The phenomenon of the mob in national psychology: Two dissertations of 1907

The paper describes scientific approaches to understanding the phenomenon of the mob developed by N.N. Golovin and D.D. Bezsonov at the beginning of the XX century analyzing their characteristic features, as well as ways in which their views were affected by other theories of the time. The specificity of the mob as a social unit, factors provoking its formation, ways in which the mob affects personality, the role of suggestion and suggestibility such were the issues which attracted attention of the two authors of the two conceptions of the mob developed at the close of the pre-revolutionary era in Russia.