Gustave Le Bon Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

The Man Who Predicted Twitter Mobs

Gustave Le Bon and the mind of the crowd

July 10, 2020 • by Mitchell Abidor

In May, the New York Times published an opinion piece I wrote on the position taken by Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin magazine on the presidential election. Both DSA and the magazine had expressed opposition to support for Joseph Biden, and the editor of Jacobin announced his intention to ...

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Adorno with Freud, Adorno Beyond Freud

Part 4

October 19, 2017 • by Chiara Bottici

“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” is a strange text. It presents itself as a dynamic interpretation of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which, in its turn is, also, according to Adorno, a “dynamic interpretation” of Le Bon’s description of the mass mind.[1] It ...

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Leaderless Crowds

Reflections on the Power of Affects, from Gustave Le Bon to Frédéric Lordon

July 5, 2017 • by Léa Barbisan

In his book The Politics of Crowds, Christian Borch notes that even though “crowds and masses... seem to sustain themselves in the margins of contemporary sociological thinking... the mass media recurrently reports on new mass events, explicitly labeled thus, typically in the form of mass protests, mass disasters such as ...

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The Psychopathology of the US Elections

Why Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power is Relevant Today

June 5, 2017 • by Leonard Mazzone

When it was published in 1960, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power did not achieve the acclaim enjoyed by his novel Die Blendung (1935), his dramas Die Hochzeit (1932), Die Komödie der Eitelkeit (1950) and Die Befriesteten (1964) and, later, the many volumes of aphorisms and the three volumes of his ...

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Populism and Freudian Mass Psychology

Three Paradoxes

January 26, 2017 • by Eli Zaretsky

Paradox one: Populism is generally described as irrational, emotional, intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and so forth, yet the main populist insight, namely that the system is rigged against the ordinary person, is correct. On the main question, in other words, populism is far more rational than the putatively rational dominant ...