Elias Canetti

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Mass, Might and Myth

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To deal adequately with Crowds and Power one would have to be, like its author, a mixture of historian, sociologist, psychologist, philosopher and poet. One is certainly confronted here with something large and important: an extremely imaginative, original and massively documented theory of the psychology of crowds.

Using heterogeneous and very numerous sources, Dr. Canetti has built a structure which has the clarity, simplicity and explanatory flexibility of a metaphysical system. His view will not prove easy to 'place' in any familiar pattern or genealogy of ideas; nor has he himself given any help to would-be 'placers.' He quotes the most diverse and esoteric writers, but the names of Freud and Marx occur nowhere in his text (Freud is mentioned once in a note). This particular reticence, which reminds one of Wittgenstein, is the mark of the artist and of the confident, truly imaginative thinker….

The book falls roughly into two halves. The first half analyses, with an amazing wealth of illustration, the dynamics of different types of crowds and of 'packs,' a term used to denote a smaller, more rigidly structured and purposive crowd. The second part, which discusses how and why crowds obey rulers, deals with the psychology of the despot. The key to the crowd, and to the crowd's master, Canetti finds in his central theory of 'command' and 'survival.'…

In the last part of the book, Canetti introduces another concept, that of 'transformation.' This specifically human talent has many uses but is most primitively a kind of protection. It is a danger to any would-be despot, whose corresponding passion is 'to unmask.' The book ends with a discussion of the case of Schreber, a paranoiac who wrote a detailed memoir of his delusional life. In this account Canetti finds all the characteristics of power and its relation to crowds which he has been analysing. 'It is only a step from the primitive medicine man to the paranoiac and from both of them to the despot of history.'…

I think Canetti's theory throws a great deal of light and precisely illuminates places which have hitherto been very dark. Marx has told us much about the dynamics of society. Freud has told us much about the human heart. But neither of them provides us [as does Canetti] with a satisfactory theoretical explanation of Hitler or an explanation, say, of the political power of a church over its adherents. (p. 337)

Ideally a 'theory' should be both centripetal and centrifugal, and this I think Dr. Canetti's theory triumphantly is. His book is full of starting points, embryo theories, sudden independent illuminations. When he says of Christianity, for instance, that it is a 'religion of lament' in which the 'hunting pack' expiates its guilt by turning into a 'lamenting pack', or when he speaks of the 'frenzy of increase' which in modern capitalism undermines the religion of lament, he is giving us new means of thinking which, as it were, contain their own ambiguities. Dr. Canetti might be the first to agree that concepts as well as men should enjoy the privileges of transformation. Rich concepts have histories. And precisely because Dr. Canetti's concepts are so rich I do not think we should be in too much of a hurry to see them as rigidly systematic.

This problem of the 'necessary incompleteness' of systems occurs to one particularly in relation to the 'moral' of Crowds and Power. Canetti speaks of power as fundamental to human nature and he analyses power with predominantly 'political' imagery…. Our most pressing need, as Canetti very movingly and convincingly argues at the end, is to control the 'survivor mania' of our rulers, and the key to this is 'the humanisation of command.' But how is command to be humanised? Canetti has not given us a psychology with which to picture the humanisation of command. Here rival science and indomitable morality stand ready to enter the argument. (pp. 337-38)

[We] have here that rare sense of being 'let out' into an entirely new region of thought. Canetti has done what philosophers ought to do, and what they used to do: he has provided us with new concepts. He has also shown, in ways which seem to me entirely fresh, the interaction of 'the mythical' with the ordinary stuff of human life. The mythical is not something 'extra'; we live in myth and symbol all the time.

Crowds and Power, one may add, is a marvellously rewarding book even if one were to read it without any theoretical interests at all. It is written in a simple, authoritative prose …, and it is radiant with imagination and humour. There are hundreds of memorable things…. The book is full of entertainments and provocations to thought. It is also a great original work on a vitally important subject, and provides us with an eminence from which we can take a new look at Marx and Freud. A large work of scholarship which is also a completely new work of theory is rare enough: and we should remind ourselves that in the obscure and disputed field of 'the study of human nature' we cannot rely only upon the piecemeal efforts of teams of merely competent scientists. We need and we shall always need the visions of great imaginers and solitary men of genius. (p. 338)

Iris Murdoch, "Mass, Might and Myth," in The Spectator (© 1962 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), No. 7002, September 7, 1962, pp. 337-38.

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Introduction

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Canetti's Cahiers