INNOCENT NKHONDOYACHEPA. UNIVERSITY OF THE PEOPLE. (Professor: Dr. Robert Green) SOC 1502, UNIT 8 LEARNING JOURNAL, T5. Discussing the reading assignment of Gustav Le Bon in light of this week’s reading material. This week’s reading material of chapter 17; Government and Politics, and chapter 21, Social movement and social change, is positively in light of the writings of Gustav Le Bon. According to Wikipedia (nd), Charles-Marie Gustav Le Bon was born on 7thMay 1841, and died on 13th December 1931. He was a notable French polymath, whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention and physics (Wikipedia nd). Le Bon travelled widely and wrote many books in course of his travelling. Among some of his notable books is titled “The crowd: A study of the popular mind,” which we are going to discuss, in light of the readings. In this book, Le Bon tries to analyse what constitutes a crowd, from the psychological point of view (Le Bon, 1926). In this book, Le Bon states that a numeric strong agglomeration of individuals, does not suffice to form a crowd. He points some other characteristics of a psychological crowds such as the disappearance of brain activity, and pre dominance of medullar activity, the lowering of the intelligence
