Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was a French physician, anthropologist and social psychologist. Trained in medicine in Paris, he served as an army doctor in 1870, traveled in North Africa, India and Nepal, and wrote on archaeology and the civilizations of the East before turning to the psychology of peoples and crowds. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, published in 1895, argued that individuals in a mass lose their reason and become suggestible, and it was read by Theodore Roosevelt, Freud, Mussolini and Hitler. He went on to write on the psychology of socialism, education, revolution and the First World War, and was a fixture of Parisian intellectual society.