The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, credited to Gustave Le Bon, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon. Read in English by Oxenhandler "Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture — all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall." - Gustave Le Bon, from Introduction

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
• Author credits: Gustave Le Bon
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 15
• Listed recording duration: 5:52:04

Catalogue topics

• democracy
• criminology
• aristocracy
• communism
• Fascism
• group psychology
• oligarcy

Track guide

1. 00 - Preface, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind — 8:32
2. 01 - Introduction, The Era of Crowds — 16:04
3. 02 - General Characteristics of Crowds— Psychological Law of Their Mental Unity — 20:25
4. 03 - The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds — 44:45
5. 04 - The Ideas, Reasoning Power and Imagination of Crowds — 20:18
6. 05 - A Religious Shape Assumed by all the Convictions of Crowds — 11:12
7. 06 - Remote Factors of the Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds — 41:15
8. 07 - The Immediate Factors of the Opinions of Crowds — 27:47
9. 08 - The Leaders of Crowds and their Means of Persuasion — 42:35
10. 09 - Limitations of the Variability of the Beliefs and Opinions of Crowds — 23:59
11. 10 - The Classification of Crowds — 7:46
12. 11 - Crowds Termed Criminal Crowds — 9:12
13. 12 - Criminal Juries — 16:00
14. 13 - Electoral Crowds — 19:22
15. 14 - Parliamentary Assemblies — 42:52

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.