ROME, July 21 — The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871 did more than redraw borders. They provided the raw material for a new discipline: political psychology. The field, formally introduced during that upheaval, set out to explain why crowds turn, why leaders lead, and why voters choose as they do.
The mechanics here are still being dissected today, more than 150 years later. The term itself came first.
Ethnologist Adolf Bastian introduced “political psychology” in his 1860 book Man in History. But it was philosopher Hippolyte Taine, a founder of the École Libre de Sciences Politiques, who applied Bastian’s ideas to contemporary politics in his multi-volume work The Origins of Contemporary France (1875–1893). Taine looked at the French Revolution and saw not just events, but psychological currents.
The catch: He and his colleagues were writing in the wake of national trauma, trying to understand how a society could fracture so quickly. Émile Boutmy, head of the École, followed with two national studies: English People; A study of their Political Psychology (1901) and The American People; Elements of Their Political Psychology (1902). On closer reading, these works try to map national character onto political institutions — a move that later scholars would both borrow and critique.
The crowd, the elite, and the vote
Gustave Le Bon pushed the crowd theory hardest. In Psychology of Socialism (1896) and Political Psychology and Social Defense (1910), he argued that crowd activity subdues individual will and pollutes rational thought, unleashing uncontrollable impulses and emotions. His proposed remedy: nationalism.
That prescription has aged badly in many quarters, but the underlying question — how groups override individual reason — remains central to the field. In Italy, the Risorgimento of 1870 triggered social reforms and voting rights, and with them came a different kind of analysis.
Gaetano Mosca, in The Ruling Class: Elements of Political Science (1896), theorized that every society has a ruling class and a ruled class. Vilfredo Pareto, inspired by Mosca, wrote The Rise and Fall of the Elites (1901) and The Socialist System (1902–1903). His later treatise The Mind and Society (1916) is less a psychology text than a sociology of power.
Follow the money: these elite theories directly influenced Robert Michels, a German socialist who compared the lower-class-run German parliament with the upper-class-run Italian parliament, and found that organization itself breeds oligarchy.
Political psychology today draws from anthropology, economics, history, international relations, journalism, media studies
Sources
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