The significant role that crowds and mobs play in modern history has been recognized since the French Revolution, and the efforts to understand their origin and behavior constitute an important, if neglected, part of early psychology. In Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871-1899, Jaap van Ginneken explores the fascinating relationship among crowd psychologists and the important events of their day.

Examining the work of five social scientists in the late nineteenth century, Jaap van Ginneken traces the history of crowd psychology from its inception to the work of the French physician Le Bon--widely considered to be the founder of the field--just before the turn of the century. Although he was the most popular and influential of the crowd psychologists, LeBon's work was much influenced by his predecessors and by contemporaries in his field, a debt he never acknowledged.

Jaap van Ginneken traces the descendants and heirs of Taine, Sighele, Fournial, LeBon, and Tarde, using unpublished correspondences to shed new light on their mutual relations.

Crowds, psychology, and politics, 1871-1899 also brings together the important events of the nineteenth century and the work being done on crowd psychology, examining the effects that events, such as the Paris Commune revolt and the Dreyfus affair, had on the founders of crowd psychology.

The approach of each theorist is placed in the context of the debates of the day, such as the "hypnosis" debate between Chartot and Bernheim in psychiatry and the "imitation" debate between Durkheim and Tarde in sociology. The inability of crowd psychology to establish itself as an academic discipline resulted from its multidisciplinary approach toward popular events, although the work of Le Bon remained influential with twentieth-century politicians ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Adolf Hitler.