Le Bon’s crowd psychology reassured Egyptians they were governed by universal laws

Evidence

‘I used to feel a resentment towards Egypt that I felt towards no other human society’, wrote a columnist in the Egyptian paper al-Mu’ayyad in 1910. ‘I would almost believe that its character and condition made it a strange exception – until I read this book.’ The book was Ruh al-ijtima`, a translation of Gustave Le Bon’s scientific study of the crowd, Psychologie des foules, and had been published in Cairo the previous year. ‘It explains the nature of societies in general, eastern and western,’ continued the columnist, ‘and determines a single law that applies to all of them, without variants or exceptions. I have learnt that there is no difference between Egypt’s people and the people of other countries.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 392

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier thesis about colonial ‘enframing’ and universal law — the colonial elite adopting European social-science universalism as self-understanding.
• DEEPTHINKING: A colonized intellectual describing his own society’s ‘strangeness’ as a wound healed by European universal science: the psychological mechanism through which colonized elites internalize the metropole’s framework.