Considered one of the great books of the twentieth century Crowds and Power was the work responsible for winning Elias Canetti the 1981 Nobel Prize. From the destructive behaviour of soccer crowds to the horror of tyrannical rulers and from Bushmen and Pueblo Indian rain dances to the pilgrimage to Mecca, the author takes us on a fascinating journey through anthropology, psychology, biology, religion and literature. Ranging from the deeply profound to the overtly controversial - from the finger exercises of monkeys to the hallucinations of alcoholics - this book will change forever the way you look at groups of people and realise their awesome potential to be manipulated for good or for evil. He concludes that 'If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting'. This book will change forever the way you look at groups of people and the whole concept of power.
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Book Description
How do crowds work? What is the nature of their unique creation - the demagogue? This is the renowned and original analysis of one of this century's most threatening and influential phenomena by the nobel prize-winning thinker.
From the Publisher
Simon Schama explains why this is one of his favourites...
Born in Bulgaria and died in Hampstead, his first language the Hebrew-medieval Spanish hybrid, Ladino, Canetti was one of the most eccentric and extraordinary writers of the last century. His great novel, Auto-da-Fe will give anyone with a passion for books serious and prolonged nightmares.
Born in Bulgaria and died in Hampstead, his first language the Hebrew-medieval Spanish hybrid, Ladino, Canetti was one of the most eccentric and extraordinary writers of the last century. His great novel, Auto-da-Fe will give anyone with a passion for books serious and prolonged nightmares.
Crowds and Power puts its finger unerringly on one of the great motor forces of modern history: the capacity of crowds to behave as more than the sum of their parts; to take on the characteristics of a collective organism, with a capacity to digest, multiply and kill. Himself a survivor of horrors (Canetti left Germany in 1938), his exacting eye takes in the grim retrospect of Europe but puts it in the context of tribal rituals in Africa, Amazonia and Australia.
Like most of the really great works of history, Canetti’s work, part ethnography, part social psychology, defies neat classification. But its message, not always welcome is - this too is what it’s like to be part of the human pack.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Canetti bypasses the known greats and reworked mythologies of the late 20thC greats (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche) to add his name to theory.
The language is sweet flowing and precise unlike two of the three, unless you delve into the Notes from Exile or Short Accounts of Psycho-analysis first.
Canetti makes some grand claims about national identities at the beginning. At first they appear as caricatures but after interviewing a friend who runs a major S&M club who affirmed national stereotypes without having read this novel. This is where Canetti begins to make sense.
Despotic power in its guises arises from primeval forces, the desire to avenge the past and rain down the slings and arrows onto those climbing up behind. Power is necessarily paranoid within this paradigm. It rests upon being beaten, the humiliation of command which affects the body, transforming it into an outer projection. This allows the person to propel themselves forward and reach the higher echelons of power to re-enact the same scenarios. He talks about the wounds needing to be avenged to sustain a notion of the body.
Canetti travels across the world to bring the themes together from myths, stories and written accounts. The detail is breathtaking. It was the basis for psycho-social re rereading of the allure of fascism by Klaus Theweleit in "Male Fantasies".
This book like Foucault is a stupendous achievement in painting huge brush strokes to provide a picture outside of the iron prison of class/superman/unfolding drives/genetic paradigms of academia.
It languishes negelected, no longer in the spotlight as academia chases its tail in fast spinning circles, producing nothing of note for the last 30/40/50/60 years. Perhaps a friendly tap on the shoulder and a copy of Crowds and Power wrapped around the stick can help to light up a new paradigm.
Until then this is worth reading in preparation for that event you will launch forward.
The language is sweet flowing and precise unlike two of the three, unless you delve into the Notes from Exile or Short Accounts of Psycho-analysis first.
Canetti makes some grand claims about national identities at the beginning. At first they appear as caricatures but after interviewing a friend who runs a major S&M club who affirmed national stereotypes without having read this novel. This is where Canetti begins to make sense.
Despotic power in its guises arises from primeval forces, the desire to avenge the past and rain down the slings and arrows onto those climbing up behind. Power is necessarily paranoid within this paradigm. It rests upon being beaten, the humiliation of command which affects the body, transforming it into an outer projection. This allows the person to propel themselves forward and reach the higher echelons of power to re-enact the same scenarios. He talks about the wounds needing to be avenged to sustain a notion of the body.
Canetti travels across the world to bring the themes together from myths, stories and written accounts. The detail is breathtaking. It was the basis for psycho-social re rereading of the allure of fascism by Klaus Theweleit in "Male Fantasies".
This book like Foucault is a stupendous achievement in painting huge brush strokes to provide a picture outside of the iron prison of class/superman/unfolding drives/genetic paradigms of academia.
It languishes negelected, no longer in the spotlight as academia chases its tail in fast spinning circles, producing nothing of note for the last 30/40/50/60 years. Perhaps a friendly tap on the shoulder and a copy of Crowds and Power wrapped around the stick can help to light up a new paradigm.
Until then this is worth reading in preparation for that event you will launch forward.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Canett's 'Crowds and Power' is... well... not like other books.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Canetti's 'incorrect' in a myriad of ways. His interpretations of phenomena - the paranoid despot, delirium tremens, and a wide scattering of origin myths, amongst others - are highly idiosyncratic, to say the least. No doubt many, and many more plausible, interpretations could be advanced of literally every claim he makes.
I read this book in the course of writing up a PhD in design, and my brain was filled with Bruno Latour, Nigel Thrift, and others. Which is, no doubt in large part, why I found Crowds and Power such an extraordinary book. It goes for grand theory in a way it's become unfashionable, maybe even untenable, to pursue. But Canett's not interested in, say, naturalising capitalism, universalising Enlightenment mores, purging the social of the 'technological' and the 'natural', or any of the stock-in-trade tendencies to the sweeping gesture that have taken such vicious flak of late.
Whether Canetti's tossing out aphorisms like 'the mouth is the prototype of all prisons' or claiming that trade emerges from the patterns of grasp-and-release of our tree-dwelling prehuman ancestors, his peculiar vision disturbs assumptions, and - without fail - in ways that make for uncomfortable reading. Canetti's highly individual history of the human race is a dark and bloody one, stripped of every last vestige of kindness. The closest contemporary comparison I can think of is the work of some of the so-called speculative realist philosophers, Reza Negarestani, Ray Brassier, their forebear Nick Land perhaps; maybe some of the new ecological thinking sketched out by, say, Timothy Morton, as well.
Great stuff. Read it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Canetti's 'incorrect' in a myriad of ways. His interpretations of phenomena - the paranoid despot, delirium tremens, and a wide scattering of origin myths, amongst others - are highly idiosyncratic, to say the least. No doubt many, and many more plausible, interpretations could be advanced of literally every claim he makes.
I read this book in the course of writing up a PhD in design, and my brain was filled with Bruno Latour, Nigel Thrift, and others. Which is, no doubt in large part, why I found Crowds and Power such an extraordinary book. It goes for grand theory in a way it's become unfashionable, maybe even untenable, to pursue. But Canett's not interested in, say, naturalising capitalism, universalising Enlightenment mores, purging the social of the 'technological' and the 'natural', or any of the stock-in-trade tendencies to the sweeping gesture that have taken such vicious flak of late.
Whether Canetti's tossing out aphorisms like 'the mouth is the prototype of all prisons' or claiming that trade emerges from the patterns of grasp-and-release of our tree-dwelling prehuman ancestors, his peculiar vision disturbs assumptions, and - without fail - in ways that make for uncomfortable reading. Canetti's highly individual history of the human race is a dark and bloody one, stripped of every last vestige of kindness. The closest contemporary comparison I can think of is the work of some of the so-called speculative realist philosophers, Reza Negarestani, Ray Brassier, their forebear Nick Land perhaps; maybe some of the new ecological thinking sketched out by, say, Timothy Morton, as well.
Great stuff. Read it.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By SH_
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
But alas neglected these days. Canetti's thesis about the genesis and abuse of autocratic power in different cultures and historical times is a fitting repost to a century of power hungry maniacs although it reaches much deeper into the very structure of the urge to rule and the behaviours of the ruled. If you haven't read this book you simply have no education. It is one of the most original works of all time.
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