The Crowd

In this book Le Bon argues that the conscious personality of the individual in a crowd is submerged and that the collective, unconcious, “crowd mind” dominates. He postulated that crowd behaviour is unanimous, emotional, and intellectually weak. Moreover, this work inspired Edward Bernays—nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of modern advertising—who himself declared that a major feature of democracy was the manipulation of the mass mind by media and advertising.