The purpose of Canetti’s book is to investigate the nature of crowds – how they form, how they behave, how they respond to panic, how they respond to a threat …
I don’t know much about Canetti’s background. I know he was German, and I know he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. He was also a successful novelist.
His book Crowds and Power, published in the early 60s, obviously, has a lot to say about the times we are living in now, the divisions, the pack mentalities, the fired-up nationalisms, the fierce groupings …
Obviously, one of Canetti’s points is that this crowd-behavior stuff is as old as mankind itself. Perhaps now, though, the questions of WHY taken on greater urgency. Why? Canetti wrote this book during the 1950s, as the Cold War heated up, and as the civilized world tried to deal with the repercussions of the Holocaust – what an industrialized group can do to another. You can feel the anxiety in Canetti’s prose at times.
Canetti studies crowds of all kinds, and dissects how they behave. The crowds who gather in churches, how those crowds are different from the audience at a play, how the audience at a play differs from the audience at a cello concerto – and then he goes further, into a geo-political mode – describing revolutions, crowd mentalities …
He has broken crowds down into recognizable types: Baiting Crowds, Flight Crowds, Reversal Crowds, Prohibition Crowds, Feast Crowds … to name a few. He gives examples so that you can anchor your understanding in something concrete. (For example: The “reversal crowd”: The best example of this type of crowd is the French Revolution, although most revolutions feature some sort of “reversal”. As in: the jailer becomes the jailed. The powerful become the crushed. Etc.)
Like I said before, this is dense heady stuff. But dammit, it’s fascinating.
Robert Kaplan used Canetti’s work on “national crowd symbols” as one of his launching-off points in Balkan Ghosts. Canetti talks about different countries, and how they find their identity, their identity as a CROWD, in certain symbols. (For England, it is the sea, for example). Kaplan, traveling through the Balkans, trying to understand the interweaving relationships of these countries, found the question: “What is the crowd symbols of Romania” or “What is the crowd symbol of Croatia” very helpful, in trying to piece together the histories, the relationships.
Obviously, these are not FACTS. It’s philosophy, stupid. It’s helpful to contemplate giant human movements … and to see how they can be predicted, or explained. Canetti is all about that.
Great book. I highly recommend it.
Excerpts coming up.
