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Crowds and power Hardcover – 1981

by Elias Canetti (Author)

17 customer reviews

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Considered one of the great books of the twentieth century Crowds and Power was the work responsible for winning Elias Canetti the 1981 Nobel Prize. From the destructive behaviour of soccer crowds to the horror of tyrannical rulers and from Bushmen and Pueblo Indian rain dances to the pilgrimage to Mecca, the author takes us on a fascinating journey through anthropology, psychology, biology, religion and literature. Ranging from the deeply profound to the overtly controversial - from the finger exercises of monkeys to the hallucinations of alcoholics - this book will change forever the way you look at groups of people and realise their awesome potential to be manipulated for good or for evil. He concludes that 'If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting'. This book will change forever the way you look at groups of people and the whole concept of power.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 495 pages
Publisher: Continuum (1981)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0826402119
ISBN-13: 978-0826402110
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1716 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Social Psychology & Interactions

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Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful

Canetti's Grim but Truthful World

By Robert T. OKEEFFE on November 5, 2006

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

Canetti's book is somewhat strange; it is also gripping and often uncannily accurate about the nature of power. At the same time it is full of conceptual nodes and holes that reflect the peculiarities of his own life and the times in which he lived (e.g., can the world's wide array of political arrangements be reduced to the narrow spectrum of paranoid rulers, their enablers, and the preponderant human majority of quasi-slaves that Canetti presents as typical throughout all of human history?) Taking into account his own early life as an "undesirable element" (a Jew) who was not fully welcome in the land of his birth (Bulgaria) and who was then cast out of the society of his adolescence and early manhood in Vienna (where he acquired his higher education and the language of his thought and writing) his focus in Crowds and Power makes sense in a very personal way -- had you led his life with all of its insults you too might have arrived at similar conclusions about the dismal nature of "power relationships" among people, especially if you came of age during the pan-European turmoils of the first half of twentieth century, a very bad time for the human race.

The work is "Nietzschean" in its construction and often in its tone (and, from the light shed on human thinking, there are shades of Kafka in the work as well - man as beset, mortified and made anxious by the social walls that surround him and metastasize in growth and shape in his mind.) As in Nietzsche, there are idiosyncratic topic groupings and unexpected leaps between groupings. Canetti illuminates his central point by setting intellectual bonfires in a circle around it.Read more ›

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Fascinating read

By A.H. on April 10, 2014

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

I'll keep this short since there are already many good reviews here.

This book is a moving treatise on the dangers of powerful leaders who are very influential to the masses. It's an analysis of the link between our leaders, how we are led, and how this has shaped the society that we live in. It's analysis covers the gambit from wild primates to suburbanites. The observations were very insightful and do seem to ring true prima facie.

I honestly think that our electorate would be far less prone to influence by charismatic politicians if every citizen read this.

Highly recommended.

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Difficult but worth the effort

By WhiskeynGolf on July 15, 2014

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

Very difficult read. Extremely informative, but slow going in my view. Perhaps I was expecting more fire, but this is definitely a must read and one that I am glad that I got through. Be prepared!

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140 of 152 people found the following review helpful

monumental, weird, funny, sobering

By Saul Boulschett on May 31, 2001

Format: Paperback

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.Read more ›

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Pretty good

By Abner Rosenweig on May 27, 2014

Format: Paperback

All I hear is praise for this book. It's good but I feel not as good as it should have been. Its rambling, discursive style is somewhat disorienting. There is no introduction and the structure of the book is very loosely held together. There is no logical progression, just a meandering through ideas loosely related to the themes of crowds and power. The book is admirable for its erudition and scope, ranging through history, anthropology, mythology, psychology, politics, biology, and more to give us insight into the human condition. I particularly enjoyed Canetti's discussion of symbols of the crowd, the psychology of teeth and digestion, the hero, and fame. It's certainly worth reading, I only wish Canetti had provided an introduction to give us a clearer sense of what he specifically intended to achieve and why he chose to include and exclude what he did.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

A big book; a bit tough going, but ...

A big book; a bit tough going, but taken from an interesting angle.

Published 7 days ago by John Muller

Excellent.

Chilling. Disturbing. Excellent.

Published 1 month ago by Anthony M. Nicoli

Canetti - the prophet of the madness of crowds.

This sardonic book by the quiet and contemplative Elias Canetti must surely be the most important book about the psychic contagion that spreads through irrational crowds. Read more

Published 12 months ago by John Harte

great book, great provider

Received the book quickly and in condition promised... a masterwork by a favored philosopher, "Crowds and Power" is essential reading for both serious academics and curious... Read more

Published 16 months ago by karel

A necessary book

Kindle-ize this please ! Very important work. Read first chapter. Test next week. Taken in hand, touched, the hand as analogy and of course, power.

Published on January 31, 2013 by Charles J. Budde

It won some award

This book is amazing. Pick it up read it put it down and pick it up again months later; it's haunting; it swarms your mind

Published on July 18, 2012 by Will Runner

still learning a lot from animals

The final few pages of a section of the book called The Entrails of Power mention laughter and a method for producing a sound like laughter from a hyena. Read more

Published on March 31, 2011 by Bruce P. Barten

A profound yet accessible work about crowds and power

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. Read more

Published on September 19, 2010 by Bartok Kinski

It's a man eat man world out there...

Well, if I'd ever once been a cockeyed optimist or a believer in the inherent goodness of humanity, this book would certainly have knocked the foundations out from under me and... Read more

Published on May 28, 2007 by Mark Nadja