The Crowd

Gustave LeBon's The Crowd is not only a classic, but one of the best-selling scienti¬c books in social psychology and collective behavior ever written. Here, LeBon analyzes the nature of crowds and their role in political movements. He presents crowd behavior as a problem of science and power, a natural phenomenon with practical implications. Originally published in 1895, LeBon's book was the ¬rst to expand the scope of inquiry beyond criminal crowds to include all possible kinds of collective phenomena. Its continuing signi¬cance is evident even in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 in which LeBon's theories were cited in testimony.