Blackwell Reference Online

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Born in 1905 in a small village in Bulgaria along the Danube, into a Sephardic community, raised multilingually in Germany, England, Switzerland, and Austria, Elias Canetti was a truly European intellectual, as well as a stern critic of European culture. Best known as a writer of one novel, a few plays, various essays, several collections of aphorisms, and a monumental three-part autobiography (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1981), Canetti is increasingly being recognized in the social and political sciences for Crowds and Power (1960) , a book which has been defined as “an unsettling masterpiece” ( Rutigliano 2007 : 15). An outsider to the academic establishment (yet in touch with prominent intellectuals such as Kraus, Musil, and Adorno), Canetti worked for almost 30 years on what he regarded as his main theoretical contribution. But despite a small number of committed supporters, the book was initially not very well received, mostly because of its antisystematic attitude and its idiosyncratic use of sources and references. More recently, Johann Arnason, Michael Mack, John McClelland, and David Roberts are among the scholars who have contributed most to an active reception of Canetti's thought into sociology and social theory. Crowds and Power is not simply, as it may appear at first sight, a phenomenology of crowds, nor is it simply a treatise on primitive ... log in or subscribe to read full text