Psychology of the masses

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Psychology of the masses (in the French original Psychologie des foules ) is the title of the most famous work by Gustave Le Bons , published in Paris in 1895 , who - alongside Gabriel Tarde - is considered one of the founders of mass psychology . Since then, mass psychology has been an area of social psychology . In the following years and decades it had an impact in the areas of sociology , political science , history and philosophy . Mass psychology deals with human behavior and actions in larger gatherings of people in a state of calm and prudence and in a state of collective excitement and emotionalization and establishes important differences between these two aggregate states of human multitudes.

concept

In his foreword , Le Bon acknowledges the central role of the unconscious in human action , which is far superior in its effectiveness to reason, which is still relatively new for humans. He regrets that so little is known about this unconscious.

The work deals with the issues of conformity , alienation , community building and leadership , as well as with the crowd as an empirical fact. Le Bon is of the opinion that the individual, including those belonging to a high culture , under certain circumstances in the masses lose their ability to criticize and behave in an affective, sometimes primitive, barbaric manner. In the crowd, a “community soul” is created that encompasses all individual beings that are integrated into it. In this situation, the individual is more gullible and is subject to psychological contamination ("contagion"). Thus, the mass of leaders is easy to steer, who Le Bon characterizes, not without irony, as "half-mad" and "truly convinced"; because only those who are convinced are also really convincing. These characteristics are based on Le Bon's special thesis , later taken up by Sigmund Freud and Max Weber , that human actions in extreme and extraordinary situations can be dominated to a large extent by unconscious impulses .

Above all, Le Bon shows how political opinions, ideologies and doctrines find their way into and spread among the masses, how one can influence the masses, how the necessary leadership emerges, which characteristics individual leadership figures must have in order to generate obedience like them act and perish - and where the limit of mass suggestibility lies. Again and again he emphasizes the low influence of reason , instruction and upbringing as well as the susceptibility of the masses to catchphrases and clever deceptions: the bolder the lie that is suggested to the masses, the more likely it will be believed and adopted en masse.

At the end of his work, Le Bon knowledgeably describes and assesses the particular organized and institutionalized mass formations occurring in French society. Lay judges at jury courts are easily blinded by insignificant things, for example, but are still more objective than people with the qualifications for judicial office , who are a mass of the highest degree of homogeneity and the highest degree of organization. The jury was to be preserved because it was probably the only type of crowd that could not be replaced by any individuality. The electorate is not capable of deliberate judgments, but only of what has been inspired. Nevertheless, the general right to vote was to be preserved. Limiting the right to vote to particular groups of people does not lead to better decisions, because these are also masses and are mainly guided by their feelings and their corps spirit . Parliaments tended to waste money and restrict individual freedoms. But only in certain moments they are masses, in other moments they are collections of more or less reasonable individuals. In many cases the parliamentarians retained their individuality and could introduce appropriate legislative proposals . Despite their shortcomings, parliaments are still the least bad institutions that the peoples have set up for their legislation.

In his best-known book Die Psychologie der Massen ( The Psychology of the Masses) (1895), Le Bon rates the masses and their behavior as predominantly negative and does not necessarily shine through scientific lack of value judgment. However, despite his own obvious antipathies, he states that the masses are capable of "anything" for good as well as evil. Le Bon developed little sympathy with modern, political and social structures, especially since he was convinced, based on his own experiences in revolutionary France of the Paris Commune, that laws and institutions sometimes have little influence on the behavior of rebellious, emotionalized masses.

At the end of his book, Le Bon describes a sketch of a pessimistic cultural morphology , which has a cyclical character and in this respect is reminiscent of Oswald Spengler's culturally pessimistic assessment of the “fall of the West”. According to this, history is the result of racial culture and national characteristics. It is not driven by rational , but by deeply internalized, emotional “soul forces”.

Central mass psychological theses

  • Types of masses:
    • A. Disparate masses (foules hétérogènes)
      • 1. Nameless masses (e.g. street gatherings)
      • 2. Not nameless (e.g. jury, parliament)
    • B. Similar masses (foules homogènes)
      • 1. Sects (political, religious, other)
      • 2nd castes (military, priest, worker cast, etc.)
      • 3rd classes (citizens, peasants, etc.).
  • Nature, function and evaluation of the mass:
    • A crowd is basically impulsive, agile, irritable, suggestible, gullible, obsessed with simple ideas, intolerant and dictatorial.
    • The spirit of the masses is conservative (“conservatism of the masses”), gullible towards old, skeptical towards new ideas and ideals.
    • There is a specific “religiosity of the masses” which by far exceeds the religiosity of individual individuals outside the masses.
    • The masses primarily transport “ideas” and cultural “goals”.
    • The individual can rise in the crowd to moral heights or sink into depths (usually the latter).
    • There is a “mass soul” of its own for all mass components, which in turn emerges from a “race soul” - as the common, inherited cultural substrate.
    • Anglo-Saxon masses react differently than Romansh masses, they often show opposing reactions in similar situations.
    • Under certain circumstances, the masses have a “community soul” and in such cases are capable of altruism, heroism and solidarity. (Example: revolutionary crowd and demonstration crowd).
    • The emerging mass age is to be assessed negatively, as the modern masses are no longer bound to traditional ideals, traditions and institutions to any significant degree.
  • Influence and gullibility:
    • The members of a highly emotionalized crowd lose the critical faculties that they have as individuals in a state of mental calm.
    • The individual personality disappears in the crowd and gives way to a collective personality: The individual now feels and thinks as part of a whole, no longer as an individual.
    • The crowd cannot distinguish personal from factual.
    • She easily succumbs to suggestions whose effects are comparable to hypnosis and, under certain circumstances, becomes hysterical.
    • If it obeys a common leadership, the crowd can be easily steered. If she does not do this, her behavior is spontaneous and unpredictable.
    • The masses are receptive to naive legends about mostly heroic leaders and events.
    • The formation of opinion in the masses takes place through spiritual transmission and imitation.
  • Intelligence, emotionality and one-sidedness:
    • The crowd is not very creative and less intelligent.
    • She thinks one-sidedly, roughly and indifferently, in good and bad.
    • The crowd does not think logically, but in images that are often evoked by simple language symbolism.
    • The crowd is easily excitable, gullible and volatile. Your emotionality is simple.
  • Judgments, Actions, and Beliefs of the Crowd:
    • The masses are above average religious (“religiosity of the masses”).
    • The crowd is inspired by a "community soul".
    • The crowd is generally very conservative.
    • The crowd cannot be convinced by logical arguments, only emotionally.
    • The masses sometimes act unselfishly, possibly virtuously or heroically.
    • The crowd is intolerant and domineering.
    • It can become very cruel, far beyond what is possible for the individual, and, with suitable leadership, is ready for revolutions.
    • The core beliefs of the crowd are backward-looking and change very slowly.
    • The moral judgments of a mass are independent of the origin or the intellect of its members.
    • The crowd judges by hasty generalizations of individual cases.
    • Their beliefs are often based on longings and desires.
  • Leaders of the masses:
    • Mass leaders and mass ideas are charismatized under certain circumstances (charged by nimbus or prestige).
    • Leaders strengthen the community longings of the masses and embody the value of the “community soul” of the masses.
    • Without a leader, the disorganized mass is like a flock without a shepherd.
    • Leaders are not thinkers but men of action; occasionally one finds nervous, irritable and half-mad people among them.
    • Leaders often work through a great gift of speaking. Great leaders can instill a belief and thus control entire peoples.
    • Leader rule works through conviction and only secondarily through violence.
    • There are two types of leaders: short term effective and long term. It depends on the perseverance of their will.
    • Leaders convince through assertion, repetition, and transference .
    • If a leader is unsuccessful, he quickly loses his nimbus and goes under - an idea that the famous sociologist Max Weber would later treat as the “disenchantment of charism”.

Le Bon justifies all of this with numerous historical case studies, primarily from Greco-Roman antiquity and the French Revolution , but also from the time of Napoleon and French history in the 19th century (e.g. during the period of the Paris Commune ).

Sketch of the history of the impact of Le Bon's "mass psychology"

The work achieved a large circulation and has been translated into ten languages. In the first third of the 20th century, alongside Gabriel Tarde's La Opinion et la Foule, it was regarded as the standard work of mass psychology and influenced numerous social scientists of high standing. Mention should be made of Émile Durkheim , Ferdinand Tönnies , Theodor Geiger and especially Max Weber , who referred to Le Bon several times in business and society in connection with “charismatic leadership” and “mass community”. Seen in this way, its history of reception extends far into sociology (cf. Masse (sociology) )

Likewise, Le Bon's work had an impact on Sigmund Freud, who dealt intensively with mass psychology in his 1921/22 essay mass psychology and ego analysis and undertook a depth psychological assessment, especially not sharing Le Bon's assessment of the nature of a leader . The psychoanalyst and socialist Wilhelm Reich does not mention Le Bon at all in his main work Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933) , which became relevant again during the student movement of the 1960s . Hannah Arendt mentions him in a footnote in Elements and Origins of Total Domination (1951). Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich refer to him several times in their writings, especially with regard to the role of a leader, in The Inability to Mourn (1967). The modern literature on National Socialism, however, almost never quotes him. Further influences can be found, for example, with the economist Joseph Schumpeter . In analyzing the phenomenon of “alienation”, the sociologist Raymond Aron brings us to endless progress? (1970) Le Bon's stern judgment on the psychology of the masses against Jean Paul Sartre's benevolent attitude in position.

Le Bon's problems were largely taken over from modern social psychology and modified in terms of content, especially with regard to the position of a leader and the different characteristics of the crowd, which can differ much more than Le Bon originally assumed. Michael Günther recently undertook a new, thorough review of Le Bon’s achievements, findings and errors from a psychosociological perspective in his work Masse und Charisma (2005).

See also

literature

  • Benoit Marpeau: Gustave Le Bon: parcours d'un intellectuel; 1841 - 1931. CNRS Éd., Paris 2000.
  • Serge Moscovici : The Age of the Masses: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
  • Catherine Rouvier: Les idées politiques de Gustave Le Bon. Presses Univ. de France, Paris 1986.
  • RA Nye: An Intellectual Portrait of Gustave Le Bon . A Study of the Development and Impact of a Social Scientist in his Historical Setting, Diss. University of Wisconsin 1969.
  • Wilhelm Schwalenberg: Gustave le Bon and his "Psychology des foules". A contribution to the critique of mass psychology. Dissertation Bonn 1919.
  • Referring to Le Bon's sensational observations of the “religiosity of the masses”, the “conservatism of the masses” and the “communal soul” of the masses, the above mentioned. Michael Günther, from a psychosociological point of view, the “community crowd” and the “individualistic crowd” as two “merging” forms of a multiplicity, but which have a “completely different” psychosocial character: The “crowd” (e.g. the solidarity crowd, the crowd of demonstrators), guided by the collective will (“essential will”), forms a coherent “wholeness” according to their “own” feelings and thinking, to which the individual, hidden within them, “listens”; the “crowd”, guided by modern individualistic will (“freestyle will”), consists of a multitude of incoherent individuals who feel alien and antagonistic without community awareness and feeling (e.g. the atomized market crowd or consumer crowd). In his work, Günther combined the partly outdated - and yet often current - mass psychology with Max Weber's sociology of domination and Ferdinand Tönnie's theory of “community and society”. As a result, he was able to convincingly explain Gustave Le Bon's puzzling observation of the almost erratic “changeover” of mass emotions and ideas “from individualism to collectivism” (and vice versa) sociologically and psychosociologically. According to Michael Günther: Mass and Charisma. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 83–121, p. 269 ff.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses. With an introduction by Helmut Dingeldey. Stuttgart 1950 (= Kröner TB. 99) and 1961.
  2. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 160.
  3. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 149.
  4. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 161.
  5. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 168.
  6. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 168.
  7. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 171.
  8. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 184.
  9. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . From the French by Rudolf Eisler, 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 183.
  10. ↑ Gustave Le Bon: Psychology of the masses . Translated from the French by Rudolf Eisler. 2nd edition Leipzig 1912. Reprint Cologne 2016, p. 184.
  11. ↑ Michael Günther: Mass and Charisma . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 83-121, 269 ff .
  12. ↑ Raymond Aron: Endless Progress? Gütersloh 1970, p. 178.
  13. ↑ Michael Günther: Mass and Charisma. Social causes of political and religious fanaticism . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-631-53536-8 .