Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon was a French writer whose influential 1895 study The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind argued that groups acquire a collective identity and will while losing the intelligence of their individual members. His broad indictment reaches beyond mobs and rioters to juries, parliaments, and gatherings of specialists. The book uses Le Bon as the sharpest representative of the suspicion that crowds cannot think well—and then argues that sufficiently large and diverse groups can, over time, surpass even a well-informed individual.

The Crowd as an Independent Force

Le Bon’s hostility to groups was political as well as intellectual. He was appalled by the rise of democracy in the nineteenth-century West and dismayed that ordinary people had come to wield political and cultural power. His argument went beyond saying that crowds merely combine the limitations of their members: a crowd, he maintained, was an organism in its own right, possessing an identity and will of its own and sometimes acting in ways no member had intended.

For Le Bon, this collective force could be brave, cowardly, or cruel, but it could never be intelligent. He held that crowds accumulated stupidity rather than practical intelligence, could not perform acts demanding a high degree of intelligence, and were always intellectually inferior to an isolated individual. The categorical nature of the claim made “the crowd” more than a name for riotous or unruly assemblies: it became a verdict on collective judgment itself.

From Mobs to Juries and Parliaments

Le Bon applied his argument to institutions ordinarily associated with deliberation. Juries, he said, delivered verdicts that each juror would reject individually. Parliaments, in his account, adopted laws that their members would normally oppose. The striking implication was that collective decisions could run against the judgment of every person who helped make them.

Nor did expertise offer an escape. Even a group of intelligent specialists from different fields, asked to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, would reach outcomes no better on the whole than a gathering of imbeciles. By extending his criticism from unruly crowds to juries, legislators, and expert committees, Le Bon made his theory a general challenge to the possibility of sound group decision-making.

The Book’s Reversal of Le Bon

The book adopts Le Bon’s expansive use of “group” and “crowd,” applying those terms to phenomena as different as game-show audiences, multibillion-dollar corporations, sports gamblers, management teams, traffic, and the stock market. Some are tightly organized and conscious of their group identity; others, such as cars caught in traffic, have no formal organization, while the stock market exists as a changing collection of numbers and dollars. What joins them is their capacity to act collectively in making decisions and solving problems, even when participants may not recognize that they are doing so.

Against Le Bon’s conclusion, the book argues that demonstrated instances of successful collective problem-solving point to a broader possibility: large enough and sufficiently diverse groups can make decisions that are intellectually superior to those of an isolated person, however smart or well-informed. Le Bon therefore serves as the argument’s decisive antagonist. His sweeping condemnation supplies the contrast through which the book presents collective judgment not as a mindless descent from individual reason, but as a potential source of intelligence.