The crowd : a study of the popular mind.

  • Le Bon, Gustave, 1841-1931.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The crowd : a study of the popular mind. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    thing in the shape of criticism or personal opinion, that they have reached the point of suppressing literary criticism^ confining themselves to citing the title of a book, and appending a puff of two or three lines.^ In twenty years' time the same fat« will probably have overtaken theatrical criticism. The close watching of the course of opinion has become to-day the principal preoccupation of the press and of governments. The effect produced by an event, a legislative proposal, a speech, is without intermission what they require to know, and the task is not easy, for nothing is more mobile and changeable than the thought of crowds, and nothing more frequent than to see them execrate to-day what they applauded yesterday. This total absence of any sort of direction of opinion, and at the same time the destruction of general beliefs, have had for final result an extreme divergency of convictions of every order, and a growing indifference on the part of crowds to every- thing that does not plainly touch their immediate interests. Questions of doctrine, such as socialism, only recruit champions boasting genuine convictions among the quite illiterate classes, among the workers in mines and factories, for instance. Members of the lower middle class, and working men possessing some degree of instruction, have either become utterly sceptical or extremely unstable in their opinions. 1 These remarks refer to the French newspaper press. —NoU. of the Trcmslator.