The Crowd #874135

Published in 1895, it anticipated the instrumental use of crowds and the era of great dictatorships with extraordinary foresight. It influenced Freud, Theodore Roosevelt, Mussolini and De Gaulle. It paved the way for the emergence of a new discipline, social psychology, becoming a fundamental text in the sociology of communication. Crowds are a destructive force, lacking an overall vision, undisciplined. This makes them easily orientable and impressionable. The prestige and charisma of the leader, thanks to the repetitive use of a few simple slogans, not argued, is able to access their primitive collective unconscious and therefore to maneuver them. In the collective soul, the intellectual attitudes of men, and consequently their individuality, are annulled.