Crowds and Power

Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, originally published in German in 1960 as Masse und Macht, is a wide-ranging work of social and political theory that draws on anthropology, history, psychology, mythology, and zoology to construct an original account of how crowds form and behave and how power operates on and through human beings. The book is not a narrative but an extended philosophical argument, built through a mosaic of concepts, ethnographic examples, and historical case studies.

Canetti opens with the claim that the most fundamental human anxiety is the fear of being touched by the unknown. All the distances people create around themselves, from houses to hierarchies, serve this fear. Only within a dense crowd does the fear reverse itself: when body presses against body, distinctions of rank fall away and the individual feels relief. From this observation Canetti derives his first major distinction, between the open crowd, which exists only so long as it grows and disintegrates when growth stops, and the closed crowd, which renounces growth, accepts boundaries such as a church or stadium, and gains staying power through the expectation of reassembly.

The decisive moment in a crowd's formation Canetti calls "the discharge," when all differences of rank, status, and property are shed and members feel equal. He argues this equality is an illusion, since members return afterward to separate homes and identities, but it is for the sake of this moment that people become a crowd. He introduces the term "crowd crystals" for small, rigid groups, such as monks or soldiers, whose constancy and clear function allow them to precipitate larger crowds.

Canetti analyzes a series of crowd phenomena. The crowd's destructiveness he interprets as an attack on boundaries and hierarchies. He defines "eruption" as the transition from a closed into an open crowd and argues that world religions have learned to domesticate crowds by replacing the urge to grow with repetition, dispensing crowd feeling in controlled doses through regular ceremonies, and placing the crowd's ultimate goal in a distant afterlife. Panic, by contrast, is the disintegration of the crowd within the crowd. He enumerates four essential attributes of the crowd: the urge to grow, equality among members, love of density, and the need for a common direction.

Canetti classifies crowds along several axes. The rhythmic crowd achieves density and equality simultaneously through synchronized movement. The stagnating crowd deliberately delays its discharge, building anticipation. Slow crowds are characterized by the remoteness of their goal. Invisible crowds, including the dead, devils, spermatozoa, and posterity, pervade human belief and imagination. He further classifies crowds by prevailing emotion into five types: the baiting crowd, which forms around a quickly attainable killing goal; the flight crowd, created by a shared threat; the prohibition crowd, exemplified by the strike, formed through collective refusal; the reversal crowd, in which those long subjected to commands turn against their commanders; and the feast crowd, gathered around abundance.

A crowd's surest means of self-preservation, Canetti argues, is the existence of a second, opposing crowd. He calls this the "double crowd" and examines three fundamental antitheses: men and women, the living and the dead, and warring armies. In war, each side simultaneously constitutes two crowds: living fighters from its own perspective and a desired crowd of dead from the enemy's.

Moving from crowds to their precursor, Canetti introduces the pack, the oldest and most limited form of collective action, typically comprising 10 to 20 people. He distinguishes four types: the hunting pack, the war pack, the lamenting pack (which forms around a dying person), and the increase pack, driven by the desire to be more. These four types tend to transform into one another, and these transmutations, when fixed as rituals, become the substance of religion. Canetti distinguishes religions of hunting, war, increase, and lament, providing extensive ethnographic illustrations from peoples including the Lele of Kasai, the Jivaros of Ecuador, and the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest.

Canetti proposes that each nation's identity is shaped by a particular crowd symbol. The English see themselves as captains commanding the sea; the Germans identify with the army-forest, the parallel rigidity of trees transfusing the marching column; the French symbol is their Revolution; the Jewish crowd symbol is the Exodus, a multitude wandering for 40 years through desert sand. He argues that the Treaty of Versailles, by prohibiting universal military service, robbed Germans of their essential closed crowd and was the birth of National Socialism. He analyzes inflation as a crowd phenomenon in which money loses its identity while the crowd of monetary units grows, arguing that the German inflation was psychologically transferred onto the Jews, who were progressively depreciated and then destroyed by the million.

The book's second half turns from the crowd to power itself. Canetti distinguishes between force, which is close and immediate, and power, which extends over space and time, likening the difference to a cat catching a mouse versus a cat playing with one. He traces the psychology of seizing and incorporation through its stages, from lying in wait through seizure to incorporation through the mouth, arguing that the entire process of digestion is the central, most hidden process of power. The figure of the survivor occupies the center of Canetti's theory: The moment of survival, standing alive while others lie dead, is the moment of power. The paranoiac type of ruler regards survival as his exclusive prerogative and finds his most dependable subjects among those he has sent to their deaths. Canetti provides an extended analysis of Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian who, after the fall of the fortress of Jotapata, manipulated a drawing of lots so that his companions killed each other while he survived, then transmitted his enhanced sense of life to the Roman general Vespasian through a prophetic promise of imperial power.

The command receives Canetti's most sustained theoretical treatment. He traces it to its biological origin: One animal stronger than another compels it to flee by threatening death. Every command consists of its "momentum," which forces action, and its "sting," a hidden replica that remains lodged in the recipient indefinitely. These stings accumulate over a lifetime and can only be discharged by reversing the original command situation. The reversal crowd is the means by which large numbers of people collectively free themselves from stings they cannot shed alone.

Transformation, the human capacity to become something other than oneself, Canetti treats as a fundamental gift. He distinguishes between linear flight transformations, a sequence of metamorphoses during a chase, and circular flight transformations, shape-changes within a captor's grasp. He contrasts the Shaman, the master transformer to whom the largest number of metamorphoses is open, with the divine king, the immobile non-transformer who sits on his throne yet transforms others at will through commands.

Extended case studies bring the book's themes together. African kings appear as living vessels of the forces of increase, installed through ceremonies that recapitulate the dynamics of lamenting, reversal, and feast crowds. Muhammad Tughlak, Sultan of Delhi, emerges as the purest case of a paranoiac ruler, whose mind was dominated by four kinds of crowds: his army, his treasure, his corpses, and his court. Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who published memoirs of paranoid delusion, provides the most detailed case study. Canetti treats Schreber's delusional system as a comprehensive model of power, interpreting the souls attracted to and consumed by Schreber's body as an image of political power feeding on the crowd, and Schreber's conviction that all other human beings had perished as the deepest urge of every seeker after power.

In the epilogue, Canetti assesses the contemporary situation. The increase pack has undergone colossal expansion, manifesting as modern industrial production, a universal faith transcending divisions between capitalism and socialism. War is dying as a means of increase, but the figure of the survivor remains humanity's worst evil: A single individual can now destroy more of mankind than all previous rulers combined. The survivor has overreached himself, since his greatness and invulnerability have become incompatible. Canetti concludes that the command must be openly confronted and its sting removed if humanity is to endure.