About the Work
The Psychology of Socialism is a work of social and political psychology by Gustave Le Bon, published by The Macmillan Co. of New York and preserved in the Cornell University Library collection through the Sage Endowment Fund. The edition opens with a French dedication to Paul Delombre, Deputy and Minister of Commerce, Industry, Posts, and Telegraphs, signed by Le Bon as his devoted friend. In his preface, Le Bon presents the book as an application of principles he had developed in two earlier works, The Psychology of Peoples and The Psychology of the Crowd. He explains that he intends to pass over doctrinal details and retain only essentials, examining the causes that gave birth to Socialism and those that favor or retard its spread. His central concern is the conflict between ancient ideas fixed by heredity and the new ideas born of modern science and industry.
“No apostle has ever doubted of the future of his faith, and the Socialists are persuaded of the approaching triumph of theirs.”
Le Bon writes as a psychologist rather than as an economist or a moralist. He notes that Socialism has had its apologists, its economists, and its apostles, but that psychologists have disdained the subject as elusive, like theology and politics. Only a psychology of intent, he argues, can exhibit the genesis of the new doctrines and explain their influence over both vulgar and cultivated minds. The book is therefore not a treatise on economic theory but an inquiry into why a set of doctrines that Le Bon considers economically feeble can nonetheless command the devotion of millions. It is written in a confident, sweeping, often prophetic register, moving between historical generalization, contemporary observation, and psychological analysis.
Context
The book belongs to a period of intense social and political ferment in Europe, when Socialist parties were growing rapidly, when the memory of the 1848 revolutions was still alive, and when the possibility of a Socialist seizure of power seemed to many observers both imminent and catastrophic. Le Bon refers repeatedly to the hopeful declarations of Socialists fifty years earlier, at the time of the 1848 revolution, when they believed a new age had been born and the face of the world would change. Instead, their country sank into despotism and then into a formidable war and invasion. Scarcely half a century later, Le Bon observes, society prepares to repeat the same round, forgetful of the lesson.
The book is also written in the shadow of a broader intellectual crisis. Le Bon describes the present age as a transition in which old beliefs have lost their empire and replacements have not been established. Man cannot live without divinities, he writes; fallen gods’ thrones never remain empty, and new phantoms rise from the dust of dead gods. Science has never disputed the prodigious empire of the gods, and no civilization has established itself without them. The flourishing civilizations of the past were propped up by religious dogmas lacking logic, truth, or good sense, yet reason and logic have never truly guided nations. It is in this vacuum of belief that Socialism appears, at a rare moment when old religions lose their might and men, weary of their gods, exist only on sufferance, awaiting a successor.
Le Bon’s frame of reference is comparative and racial. He contrasts the Latin peoples—France, Spain, Italy, and their descendants—with the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples, arguing that the same doctrines take different forms and have different fates depending on the race that receives them. He draws on contemporary events: the Franco-Russian alliance, the Spanish-American war, the Dreyfus-era atmosphere of French politics, the growth of the German Social Democratic Party, the cooperative and trade-union institutions of England, and the vast expansion of the English-speaking peoples. The book is thus both a work of theory and a document of its time, saturated with the anxieties and assumptions of the late nineteenth century.
Structure of the Book
The work is organized into six Books, each addressing a distinct facet of the problem. Book I, “The Socialistic Theories and Their Disciples,” examines the various aspects of Socialism, the origin of Socialism and the causes of its present development, the theories themselves, and the mental state of their disciples. Book II, “Socialism as a Belief,” turns to the foundations of our beliefs, tradition as a factor of civilization and the limits of the variability of the ancestral soul, and the evolution of Socialism toward a religious form. Book III, “Socialism as Affected by Race,” surveys Socialism in Germany, in England and America, and among the Latin peoples, devoting separate chapters to the Latin conception of the State, the Latin concepts of education and religion, the formation of Socialism among the Latin peoples, and the present state of the Latin peoples.
Book IV, “The Conflict Between Economic Necessities and Socialist Aspirations,” examines the industrial and economic evolution of the modern world, the economic struggles between East and West, the economic struggles among the Western peoples, and the relation between economic necessities and the growth of populations. Book V, “The Conflict Between the Laws of Evolution, the Democratic Ideal, and Socialist Aspirations,” addresses the laws of evolution and the democratic ideal, the sources and division of wealth in intelligence, capital, and labor, the conflict of peoples and classes, social solidarity, the fundamental problem of Socialism in the unadapted, and the struggle with the unadapted. Book VI, “The Destinies of Socialism,” closes the work with chapters on the limits of historical prevision and the future of Socialism.
The movement of the book is thus from doctrine to psychology, from psychology to race, from race to economics, from economics to evolutionary law, and finally to prophecy. Each Book narrows the focus while widening the frame of reference, so that the fate of Socialism is ultimately presented as a function of forces far larger than any political program: the laws of heredity, the competition of races, the growth of populations, and the slow formation and dissolution of beliefs.
Inside the Book
The Bookplate, Title Page, and Dedication
The edition opens with the Cornell University Library bookplate and acquisition notice, recording that the volume came through the Sage Endowment Fund as a gift of Henry M. Sage in 1892, with call number HX266 and no known copyright restrictions. The title page names Gustave Le Bon as author, published by The Macmillan Co. of New York, and carries a French dedication to Paul Delombre, Deputy and Minister of Commerce, Industry, Posts, and Telegraphs, signed by Le Bon as his devoted friend.
The Preface: Socialism as a Belief
Le Bon defines Socialism as a synthesis of beliefs, aspirations, and reform ideas that appeals profoundly to the mind; governments fear it, legislators manipulate it, and nations see in it happier destinies. He states that the book applies principles from his earlier works, The Psychology of Peoples and The Psychology of the Crowd. He will pass over doctrinal details, retaining essentials, and examine the causes giving birth to Socialism and those favoring or retarding its spread, showing the conflict between ancient heredity-fixed ideas and new ideas born of modern science and industry. Without contesting the lawfulness of the majority’s wish to improve their condition, he asks whether institutions can really effect such amelioration, or whether destinies are decided by necessities independent of created institutions. Socialism has had apologists, economists, and apostles, but psychologists have disdained it as elusive like theology and politics; only intent psychology can exhibit the genesis of the new doctrines and explain their influence over vulgar and cultivated minds.
A Socialist victory, he argues, implies destruction of present society and reconstruction on new bases; a society may be disorganized by violence like a building burned in an hour, but can man re-fashion it at will? Civilizations are tissues of ideas, sentiments, customs, and modes of thought determined by heredity; no society is firmly held unless this moral heritage is established in men’s natures, not codes. Latin States’ writers and peoples have never accepted this conception, believing enlightened constitutions and rational laws can re-fashion the world, still possessed by illusions of the Revolution’s heroic epoch when philosophers and legislators held society an artificial thing benevolent dictators could rebuild. Such theories seem untenable today, yet constitute motives of a destructive influence greatly to be feared; creation waits on time and place, destruction is always at hand; destruction may be rapid, reconstruction always slow, sometimes requiring centuries.
Socialism’s success is alien to its proposed theories and negations; like religions (and it tends to assume a religious guise) it propagates by any means rather than reason; feeble when reasoning economically, powerful in dreams, affirmations, chimerical promises. Thanks to promises of regeneration and hope for the disinherited, Socialism becomes a belief of religious character; the power of such beliefs lies in propagation independent of truth or error; once lodged, absurdity no longer appears, reason cannot reach it, only time impairs it. Leibnitz, Descartes, and Newton bowed before religious doctrines whose weaknesses reason would have found. What enters sentiment cannot be touched by discussion; religions act on sentiments and cannot be destroyed by arguments, hence their absolute power. The present age is a transition when old beliefs lost empire and replacements are not established; man cannot live without divinities; fallen gods’ thrones never remain empty; new phantoms rise from dead gods’ dust. Science has never disputed the gods’ prodigious empire; no civilization established itself without them; flourishing civilizations were propped by religious dogmas lacking logic, truth, or good sense. Reason and logic never truly guided nations; the irrational is a powerful motive. Religions founded on chimeras marked civilizations indelibly and retain most men; philosophical systems built on reason played insignificant, ephemeral parts, offering only arguments while the soul demands hopes. Religions gave hopes and an ideal; under their wand empires were created and literature and art rose from chaos.
Socialism, dreaming to substitute itself for ancient faiths, proposes a very low ideal and appeals to lower sentiments—promising merely daily bread at the price of hard labor, raising the soul with envy and hatred, proposing equality of condition to crowds no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, ignoring that social inequalities are born of natural inequalities man has always been powerless to change. Such feeble beliefs should spread little, yet they do, because man transforms things to his desires through a magical prism; each perceives in Socialism what founders never put there—the priest sees universal charity, the slave glimpses paradise, the enormous legion of the discontented hopes for amelioration. The sum of dreams, discontents, and hopes endows the new faith with incontestable power. Socialism appeared at a rare moment when old religions lose might, men weary of their gods, existing only on sufferance awaiting a successor; Socialism tends to possess their place. Nothing shows it will not succeed in taking it; everything shows it will not keep it long.
The Contents: Six Books
The Contents list six Books: Book I, The Socialistic Theories and Their Disciples, with chapters on various aspects, origin and causes, theories, and disciples and mental state; Book II, Socialism as a Belief, on the foundations of beliefs, tradition as a factor of civilization and the limits of variability of the ancestral soul, and the evolution toward religious form; Book III, Socialism as Affected by Race, covering Germany, England and America, Latin Socialism and the psychology of Latin peoples, the Latin conception of the State, Latin concepts of education and religion, the formation of Socialism among Latin peoples, and the present state of Latin peoples; Book IV, Conflict Between Economic Necessities and Socialist Aspirations, on industrial and economic evolution, economic struggles East and West and among Western peoples, and economic necessities and population growth; Book V, Conflict Between Laws of Evolution, Democratic Ideal, and Socialist Aspirations, on the laws of evolution, the sources and division of wealth—intelligence, capital, labor—the conflict of peoples and classes, social solidarity, and the fundamental problem of Socialism: the unadapted.
The Unchanging Laws of Human Nature
The text opens by reflecting on the apparent antiquity of historical events involving the Greeks, Romans, and Jews, arguing that they remain perpetually young because they reveal the unchanging laws of human nature. Humanity ages but continues to pursue the same dreams and suffer the same experiences without learning from them. The author cites the hopeful declarations of Socialists fifty years prior, at the time of the 1848 revolution, of which they were the most valiant partisans. They believed a new age was born and the world’s face would change; instead, their country sank into despotism and, a few years later, into a formidable war and invasion. Scarcely half a century later, forgetful of this lesson, society prepares to repeat the same round.
The Causes of the Present Development of Socialism
Modern complaints, the author argues, are a repetition of the plaint uttered by fathers, but louder because the progress of civilisation has rendered sensibility keener. Conditions of existence are far better than of old, yet people are less and less satisfied. Despoiled of beliefs and having no perspective other than austere duty and dismal solidarity, disquieted by upheavals and instability caused by industrial transformations, and seeing social institutions crumble, modern man attaches himself eagerly to the present. Interested only in himself, he wishes to rejoice in the present hour. In default of lost illusions, he must enjoy well-being and consequently riches. Wealth becomes more necessary because industry and sciences have created luxuries that have become necessaries. The thirst for riches becomes general while the number among whom wealth is divided increases.
Faith That Cannot Be Argued Away
Le Bon opens by insisting that the blind, unshakable faith we associate with heroic ages is not a thing of the past. Many people inherit a “mystic stock” that breeds belief upon belief, immune to every argument. The small sects that have sprung up over the last quarter-century—Spiritualism, Theosophy, Esoterism—mirror those of dying Paganism and claim countless disciples in exactly this mental state. His favourite illustration is the spirit-photographs affair: a photographer named B. publicly confessed that all his phantom pictures were made by photographing dummies, and even displayed the dummies—yet his credulous clients energetically insisted they recognised in the photographs the features of their dead relatives. This “marvellous obstinacy of faith” is, for Le Bon, profoundly instructive about the power of belief.
Beliefs as the Soul of Civilisation
The past, he argues, is what elaborates faiths: a new belief can only take root by attaching itself to an anterior one. An established belief gives a people common sentiments, thoughts, and words—an identity of ideas that marks every element of a civilisation and is perhaps the most powerful factor in creating a national soul. Great civilisations are the logical efflorescence of a small number of beliefs, and a nation’s decadence begins when those common beliefs dissociate. A shared faith unites manifold individual desires so that a nation acts as a single individual; the great periods of history coincide with a universal belief establishing itself. Even a transitory belief confers formidable strength—the French at the Revolution, animated by a faith that could not last because it could not fulfil its promises, nonetheless struggled victoriously against all Europe in arms.
The Regulator of Judgment
Once securely established, a belief becomes the regulator of life, the touchstone of judgment, the director of intelligence; the mind receives nothing new that does not conform to it. Like Christianity in the Middle Ages and Islam among the Arabs, the prevailing faith imprints philosophy, literature, and the arts, explaining everything. Comprehension, Le Bon notes, means carrying the unknown to the known—coordinating a fact with the small number of ideas already possessed—and every brain does this according to its subconscious concepts. Because perceptions are co-related to ancestral conceptions, races judge differently; we perceive things only by deforming them according to our beliefs.
Words That Do Not Mean the Same Thing
Beliefs transformed into sentiments govern the sense we attach to words. The same terms—religion, liberty, republic, property, capital, labour—evoke profoundly separated mental representations across centuries, races, and sexes. Different classes of one society, and individuals of different sex, seem to speak the same language only in appearance; the nuances of signification are as numerous as the social and mental categories employing them, sometimes producing absolute incomprehension. Classes and nations are separated by divergence of conception as much as of interests, so conflict—not chimerical concord—is the dominant fact of history, and discordance can only increase as civilisation differentiates men more and more. Between a feudal baron and his least retainer there was far less mental difference than today between an engineer and the labourer he directs. Agreement is possible only on technical subjects free of instinctive sentiments; in morals, religion, and politics it is impossible unless individuals share the same origin—and then they agree not by reasoning but by identity of conceptions. Persuasion is never rooted in reason: when people gather to debate politics, religion, or morals, “they are the dead, not the living, who discuss.” A footnote calls this deformation of concepts according to race, age, sex, and education one of psychology’s least explored questions, and mentions that Le Bon sketched the programme of such a study for a young psychologist, M. E. Renoult, who lives among the lower classes and has furnished interesting documents, notably on the psychology of the working man.
The Difficulty of Understanding One Another
Penetrating minds of differing types is perhaps the most arduous effort of thought—difficult even with compatriots differing in age, sex, or education, and far more so with men of another race separated by centuries. To make another understand, one must speak in his own tongue, with the nuances of his personal conceptions; one may live for years beside another without understanding him, as parents do by their children. Usual psychology wrongly assumes all men experience identical sentiments under similar influences. We can never see things as they really are, only states of consciousness created by our senses, and the deformation varies by race, sex, and environment—so an almost total incomprehension qualifies relations between individuals of different race, sex, or environment. They may employ the same words but never speak the same language. Yet we suspect no deformation in ourselves and cannot admit that others think and act otherwise than we do. This incomprehension results in absolute intolerance, especially regarding beliefs and opinions resting on sentiments: those professing different opinions in religion, morals, art, or politics become in our eyes dubious characters or lamentable imbeciles.
The Laporte Case: Opinion Invades the Courts
Le Bon then turns to Dr. Laporte as one of the most curious examples of popular opinion invading courts formerly presided over by firm characters. Called out at night to an extremely difficult accouchement, lacking the necessary instruments and seeing his patient near death, Laporte used an iron instrument borrowed from a workman nearby—differing from the classic instrument only in insignificant details. Because it did not come from a surgeon’s case, a mysterious thing enjoying prestige, neighbourhood gossips declared him an ignorant fool and a butcher. They stirred up the neighbours; the rumour spread; the papers recorded it; public opinion grew indignant; a magistrate committed the doctor to prison, and a tribunal condemned him to a new imprisonment after a long remand. Eminent specialists then took up the affair and entirely reversed public opinion; within weeks the murderer had become a martyr. The case went to the Court of Appeal, and the magistrates, following public opinion, acquitted the accused. The danger of such tides is that they act unconsciously on ideas and modify them without our suspecting it: the magistrates who condemned Laporte and those who acquitted him both obeyed public opinion without realising it, their subconsciousness transformed to follow it, their reason merely finding justifications for a reversal that had taken place unknown to themselves.
Opinion, the Press, and the Instability of Governments
These popular movements deprive all governments of stability in conduct. Public opinion decrees alliances—the Franco-Russian, for example, arising from an explosion of national enthusiasm—and declares war, as in the Spanish-American war, born of a movement created by journalists and financiers. The American writer Mr. Godkin, in Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy, denounces the lamentable part American papers play regarding public opinion, most being in the pay of advertisers and speculators; a prospective war, he says, will always be favoured by journals because new soldiers, victorious or defeated, will enormously increase sales. The book was written before the war in Cuba, which showed how just were his previsions. The journals direct opinion in the United States, but a few financiers direct the journals from their office chairs—a power more evil than that of the worst tyrants, for it is anonymous and guided by sole personal interest. One of the great problems of the future will be to escape the sovereign and demoralising power of cosmopolitan financiers, who tend more and more to become indirect masters of public opinion and consequently of governments.
The Decline of the Latin Peoples and the Rise of New Criteria
Le Bon opens this stretch by arguing that the qualities once decisive for civilisation—wit, elegant speech, chivalrous manners, literary and artistic aptitude—were precisely those in which the Latin peoples excelled, and for centuries this excellence kept them in the lead. But the industrial, geographic, and economic evolution of the modern age has shifted what national superiority requires: enduring energy, enterprise, and method. These the Latin nations scarcely possess, and so they have steadily yielded ground to those who do.
The education imposed on Latin youth, he continues, is finishing the work of destroying what remains of persistent will-power, perseverance, enterprise, and above all self-control—the capacity to dispense with a master. Repeated negative selection has decimated the most energetic, active, and independent minds. Spain’s Inquisition ground down her best elements across centuries; France’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Revolution, the Empire, and the civil wars destroyed her most enterprising sons. The feeble population growth of most Latin peoples compounds the decay—harmless in itself if the best reproduced, since a nation’s strength lies in quality, not number, but disastrous because the weakest and most imprudent maintain the numbers.
Fouillée, Lapouge, and the Lessons of Rome
M. Fouillée is invoked to sharpen the point: France practises Darwinism backwards, relying for population on the selection of inferior types. The wealthier classes, who rose through work and intelligence, eliminate themselves by voluntary sterility, while imprudence, idleness, insanity, and misery breed prolifically. A stock-breeder proceeding thus, Le Bon notes, would degenerate his own herds. M. Lapouge’s recent study of Rome reaches analogous conclusions: comparing great Roman families at two-hundred-year intervals, the most illustrious old houses have vanished, replaced by inferior families drawn from every class, even freedmen. Cicero lamented the decay of Roman virtue but forgot how few pure-blood Romans remained in the city and Senate—for one scion of the Quirites there were ten mongrel Latins and ten Etruscans. Once Rome was thrown open to every nation, the citizen title lost its lustre, borne by more sons of the vanquished than of the conquerors, and pure-blood Romans disappeared.
By contrast, the Anglo-Saxon race advanced because selection worked toward progress rather than in reverse. The United States were peopled by the most independent and energetic emigrants of Europe, above all England, and emigrating with family to a distant land of hostile nations demanded virile character. Le Bon insists—as in his later books—that nations are effaced from history not by diminution of intelligence but by weakening of character, a truth verified by the Greeks and Romans and tending to verify itself again.
Kidd on Character and the Colonial Duel
Mr. Benjamin Kidd, an English writer, is cited on the differences dividing Anglo-Saxon from Frenchman. Kidd grants that France probably holds the largest Celtic leaven and can claim a rank a degree higher in certain intellectual characteristics than any other Western people; French intellect has left its mark on Western politics, art, and higher thought, and conscientious observers feel in it a distinctly high order largely wanting in the German or English mind. Yet Kidd insists on the greater social importance of character over intelligence. On the colonial struggle of the later eighteenth century—one of history’s most stupendous duels, waged across Europe, India, Africa, North America, and the high seas—appearances favoured the more brilliant race, superior in armaments, resources, and population. In 1789 Britain had 9,600,000 people to France’s 26,000,000, and a smaller revenue besides. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, the English-speaking peoples had expanded to 101,000,000 while the French scarcely reached 40,000,000, and the former had succeeded at almost every point, holding the lands best suited to European races and facing no limit to their expansion.
The Schools of State Socialism
The pupils trained under minute regulation, Le Bon argues, learn to forecast their time almost to the minute and are thereby prepared for the uniformity of thought and action State Socialism demands. They acquire a horror of originality and personal effort, suspicion of anything unspecialised, and a reverent admiration for hierarchies and gold braid. All initiative is extinguished; though such pupils may occasionally rebel, they will never be persistent rebels. The école normale, the lycées, and similar institutions are the most admirable schools of levelling State Socialism, and it is thanks to them that society tends ever more toward that government. Only by studying the Latin system of education can one understand Socialism’s success among the Latins.
Michel Bréal is quoted on primary instruction: the half-knowledge it gives recruits soldiers for disorder as surely as ignorance—far more surely, Le Bon adds, citing rising criminality, alcoholism, and anarchy among the young men these colleges turn out. Renan is quoted on the University of France, too like the orators of the Decadence, its disease of peroration fostered by disdaining the fountain-heads of knowledge and esteeming nothing but style. Paul Bert is quoted on the injurious ignorance of the bourgeoisie. M. C. Lauth writes that education has taken a wrong path, the Abstract stifling all sense of application, the whole system bad from top to bottom. A happy symptom appears: a very small number of University functionaries begin to see the absurdity of classical education. M. Jules Lemaitre is quoted at length—despite twenty-five years of tinkering, secondary classical instruction remains what it was under the ancien régime, only taught worse, a shameless anachronism in a democratic and industrial society. Professor Bain of Aberdeen had proven long before that studying Greek and Latin exercises nothing but memory, and proposed limiting them to an hour a week for two years. M. Léon Bourgeois asks whether making the Latin heritage the race’s sole treasure would not be to stultify it. The only serious argument professors can invoke, Le Bon says, is that it lets them make a living. When Lemaitre noted their imperfect Greek, a professor replied that they need only enough to decipher texts patiently at home with lexicon and annotated editions—a confession that would see a German or English teacher shown the door. A footnote mocks the University’s inability to teach any tongue at all.
State Socialism as the Latin Racial Destiny
State Socialism, closely related to Collectivism, is not a revolutionary doctrine but the culmination of long-standing French institutions—a highly retrograde creed whose followers are timid reactionaries developing ancient Latin traditions. Defined as the centralisation of all national life in the Government’s hands, it is the most characteristic and obstinate conception of Latin societies, and it grows daily. Once limited to political functions, State absorption extended to industry, and as industry became preponderant, political authority intervened in every branch. The State directs important enterprises and holds monopolies over instruction, telegraphs, telephones, tobacco, and matches; it subsidises railways, shipping, sugar, silk, and agriculture—hardly an industry fails to claim its protection. Every party agrees on this point. A department wanting funds for a local industry applies to the State; a town wanting a local railway applies to the State; a seaport wanting improvements applies to the State. Nowhere is there a trace of private enterprise or association.
M. P.
Italy, Spain, and the Spread of Socialist Discontent
Ferrero’s portrait of Italy frames the country as standing at the threshold of a superior civilisation: new wants have taken hold, and Italians long to embellish life with comfort and culture, yet their means fall short. The passage asks what disillusions, rage, and vexation must fill the daily existence of most men under such conditions, and concludes that reckoning the prodigious sum of irritability gathering in society makes the terrible instability of its equilibrium comprehensible. Socialism, the author argues, develops most easily among individuals whose needs are very great but who lack the capacity or energy to satisfy them; it offers itself as a remedy for all evils, and for this reason Italy seems fatally destined to suffer the most dangerous Socialistic experiments.
Spain supplies the contrast. The craving for luxury, enjoyment, and splendour is one of the greatest differences between the two nations. In external civilisation Spain lags far behind Italy, but her middle and lower strata have little to complain of: their requirements have not multiplied and remain easily satisfied. Because means of communication, especially railways, are little developed, whole provinces remain isolated and retain their ancient manner of existence; needs are small, luxury unknown, local produce suffices. Setting aside large towns and external luxury—the only things known because the only ones that make themselves heard—Spain possesses a civilisation little refined but entirely suited to her mental evolution. Socialism therefore cannot seriously threaten her.
The Morality of the Directing Classes
Among most Latin peoples, few but the so-called directing classes grow eager for expensive refinements of civilisation. This aspiration is allowable when one is confident of the intelligence and energy needed to procure them, and far less allowable when energy and intelligence are inferior to the development of requirements. When people wish to make a fortune at any price and their capacities do not permit satisfaction of the desire, they have little regard for means; honesty becomes elastic and demoralisation becomes general, as in most Latin nations. There the morality of the directing classes often falls far below that of the populace—one of the most dangerous symptoms of decadence, for if civilisations advance through the upper classes, they also perish through them.
The term “morality” is vague and embraces dissimilar things, so the author employs it in the sense of simple honesty, the habit of respecting engagements, and the sentiment of duty—the sense used by an English author already quoted, who showed that through these modest qualities the English rapidly revolutionised the credit of Egypt and rendered their colonial finances prosperous. Criminal statistics, registering only extreme cases, must not be used to determine a nation’s morality; detail is indispensable. The financial bankruptcy of so many Latin peoples is a barometrical sign indicating a final state reached by successive steps. To form a reliable opinion one must enter each country’s intimate life, study the administration of financial societies, commercial manners, the independence or venality of justice, the probity of lawyers and officials. Only a few dozen persons in Europe are perfectly informed on these subjects; the surest route is to consult leading men of business—contractors, manufacturers, engineers—with close relations to commerce, administration, and legislatures. A contractor building railways, tramways, gas and electric light works in many countries will tell which countries allow everyone to be bought, which few are bought, and which absolutely no one is bought. A footnote limits the author to saying that among Latin nations, excepting a few politicians, financiers, and journalists, France has the greatest probity in administration and justice; her magistracy is often narrow and yields too readily to political pressure, but has remained honest, while French industrial and commercial morality is sometimes dubious. Conversely, there are countries where venality and lack of probity have reached a degree where such vices no longer seek to dissimulate themselves.
France’s Fatigue and the Adoption of Latin Concepts
The examination of Latin peoples is incomplete without France, whose part in the world was formerly brilliant and preponderant. She still holds out against decadence but is badly shaken. In one century she has known all a nation can know: the bloodiest revolutions, glory, disaster, civil war, invasion, and but little repose. What she most visibly experiences is a fatigue and indifference seemingly amounting to exhaustion. A German pamphleteer quoted by la France extérieure wrote that compared with the same class in England and Germany, the French bourgeoisie give the impression of a person well advanced in years: individual initiative decaying, the spirit of enterprise paralysed, craving for repose and sedentary occupations increasing, investments in State funds increasing, functionaries multiplying, energy and the sentiment of authority, justice, and religion diminishing, interest in public affairs diminishing, expenditure and imports increasing, infiltration of foreigners increasing. The author says that in studying the commercial and industrial struggles of the Western peoples, we shall see to what degree these assertions are unhappily justified.
Examples of peoples in an inferior state of civilisation suddenly adopting in entirety the institutions of other peoples are rare in modern times; only Greece and Japan can be cited. Greece presents the interesting phenomenon of a nation adopting Latin concepts en bloc, notably education. The results are extremely striking and have not yet attracted the attention they deserve.
Instability, Economic Necessity, and the Socialist Illusion
Setting aside speculation about future discoveries, the last fifty years have changed conditions of existence so daily and precipitately that society must undergo transformations far more rapid than the mental state produced by long, gradual inheritance. Instability is replacing the stability of centuries everywhere. The present age is therefore both destructive and creative: no past ideas or conditions of life seem able to survive changes determined by science and industry. The difficulty of adapting lies in habits and sentiments changing slowly while external circumstances change too quickly for old conceptions to persist. No one can say what social state will emerge, but it is clear that the phenomena most important to the life of States, and the very condition of their progress, are increasingly subtracted from their will and ruled by economic and industrial necessities over which they are powerless. The claims of the Socialists will appear more and more contrary to the economic evolution preparing itself without them and beyond their reach; they will nonetheless have to comply with it, as with all natural fatalities.
The Economic Struggle Between East and West
The chapter on the economic struggles between East and West opens by stating that the economic and industrial evolution of the world has overturned old conditions of human existence. Socialists show complete ignorance of the necessities dominating the modern world, reasoning as though the universe were limited to their own country. Isolation was possible centuries ago but not today. The role of governors is increasingly conditioned by economic phenomena of remote origin, independent of statesmen’s doings, to which they must submit; the art of government now consists in adapting to external necessities that desires cannot affect. A country is always a country, but science, industry, and economic relations now form one single world whose laws are rigorous because imposed by necessities, not codes. Economic events in distant parts may force even the most removed nation to transform its agriculture, industrial processes, manufacture, commercial customs, and consequently its institutions and laws. Government action therefore tends to become more feeble and uncertain—one of the most characteristic phenomena of the present age.
The problem illustrates how superficial and impossible of realisation are Socialist formulae for universal happiness. Reduction of distances by steam and industrial evolution have brought the Orient to our doors and transformed its inhabitants into competitors with the West. These competitors, formerly buyers of Western products, began making them once they possessed Western machines, and now want to sell to us rather than buy from us.
Population, Emigration, and the Malthusian Check
Le Bon opens with relief that the statisticians’ lamentations over population have not added a single inhabitant to his country, congratulating himself on the complete futility of their discourses. Were an offended Deity to inflict the worst calamity on France, He would not choose war, plague, or cholera—ephemeral ills—but would simply double the population, which under present economic conditions and French psychology would mean irremediable disaster: bloody revolution, hopeless misery, the assured triumph of Socialism, permanent wars, incessant invasions. England and Germany escape this because they possess colonies and regard emigration as highly desirable; the taste for emigration, first a consequence of excess population, becomes in turn a cause that further increases it. Stanley’s observations, published in a journal, fix the threshold: Great Britain had 130 inhabitants per square mile in 1801, and when this reached 224 in 1841 emigration began and rapidly increased; Germany sought colonies at the same density; Italy, thanks to her sobriety, waited until 253, then spent £8,000,000 in Africa only to end in humiliating defeat, and must recommence on pain of ruin. Present figures are England 300, Italy 282, Germany 254, France 187, Spain 92. France, far less densely populated, has no need of emigration, and it is deplorable that she spends her young men’s strength in Tonkin, Madagascar, and Dahomey while Algeria and Tunis, with only 25 inhabitants per square mile, lie at her doors unable to be populated. Stanley’s conclusions echo Malthus, who demonstrated the close relation between population and subsistence, and that when equilibrium is deranged, famine, war, and pestilence restore it through mortality. The English verified this in India: after conquest brought profound peace, population increased enormously—33 millions in twenty years—and, unable to be reduced by wars, tends to be reduced by periodic famines and epidemics, gigantic hecatombs each destroying as many men as all Napoleon’s wars, at which Europe looks on philosophically because it concerns Orientals. Statisticians should learn they err in preaching multiplication; Socialists should learn that remedies often have remote consequences more distressing than the ills they were meant to cure. In future economic evolution, the happiest lot will belong to scantily populated countries; over-populated nations living only by commerce and industry will be most threatened, while France, agricultural and nearly self-sufficient, will suffer far less from the coming crisis that Socialist triumph would quickly precipitate.
The Laws of Evolution and the Democratic Ideal
The chapter opens by outlining its three sections: the relations between living things and their surroundings, the conflict between natural laws of evolution and democratic conceptions, and the conflict between the democratic ideal and Socialist aspirations. Naturalists long ago proved that all living things’ existence is rigorously conditioned by environment, and a slight prolonged modification suffices to transform inhabitants entirely; embryology shows the profound changes undergone during geologic ages. The argument then turns to the vices attributed to democracy, which are inherent to all democracies rather than a racial defect, citing France and, to a greater degree, the United States. In America the intellectual and moral level of the specially qualified class of politicians declines daily, threatening the future of the Great Republic, because capable men disdain political functions, which are exercised only by the diclasses of all parties—an inconvenience less severe than in Europe because the Government’s role is small. America also exhibits democracy’s greatest danger: venality, which has reached its highest development there. Corruption pervades every degree of public service; hardly an election, concession, or privilege cannot be obtained for money. A presidential election costs £8,000,000, advanced by the plutocracy, and the winning party is repaid largely besides; all functionaries are discharged at once and replaced by electors of the new party, while unplaced partisans receive electoral pensions now reaching nearly £32,000,000 annually. Party chiefs and large speculators feather their nests royally: twenty years earlier, at an election’s end, it was decreed they might exchange metallic silver for gold at the Treasury on the old basis, depositing silver bought for £12 to yield gold worth £20—a colossal piracy so ruinous it was limited to £10,000,000 annually and finally suspended when bankruptcy threatened. France made an uproar over the Panama affair, dishonouring itself over a few thousand-franc bills, which Americans could not understand, since every politician had done the same and none was satisfied with such insignificant recompense; compared with American houses, the French Parliament rejoices in Catonian virtue. There is no excuse for American financial manners, yet since Americans accommodate themselves to them without dishonour, they must correspond to a certain ideal. In America—without traditions, devoted to commerce and industry, with perfect equality and no social hierarchy, all important employments including the magistracy incessantly renewed—only one distinction exists: fortune. An individual’s worth, power, and social position are measured solely by dollars, and all means are good means. Politics is regarded as a trade that ought to remunerate largely, and the public accepts this entirely, voting for politicians most notorious for pillage. Politics as commerce implies syndicates, hence the power of associations like Tammany Hall, exploiting New York’s finances for over fifty years—a freemasonry nominating the municipality’s servants, magistrates, police agents, and contractors, all obeying the supreme head blindly. Once only, in 1894, it failed to keep itself in power; the inquiry revealed incredible depredations, and under William Tweed the total stolen amounted to £32,000,000. After a short eclipse the syndicate regained all power, reportedly spending £1,400,000 at the last elections to nominate its candidate mayor, a sum easily repaid since the mayor disposes of an annual budget of £16,000,000. Any other nation would be quickly disorganised by such morals, as in the Latin republics of America, but the United States population possesses sovereign energy triumphing over all obstacles; when financiers and prevaricators embarrass them too much, they will lynch a few dozen to make others reflect on virtue’s utility. This demoralisation has affected only the special class of American politicians, barely touching commercial and industrial classes, and its effects are narrowly limited because Government intervention in business is very slight, unlike the almost universal intervention of Latin nations—which explains American democracy’s vitality versus the feeble vitality of Latin democracies. The Latin republics show the fate awaiting democracy in nations without strength of will, morality, or energy: love of authority, intolerance, contempt of law, ignorance of practical questions, and inveterate taste for pillage develop; anarchy follows, and to anarchy always succeeds dictatorship.
Sources and Division of Wealth
The passage opens with a hypothetical: if the fortune of France, given as 8,800,000,000, were divided equally among its 38,000,000 inhabitants, and if this fortune could be realized in money—plainly impossible, since only about 300,000,000 exists as money, the rest being houses, factories, land, and objects—and if property values did not vanish within twenty-four hours, each individual would receive a capital of about 220. Even granting these impossibilities, incapacity and waste on one side and capacity, thrift, and energy on the other would soon re-establish inequality.
Solidarity Against Charity
Le Bon defines solidarity narrowly: it is mere association, and he pointedly excludes charity and altruism from its meaning. Charity he calls a noxious and anti-social sentiment; altruism, artificial and impotent. The useful works of solidarity — insurance and mutual-aid societies, pension societies, co-operatives — rest not on benevolence but on the combined interests of people who may never have met. A subscriber pays an annual sum and receives a pension proportional to it in sickness or old age: a privilege bought, like fire insurance, not a favour received. He may profit more than he paid, but so may every member, and he owes nothing to any man. Le Bon insists on the profound difference between associations of interest, guided by calculation of probabilities, and works of charity, which rest on hypothetical good wishes and uncertain altruism. Charity, lacking any possible supervision, supports a class that exploits pity to live in idleness, prevents the destitute from working, and multiplies professional mendicity. Its countless associations occupy unemployed old ladies and idle men of the world seeking cheap salvation as presidents, secretaries, and treasurers, procuring the illusion of usefulness. A footnote recounts his own experiment: joining the most important such charity, he submitted the simplest cases — able individuals temporarily unemployed, ready to accept the lowest wages — and not one obtained a place; sent to ordinary employment bureaux, which make no philanthropic pretensions, they found modest situations within days. Private interest proved far more effectual than noisy, decorated philanthropy.
The Rise of Solidarity
Le Bon calls the movement for solidarity — the association of similar interests — perhaps the most definite of the new social tendencies, likely to have the greatest effect on evolution. The word is heard far oftener than the old shibboleths equality and fraternity, and tends to supplant them, though it is by no means synonymous. Since the final object of associating interests is to struggle against other interests, solidarity is only a particular form of the universal conflict of classes and individuals; it reduces old dreams of fraternity to the narrow limits of associations. Its causes lie in the abatement of individual will and initiative, and in the uselessness of those qualities under modern economic conditions, where isolated action is rarely possible and effort can exert itself almost only through collectivities. A profounder cause: modern man has lost his gods, sees his home threatened, no longer has faith in the future, and needs something to lean on. Association replaces the individual’s impotent egoism with a collective, powerful egoism by which everyone profits. It is almost the only means remaining to the weak — the greater number — to struggle against the powerful and be not too greatly oppressed. Lords, feudal, financial, or industrial, have never troubled much about those below them; neither religions nor laws have combated this oppression with stronger weapons than empty words. Solidarity is the weak’s best arm for effacing somewhat the consequences of social inequality. Far from contradicting natural laws, it is based on them: science knows nothing of liberty, believes still less in equality, and will not accept fraternity. Certain animals, above all the weakest, exist only by a rigid solidarity enabling them to defend themselves against enemies. Association of similar interests is very ancient, but in all ages was hampered and limited. The Revolution thought to do useful work in suppressing the corporations; no measure could have been more disastrous to the democratic cause. To-day these abolished corporations reappear everywhere under new names and forms.
The Modern Forms of Solidarity
Solidarity between individuals does not exist simply because they share a common work. The director of a factory, his men, and his shareholders theoretically share an interest in the concern’s success, but in reality this far-fetched solidarity covers very conflicting interests: the workman wants his salary raised, possible only by reducing shareholders’ profits; the shareholders, represented by the director, have every reason to reduce the workmen’s profits to increase their own. True solidarity is possible only between persons with the same immediate interests — such as those calling into being the modern trades-union.
The Unadapted and the Sweating System
The unadapted — the incapable, disinherited, and degenerate — pose a graver threat to modern society than the Barbarians did to Rome. Unlike the Barbarians of antiquity, who respected Rome’s power and prestige and sought to maintain the Empire for their own profit, the new barbarians are within our walls and desire nothing less than the destruction of the civilisation they believe victimises them. They aspire to destroy, not to conquer; only lack of means prevented them from burning Paris completely during the Commune. Industrial evolution has rapidly increased their number. Under the old corporations, trades were regulated, the member neither rose high nor sank low, and the corporation was his family. With modern competition this changed: the superior rise like a gas-filled balloon, the deficient fall headlong without a parachute. In this transitional period the unadapted can hardly live. Competition is keenest in the region of incapacity because it is more populous; the unadapted person lowers his price to gain preference, and the employer, selling to a numerous but undemanding clientele, pays as little as possible. The worker’s price descends to the starvation limit — the sweating system, prevailing wherever individuals without sufficient capacity produce ordinary articles of inferior quality on their own account. Corset makers, waistcoat hands, shoemakers, and shirtmakers often earn no more than a shilling to fifteen pence a day; furniture hands scarcely half a crown. The employer is not to blame: raising wages would raise prices and drive customers to cheaper neighbours; if all employers united, foreign goods made at low wages would inundate the market.
Trades-Unions and the Law of Selection
Trades-unions sought to fix a minimum wage, aided by municipal minimum rates for public works contractors. These fixed rates and municipal tariffs have been more hurtful than useful, showing legislation’s powerlessness against economic necessities. In the Paris furniture industry, when unions made demands, masters dismissed three-quarters of their men, retaining only the most capable; the workman worked at home, had no customer but his employer, and the employer dictated conditions. Prices fell by half; a workman formerly earning six or seven shillings a day now earns with difficulty half a crown. Contractors obliged to accept municipal tariffs similarly employed only the most capable workmen — precisely those needing no protection. Measures designed to protect inferior workers turned against them. The lesson: no one can dispense with the workman of intrinsic value. Competition makes the most capable triumph and eliminates the less capable — the law of selection, from which man has not escaped. Socialists wish to suppress competition, but even if they destroyed it in countries they mastered, how could they destroy it in countries where they have no influence? Competition is an inevitable law of the present age. An engineer friend, remaking a country’s map with Government support, first divided his allowance equally; finding work slow and indifferent, he paid by the piece. Capable employes soon did three or four times as much as ordinary employes, earning more than twice their previous salary; the incapable eliminated themselves, and in less than two years the State allowance exceeded expenses by thirty per cent.
The American Danger
The dangers threatening Europe threaten the United States even more immediately. The War of Secession is presented as the prelude to a coming bloody conflict between the classes living on American soil. All the unadapted of the universe direct themselves to the New World, and no American statesman has understood the danger of these invasions.
Main Arguments
Le Bon’s central argument is that Socialism must be understood not as an economic theory but as a belief, and that the power of a belief is independent of its truth or error. Once a belief is lodged in the mind, absurdity no longer appears, reason cannot reach it, and only time impairs it. Leibnitz, Descartes, and Newton bowed before religious doctrines whose weaknesses reason would have found. What enters sentiment cannot be touched by discussion; religions act on sentiments and cannot be destroyed by arguments, hence their absolute power. Socialism, Le Bon argues, tends to assume a religious guise and propagates by any means rather than by reason. It is feeble when reasoning economically but powerful in dreams, affirmations, and chimerical promises. Thanks to its promises of regeneration and its hope for the disinherited, it becomes a belief of religious character.
A second argument concerns the nature of the promises themselves. Socialism, Le Bon writes, dreams of substituting itself for the ancient faiths but proposes a very low ideal and appeals to lower sentiments. It promises merely daily bread at the price of hard labor, raising the soul with envy and hatred, and proposing equality of condition to crowds no longer satisfied with political and civic equality. It ignores that social inequalities are born of natural inequalities that man has always been powerless to change. The great objection to the Socialist system is what Le Bon calls “those terrible natural equalities” against which recrimination has never prevailed. Unless each generation systematically massacred all individuals surpassing the lowest imaginable average, social inequality—the child of mental inequality—would quickly re-establish itself. Theorists answer that in the artificially created new environment individual capacity would equalize itself, personal interest would become useless, and altruistic instincts would suddenly form. Religions, at least during the short periods of ardent belief following their birth, obtained some analogous result, but they had Heaven and eternal rewards to offer; the Socialists offer only a hell of servitude and hopeless baseness.
A third argument concerns the actual working of a collectivist regime. Le Bon describes the Marxist explanation of history as holding that the necessities of nutrition stand at both the summit and the base of human development, that humanity is at the end as at the beginning “a stomach,” an enormous stomach whose physical needs constitute the sole motive of all mental activity. This regime, he argues, implies the absolute dictatorship of the State over the distribution of wealth and an equally absolute servitude of the workers. In exchange for the rations promised by Socialist theorists, the worker would labor under the surveillance of State functionaries, like so many convicts under the eye and hand of the warder. All individual motive would be stifled; each worker would rest, sleep, and eat at the bidding of headmen placed over food, work, and recreation. With all stimulus destroyed, no one would strive to improve or escape his position—a slavery of the gloomiest kind, without hope of enfranchisement. Under capitalism the worker can at least dream of becoming a capitalist; under an anonymous, brutally despotic, levelling State that foresees all his needs and directs his will, no such dream is possible.
A fourth argument concerns the actual mental state of the working classes, whom the theorists believe they know but know very little. The real sources of persuasion, Le Bon insists, are not discussion and argument. Of their speeches, little remains in the vulgar mind. Questioning a self-styled Socialist workman, once one ignores ready-made humanitarian phrases and stale imprecations against capital repeated mechanically, reveals his Socialist concept to be a vague reverie like that of the early Christians: a distant future kingdom of the poor—poor in fortune and in spirit—from which the rich in money and mind will be jealously expelled. The workman scarcely dreams of the means of realizing this remote ideal. Theorists do not suspect that the plebeian will be Socialism’s most formidable enemy when it passes from theory to practice. Workers, and still more peasants, have an instinct of property at least as developed as the middle classes; they wish to increase possessions but to dispose of the fruits of their labor themselves rather than surrender them to a collectivity. This sentiment has secular origins and will always rise as an inviolable wall against Collectivism.
A fifth argument concerns the character of the working man. Though headstrong, turbulent, and ready to side with promoters of revolution, the working man is strongly attached to the old order, extremely arbitrary, a thorough conservative, and a firm believer in authority. He has acclaimed those who shattered altars and thrones, but far more fervently those who re-established them. Becoming an employer, he behaves like an absolute monarch, harder on former comrades than a middle-class employer. General du Barrail describes the workman who emigrated to Algeria as a colonist—a profession consisting in making natives work by hitting them with a stick—as a democrat in soul who entertained all the instincts of the feudal age, speaking and reasoning like vassals of Pepin the Short or Charlemagne. The only well-defined result of Socialist propaganda among workers has been to sow the opinion that they are exploited by employers and that changing the Government would bring higher wages and far less work; but conservative instincts withhold the majority. At the 1893 elections, of ten million electors only 556,000 voted for Socialist deputies, who numbered only 49; this low percentage, hardly increased in 1898, proves the tenacity of working-class conservative interests. The class most refractory to Socialism will be precisely the working class on which Socialists count.
A sixth argument concerns the directing classes. M. de Laveleye is quoted to the effect that a fact aiding Socialism’s progress is its gradual invasion of the upper and educated classes. The factors are the contagion of fashionable beliefs, fear, and indifference. Signor Garofalo observes that much of the middle class regards the movement with trepidation yet is convinced it is irresistible and inevitable; some are candid souls enamoured of the Socialist ideal as the reign of justice and universal felicity—a superficial, unreasoning sentiment accepted through contagion. Adopting a political or social opinion only after mature reflection is apparently impossible to the average Latin mind.
A seventh argument concerns the role of popular opinion and the press. Le Bon cites the Laporte case as an example of popular opinion invading the courts. A doctor called out at night to a difficult accouchement, lacking the necessary instruments, used an iron instrument borrowed from a workman nearby. Because the makeshift instrument did not come from a surgeon’s case—a mysterious thing enjoying prestige—neighborhood gossips declared the surgeon an ignorant fool and a butcher. The rumor spread, papers recorded it, public opinion grew indignant, a magistrate committed the doctor to prison, and a tribunal condemned him. Eminent specialists then took up the affair, entirely reversing public opinion, and within weeks the murderer had become a martyr. The magistrates who condemned Laporte and those who acquitted him certainly obeyed public opinion without realizing it; their subconsciousness became transformed to follow it, and their reason only served to find justifications for the reversal of judgment. Le Bon also cites Mr. Godkin’s Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy, which denounces the lamentable part American papers play regarding public opinion, most being in the pay of advertisers and speculators. A prospective war will always be favored by journals because new soldiers, victorious or defeated, will enormously increase sales. The journals direct opinion in the United States, but a few financiers direct the journals from their office chairs. One of the great problems of the future will be to find means of escaping the sovereign and demoralizing power of cosmopolitan financiers, who in many countries tend more and more to become indirectly masters of public opinion and consequently of governments.
An eighth argument concerns race. Le Bon argues that the same doctrines take different forms and have different fates depending on the race that receives them. In Germany, Socialism has taken a particular form; in England and America, another; among the Latin peoples, another still. The Latin conception of the State, the Latin concepts of education and religion, and the formation of Socialism among the Latin peoples are treated in separate chapters. The Latin peoples, Le Bon argues, have never accepted the conception that civilizations are tissues of ideas, sentiments, customs, and modes of thought determined by heredity, and that no society is firmly held unless this moral heritage is established in men’s natures rather than in codes. Latin writers and peoples believe that enlightened constitutions and rational laws can re-fashion the world; they are still possessed by the illusions of the Revolution’s heroic epoch, when philosophers and legislators held society to be an artificial thing that benevolent dictators could rebuild. Such theories seem untenable today, yet they constitute motives of a destructive influence greatly to be feared.
A ninth argument concerns education. The Latin system of education, Le Bon argues, is gradually destroying what remains of the qualities needed for national superiority: persistent will-power, perseverance, enterprise, and above all self-control, the ability to dispense with a master. Pupils trained under a system of minute regulation learn to forecast their time almost to the minute and are thereby prepared for the uniformity of thought and action required by State Socialism. Such pupils will develop a horror of originality and personal effort, suspicion of anything unspecialized or uncatalogued, and an envious yet reverent admiration for hierarchies and gold braid. All initiative and individual effort will be extinguished; though they may rebel occasionally, as they did at college against severe preceptors, they will never be disquieting or persistent rebels. The école normale, the lycées, and similar institutions are called the most admirable schools of equalizing, levelling State Socialism, and it is thanks to this system that society tends increasingly toward that form of government. By contrast, English education, though summary in appearance, still produces thinkers and scientists equal to those of nations with the most cultured schools. These thinkers, recruited outside universities and societies, are marked by an originality only self-made minds possess, never found among those poured into identical moulds on college benches. The Englishman seeks to make his son a man armed for life, able to rely on himself and escape the perpetual tutelage Latins cannot shake off. This education gives above all self-control, the national virtue of England, which alone would almost suffice to assure her prosperity and greatness.
A tenth argument concerns the economic and demographic forces that Socialism cannot escape. Book IV examines the industrial and economic evolution of the modern world, the economic struggles between East and West, the economic struggles among the Western peoples, and the relation between economic necessities and the growth of populations. Book V addresses the laws of evolution, the democratic ideal, the sources and division of wealth in intelligence, capital, and labor, the conflict of peoples and classes, social solidarity, and the struggle with the unadapted. Le Bon argues that the laws of evolution, the competition of races, and the growth of populations are forces over which man has no power, and that Socialism’s promises of happiness must be realized here on earth, in fatal clash with these necessities. The hour of Socialism’s advent will undoubtedly be the hour of its decline.
An eleventh argument concerns the decline of the Latin peoples. Le Bon argues that at a not-very-remote period, wit, elegant speech, chivalrous qualities, and literary and artistic aptitude were the principal factors of civilization; possessing these in high degree, the Latin peoples long led all nations. With the industrial, geographic, and economic evolution of the modern period, national superiority came to require different abilities: enduring energy, enterprise, and method. The Latin nations hardly possess these, so they have progressively given place to those who do. The education system imposed on Latin youth is gradually destroying what remains of these qualities. Many events have decimated, by repeated negative selection, individuals with the most developed energy, activity, and independence of mind. In Spain the Inquisition steadily decimated the country’s best elements over many centuries; in France the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Revolution, the Empire, and the civil wars destroyed her most energetic and enterprising sons. The insignificant population increase among most Latin peoples adds to these causes of decadence. M. Fouillée is quoted: France practises Darwinism the wrong way, relying for population on selection of inferior types. Wealthier classes who attained ease through work and intelligence eliminate themselves by voluntary sterility, while imprudence, unintelligence, idleness, insanity, and misery are prolific and responsible for a great proportion of the population. A stock-breeder proceeding thus would degenerate his horses and cattle. M. Lapouge, in a recent Revue scientifique essay, reaches analogous conclusions about the Romans: considering great Roman families at two-hundred-year intervals, the most illustrious old families no longer exist, replaced by inferior families recruited from all classes, even freedmen. When naturalization after naturalization opened Rome to every nation, pure-blood Romans had disappeared. The Anglo-Saxon race’s rapid progress, by contrast, stems from selection operating toward progress rather than in reverse. The United States were long populated by the most independent and energetic persons of various European countries, notably England; emigrating with family to a distant country of hostile warlike nations required emphatically virile character. Le Bon emphasizes that nations are effaced from history not by diminution of intelligence but by weakening of character—verified by Greeks and Romans and tending to verify itself again.
A twelfth argument concerns the nature of crowds. Le Bon argues that the fundamental characteristic dividing the isolated individual from the crowd is that the first is almost always guided by personal interest, while the masses are rarely swayed by egoistical motives, but most often by collective and disinterested interests. Heroism and self-forgetfulness are more frequently found in crowds than individuals. Behind all collective cruelty there is more often than not a belief, an idea of justice, a desire for moral satisfaction, complete forgetfulness of personal interest, or readiness to sacrifice to the general interest—the opposite of egoism. The crowd may become cruel but is above all altruistic, as easily led to sacrifice itself as to destroy others. Dominated by the subconsciousness, it has a morality and generosity tending towards activity, whilst those of the individual generally remain contemplative and limited to speeches. Reflection and reasoning most frequently lead to egoism; egoism, deeply rooted in the isolated individual, is unknown to the crowd because the crowd cannot reason and reflect. No religions, no empires could have been founded had the armies of their disciples been able to reason and reflect; very few soldiers would have sacrificed their lives for any cause. History can only be clearly understood if we bear in mind that the morale and conduct of the isolated man are very different from those of the same man as part of a collectivity. The collective interests of a race, implying forgetfulness of personal interest, are maintained by the crowd. Profound altruism—the altruism of acts, not words—is a collective virtue. All work of general import, demanding a minimum of egoism and a maximum of blind devotion, self-abnegation, and sacrifice, can scarcely be accomplished but by crowds. Despite momentary outbursts of violence, the masses have always shown themselves ready to suffer all things. Tyrants and fanatics of all ages have never had difficulty finding crowds ready to immolate themselves to defend whatever cause.
A thirteenth argument concerns the role of beliefs in civilization. Le Bon insists on the past’s influence in elaborating faiths: a new faith can only establish itself by attaching to an anterior faith. An established belief gives a people common sentiments, thoughts, and words—identity of ideas—creating a common state of mind that marks every element of a civilization. A common faith is perhaps the most powerful factor creating a national soul and mind. Great civilizations are the logical efflorescence of a small number of beliefs; a nation’s decadence nears when common beliefs dissociate. A collective belief unites manifold individual desires, making a nation act as a single individual; great periods of history coincide with a universal belief establishing itself. No civilization has established or maintained itself without common beliefs at its base. This gives formidable strength even when the belief is transitory: the French at the Revolution, animated by a new faith that could not last because it could not fulfill its promises, struggled victoriously against all Europe in arms. Once securely established in the understanding, a belief becomes the regulator of life, touchstone of judgment, director of intelligence; the mind receives nothing new not conforming to it. Like Christianity in the Middle Ages and Islam among the Arabs, the prevailing faith imprints philosophy, literature, and the arts; it is the supreme criterion, explaining everything. Comprehension consists of carrying the unknown to the known—coordinating a fact with the small number of ideas already possessed—and each brain does this according to its subconscious concepts. From the lowest to the highest mind the mechanism is the same: introducing a new idea amid already acquired conceptions. Because perceptions are co-related to ancestral conceptions, races judge differently; we perceive things only by deforming them, according to our beliefs.
A fourteenth argument concerns the deformation of concepts. Beliefs transformed into sentiments influence the sense attached to words. The causes of dissensions and struggles dividing humanity arise mostly from the same phenomena but diverse mental constitutions. The same words—religion, liberty, republic, bourgeoisie, property, capital, labor—evoke profoundly separated mental representations across centuries, races, and sexes. Different classes of the same society, and individuals of different sex, seem to speak the same language only in appearance; nuances of signification are as numerous as the social and mental categories employing it, sometimes producing absolute incomprehension. Classes and nations are separated by divergence of conception as much as of interests; hence conflict of classes and races, not chimerical concord, is a dominant fact of history. Discordance can only increase; civilization differentiates men more and more. Between a feudal baron and his least retainer there was far less mental difference than today between an engineer and the laborer he directs. Agreement is possible only on technical subjects free of instinctive sentiments; in morals, religion, and politics agreement is impossible unless individuals share the same origin—and then they agree not by reasoning but by identity of conceptions. Persuasion is never rooted in reason: when people gather to consider politics, religion, or morals, they are the dead, not the living, who discuss; ancestral souls speak through their mouths.
A fifteenth argument concerns the future of Socialism. Le Bon argues that Socialism lacks one factor of success: the magic power of creating a future life, hitherto the principal strength of the great religions that conquered the world and endured. All Socialism’s promises of happiness must be realized here on earth. Such realization will clash fatally with economic and psychologic necessities over which man has no power; therefore the hour of Socialism’s advent will undoubtedly be the hour of its decline. Socialism may triumph for an instant, as the humanitarian ideas of the Revolution triumphed, but it will quickly perish in bloody cataclysms, for the soul of a nation is not stirred up in vain. It will be one of those ephemeral religions of which the same century sees the birth and death, useful only in preparing or renewing other religions better adapted to human nature and to the manifold necessities to whose laws all societies are doomed to submit. Considering Socialism as an agent of dissolution destined to prepare the advent of new dogmas, the future will perhaps judge its part not absolutely baneful.
Key Concepts
Several concepts recur throughout the book and give it its distinctive vocabulary. The first is the idea of Socialism as a belief or religion. Le Bon treats Socialism not as a scientific doctrine but as a faith, and he insists that the power of a faith lies in its propagation independent of truth or error. Once lodged, absurdity no longer appears, reason cannot reach it, only time impairs it. Socialism tends to assume a religious guise and propagates by any means rather than reason. It is feeble when reasoning economically, powerful in dreams, affirmations, and chimerical promises. The new religion of Socialism enters the phase where its propagation is undertaken by apostles, to whom a few martyrs may already be added, constituting a new element of success. After the last executions of Anarchists in Paris, police intervention was needed to prevent pious pilgrimages to the victims’ tombs and the sale of their images surrounded with religious attributes. Fetichism is the most ancient of cults and perhaps the last; a people must always have fetiches to embody dreams, desires, and hates.
The second concept is the ancestral soul or racial soul. Le Bon argues that civilizations are tissues of ideas, sentiments, customs, and modes of thought determined by heredity; no society is firmly held unless this moral heritage is established in men’s natures rather than in codes. A common faith is perhaps the most powerful factor creating a national soul and mind. The past’s influence in elaborating faiths is decisive: a new faith can only establish itself by attaching to an anterior faith. Because perceptions are co-related to ancestral conceptions, races judge differently; we perceive things only by deforming them, according to our beliefs. When people gather to consider politics, religion, or morals, they are the dead, not the living, who discuss; ancestral souls speak through their mouths.
