The Rape of the Masses by Serge Chakotin

Author: Chakotin, Serge
Title: The Rape of the Masses
Publisher: George Routledge & Sons
Date: 1940
Place: London
Dimensions: 8vo. 20.5cm x 14cm

xviii + 299pp
1st edition in English after the true first edition of 1939 published in Paris under the title Le Viol des Foules.

Yellow cloth boards with red titles to spine. Jacket VG if a trifle age toned. Leaves age toned, binding square and tight. A very good copy.

Serge Chakotin was a Russian propagandist during the Russian Revolution who also played an important part in the anti-Nazi struggle of the German Socialist Party (SPD) in 1932-33 and worked as propaganda adviser to the French Popular Front during 1934-36. Chakotin used Pavlovian ideas of behaviorist conditioning in his work on social and crowd psychology and the practice of anti-totalitarian propaganda. The Rape of the Masses is Chalotins key work on the subject and - towards the end of the book - contains practical steps for the practice of anti-fascist propaganda.

According to Neil Macmaster "Chakhotins work appears frequently on university reading lists for courses in media studies, communication theory and crowd psychology, as a standard reference for the study of Pavlovian theories of conditioned reflexes, brainwashing and totalitarian forms of mass indoctrination. From the early 1960s the book was better known for its impact on the counter-insurgency or psychological warfare doctrine adopted by the French army during the long and bloody war of decolonization in Algeria (1954 -1962)...despite the fact that Chakhotin as a pacifist and social democrat was profoundly opposed to colonial repression and militarism."