Leaders and the Masses

The 20th century is commonly associated with the emergence of a new historical and political actor: the masses.

It became the age of mass politics, mass mobilization, and totalitarian regimes that relied on broad popular support while simultaneously giving rise to repression, war, and human suffering on an unprecedented scale.

Naturally, the phenomenon of the masses began to attract scholarly attention long before Elias Canetti. His Crowds and Power became one of the most original and influential studies of the subject, but it appeared only after a number of works that had already become classics.

In 1895, the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, a work that profoundly influenced twentieth-century political thought. His ideas were carefully studied by politicians of widely differing persuasions. I myself once saw a copy of the book in the library of the Buchenwald concentration camp; if memory serves me correctly, it was intended for the guards. In any case, Le Bon’s writings were well known to many of the theorists and practitioners of mass politics.

A crowd is capable of assembling and acting on its own.

The nature of the crowd was examined by philosophers, psychologists, and political thinkers alike. One need only recall Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, and Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Canetti’s biographers note that he studied Freud with great care, although he would later challenge many of Freud’s conclusions.

Nor can one overlook the works of Romano Guardini and Ernst Jünger, as well as the writings of the twentieth century’s political leaders—Hitler and Lenin. In Mein Kampf, Hitler repeatedly addressed the psychology of the masses, arguing that they are unreceptive to weakness and compromise, preferring decisiveness and strength instead. He further maintained that a mass movement must present itself as possessing exclusive truth and must not display liberal tolerance toward competing worldviews, since the masses tend to interpret such tolerance as a sign of weakness.

Lenin approached the question of the masses from an entirely different ideological standpoint, yet he was no less preoccupied with the mechanisms of political leadership over mass movements. After the October Revolution, he increasingly focused on the relationship between the masses, the class, the party, and political leadership, seeking to explain how a revolutionary party could become the organizing force of millions.

In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, he wrote:
“So long as—and insofar as—it was a question of winning over the vanguard of the proletariat to the side of communism, propaganda necessarily occupied first place… But when it becomes a question of the practical action of the masses, of deploying—if one may so express it—armies of millions, of arranging all the class forces of a given society for the final and decisive struggle, propaganda alone, or the mere repetition of the truths of ‘pure’ communism, is no longer sufficient… Here one must reckon not in thousands, as the propagandist, a member of a small group that has not yet led the masses, essentially does, but in millions and tens of millions.”

For Lenin, the crucial challenge was the transition from propagandizing a relatively small revolutionary vanguard to providing practical leadership for a mass political movement.

Before turning to the concepts of power and leadership, however, Canetti sought to understand the very process by which crowds come into being. Unlike Freud, he relied less on psychoanalytic theory than on his own observations and on historical evidence.

It is generally believed that the decisive impulse for these reflections came from the events of July 15, 1927, in Vienna. The mass demonstration, which initially lacked any unified leadership, made such a profound impression on the young Canetti that it later became the foundation of his entire conception of the crowd.

Comparable spontaneous eruptions may also be found in Russian history—for example, during the early stages of the Revolution of 1905 and the February Revolution of 1917, when mass action initially developed more rapidly than stable political centers of leadership could emerge.

A crowd is capable of assembling and acting on its own, yet such a condition rarely endures for long. As Vladimir Vysotsky wryly observed:
“There aren’t enough truly wild ones—that’s why there are no leaders.”

Long before the rise of structuralism, Canetti therefore turned to history, mythology, and anthropology in an attempt to understand the most ancient forms of collective human behavior. All of his writings ultimately converge upon Crowds and Power. Even his novel Auto-da-Fé, as he himself acknowledged, absorbed the fruits of his long-standing reflections on the nature of the crowd.

The 20th revealed the extraordinary power of political myths and symbols.

Canetti once remarked that in Crowds and Power he had “seized the twentieth century by the throat.” Perhaps this was because the century merely revealed with particular clarity a phenomenon that had existed throughout human history. The Great Migration, the Mongol invasions, Tamerlane’s conquests, the Crusades, and the great peasant uprisings all demonstrate, in one form or another, the immense force of collective movements.

It is therefore no coincidence that Canetti sought the explanation for modern events in the depths of history. As the Russian sociologist Leonid G. Ionin observed, the tragedies of the twentieth century were exceptional above all because technological progress vastly increased humanity’s capacity to organize, wage war, and destroy—not because human beings had suddenly become more cruel than in previous ages.

Some contemporary scholars criticize Canetti for reducing the political history of the twentieth century too readily to primordial instincts and mythological structures. Yet this is precisely the central insight of his work: the past continues to live within the present, and the deepest patterns of collective behavior are capable of re-emerging even in the most modern societies.

In this sense, the twentieth century, in Canetti’s view and in the opinion of a number of other thinkers, revealed the extraordinary power of political myths and symbols, whether they assumed nationalist, communist, or other ideological forms.

To be continued…

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Published with permission from the Editorial board of the web magazine “Intelligent.”
Media Registration Certificate: El No.77-4347, dated February 5, 2001.