Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon was a French polymath, born in Nogent-le-Rotrou in 1841 and died in 1931, whose interests spanned anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine and physics. He qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866 but did not practise, and after travelling in Europe, Asia and North Africa he turned in the 1890s to psychology and sociology. He is best known for The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), a seminal work of crowd psychology that proposed that a crowd forms a new psychological entity which is more than the sum of its members. His conservative politics and essentialist view of peoples were controversial, and parts of the French academic establishment ignored or criticised him in his lifetime.