Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Future Belongs to Crowds

An astounding book. It reads like a series of essays by Montaigne but all directed toward the phenomenon of human organisation. Each essay, which might include references as diverse as the anthropology of South American tribes to the history of European warfare, contains some comment which is not only arresting but revelatory of profound insight. Who knew that an apparently sociological treatise could be so creative, so enthralling, so literate? Crowds and Power is also something like Dr Johnson's dictionary. It shows Canetti's pet-peeves and prejudices as well as his erudition.

Canetti's world is one composed of human groups rather than words, but his achievement is to describe these groups and their dynamics as had never been done before. His unit of analysis is the crowd, which may arise from something more primitive called a pack, but which takes on uniquely crowd-like characteristics and force. The crowd, depending on its type, of which there are several, has an implicit crowd-mind, not dissimilar perhaps from the hive-mind of bees (or ten-year old girls). 

After establishing his basic crowd-typology, Canetti presents page after page of remarkable observations and conclusions about what makes each type behave as it does. Only a few of his crowds could be termed mobs. Most are institutionalised, or 'closed', crowds, the primary issue of which is to prevent them becoming anything like a mob, which is 'open'. Prototypical of an institutionalised crowd is religion. Religions 'domesticate' crowds through precisely controlled ritual. Congregants must be united but not excited enough to press for too rapid expansion nor irritated enough by its demands to provoke departure. Consequently: "Their feeling of unity is dispensed to them in doses and the continuation of the church depends on the rightness of the dosage."

Parliamentary crowds, that is democratically elected Party-affiliated representatives, are an example in a modern form of bloodless warfare. Parliamentary crowds are only possible because the losers in democratic election are not killed or physically harmed. This is the reason, of course, that Trump’s threat to prosecute Clinton during the American election campaign was implicitly treasonous. It was a threat not just to Clinton but to the essential conditions of elected government. The very solemnity with which elections are conducted, argues Canetti, derives from the renunciation of death an instrument of decision.

His discussion of National Crowd Symbols is presented almost as an aside but is particularly thought-provoking. Some are obvious once stated: the Sea for England, Barriers Against the Sea in The Netherlands, the Mountains for Switzerland. But one tends to forget that these are far more than clichés. They have an emotional significance that is real (the last night of the Proms comes to mind, as does the role of the Dijkgraaf in the political unity of Holland). Others are less apparent but of very practical historical import. For example, the Marching Forest of the Army in Germany, a symbol of pan-Germanic strength and unity created by Bismarck was fatally disgraced by the Treaty of Versailles. It is Canetti's not uninformed view that "Hitler would never have come to power if the crowd of the army had not been prohibited by Versailles."

Like Dr Johnson, Canetti inserts more than one or two private prejudices into his analyses. Islam, he believes, is inherently a religion of continuous warfare as indicated by selections from the Quran. But similar references in the Christian and Hebrew Bible are not quoted. Christianity is a 'crowd of lament' for a slain god, and thus one in a line that stretches from the Babylonian cult of Tammuz to the various mysticisms of the Australian aborigines. This is an interesting hypothesis which has been articulated elsewhere but with neither discussion nor additional confirming material in Crowds and Power.

Canetti's final chapters on the use of power within crowds, to manipulate and lead them, are less satisfactory than his analysis of, as it were, naked crowd dynamics. But even here his insights are at least as provocative and stimulating as most organisational theorists today. His definition of the 'increase crowd' which is crystallised around an associated 'increase pack' is not an irrelevant way to view modern corporate organisations. Given its date of publication (1960), Crowds and Power is a rather sophisticated appreciation of organisation compared with the puerile discussions of such topics as 'Authority Structure' and 'Line vs. Staff' that were common in the mainstream academic discussion of the day.

Crowds and Power is a refreshing look at how human beings act in groups. Refreshing because after almost six decades this inter-disciplinary work has never found a disciplinary home in the social sciences and consequently never has been turned into countless doctoral theses and academic articles. It is a phenomenology not a sociological study. The obvious point of Crowds and Power is to escape from the tacit, largely unexamined presumptions and categories of social scientific thought. It remains therefore suggestive, if not inspirational. But very few social scientists would dare cite it to their colleagues. It breaks the rate, as it were, in both creativity and literacy and so is ignored.

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