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Author Mackay, Charles, 1814-1889, author.

Title Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds / by Charles Mackay ; with a foreword by Bernard M. Baruch
Published New York : Noonday Press, 1932

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Description xxiv, 724 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm
Series PsychBooks Collection
Contents The Mississippi scheme -- The South-Sea bubble -- The tulipomania -- The alchymists -- Modern prophecies -- Fortune-telling -- The magnetisers -- Influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard -- The Crusades -- The witch mania -- The slow poisoners -- Haunted houses -- Popular follies of great cities -- Popular admiration of great thieves -- Duels and ordeals -- Relics
Summary "The object of the author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative, and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes. Some of the subjects introduced may be familiar to the reader; but the Author hopes that sufficient novelty of detail will be found even in these, to render them acceptable; while they could not be wholly omitted in justice to the subject, of which it was proposed to treat. The memoirs of the South Sea madness and the Mississippi delusion are more complete and copious than are to be found elsewhere; and the same may be said of the history of the Witch Mania, which contains an account of its terrific progress in Germany, a part of the subject which has been left comparatively untouched by Sir Walter Scott, in his "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft," the most important that have yet appeared on this fearful but most interesting subject. Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history, a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes! Interspersed are sketches of some lighter matters, amusing instancies of the imitativeness and wrongheadedness of the people, rather than examples of folly and delusion. Religious manias have been purposely excluded as incompatible with the limits prescribed to the present work; a mere list of them would alone be sufficient to occupy a volume"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)
Notes With reproductions of title pages of 1841 and 1852 editions
First edition, published 1841 under title: Memoirs of extraordinary popular decisions
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Impostors and imposture.
Swindlers and swindling.
Occultism.
Hallucinations and illusions.
Social psychology.
Occultism
Hallucinations
Illusions
Psychology, Social
social psychology.
illusion (psychological concept)
Hallucinations and illusions
Impostors and imposture
Occultism
Social psychology
Swindlers and swindling
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0374502765
9780374502768