Crowds and Power

by Elias Canetti, Carol Stewart (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374518202
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/1984
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 10.80(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Canetti dissolves politics into pathology, treating society as a mental activity—a barbaric one, of course—that must be decoded.” —Susan Sontag

From the Publisher