Crowds & Power [Paperback]

 

 

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Canetti's monumental work is at the same time, frightening, awe-inspiring, shocking, numbing, believable & unbelievable . Strange though it may seem, it requires a deeply individual experience to understand 'Crowds and Power'. For, according to Canetti, a crowd is not just a bunch of people. The concept of crowd is ontologically prior to Man. In one of the most illuminating books ever written, Canetti takes one through two of the most important traits that have shaped Man's destiny on this planet - the formation of crowds and the facet of power. Hence, this is not a book about crowds. Its about Man.

The kaliedoscopic journey for the reader includes a vast range of topics from Australian aborigines,pueblo indians, jivaro indians, etruscans to ants, monkeys, kangaroos to Islam, Christianity, Judaism.

Some aspects of this book might sound unbelievable( like laughing being a substitute for eating..I believe it though)...but I can only quote what Blake wrote in 'Proverbs from Heaven and Hell' -

"There is no truth that can be understood and not be believed".

Read this book. It could be one of the most important things you might be doing in your life.

That the author won the Nobel may suade the reader one way or another. But as this work is what got him the prize, which to me says the Nobel must be worth something. If you don't know Canetti's work, you won't get the impression from the title that the man is incredibly funny. But he is. And yet his brand of humor comes only from surgical-precise observation of the ordinary. Canetti is the Montaigne of our time, of modernity, bearing all the marks and scars of our age. If Canetti's prose has the disarming rambling style that we associate with Montaigne's, it also has the latter's power to draw out the most unexpectedly profound from the ordinary. Sort of like old fencing masters: they never run, never sweat, are never fancy, but they always beat you to the jugular. All the scholarship,all the discipline is hidden, like the hull of a ship that keeps the whole thing afloat. In this book, without torturing language, Canetti tells you more about the nature of power than Foucault, and more about the nature of crowds than a room full of social psychologists. (That such a feat is possible ought to be a sobering lesson in itself!) Canetti's book is a wonderful mix of the potentially tedious (kangaroo behavior) and the...funky. For example, in describing the psychology of mass fear as it relates to its twin, the desire to out-survive others, he cites unexpected examples: burial customs in rural India in which a strenuous attempt is made to appease the spirit of the child if it dies a preventable death; the peculiar madness of Roman emperors; and the Viking warriors' tradition of piling up a mound of stones before going into battle. Each warrior brings a stone and adds to the pile. After battle, each warrior removes one stone, thus leaving a mound of stones that would represent the dead. Contemplating by the fire the remaining mound was immensely satisfying to the survivors, apparently. Canetti's notion of the crowd is never just a bunch of people. Canetti defines crowd as a cumulation of small units into a large ensemble, causing it to become something entirely different from the units that make it up. He sees nature as the teacher that taught man to behave as a crowd, as a liquid. For example, for the Germans, it is the forest with its innumerable trees, standing vertically, that has inspired the German soul since time primordial in its aspiration to become a marching liquid. For the Arabs, it is the sand of the desert. For the Dutch, it is the threatening sea itself. For the Mongols, the wind. Etc. Canetti's prose is muscular, never bloated. Given that he was a man of letters, and not an anthropologist, it may be of some significance that his lifelong project -- it took him some 30 years to write this book -- was shaped by his lifelong preference for a world as envisioned by the ancient Greeks and the ancient Chinese in matters literary, moral, and philosophical. His science is the science of a man confident in his experience and aristocratic power of observation. Canetti never sets out to convince. He has nothing to sell. It is his style to simply put it in front of you, and then leave. Take it or leave it, but this book will never leave you once you begin it.

Over twenty years in the making, this book is a must read
for anybody who's ever been disturbed by destructive crowd
behavior or the horror of tyrannical rulers. Insights into
crowd psychology and the pathology of power are supplied
through a wealth of material from such diverse subjects as
anthropology, psychology, biology, religion, and literature.
However, what emerges is no mere dry academic treatise, but
an absolutely fascinating journey through topics such as the
rain dances of the Pueblo Indians, the finger exercises of
monkeys, and the hallucinations of alcoholics.
Even if you find yourself disagreeing with some of
the author's conclusions, you will still find yourself
looking at the world in new ways. For example, I will never
watch the public actions of an orchestra conductor without
trying to glean insights into the nature of power.
In short, this is one of those rare books which
makes old, dull things you've known for years suddenly stand
up in a whole new dimension.

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