Gustave Le Bon

From Free net encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)

Revision as of 22:38, 8 March 2006
Fastfission (Talk | contribs)
add physics info
Next diff →

Current revision

Gustave Le Bon (May 7, 1841 – December 13, 1931) was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behaviour and crowd psychology.

His work on crowd psychology became important in the first half of the twentieth century when it was utilized by media researchers such as Hadly Cantril and Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media.

He also contributed to on-going debates in physics about the nature of matter and energy. His book The Evolution of Matter was very popular in France (going through twelve editions), and though some of its ideas — notably that all matter was inherently unstable and was constantly and slowly transforming into luminiferous ether — were taken up favorably by physicists of the day (including Henri Poincaré) though his specific formulations were not given much consideration. In 1896 he reported observing a new kind of radiation, which he termed "black light" (not the same thing as a black light today), though it was later discovered to not exist.<ref>Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999): 11-12.</ref>

Le Bon was born in Nogent-le-Rotrou, France, and died in Marnes-la-Coquette. He studied medicine and toured Europe, Asia and North Africa while writing on archaeology and anthropology before beginning to write his most famous works on psychology - most notably Les Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples (1894; The Psychology of Peoples) and La psychologie des foules (1895; English translation The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1897).

[edit]