Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is one of the classic books on human folly, mass belief, financial mania, superstition, and the strange things people will do when they think everyone else is doing them too. Charles Mackay surveys famous episodes of collective irrationality, from the Mississippi Scheme, the South Sea Bubble, and tulip mania to alchemy, prophecies, crusading zeal, haunted houses, dueling customs, witch trials, and other outbreaks of popular enthusiasm, fear, greed, and credulity.
The book remains valuable because its subject has never gone out of fashion. Mackay's nineteenth-century prose can be dramatic, moralizing, and sometimes overstated, but the central insight is still painfully modern: crowds can make intelligent people reckless, and fashionable certainty can become more dangerous than ignorance. Readers interested in financial bubbles, market psychology, conspiracy thinking, moral panics, occult history, public delusion, and social contagion will find this an unusually rich classic.
This edition presents Mackay's landmark study as a warning against the comfort of fashionable certainty. Whether the crowd is chasing easy wealth, fearing hidden enemies, embracing occult promises, or repeating a story because everyone else repeats it, Mackay shows how quickly judgment can surrender to imitation. The result is a classic work of history, psychology, and social criticism that remains sharply useful wherever panic, greed, rumor, or belief move faster than reason.