Crowd psychology

Author's name: Gustave Lebon

Crowd Psychology is a book by the French crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon. The Arabic version was translated and introduced by Hashem Saleh, and the first Arabic edition was published by Dar Al Saqi in 1991. Although it is a single book, the internal organization of the book includes three books: Book One, Book Two, and Book Three. After the translator's introduction and the scientific principles that resulted from the author's discoveries, the preface, the introduction, and the book's introduction, Book One begins and ends with Book Three, followed by the footnotes, which provide a detailed overview of the footnotes and references the author used in writing his book, Crowd Psychology. It is well known that Le Bon's long life allowed him to witness the triumph of science in the late nineteenth century, the crises of parliamentary democratic systems, the rise of socialism, and the emergence of the popular forces that accompanied them and greatly worried him. In light of this context, we can better understand and appreciate Le Bon's thought, who was able to crystallize his theory related to the psychology of peoples or the psychology of peoples and human races. For Gustave Le Bon, the masses had become a reality. Therefore, he studied the phenomenon of the masses scientifically, in light of psychology. The basic idea of ​​his theory focused on the fact that the disasters that befell France in the recent past, as well as all its defeats and the difficulties it faced, were due to the masses' assault on the historical stage and their inability to confront them. This explains why the weakness of the democratic parliamentary system is due to ignorance of the laws of psychology and the methods of managing the masses. In the pages of this book, Le Bon expressed these ideas in a simple and easy-to-understand manner, shaped in a comprehensive and coherent scientific theory that made him an intellectual master for an entire era. Everyone agrees that Le Bon's book, whose pages we are turning, "The Psychology of Crowds," was an unparalleled success in the field of mass psychology. The book is the manifesto that inaugurated what is now called social or group psychology.