Massa e potere: l’attualità di un’opera senza tempo

Unlike Elias Canetti’s novel, aphorisms and autobiography, his «life’s work» dit not obtain a similar fortune, nor it has been taken into serious consideration by human and social sciences. Besides analyzing the main charges against Crowds and Power, the article sheds light on its stylistic, substantive and methodological uniqueness in order to demonstrate the lasting importance of this socio-political and philosophical masterpiece of the Twentieth Century. As admitted by its author, Crowds and Power was aimed at «grabbing the twentieth century by the throat» by clarifying the historical complicity between crowds and totalitarian power in the first half of the Twentieth century. In order to achieve this goal, Canetti refused the classical categories used by the academic disciplines and adopted a multidisciplinary approach; at the same time, he renewed their vocabulary by introducing a new lexicon, able to identify the historical dynamics between the crowds and the phenomenon of power. Moreover, Canetti refused the main theoretical paradigms of collective psychology and political theory in order to highlight the plurality of the crowds, the potential autonomy of some of them and the constitutive link between power and the experience of physical and social surviving, the pathology of paranoia and the so called «prohibitions on social transformation». Unlike the negative dialectic of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Canetti tried to «overcome the concept» through the images disseminated in his masterpiece, rather than by adopting further conceptual mediations. Such a theoretical attempt molds the literary style of Crowds and Power. Far from being only an aesthetic choice, such as richness of images reflects an epistemological challenge: without these images it wouldn’t be possible to understand the crowds nor the predatory gestures of power. Together with these content and stylistic choices, and other feature of this work is its lasting gestation, which allowed Canetti to put systematically into question his conclusions and to compare them with historical events of his time. All these features make the reading of Crowds and Power a real experience, able to identify current phenomena of social domination and to exhort its readers to join in critical crowds, resist and overcome nowadays manhunts