To deal adequately with Crowds and Power one would have to be, like its author, a mixture of historian, sociologist, psychologist, philosopher and poet. One is certainly confronted here with something large and important: an extremely imaginative, original and massively documented theory of the psychology of crowds.

Elias Canetti 1905– © Lütfi Özkök

Using heterogeneous and very numerous sources, Dr. Canetti has built a structure which has the clarity, simplicity and explanatory flexibility 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 of Freud and Marx occur nowhere in his text (Freud is mentioned once in a note). This particular reticence, which reminds one of Wittgenstein, is the mark of the artist and of the...