Crowds and Power

What is power, and what is the crowd? How do the two relate to each other?  Crowds and Power is a striking and unclassifiable study of how human beings behave in groups and how collective forces shape history. Rejecting conventional sociology, 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Elias Canetti creates a unique framework that draws on anthropology, mythology, psychology, history, psychoanalysis and literature to explain why crowds form, how they act and what makes them so powerful. Drawing on his experiences in Vienna in the 1930s and a range of material spanning centuries and every continent, Canetti offers insights into the psychology of the crowd, the variety of religious experience, the paranoia of rulers and the pathology of power. A visionary and provocative book,  Crowds and Power is a major work illuminating the forces driving mass movements and offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition ever written.

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 into a Sephardi Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria. He moved to Vienna in 1924, where he became involved in literary circles while studying for a degree in chemistry. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he emigrated to England and later to Switzerland, where he died in 1994. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 'writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, and artistic power'. His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes; the novel Auto-da-Fé; and the non-fiction book Crowds and Power.