Corpus boundary — Gustave Le Bon v1

Fixed before any extraction, per the recipe's step 1.

Included — PROOF WORK

  • The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (English translation, 1896; of
    Psychologie des foules, 1895) — sources/thecrowd_pg445.txt,
    Project Gutenberg #445.

The evidence pool is bound to the two doctrinal books that carry Le Bon's
psychology of the crowd:

  • BOOK I. THE MIND OF CROWDS
    • I. General Characteristics of Crowds — Psychological Law of Their Mental Unity
    • II. The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds
    • III. The Ideas, Reasoning Power, and Imagination of Crowds
    • IV. A Religious Shape Assumed by All the Convictions of Crowds
  • BOOK II. THE OPINIONS AND BELIEFS OF CROWDS
    • I. Remote Factors of the Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds
    • II. The Immediate Factors of the Opinions of Crowds
    • III. The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion
    • IV. Limitations of the Variability of the Beliefs and Opinions of Crowds

Concept anchors are mined chiefly from Book I (all four chapters) and from
Book II ch. III (leaders, means of action, prestige). Book II ch. I–II and IV
are read for context and may be cited, but v1 does not mine them for anchors.

Touched, but out of the evidence pool (marked)

  • The Introduction («The Era of Crowds») is read as framing and may be
    cited, but the doctrine is anchored in Books I–II, not the Introduction.

Excluded from v1

  • BOOK III. THE CLASSIFICATION AND DESCRIPTION OF THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF
    CROWDS     (criminal crowds, juries, electoral crowds, parliamentary
    assemblies). It is public domain and in the same file, but was not ingested
    for v1. Book III is applied taxonomy of particular crowds; the general
    psychology — the KB's subject — lives in Books I–II. A future v2 may ingest
    Book III as its own marked layer.
  • Le Bon's other books (The Psychology of Peoples, The Psychology of
    Revolution    , The Psychology of Socialism, etc.) — not this corpus.
  • «Best of Le Bon» motivational/propaganda quote collections without an edition
    trace (see QUOTE_AUTHENTICITY).
  • Modern edited/abridged reprints — the Gutenberg #445 text is the anchor.

Language note

  • English is the primary evidence pool. Every evidence blockquote is a
    verbatim English substring of thecrowd_pg445.txt.
  • French is the term arbiter (the original Psychologie des foules): the
    canonical vocabulary in TERMINOLOGY.md is checked against Le Bon's French so
    the English translator's word-choices do not distort the concept slugs.
  • RU renderings are «перевод наш» and are not matched by the verbatim gate.

Reason

Le Bon's enduring contribution is the general psychology of the crowd —
mental unity, the unconscious, contagion, suggestibility, the loss of
personality, image-thinking, the religious form of belief, and the mechanics of
leaders and prestige. That doctrine is complete within Books I–II. Book III
merely applies it to named crowd-types. Binding the evidence to Books I–II keeps
the KB the smallest corpus that still carries the whole doctrine, and keeps the
individual-vs-mass debate (its reason for being in this constellation) sharp.