Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
"Crowds and Power" by Elias Canetti is a profound exploration of the dynamics between individuals and collective entities such as crowds, examining how these interactions shape human existence and the concept of power. Canetti, a multilingual intellectual who wrote primarily in German, delves into the psychological and philosophical implications of crowds, asserting that the acceptance of power is intertwined with the acceptance of death. The book is structured into twelve sections, with the first half focusing on the nature of crowds and the latter half on the essence of power, revealing Canetti's belief that humanity is in constant conflict between these masses and the individual self.
The text draws from diverse fields including social psychology, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology, infused with mythological references from various cultures. Despite its scholarly roots and extensive bibliography, "Crowds and Power" is noted for its complexity and difficulty in navigation, lacking traditional structural aids such as an index. Critics have debated its accessibility and scientific rigor, yet some praise it as a significant work of wisdom for the modern era. Canetti's unique approach avoids dogmatic conclusions, advocating for awareness and detachment from the influences of power and crowd mentality, encouraging individuals to embrace their separateness and the richness of individual experience.
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Subject Terms
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
First published:Masse und Macht, 1961 (English translation, 1962)
Type of work: Cultural criticism
Form and Content
It may be that many writers have a lifelong theme they are committed to exploring. The English philosopher-historian Isaiah Berlin calls such writers hedgehogs, as opposed to foxes, since they have but one burrow to inhabit, one issue to which they adhere. Despite the seeming diversity of his works, Elias Canetti is a hedgehog. Though multilingual (his first language is Ladino but he writes in German) and highly educated—and thus superlatively equipped to build systems of thought—he remained throughout his long career preoccupied with the theme of crowds and power and their corollary, death. He remained faithful to their concrete reality as well. Canetti’s uniqueness consists of his unwillingness to formulate a system of belief, a grand synthesis presuming to define the subject once for all.
“Man has a profound need to arrange and re-arrange all the human beings he knows or can imagine,” writes Canetti in Crowds and Power. Yet Canetti transcends this need. Not only anti-Freudian and anti-Marxist but also antireligious and, in a sense, antiphilosophical, this antihistorian and antitheoretician, this intellectual’s intellectual has made his life’s work a difficult-to-classify book intended if not to redeem then at least to explain the century of totalitarianism.
The germ of Crowds and Power may be found in Die Blendung (1935; Auto-da-Fe, 1946; also as The Tower of Babel, 1947), Canetti’s only novel, a companion piece to Crowds and Power though altogether different in form, tone, and style. The destruction of the novel’s antihero—Dr. Peter Kien, the self apart from the crowd—by his housekeeper-wife and a rogues’ gallery of brutal doormen, vicious dwarfs, and the flotsam of the Viennese underworld—the crowd—links the novel with Crowds and Power. Consider this passage from Auto-da-Fe:
We wage the so-called war of existence for the destruction of the mass-soul in ourselves, no less than for hunger and love. . . . “Mankind” has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down into an idea. It foams, a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal.
The implications of this passage are developed at length in Crowds and Power, which consists of social psychology, political philosophy, rhetorical analysis, and cultural anthropology in equal measure, with much mythological material gleaned from “primitive” cultures. The book is packed with information and references (its “selected” bibliography contains 341 book titles in various languages) but is more difficult to use than it need be since its endnotes are not numbered and it contains no index. Crowds and Power is also not easy to grasp, in spite of its sentence-by-sentence lucidity. Its twelve sections do not proceed in inevitable, linear fashion. Yet they are, to a degree, unified by Canetti’s assumption that to accept power is to accept death.
The first four sections, somewhat less than half the book, concentrate on crowds, the last eight on power. Under them all lies Canetti’s belief that the human race can be explained as an ongoing conflict between the masses—often symbolized as fires, forests, rushing noises, winds, and foaming torrents—and the individual self, voiceless and powerless. He does not say so directly, but it is clear that the former are identified with death, the latter with life. Canetti does not accept death; he believes that it is important for a man to plan, even at the end of his life. Canetti also does not accept power, which always corrupts.
Critical Context
It may be that Crowds and Power has not yet found its audience. Its singularity, its mixture of the puzzling and the apparently obvious, and its lack of a sustained argument make it less accessible than most works of social psychology. Furthermore, Canetti does not specifically refer to events in the age of totalitarianism; they appear by inference. Canetti never mentions Fascism or Nazism, though he does discuss National Socialism occasionally. Hitler is mentioned only briefly, perhaps twice. Canetti’s examples of rulers and paranoiacs, apart from Schreber, are African kings and Mogul sultans.
Critics have found the book to be problematic in the extreme, some insisting that it is hopelessly unscientific, even preposterous. Other critics, however, claim that it is original and stimulating; one called it “the nearest thing to a book of wisdom we are likely to get in the twentieth century.” Canetti has been recognized both as a great hater and as a humanist attempting to hold together a world fallen into fragments, as a misanthrope and as a hero making a desperate effort to understand his dark times. He is often compared with other Central European intellectuals, such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, Georg Buchner, and Franz Kafka. Like these men, Canetti possesses a mana, a power himself. He has “never heard of a person attacking power without wanting it” and warns himself of his “own power over people.” He is without hope, but he acts as if hope were possible in giving years of his life to a book whose implicit intent is to aid humankind by defining its enemies: crowds, power, death. “So long as there are people in the world who have no power whatsoever, I cannot lose all hope,” he writes in his notebook. What, then, is to be done? Become conscious, Canetti implies, seek light not heat, avoid dogmas and crowds, detach oneself. In effect, Canetti suggests, become like Stendhal:
It would be hard to find a man less sympathetic to religion and more completely unaffected by its promises and obligations. His thoughts and feelings were directed wholly to this life and he experienced it with exactness and depth. . . . He allowed everything that was separate to remain separate, instead of trying to construct spurious unities. . . . He loved many things and believed in some, but all of them remained miraculously concrete for him.
The same can be said for Canetti.
Bibliography
Gass, William H. “The Road to the True Book,” in The New Republic. CLXXXVII (November 8, 1982), pp. 27-34.
Hulse, Michael, trans. Essays in Honor of Elias Canetti, 1987.
Murdoch, Iris. “Mass, Might, and Myth,” in The Spectator. September 7, 1962, p. 337.
Vinson, James, and Daniel Kirkpatrick, eds. Contemporary Foreign Language Writers, 1984.
Watson, Ian. “Elias Canetti: The One and the Many,” in Chicago Review. XX/XXI (May, 1969), pp. 184-200.
Wood, Michael. “Precise Exaggerator,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIV (April 29, 1979), pp. 11, 58-59.