Crowds and Power

Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature: A “massive, provocative, brilliant” study of the nature of humankind and the manifestations of that nature (Time).

“Critics have compared Crowds and Power to the intellectually revolutionary works of Marx, Freud, and Frazer. . . . Canetti writes more lucidly and readably than those explorers of ideas.” —The New York Times

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.

“An extremely imaginative, original and massively documented theory on the psychology of crowds . . .a great original work.” —Iris Murdoch

“A book of immense distinction in which the fruits of human action en bloc have been wisely tabled and formulated.” —The London Times