Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power is a very odd book. Appearing at first glance to be a psycho-sociological treatise on crowd psychology, it actually is a mishmash of anecdotes, weakly examined theories, and prose poetry that doesn’t add up to a whole lot. But it isn’t entirely uninteresting.
Canetti begins his discourse by defining and describing different varieties of crowds. From the start you could be forgiven for thinking this typographical section will introduce definitions that will later be used as support for theories. At least that is one method of structuring a good quality work of social science. But these descriptions get awkward and problematical from the start. Some of Canetti’s crowds are described in vague and poorly defined terms. One example is when he says that all members of a crowd are equal, but he gives no qualification as to what he means by “equal”. Are they of equal economic status? Equal in height, weight, or age? Equal in levels of happiness or sadness? Equal in educational achievements? We can not really know because he does not give any explanation or examples of what he means. From there he assigns symbols to different types of crowds. One type of crowd is like fire, another like wheat grains, another like a river, and so on. While this may help to clarify the ideas he had just explained, it reads more like a literary exercise, a poetic version of semiotics, than legitimate sociological theory.
Another large portion of the book leaves the idea of the crowd behind and focuses more on the psychology of the individual. One type of individual Canetti describes is the “survivor”, the man who triumphs over death in order to make himself more powerful. This, in combination with his concept of debt being used to exert power over individuals, might sound familiar to some readers, particularly those who have read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. That is because Canetti lifted those ideas, uncredited of course, from that classic work of philosophy. (Canetti does make mention of Nietzsche in one place, referring to The Will to Power which he calls Nietzsche’s most significant work, a strange idea considering that book is nothing but a collection of scraps that the existentialist philosopher decided not to use in his published writings. Some of them were possibly not even written by him.)
This explanation of the survivor makes a comfortable segue into a treatise on the man of power or the man who exerts power over crowds. The concepts surrounding crowds he describes at the start of the book recede into the background at this point and almost entirely disappear from the text. Canetti’s preoccupation is with only one kind of power, the despot who amasses large amounts of strength by killing masses of people. In this way, despots like Genghis Khan and Napoleon absorb the departing souls of those they kill. Here Canetti has left the discipline of social science and entered into the domain of pseudoscience, occultism, and mysticism.
Somehow this makes sense because the support he offers for his sketchy, and often vague, theories is based on anecdotes provided by 19th century anthropologists, mostly about tribal people subject to colonial rule. In fact, at least a good quarter of the book is comprised of long passages directly copied out of these anthropological studies. After each of these quotes, Canetti offers an analys but these analyses are little more than verbatim retellings of what you just read without offering any enhanced insights into the matters at hand.
Aside from the problematical nature of these lifted passages (19th century anthropologists worked in the service of colonial governments, functioning in a similar way to what the CIA does now), there are methodological problems too. Canetti draws hasty and grandiose conclusions based on flimsy evidence that is cherry picked to support whatever claim it is he wants to make. Only one anecdote is supplied for each claim; a narrow range of data is used to the exclusion of other information that may justify or disprove whatever it is he wants to say. Canetti doesn’t even come close to examining the full range of data and furthermore never even argues in favor of his own theories. He states them without explaining them or evaluating them in any detail. There is no process of reasoning behind what he says, no examination of theses and antitheses.
Just as bad is the way that Canetti writes in terms of sweeping generalizations. He writes as though all members of a crowd feel exactly the same way as each other. All despots have the same thoughts and use the same tactics for conquering and subduing people. Shamans, in every culture of the world, do exactly the same things; they fly into the air to command spirits in the sky and they swim to the bottom of the sea to command the spirits of the water. He uses this same explanation more than once. Anybody remotely familiar with shamanism would likely concur that the practices of shamans vary widely across cultures even if they do serve similar functions all around the world.
What is truly interesting about this book is that Canetti does an excellent job of curating the passages he quotes from anthropological sources. In fact, these passages are the best parts of Crowds and Power which is a little sad considering he didn’t write any of them. But he did have a good eye for clearly described and well-written accounts of so-called “primitive” people in Australia, Africa, and South America. There are some fascinating stories about religious rituals, communal feasts, initiations, and mythologies. A lot of them are quite dark. Aspects of morbid curiosity are detailed in accounts of deaths during pilgrimages, self-flagellation rituals, funeral rites, and bodily mutilations as well as myths involving self-cannibalization and suicide. There is a strong predilection for exoticism or what Edward Said would refer to as “orientalism”, which is not considered politically correct in today’s university social science departments. Still, these are actual things that people did and believed and they reveal interesting sides of the human experience that we can not otherwise access in today’s world.
As far as books on the social sciences go, Crowds and Power is not a great book. Elias Canetti was an armchair anthropologist with no experience in field work, data collection, or analysis. He was a collector of curios which he tries to pass off as a middle-brow version of the old Ripley’s Believe It or Not comic strip. He doesn’t provide an amazing insights into either crowds or power and he certainly doesn’t state anything that hasn’t been better explained by other writers either before or after his time. The overall effect of this book is like visiting a literary wunderkammer or watching a mondo movie, that genre of 1970s exploitation films that posed as educational movies with the ulterior motive of shocking and titillating the more sordid variety of audiences. It is surprising this book is still in print since it probably isn’t being used as a university text these days unless professors want to use it as an example of everything that was wrong with the social sciences in the 20th century. It is an interesting read though. Just don’t take it too seriously.
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York: 1984.
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