Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War is the title of an influential book by English surgeon Wilfred Trotter, published in 1916. Based on the ideas of Gustave Le Bon, it was very influential in the development of group dynamics and crowd psychology, and the propaganda of Edward Bernays. Trotter's book was also a key influence on Q. D. Leavis' book Fiction and the Reading Public (1932).

Quotes

From Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1942 ed., pg. 90):

Response

Writer Vernon Lee owned a first edition of Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War: Leen wrote marginalia into her copy taking issue with Trotter's ideas. Lee's notes criticised Trotter's ideas of organicism and his use of "crowd theory", and disagreed with Trotter's support for the First World War. Lee later wrote her 1932 book Music and its Lovers partly as a response to Trotter's book.

Popular culture

In the James Bond novel: Live and Let Die, the villain of the book, Mister Big, speaks about and quotes this book to James Bond, from chapter 21: "You have doubtless read Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, Mister Bond. Well, I am by nature and predilection a wolf and I live by a wolf’s laws. Naturally the sheep describe such a person as a “criminal”. ‘The fact, Mister Bond,’ The Big Man continued after a pause, ‘that I survive and indeed enjoy limitless success, although I am alone against countless millions of sheep, is attributable to the modern techniques I described to you on the occasion of our last talk, and to an infinite capacity for taking pains. Not dull, plodding pains, but artistic, subtle pains. And I find, Mister Bond, that it is not difficult to outwit sheep, however many of them there may be, if one is dedicated to the task and if one is by nature an extremely well-equipped wolf."