Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (French: [ɡystav lə bɔ̃]; 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.A native of Nogent-le-Rotrou, Le Bon qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866. He opted against the formal practice of medicine as a physician, instead beginning his writing career the same year of his graduation. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Gustave Le Bon has received more than 684,977 page views. His biography is available in 50 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 48 in 2019). Gustave Le Bon is the 15th most popular psychologist, the 194th most popular biography from France (up from 198th in 2019) and the 2nd most popular French Psychologist.

Gustave le bon is most famous for his theory of crowd psychology. He believed that crowds are composed of three types of people: the intelligent, the semi-intelligent, and the imbeciles. The intelligent and semi-intelligent people are able to think for themselves and form their own opinions, but the imbeciles do not have the mental capacity to think for themselves and instead follow the opinions of the intelligent and semi-intelligent people.