Crowds and Power - Softcover

Canetti, Elias

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374518203 ISBN 13: 9780374518202

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984

Synopsis

Crowds and Power is a revolutionary work in which Elias Canetti finds a new way of looking at human history and psychology. Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.

About this title

Review:

Elias Canetti's 1981 Nobel Prize was awarded mainly on the basis of this, his masterwork of philosophical anthropology about la condition humaine on an overpopulated planet.

Ranging from soccer crowds and political rallies to Bushmen and the pilgrimage to Mecca, Canetti exhaustively reviews the way crowds form, develop, and dissolve, using this taxonomy of mass movement as a key to the dynamics of social life. The style is abstract, erudite, and anecdotal, which makes Crowds and Power the sort of work that awes some readers with its profundity while irritating others with its elusiveness. Canetti loves to say something brilliant but counterintuitive, and then leave the reader to figure out both why he said it and whether it's really true. --Richard Farr

About the Author:

Elias Canetti (1905-94) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. His writings include a novel, Auto-da-Fe, and three volumes of memoirs, The Tongue Set free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0374518203
• ISBN 13: 9780374518202
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496