EUGENE GOODHEART
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normal, not exceptional, events in the story that Canetti tells about
human life.
World War I haunts Canetti's imagination of human destructiveness
as it did his idol, Karl Kraus, the influential author of
The Last Days of
Mankind
and innumerable polemics against the decadence that brought
Europe to catastrophe. Canetti tells in his memoirs of the tremendous
effect Kraus's lectures (he attended more than a hundred) had on him.
And yet the influence of a catastrophic "moment" in history does not
translate into a historical perspective on the subject. Although the emer–
gence of democracy in the past two hundred years has focused our
minds on crowds and has affected the forms they have taken and their
significance, Canetti writes as if crowds have no history.
In
a study of power, we expect an attention to its sublimations in pol–
itics. We learn of power relationships between chiefs and their tribes,
but not of how a knowledge of those relationships can be transferred to
an understanding of
political
behavior in advanced societies . Canetti
brings Hobbes to mind in his vision of men at war with one another in
the state of nature, but unlike Hobbes he has only the rudiments of a
political imagination of possible solutions. He writes of parliamentary
factions as double crowds, but the translation of one term to another
seems little more than a tautology. We are told little of the dynamics of
factional life in parliamentary democracies.
In
this respect, Canetti
resembles Foucault, a writer of an altogether different character, for
whom power is also pervasive and oppressive. Both writers pay little
attention to its political expression and are pessimistic on the question
of whether power can be resisted.
In
an epilogue, Canetti suggests that the obsession with productivity
in both capitalist and socialist countries might be understood as an anti–
dote to war. "Production cannot but be peaceful. War and destruction
mean decrease and thus, by definition, harm it. Here capitalism and
socialism are at one, twin rivals in the same faith . For both of them pro–
duction is the apple of their eye and their main concern." This ignores
the "creative destruction" (Schumpeter's phrase) that characterizes
advanced capitalism or for that matter war itself. Canetti here expresses
the faith (not necessarily his own) in our global economy decades before
its appearance. He sees parliaments "in its peaceful and regular rotation
of power" as another recourse against war and destruction, anticipating
current wisdom that there is an affinity between democracy and peace.
And he turns to ancient Rome as an example of how "sport can replace
war as a crowd phenomenon." (What would he have made of the
behavior of soccer fans in his own adopted country, England?)
