BOOKS
Mass, Might and Myth
By IRIS MURDOCH alvi not the polymath who would be the ideal
reviewer of this remarkable 'book. To deal adequately with Crowds and Power* one would have to be, like its 'author, a mixture of historian, sociologist, psychologist, philosopher and poet. °Ile is certainly confronted here with something large and important : an extremely imaginative, original and massively documented theory of the Psychology of crowds. Using heterogeneous and very numerous tonraes, Dr. Canetti has built a structure which has the clarity,, simplicity and explanatory flexi- bility of a metaphysical system. His view will not prove easy to 'place' in any familiar pattern. or genealogy of ideas; nor has he himself given any help to would-be 'placers.' He quotes the most diverse and esoteric writers, but the names °t Freud and Marx occur nowhere in his text (Freud is mentioned once in a note). This par- ticular reticence, which reminds one of Witt- genstein, is the mark of the artist and of the confident, truly imaginative thinker; only whereas Wittgenstein had in fact not troubled to read some of his best-known predecessors, one may be pretty sure that Dr. Canetti has read everything. The book tails roughly into two halves. The first half analyses, with an amazing wealth of illustration the dynamics of different types of crowds and of 'packs,' a term used to denote a smaller,, more rigidly structured and purposive crowd. The second part, which discusses how and v'hal crowds obey rulers, deals with the psycho- logY of the despot. The key to the crowd, and to the crowd's master, Canetti finds in his central theory of 'command' and 'survival' A simplified account of this theory runs as follows. A fundamental human passion and a "seY to the nature of all power is the passion to survive .. There is always satisfaction in the thought that it is someone else who is dead; and is satisfaction may become an addiction. This is something much more' positive than a mere nstinet of self-preservation. 'The lowest form of survival is killing.' In one guise or another— !he meditation in _the cemetery, the general throwing in another division'—there is deep satisfaction in the notion: 'They lie dead. I stand here alive.' This is one aspect of power. A related aspect is -`the command.' Canetti connects command with the primitive notion of 11flight from death. (The herd flees when the °t1 roars.) 'Beneath all command glints the harshness of the death sentence.' We are all sub- Jeet to commands and each command which we obey leaves behind in us its 'sting.' This alien nng 'remains in us unchanged.' We do not for- t,!. or forgive any command. This in turn pro- as with a major source of energy : the l, * CROWDS AND POWER. By Elias Canetti. Trans- ated from the German by Carol Stewart. {Ciollancz„, 42s.) desire tor a 'reversal, the desire to 'get .rid of our stings' .by making other people obey cor- responding orders. This has many and varied consequences, some obvious and some not so obvious. Many promotion systems rely quite ex- plicitly upon this primitive aspect of human nature. A man under orders will do anything. because. he does. not accuse himself but the sting.' Our stings are our destiny.
In the last part of the book, Canetti introduces another concept, that of 'transformation.' This specifically human talent has many uses but'is most primitively a kind of protection. It is a danger to any would-be despot,. whose corre- sponding passion is `to unmask.' The book ends with a discussion of the case of Schreber, a paranoiac who wrote a detailed memoir -of his delusional life. In this account Canetti finds all the characteristics of power and its 'relation to crowds which he has been analysing. 'It is only a step from the primitive medicine man to the paranoiac and from both of them to the despot of history.'
How does one judge a large-scale theory 'of this sort? Clearly there is no point in just say- ing impatiently, well, is it true or not? The ques- tion is, how much will it explain, how much light will it throw, what will it connect with what? I think Canetti's theory throws a great deal of light and precHely illuminates 'places which have hitherto been .very dark. Marx has told us much about the dynamics of _society. Freud has told us much about the human heart. But neither of them provides us with a satisfactory theoretical explanation of Hitler or an explana- tion, say, of the political power of a church over its adherents. Let us take two instances from Canetti. Roman Catholicism 'sees the open crowd as its enemy.' Communication between worshippers is hindered.' Even the communion service gives each man 'a precious treasure for himself."The communion links the recipient with the vast invisible church but it detaches him from those actually present.' The only 'per- mitted crowd' is the crowd of the blessed, who are 'not imagined as active.'
And then (fragment of another discussion) about Germany. The German national symbol is the forest, which means also the army. The prohibition on universal military service robbed the Germans of their most essential closed crowd. This was 'the birth of National Social: ism.' 'The party came to the rescue,' with its hierarchical order-uttering structure. Canetti concludes the discussion with speculations con- cerning the persecution of the Jews, which he connects with the German experience of infla- tion. The Germans felt that they had been 'depreciated,' and they needed to pass this humiliation on to something else which could he, like the mark, reduced to worthlessness and thrown away by the million. -This sort of quotation. and reference cannot do justice to the imaginative subtlety and variety of the analyses which Dr. Canetti produces on page after page; and even if we do not always agree, we have certainly been given something to reflect with. One's hesitations, I think, are not at all concerned either with the importance or the scale of what is here presented, but (a characteristically philosophical question) with its relation to other. types • of theory. Canetti gives us no direct help with this problem, but indit'ectly presents us with an excellent object of 'study, since the case of Schreber has also been discussed by Freud. A feature of .Schreber's delusions was that he imagined that he was being changed into a woman; this, which at first dis- tressed him, he later decided was part of a plan whereby he was, to redeem humanity by enter- ing into sexual relations with God. Freud em- phasises the subsequent nature of the religious fantasy, and finds the origin of Schreber's con- dition in repressed homosexuality.
Canetti disagrees: 'Processes of power always play a crucial part' in paranoia. He adds 'a note that 'Freud wrote in 1911, before the great wars and revolutions of our century. Had he read Schreber forty years later he would have been the first to see the limitations of his approach.' Canetti sees the case of Schreber against a back- ground of power conceived in quasi-political terms. Schreber's sex-change is to be thought of as a device used • by Schreber in a power-battle with the Almighty. Here 'religion and politics are inextricably intermingled: the Saviour of the world and the Ruler of the world are one. . . . At the core of all this is the lust for power.'
One has here the profoundest hesitations. I suspect that many of us (such is the power of Freud) would tend to regard it as axio- matic that in a delusion about sex-change the purely sexual aspect must be radical. It is eminently salutary to be made to challenge such axioms. For myself, I do not want to be forced to say that Canetti's account necessarily invali- dates Freud's, or vice versa. The human mind is an ambiguous thing. One hesitates here be- tween an appeal to 'science' and an appeal to a natural metaphysic which lies at the basis of morality and which is not under orders from either science or philosophy. The paradox of our situation is that we must have theories about --- human nature, no theory explains everything, yet it is just the desire to explain everything which is the spur of theory. The peculiarity of contemporary philosophy is that it is so stunned by 'everything' that it has given up explaining.
Ideally a 'theory' should be both centripetal and centrifugal, and this I think Dr. Canetti's theory triumphantly is. His book is full of start- ing points, embryo theories, sudden indepen- dent illuminations. When he says of Christianity, for instance, that it is a 'religion of lament' in which the 'hunting pack' expiates its guilt by turning into a 'lamenting pack'; or when he speaks of the 'frenzy of increase' which in mod- ern capitalism undermines the religion of lament, he is giving us new means of thinking which, as it were, contain their own ambiguities. Dr. Canetti might be the first to agree that con- cepts as well as men should enjoy the privileges of transformation. Rich concepts have histories. And precisely because Dr. Canetti's con,:epts'are so rich I do not think we should be in too much of a hurry to see them as rigidly systematic.
This problem of the 'necessary incomplete- ness' of systems occurs to one particularly in relation to the 'moral' of C'rowds and Power. Canetti-speaks of power as fundamental to
human nature and he analyses power with pre- dominantly 'political' imagery: 'Canetti's man' appears as a conscious, irritable person ruled by 'stings.' And it is incidentally a matter of 'accident' whether extreme cases turn out to be Hitters or harmless Schrebers. Our most press- ing need, as Canetti very movingly and con- vincingly argues at the end, is to control the 'survivor mania' of our rulers, and the key to this is 'the humanisation of command.' But how is command to be humanised? Canetti has not given us a psychology with which to picture the humanisation of command. Here rival science and indomitable morality stand ready to enter the argument. How strictly is one to understand the imagery of the 'stings'? Command has a sexual aspect which deserves analysis. (This Hegel appreciated. Dr. Canetti is resolutely non- Hegelian.) Also, cannot the pain of stings be removed by love and compassion without any 'reversal'? How are we here to conceive the 'free' man? No theory of human nature can place it- self beyond the attack of purely moral concepts.
Whether or not we agree, we have here that rare sense of being let out' into an entirely new region of thought. Canetti has done what philosophers ought to do, and what they used to do: he has provided us with new concepts. He has also shown, in ways which seem to me entirely fresh, the interaction of 'the mythical' with the ordinary stuff of human life. The myth- ical is not something 'extra'; we live in myth and symbol all the time.
Crowds and Power, one may add, is a marvel- lously rewarding book even if one were to read it without any theoretical interests at all. It is written in a simple, authoritative prose, splen- didly translated by Carol Stewart, and it is
radiant with imagination and humour. There are hundreds of memorable things. A matchbox derives its charm from being reminiscent of a forest: a forest fire in a matchbox. 'A menagerie of transformed clothes' is mentioned in passing. There is a beautiful discussion of the human hand, and a remarkable section on the psycho- logy of eating. The book is full of entertain- ments and provocations to thought. It is also a great original work on a vitally important sub- ject, and provides us with an eminence from which we can take a new look at Marx and Freud. A large work of scholarship which is also a completely new work of theory is rare enough : and we should remind ourselves that in the obscure and disputed field of 'the study of human nature' we cannot rely only upon the piecemeal efforts of teams of merely competent scientists. We need and we shall always need the visions of great imaginers and solitary men of genius.
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