50 Books Challenge: Book #7: Psychology of Revolution by Gustave Le Bon

I’m already 3 months behind!

The book is quite unique and interesting in that it employs psychoanalysis in the study of a particular historical event specifically, the author uses crowd psychology in analyzing Revolutions in general and The French Revolution in particular. To date, there is no other history book that utilizes such methodology in its investigation of an event in the past. The book was published in 1896 and during that time, both the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution are becoming to take its course, which is probably one of the impetus for the author to write on such a subject matter. To the modern reader, the book and by extension, the author sounded condescending, patronizing, elitist, a royalist sympathizer, an ardent Napoleonic admirer/ apologist, a sham humanitarian, and a bigot. However, this is no fault of the author but rather this is a reflection of his era or generation and the book do represent the ideas prevalent of his generation. Nevertheless, these “attributes” should not detract from the rather excellent observations of author regarding the French Revolution for such observations are universally true and applicable to any Revolution generations before and those of yet to happen. However, care should be taken to discern between the authors observations and those of his rather seemingly logical deduction which tends to be biased and speculative and is not borne out of empirical observation. A careful reading of the book would also expose some strands of thought akin to Sigmund Freud’s logic as expounded in his seminal work, “Civilization and it’s Discontent” which beautifully link the human psyche and the forces that creates the mosaic that we all know as “history”. The last two chapters of the book is rather an oddity in the sense that there seems to be no connection with the subject matter at hand but rather it looks more like the author’s political rants and opinion of the political issues of his days which is surprisingly or rather strangely sounded pretty much like the present political discourse.