I have already begun to read Elias Canetti’s book Crowds and Power – it is dense, and rather slow-going, and yet – I can see why he is so influential, I can see why people who are interested in culture, civilization, war, humanity (Robert Kaplan cites Elias Canetti on almost every other page of Balkan Ghosts) – find him to be so useful.
This is a man who, like other great philosophers and scientists and thinkers, has raised himself above the horde. He has raised himself above enough to describe the way the horde behaves.
It’s a book of philosophy, I would say.
The purpose of the 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 novelist, quite a successful novelist – but Crowds and Power is his main accomplishment.
I’ll post some excerpts so you can see how he writes, what he is about. The book, obviously, has a lot to say about the times we are living in, with crowd mentalities cropping up like brush-fires across the planet. A couple of passages resonated with: “Wow. He is describing NOW”.
He takes 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 …
I cannot tell you how gripping this book already is. By the second paragraph I was hooked.
So again: I want to thank the reader who sent it to me. It is a wonderful gift.
Oh, by the way: do I have any readers who speak German? Or who can read German enough to translate it into English?
this sounds like a very interesting book. i just rented gimme shelter. have you seen it? it is a maysles brothers documentary that started out as a rock tour doc about the rolling stones, but it wound up becoming something very different. during a free concert given by the rolling stones at altamount speedway north of san francisco, the filmmakers captured on film the murder of a black man by a group of hells angels, who had unofficially been recruited as security. this all happened in 1969 amidst hundreds of thousands of people. this incident, along with the manson murders, has been mythologized as the final nail in the coffin of the free-loving 60s. anyway, crowd mentality played into this a lot. fascinating.
God, yes, I did see that movie. A long time ago. I think that incident was part of one of those ubiquitous VH1 specials – like: “Top 100 disasters in rock in the last 32 and 3/4 years.” Or something like that.
It’s terrifying.
The book is making me think of the panic that ensued in the nightclub fire in Rhode Island as well – Canetti deals extensively with fire, and humanity’s collective terror of fire, especially in closed places.
There are elements to that crowd mentality thing, too, in that famous story about the woman being raped on the sidewalk, and everyone heard the screams, and every single person assumed that somebody ELSE would call the police (collectively – they were all in separate apartments) – and so nobody called the police, and her screams went unheard.
Canetti looks at cultural expressions of being in a crowd – like the Maori haka dance – and what that actually means in terms of crowd dynamic.
Amazing book. (I mean, I’ve only read 20 or so pages, but it is amazing so far.)
Well, I took German in high school, but I’ve forgotten most of it and it was never good enough that I think I would’ve been able to translate something serious.
Canetti’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech is listed in German
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1981/canetti-speech.html
I’d love to know what he said. (Nobel prize speeches – especially from authors – are a pet obsession of mine)
Thanks, though, Dave. :)
Red – I can sprechen sie Deutsch, if you need something translated. Sorry, I didn’t notice this earlier.
Red this is why you’re the best – I hadn’t thought about Kaplans’ fascination with Canetti in years. Right after Balkan Ghosts came out (at a time when I happened to be a big student of the Balkans), I kept thinking “why is Kaplan so fascinated with this guy?” and finally had to get the book.