Crowds And Power by Elias Canetti. New York. 1962. Viking Press. hardcover. 295 pages. Jacket design by James and Ruth McCrea.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A mounting groundswell of opinion from abroad indicates that this bold and startlingly original work will be a publishing event of the greatest importance. The book will doubtless prove to be as obligatory for the reader of today, concerned with the mainsprings of human affairs, as Spengler’s DECLINE OF THE WEST was for an earlier generation. Canetti’s book is, however, both shorter and far easier to read than Spengler’s. The increasing interplay between crowds and power is the most important social phenomenon of our century. Men hitherto unknown are suddenly thrown up by the crowd, and the power they then wield is more absolute than that of any established former ruler. These men have started wars involving the whole of mankind, and the destruction of life they have wrought is incalculable. Event single human being on earth is in some way or another affected by them, and the complete extinction of mankind is threatened by this mysterious interplay between crowds and power. A real understanding of this problem is urgent. CROWDS AND POWER is based on the author’s own firsthand observation of crowds in several countries, on his vast research for twenty-five years on historical crowds in various civilizations, and on the roots and motives of personal power. DR. C. VERONICA WEDGWOOD, the distinguished British writer and lecturer, says in her review of CROWDS AND POWER in The London Daily Telegraph: ‘This is a powerful and haunting book which fires the imagination and the intellect. of comprehensive significance, a kind of ‘Leviathan’ for the twentieth century. Some passages in this book recall in their unvarnished and telling directness the etchings of Goya. The whole provides an astonishing and disturbing new perspective of the human scene.’ IRIS MURDOCH in The Spectator writes: ‘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. 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. We need and we shall always need the visions of great imaginers and solitary men of genius.’
Elias Canetti (1905-1994), Bulgarian-born author of the novel Auto-da-Fé, the sociological study Crowds and Power, and three previously published memoir volumes (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in my Ear, and The Play of the Eyes), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.