Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a singular casebook of human folly throughout the ages. This nineteenth-century landmark study of crowd psychology and mass mania includes accounts of classic swindles, schemes, and scams on a grand scale. The Mississippi Scheme that swept France in 1720, the South Sea Bubble that ruined thousands in England during the same decade, and the Tulipomania that practically consumed the Dutch imagination in the seventeenth century (fortunes …