Power, Crowds, Violence and Desire in Elias Canetti and Rene Girard

The essay has a twofold aim: the first is to nail down the key ideas about the origin of power and the behavior of human crowds as explained by Elias Canetti in his monumental work “Crowds and Power” that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. The second is to try to connect the dots between the thought of Canetti and the one of another great literate and anthropologist of the 20th century, Rene’ Girard who also investigated the behavior of crowds from the perspective of the birth of myths and religion.
I believe and try to prove that Canetti actually complements Girard findings so that the two must be adopted to account for the complex dynamics and interconnections between power, violence and religion, both in the early stages of human development and in the following evolution of history.