Crowds and Power

French paperback with flaps, 716 pages

THE FEAR OF BEING TOUCHED

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.

All the distances which men create around themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which no one may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

The repugnance at being touched remains with us when we go about among people; the way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses, is governed by it. Even when we are standing next to them and are able to watch and examine them closely, we avoid actual contact if we can. If we do not avoid it, it is because we feel attracted to someone; and then it is we who make the approach.

The promptness with which apology is offered for an unintentional contact, the tension with which it is awaited, our violent and sometimes even physical reaction when it is not forthcoming, the antipathy and hatred we feel for the offender, even when we cannot be certain who it is – the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch – proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. Even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he
can all too easily be disturbed by a touch.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest. (…)

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.

‘Marvellous … an immensely interesting, often profound reflection about the nature of society, in particular the nature of violence.’
— Susan Sontag

‘One of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius.’
— Iris Murdoch

‘Canetti led his life without compromise, fear, or guilt, and [reading him is] like discovering, without warning, a complex and satisfying work of art.’
— David Denby, New Yorker

‘Canetti invites – indeed, compels – judgement. His exacting presence honours literature.’
— George Steiner, New Yorker

‘The erudition is genuinely awe-inspiring.’
— Salman Rushdie

‘Before there was the mysterious W. G. Sebald, there was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti’
— Clive James, New York Times

‘[A] magisterial work by a polyhistor who knows how to reveal an overwhelmingly large number of viewpoints of men’s behaviour as mass beings.’
— Swedish Academy, Nobel Prize in Literature 1981

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 nonfiction book Crowds and Power.

Carol Stewart was a distinguished translator and editor whose work helped bring the writing of Elias Canetti to an English-speaking audience. Best known for her acclaimed translation of Crowds and Power, she also translated his play The Numbered.

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