... The Crowd was writing during a time of 'incipient social progress' when the masses were wreaking havoc across France. Being a member of the bourgeoisie this situation worried Le Bon and he wanted to cure the disorders brought about by the masses. He found the answer in psychology and the discovery of 'a crowd soul'. Le Bon, in his work, rejected all three of the popular views of the time that the crowd was mad, criminal or antisocial and mainly inhabited by the people at the lower end of the social spectrum for the idea that a man, irrelevant of his social standing, once in a group would lose his personal characteristics and the personalities in the group would fuse together. The characteristics of the crowd are 'savagery, primitive and uncivilised because the individual is no longer acting consciously but unconsciously as the people are a collective mass. He described ...

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