Description
The world of the 18th and 19th centuries had been wracked by change and revolution. Gustave Le Bon, a doctor by trade but wandering philosopher by avocation, was a first-hand witness to one such revolution: the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, in which a crowd of mutinous National Guardsmen seized the city and established a socialist government for two brief months in what Engels called one of the first examples of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
After that revolution, Le Bon left to travel the world, developing his theories on the psychology of crowds. The Crowd is his...
