Canetti believes that without precise knowledge of crowds and packs, no social event can be

understood. Thus, he felt compelled to produce a relentlessly descriptive book whose

multitude of historical and anthropological illustrations demonstrate that for humans to
survive they must never trust rulers and crowds. They must disobey all commands, since
“the oldest command—and it is far older than man— is a death sentence.” Crowds and
Power is, properly understood, a summons to rebellion, but it is miles away from the
polemical and propagandistic and thus makes its political points by implication. It is a
patient, impersonal elaboration on the taxonomy of power, descriptive rather than
normative, stylistically straightforward and dispassionate though of magisterial force.

It takes as its point of departure mankind’s primal fear, the fear of being touched, which is
the title of the opening section. We want to see what reaches toward us, Canetti claims, and
to recognize and classify it: Clothes, houses, all the distances we create between ourselves
and others testify to this fear. Yet we can never be fully free of it except in a crowd. Then
“fear changes into its opposite.” In crowds, people are no longer adversaries of one another,
each protecting the space he draws around himself, but allies whose emotions are now
directed toward and discharged upon a common threat.

Canetti sometimes sounds as if he thought he could take nothing, absolutely nothing, for
granted. Yet his intention is to look for the first time at commonplaces others have long
since failed to regard. One example is teeth. One might think that their significance is self-
evident. Yet Canetti anatomizes them in the section “The Entrails of Power,” noting that
they are “the most striking natural instrument of power in man” and that their smoothness,
hardness, and arrangement are “quite different from anything else belonging to the body.”
Furthermore, this order operates as a danger to the world outside: As omnivores, humans
always threaten to eat the world. Thus teeth are an archetype of power, and their
attributes, smoothness and order, have entered into the very nature of power. Modern
architecture, prisons especially (“The mouth is . . . the prototype of all prisons”), testifies to
the human obsession with order. It is not accidental that ornament and decoration are out
of favor in the twentieth century, because though “we speak of function, clarity of line, and
utility . . . what has really triumphed is smoothness, and the prestige of power it conceals.”
Furthermore, maintaining that power is never neutral and never beneficent, Canetti
observes that “the order of military formations, which is artificially connected with man
himself, is in myth connected with teeth: the soldiers of Cadmus, who sprang from the soil,
were sown as dragon’s teeth.”
From teeth Canetti proceeds to eating, a central concept for him, and one that seems
initially surprising in the context of power and politics. Canetti, however, is faithful to the
concrete reality of the thing-in-itself, which, examined critically, has remarkable
implications. He observes that “whatever goes in there [the mouth] is lost, and much goes in
whilst still alive.” The maws of whales and dragons, prisons, and torture chambers all derive
from the Ur-prison, the mouth.

The next step by the possessor of power involves the incorporation of what has been seized,
chewed, and swallowed, during which all substance is sucked from the prey until “all that
remains is refuse and stench.” According to Canetti, this process, which stands at the end of
every act of power, gives us a clue to the nature of power in general.” It also offers insight
into the analogies on which Canetti feeds. The holder of power, the ruler, intends always to
incorporate the body politic into himself and suck out its substance, although he would
never say so. In fact, the ruler usually protests that the body politic feeds on him.

For Canetti, the process of ingestion, digestion, and excretion is central to power, although
it is so far beyond consciousness that its importance is underrated. It is clear, however, that
“all the phases of this process, and not only the external and half-conscious ones, must have
their correspondence in the psyche.” Crowds and Power attempts to illuminate these
correspondences. Only an original mind determined to examine without preconception
would produce so startling and yet so inevitable an argument. Starting with a premise that
may strike the reader as either outrageous or banal, Canetti reaches a conclusion difficult to
fault.

“The Entrails of Power” is one of the central sections of Crowds and Power. “The Survivor,”
another crucial section, elaborates on the idea that “the moment of survival is the moment
of power” because “to be the last man to remain alive is the deepest urge of every real
seeker after power.” This section leads, after “Elements of Power,” to “The Command,”
another important section. Canetti believes that since the command “is the most dangerous
single element in the social life of mankind . . . we must have the courage to stand against it
and break its tyranny,” one of the few sentences in the book suggestive of activism.

Crowds and Power draws its strength from description, not judgment or calls to arms.
Canetti is devoid of the obvious signs of revolutionary fervor, but in his scholarly way he is
as radical as an anarchist. Indeed, a benevolent anarchy seems the ineluctable outcome of
his assumptions. Like anarchists, he believes that the separation of public and private is
utterly false. On the subject of Franz Kafka, whom he greatly admired, Canetti writes, “A
person who [unlike Kafka] thinks that he is empowered to separate his inner world from the
outer one has no inner world from which something might be separable.” That may be one
of Canetti’s most significant ideas, since most people do in fact empower themselves to
acquire balance by making this separation.

One man who empowered himself in this way was an obscure nineteenth century Dresden
judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, on whom Sigmund Freud wrote and to whom Canetti devotes
nearly thirty pages of Crowds and Power. Canetti discussed this man’s case for a specific
purpose:A madman, helpless, outcast, and despised, who drags out a twilight existence in
some asylum may, through the insights he procures us, prove more important than Hitler or
Stalin, illuminating for mankind its curse and its masters.

Clearly Schreber, an educated and intelligent man, is an exemplary figure for Canetti, and to
understand why is to understand the thesis of Crowds and Power. Schreber epitomizes
Canetti’s major themes, and though the reader may not find inevitability in the internal
arrangement of chapters in the book, he will sense it in Schreber’s having very nearly the
last word.

Schreber was a paranoid megalomaniac who described in his memoirs his delusion that he
was the only human left alive after a universal catastrophe. He is the ultimate survivor, a
man who sees faintly other inmates of the asylum wherein he was confined for seven years
but accords them no real existence. He confirms Canetti’s idea that the paranoiac is driven
to incorporate the whole of reality into himself in an attempt to contain its otherwise
insupportable threat. Paranoiacs are often grandiose. Their fear and impotence make for
compensatory delusions of omnipotence. Both madmen and paranoid political leaders see
the world as prey to be ingested, and both are prone to playing God. Thus, in describing
Schreber’s case, Canetti lays bare the roots of Fascism, since Fascism may be understood as
the most naked and overt form of a politics that rests unapologetically on realpolitik, on
power.

The relation between power and crowds is clear: The former needs the latter as the
anemone the shrimp. Therefore, if humans are to survive, they must learn to resist
commands, the naked expressions of power. Canetti warns,It is difficult to resist the
suspicion that behind paranoia, as behind all power, lies the same profound urge: the desire
to get other men out of the way so as to be the only one; or, in the milder, and indeed often
admitted, form, to get others to help him become the only one.

Schreber’s delusion is thus “a precise model of political power, power which feeds on the
crowd and draws its substance from it.” The Dresden madman whose fantasies culminated
in his casting himself in the role of a Mongolian prince anticipates the psychopathic Austrian
housepainter who a few decades later “accorded high honour” to Schreber’s political
system, “though in a rather cruder and less literate form.” Indeed, Adolf Hitler made
Schreber’s delusion “the creed of a great nation, leading . . . to the conquest of Europe and
coming within a hair’s breadth of the conquest of the world.” The only difference between
Schreber and Hitler is that Schreber “never actually attained the monstrous position he
hungered for.” The lust for power is common to both men. It is a lust pervasive if not
universal, and Crowds and Power attempts nothing less than to search out all of its hiding
places.

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.

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.

Bibliography
(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: NONFICTION MASTERPIECES)
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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.