You get yourself, not a drizzle, but some honesttogoodness rain, and you find yourself someone really nice and drive her through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi.

Other sources, while admitting that unaccompanied minors were in Lobone, considered the number to be far lower than 2,000.

This discord is threatening to derail these countries burgeoning democratic processes, owing to growing competition between what Le Bon called the sovereignty of the crowds and the sovereignty of political elites.

As spontaneous protest overtakes organized political movements across the Arab world, the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya s nascent democracies should heed Le Bon s warning.

As Le Bon emphasized, people cannot easily do great things as individuals. They need to operate together within organizations that redirect crowd psychology, facilitate creativity, and are led by people of integrity.

Still, the word crowd has taken on an entirely different meaning and political valence in our century. Crowdsourcing and crowd funding have created new kinds of crowds, of the sort that Le Bon never could have imagined.

ABU DHABI In 1896, the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon warned his contemporaries of the dangers of crowds, writing that, It is necessary to arrive at a solution to the problems offered by crowds psychology, or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

Le Bon believed that crowds need strong leaders, to distance them from their natural madness and transform them into civilizations of splendor, vigor, and brilliance. Mussolini and Hitler both took inspiration from his book, and incorporated his ideas into Fascist and Nazi ideology and those ideas did not die with those regimes.