Sooner or later, Europe was bound to break the American monopoly in the manufacture of new social theories and facts. Since the war the study of society has become an American industry, and though the sociologists have naturally been the biggest producers, a few historians, some glossy journalists, and a number of freelance thinkers have also made their contribution to the national effort. … most of the new studies were little more than progress reports on the growth of American society. They claimed to be empirical and open-minded, but what they really did was to create a new style of observation that made their theories and insights look like facts. Some of these studies used the new style for cultural apologetics instead of analysis. Others seemed to be more critical, and many of them complained about the slickness of the culture. But their complaints were themselves so slick that they immediately became fashionable. The result of all these advances in social thought was that the thing criticized became indistinguishable from the criticism of it, and soon both became part of the same cultural package. … … the value of … an insight [such as "the rulers deceive the ruled"] depends on how it is … developed. But [Elias] Canetti does not really develop the idea; what he does instead is to spin a web of … associations and analogies. In [some] sense, he has written a poem. The trouble, however, is that it is a bad poem, far too long, cluttered up with home-made jargon, and much too pretentious. Its method is to convert truisms into metaphors, to state a fact as though it were a discovery, such as that “a soldier on duty acts only in accordance with commands,” or that war consists of one crowd fighting another, or that “in revolutionary periods executions are accelerated”; and then to give these inflated facts all kinds of historical resonance. Frequently, the idea itself is a bad metaphor: the most picturesque example is Canetti’s description of spermatozoa as a crowd, with one survivor. Sometimes the metaphor is purely verbal, as when Canetti says that in an inflation the “unit of money loses its identity.” Here we have just the opposite of what goes on in a good poem: instead of an original and concrete association that puts things in a new light or makes for a new experience, an ordinary observation is given “poetic” overtones, and made to sound more suggestive. And unlike good poetry which loses in paraphrase, some of Canetti’s inspired rhetoric might easily gain by a paraphrase.
William Phillips, 1963, reviewing Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power
