L'évolution Actuelle Du Monde: Illusions Et Réalités

A socio-political and psychological treatise written in the early 20th century. It analyzes how modern civilization is being reshaped by the clash of material innovations (steam, electricity, coal, oil) and immaterial forces (beliefs, mysticism, crowd psychology), and it probes the illusions surrounding peace, security, disarmament, alliances, and arbitration. The work argues that destructive collective passions, revolutionary faiths, and ancestral legacies threaten Europe even as America rises, and that only a hard-headed grasp of collective psychology and economic realities can temper conflict. The opening of this treatise sketches a world poised between an old order and a new one, driven by creative, conservative, and destructive forces: Europe is fractured by border rivalries and party strife, dictatorships emerge, Britain is shaken by strikes and imperial strain, Russia regresses, the East is in turmoil, while America amasses wealth and influence. Le Bon warns that science has multiplied destructive means, that the League of Nations and legalistic arbitration cannot overcome clashing mentalities, and that alliances endure only while interests align—economic arrangements may preserve peace better than pacts. He stresses that collective forces are irrational, future wars may be internal and ideological, and that syndicalism and socialism function as modern religions responding to a persistent human need for faith. Early chapters contrast material power (especially coal and oil) with immaterial power (mysticism and belief), illustrate enduring credulity—even among eminent scientists—with spiritist and pseudo-scientific episodes, and lay out laws for how beliefs spread. He then posits the “soul of the race,” the commanding will of the dead shaping the living, to explain national continuity and the instability of mixed peoples, using France’s oscillations and other historical cases. Finally, he attributes major political disasters to errors of psychology, notes how personalities transform under revolutionary conditions, and critiques pacifist, disarmament, alliance, and arbitration illusions, concluding that only unity and credible defense can provide real security.