Crowds and Power is a 1960 book by Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...

, dealing with the dynamics of crowds and "packs" and the question of how and why crowds obey rulers. Canetti draws a parallel between ruling and paranoia

Paranoia

Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...

. Also, the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber

Daniel Paul Schreber

Daniel Paul Schreber was a German judge who suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox. He described his second mental illness , making also a brief reference to the first illness in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness...

 are analyzed with an implicit critique of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

.

The book was translated from the German by Carol Stewart in 1962.