Rhetoric for Crowds

Gustave Le Bon’s eminent work The Crowd is considered as one of the fundamental works in mass psychology. Concurrently, the importance of this work and the impact it had on communication practices has been recently recognized by some of the scholars. While The Crowd primarily places focus on meticulous description of origin and psychological condition of the crowd, this paper suggests that, among others, Le Bon uses psychological discourse to define rhetorical precept that can be used as an agency for eliciting such condition. It is the purpose of this paper to extract and present the guidelines suggested by Le Bon in his work for mass oratory and corroborate it with apposite rhetorical theory in order to lend credibility to this thesis. Through broader treatment of rhetorical modes of pathos (state and language that induces it), orator, oration, and kairos (the right moment), with other hitherto rhetorical and linguistic insights, Le Bon constitutes activation means for evoking the psychological phenomena of the crowd. This paper represents Le Bon’s explicit and implicit rhetorical instructions in The Crowd by constructing the rhetorical model and indicating that his scholarly contribution was rhetorical as was psychological, suggesting consideration of his inclusion in the history of rhetoric and his contribution to the development of contemporary communication practices. This paper represents an interdisciplinary rhetorical model that engages the field of interest of various scientific disciplines, such as linguistics, rhetoric, communicology, public relations, and their subbranches.