by instinct and the unconscious rather than by deliberation.
Closely tied to this is the psychology of race, which for Le Bon was a hereditary and determining force. He held that culture is chiefly shaped by hereditary factors, above all the unique racial features of a people, and he developed an essentialist view of humanity over the course of his anthropological travels. In his thinking, the “racial unconscious” of a people supplies the deep structure of its behaviour, and it is this inherited character that a society must defend if it is to endure.
The theme of social defence follows from these premises. If peoples are shaped by enduring hereditary traits, and if political behaviour is driven by affect rather than reason, then the stability of a civilisation depends on protecting its inherited character against disruptive forces. Le Bon was a critic of majoritarianism and socialism, and he was an avowed opponent of socialist pacifists and protectionists, whom he believed were halting France’s martial development and stifling its industrial growth. He also warned his countrymen about the harmful effects of political rivalries in the face of German military might and rapid industrialisation. These commitments give the book its polemical edge: it is a defence of a particular vision of social order against what Le Bon saw as the leveling and destabilising tendencies of his age.
The book also reflects Le Bon’s view of history and civilisation. He treated the history of civilisation as something to be explained through the psychology of peoples, and he was convinced that human affairs unfold according to laws that could be studied and stated. His account of political life is therefore not a chronicle of events but an attempt to identify the enduring psychological forces beneath them.
Structure and Approach
The work is a discursive exposition of Le Bon’s psychological and political doctrines rather than a narrative or a technical treatise. Its method is that of the generalising theorist: it moves between claims about affective and rational thought, about race and heredity, and about the history of civilisation, drawing them together into a single outlook. Le Bon wrote for a broad educated readership as well as for specialists, and his books of this period were widely read; the same years that produced La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale also produced works that rankled the largely socialist academic establishment of France.
Significance and Influence
The book belongs to the period in which Le Bon’s psychological and sociological theories reached their widest audience. His psychological works of the 1890s had been best-sellers — Psychologie des Foules was translated into nineteen languages within a year of its appearance — and the books he wrote after returning to psychology in 1908 extended that reputation into the years just before the First World War. Le Bon’s ideas about crowds, leadership, and the irrational springs of political behaviour circulated widely in the early twentieth century and were studied by political movements and thinkers across Europe, though the specific reception of La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale is not documented in the available sources. What can be said is that the work belongs to the mature phase of a body of thought that shaped early twentieth-century thinking about mass politics and the psychology of peoples.
Le Bon was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, Centre-Val de Loire, on 7 May 1841, into a family of Breton ancestry. His mother, Annette Josephine Eugénic Tétiot Desmarlinais, was twenty-six at his birth; his father, Jean-Marie Charles Le Bon, was forty-one and a provincial functionary of the French government. He was a direct descendant of Jean-Odet Carnot, whose grandfather Jean Carnot had a brother, Denys, from whom Marie François Sadi Carnot — the fifth president of the French Third Republic — was directly descended. When Le Bon was eight, his father obtained a new post in the French government and the family, including Gustave’s younger brother Georges, left Nogent-le-Rotrou never to return; the town nonetheless took pride in his birth and later named a street after him. Little else is known of his childhood beyond his attendance at a lycée in Tours, where he was an unexceptional student.
In 1860 he began medicinal studies at the University of Paris, completed his internship at Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, and received his doctorate in 1866. From that time on he called himself “Doctor” though he never formally worked as a physician. During his university years he wrote articles on medical topics, the first concerning the maladies that plagued those living in swamp-like conditions, and published several others on loa loa filariasis and asphyxia before releasing his first full-length book in 1866, De la mort apparente et des inhumations prématurées, which dealt with the definition of death and preceded twentieth-century legal debates on the issue.
After graduating he remained in Paris, teaching himself English and German by reading William Shakespeare’s works in each language. He authored several papers on physiological studies and an 1868 textbook about sexual reproduction before joining the French Army as a medical officer after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870. During the war he organised a division of military ambulances and, in that capacity, observed the behaviour of the military under total defeat, writing reflections on military discipline, leadership, and the behaviour of man in a state of stress and suffering; these reflections earned praise from generals and were later studied at Saint-Cyr and other French military academies. At the war’s end he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He also witnessed the Paris Commune of 1871, looking on as Parisian revolutionary crowds burned down the Tuileries Palace, the library of the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, the Gobelins Manufactory, the Palais de Justice, and other irreplaceable works of architectural art; the experience deeply affected his worldview. From 1871 on he was an avowed opponent of socialist pacifists and protectionists, stating in 1913: “Only people with lots of cannons have the right to be pacifists.” He was therefore uninvolved in the Dreyfus Affair, which dichotomised France.
Anthropology and the Study of Peoples
Le Bon became interested in anthropology in the 1870s and travelled throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Influenced by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel, he supported biological determinism and a hierarchical view of the races and sexes; after extensive field research he posited a correlation between cranial capacity and intelligence in Recherches anatomiques et mathématiques sur les variations de volume du cerveau et sur leurs relations avec l’intelligence (1879), which earned him the Godard Prize from the French Academy of Sciences. During his research he invented a portable cephalometer to aid in measuring the physical characteristics of remote peoples, and in 1881 published a paper, “The Pocket Cephalometer, or Compass of Coordinates”, detailing his invention and its application.
In 1884 he was commissioned by the French government to travel around Asia and report on the civilisations there. The results were a number of books and a development in his thinking toward viewing culture as influenced chiefly by hereditary factors such as the unique racial features of a people. The first book, La Civilisation des Arabes (1884), praised Arabs highly for their contributions to civilisation but criticised Islamism as an agent of stagnation; he described their culture as superior to that of the Turks who governed them, and translations of the work were inspirational to early Arab nationalists. He followed this with a trip to Nepal, becoming the first Frenchman to visit the country, and released Voyage au Népal in 1886. He next published Les Civilisations de l’Inde (1887), applauding Indian architecture, art, and religion but arguing that Indians were comparatively inferior to Europeans in scientific advancements and that this had facilitated British domination. In 1889 he released Les Premières Civilisations de l’Orient, giving an overview of the Mesopotamian, Indian, Chinese, and Egyptian civilisations. The same year he delivered a speech to the International Colonial Congress criticising colonial policies that included attempts at cultural assimilation, stating: “Leave to the natives their customs, their institutions and their laws.” He released the last book on his travels, Les monuments de l’Inde, in 1893, again praising the architectural achievements of the Indian people.
From Horsemanship to Psychology
On his travels Le Bon travelled largely on horseback and noticed that techniques used by horse breeders and trainers varied depending on the region. Returning to Paris, in 1892 he was bucked off a high-spirited horse and narrowly escaped death. Unsure what had caused him to be thrown, he decided to study what he had done wrong as a rider. The result was L’Équitation actuelle et ses principes. Recherches expérimentales (1892), consisting of numerous photographs of horses in action combined with analysis by Le Bon. The work became a respected cavalry manual, and Le Bon extrapolated his studies on the behaviour of horses to develop theories on early childhood education.
This behavioural study of horses also sparked a long-standing interest in psychology. In 1894 he released Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, dedicated to his friend Charles Richet though drawing much from the theories of Théodule-Armand Ribot, to whom Le Bon dedicated Psychologie des Foules (1895). Psychologie des Foules was in part a summation of his 1881 work L’Homme et les sociétés, to which Émile Durkheim referred in his doctoral dissertation De la division du travail social. Both were best-sellers, with Psychologie des Foules translated into nineteen languages within one year of its appearance. He followed these with two more books on psychology, Psychologie du Socialisme and Psychologie de l’Éducation, in 1896 and 1902 respectively; these works rankled the largely socialist academic establishment of France.
Physics, Salons, and the Return to Psychology
Le Bon constructed a home laboratory in the early 1890s, and in 1896 reported observing “black light”, a new kind of radiation he believed distinct from, but possibly related to, X-rays and cathode rays. Not the same type of radiation as what is now known as black light, its existence was never confirmed and, similar to N rays, it is now generally understood to be non-existent, but the discovery claim attracted much attention among French scientists at the time, many of whom supported it and Le Bon’s general ideas on matter and radiation; he was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. In 1902 he began a series of weekly luncheons to which he invited prominent intellectuals, nobles, and ladies of fashion; participants included cousins Henri and Raymond Poincaré, Paul Valéry, Alexander Izvolsky, Henri Bergson, Marcellin Berthelot, and Aristide Briand. In L’Évolution de la Matière (1905) he anticipated the mass–energy equivalence, and in a 1922 letter to Albert Einstein complained about his lack of recognition; Einstein responded and conceded that a mass–energy equivalence had been proposed before him, but only the theory of relativity had cogently proved it. Gaston Moch gave Le Bon credit for anticipating Einstein’s theory of relativity. In L’Évolution des Forces (1907) Le Bon prophesied the Atomic Age, writing about “the manifestation of a new force—namely intra-atomic energy—which surpasses all others by its colossal magnitude,” and stating that a scientist who discovered a way to dissociate rapidly one gram of any metal would “not witness the results of his experiments … the explosion produced would be so formidable that his laboratory and all neighbouring houses, with their inhabitants, would be instantaneously pulverised.”
Le Bon discontinued his research in physics in 1908 and turned again to psychology, releasing La Psychologie politique et la défense sociale, Les Opinions et les croyances, La Révolution Française et la Psychologie des Révolutions, Aphorismes du temps présent, and La Vie des vérités in back-to-back years from 1910 to 1914, expounding in them his views on affective and rational thought, the psychology of race, and the history of civilisation.
Crowd Theory in Detail
Le Bon theorised that the new entity, the “psychological crowd”, which emerges from incorporating the assembled population, not only forms a new body but also creates a collective “unconsciousness”. As a group of people gather and coalesce to form a crowd, there is a “magnetic influence given out by the crowd” that transmutes every individual’s behaviour until it becomes governed by the “group mind”. This model treats the crowd as a unit in its composition which robs every individual member of their opinions, values, and beliefs; as Le Bon states: “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”.
Le Bon detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd: anonymity, contagion, and suggestibility. Anonymity provides rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility; an individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional, and this lack of self-restraint allows individuals to “yield to instincts” and accept the instinctual drives of their “unconscious”. For Le Bon, the crowd inverts Darwin’s law of evolution and becomes atavistic, proving Ernst Haeckel’s embryological theory: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviours, with individuals sacrificing their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which contagion is achieved; as the crowd coalesces into a singular mind, suggestions made by strong voices create a space for the unconscious to come to the forefront and guide behaviour. At this stage the psychological crowd becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. “The leaders we speak of,” says Le Bon, “are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight… They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”
According to Steve Reicher, Le Bon was not the first crowd psychologist: “The first debate in crowd psychology was actually between two criminologists, Scipio Sighele and Gabriel Tarde, concerning how to determine and assign criminal responsibility within a crowd and hence who to arrest.” Le Bon, who also explicitly recognised the positive potential of crowds, viewed the criminological focus of the earlier authors as an unnecessary restriction for the study of crowd psychology.
Later Life, Death, and Wider Influence
Le Bon continued writing throughout World War I, publishing Enseignements Psychologiques de la Guerre Européenne (1915), Premières conséquences de la guerre: transformation mentale des peuples (1916), and Hier et demain. Pensées brèves (1918) during the war. He then released Psychologie des Temps Nouveaux (1920) before resigning from his position as Professor of Psychology and Allied Sciences at the University of Paris and retiring to his home. He released Le Déséquilibre du Monde, Les Incertitudes de l’heure présente, and L’évolution actuelle du monde, illusions et réalités in 1923, 1924, and 1927 respectively, giving in them his views of the world during the volatile interwar period. He became a Grand-Croix of the Legion of Honour in 1929. He published his last work, Bases scientifiques d’une philosophie de l’histoire, in 1931, and on 13 December died in Marnes-la-Coquette, Île-de-France, at the age of ninety. A tribute stated: “In putting an end to the long, diverse and fruitful activity of Gustave Le Bon, death deprived our culture of a truly remarkable man. His was a man of most exceptional intelligence; it sprang entirely from within himself; he was his own master, his own initiator…. Science and philosophy have suffered a cruel loss.”
George Lachmann Mosse claimed that fascist theories of leadership that emerged during the 1920s owed much to Le Bon’s theories of crowd psychology. Adolf Hitler is known to have read The Crowd and in Mein Kampf drew on the propaganda techniques proposed by Le Bon. Benito Mussolini also made a careful study of Le Bon. Le Bon was widely read within the Committee of Union and Progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; philosophical and military leaders who would later lead the Young Turk Revolution, such as Ahmet Rıza and Enver Bey, took inspiration from Le Bon and movements such as Social Darwinism to define their elitist and authoritarian approach to politics, as well as their advocacy of revolution from above. Some commentators have drawn a link between Le Bon and Vladimir Lenin / the Bolsheviks, although the two are polar opposites ideologically. Just prior to World War I, Wilfred Trotter introduced Wilfred Bion to Le Bon’s writings and Sigmund Freud’s work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Trotter’s book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1919) forms the basis for the research of both Wilfred Bion and Ernest Jones, who established what would be called group dynamics. During the first half of the twentieth century, Le Bon’s writings were used by media researchers such as Hadley Cantril and Herbert Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was influenced by Le Bon and Trotter; in his influential book Propaganda, he declared that a major feature of democracy was the manipulation of the electorate by the mass media and advertising. Some have claimed that Theodore Roosevelt, Charles G. Dawes, and many other American progressives in the early twentieth century were also deeply affected by Le Bon’s writings.
