Forms of Power

Gianfranco Poggi

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745624754
  9780745624747
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745668307
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Political power is often viewed as the sole embodiment of 'social power', even while we recognize that social power manifests itself in different forms and institutional spheres. This new book by Gianfranco Poggi suggests that the three principal forms of social power - the economic, the normative/ideological and the political - are based on a group's privileged access to and control over different resources.

Against this general background, Poggi shows how various embodiments of normative/ideological and economic power have both made claims on political power (considered chiefly as it is embodied in the state) and responded in turn to the latter's attempt to control or to instrumentalize them. The embodiment of ideological power in religion and in modern intellectual elites is examined in the context of their relations to the state. Poggi also explores both the demands laid upon the state by the business elite and the impact of the state's fiscal policies on the economic sphere. The final chapter considers the relationship between a state's political class and its military elite, which tends to use the resource of organized coercion for its own ends.

Forms of Power will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology and politics.

1

Homo Potens

Our subject

This book deals with social power chiefly as it manifests itself in differentiated forms, each embodied in distinctive institutions, that is, in relatively self-standing sets of practices, resources and personnel. It is particularly concerned, on the one hand, with the ways in which such embodiments emerge, and, on the other, with the tendency of those differentiated institutions to bargain or struggle with one another for advantage, to increase each its own autonomy at the others’ expense.

I shall explore this theme in a selective and non-systematic manner, examining only some aspects of it. One reason for this preference (among others) is that a systematic approach is not easily adopted in this thematic area. In particular, it would be good to approach our theme starting from a widely shared, generic concept of social power or indeed of power in general. Unfortunately, no such concept exists. What does exist, however, is a largish body of literature – a great number of essays, a sizeable number of books from the disciplines of sociology, political science, social psychology and philosophy – where numerous, overlapping and generally inconclusive attempts are made to generate agreement on a given understanding of the notion of power.¹ Typically, each author recalls some classical presentations of that notion (Hobbes’s Leviathan is a favourite beneficiary, or perhaps victim, of such exercises), then reviews the related contemporary controversy, then proposes and variously justifies his or her more or less distinctive contribution to the theme. There even are anthologies assembling a number of such contributions,² the more recent of which often remind the reader that the notion of power has been authoritatively characterized as being ‘essentially contested’³ – as if social scientists needed such a fancy justification for squabbling over how to define their terms.

It is not my intent to add to this literature, which tends to focus on topics (such as the relation between power, intention and interest, or the roles respectively of force and consensus as the grounds of power, or the question of how to ascertain the existence of a power relationship and of how to measure it) in which I have little interest. As I have already suggested, my concern is much more with diverse institutional embodiments of the power phenomenon, and the relations between such embodiments – a theme that has held my interest for decades, and the significance of which was emphasized, in the mid-1980s, by Michael Mann.⁴

Unfortunately I cannot arrive at that theme without attempting a preliminary statement, however brief, on what ‘power’ should be taken to mean, and on why there should be power among human beings. Furthermore, while I feel little inclined to deal with such an assignment in the standard fashion – line up the usual suspects and possibly a few unusual ones, sort them out into a few clusters by reference to their similarities, adjudicate their contrasts, present personal answers to the key queries – I find it convenient to signpost my approach to that theme by referring to a few entries from the literature that I mentioned earlier.

I do not claim that my selection of these entries is the outcome of a close, critical examination of that literature, and that the arguments I shall introduce are demonstrably more significant than those I have instead neglected, or fit together into a particularly cogent discourse. I am simply sharing with the reader what seems to me a plausible conceptual itinerary to my main topic, emphasizing the contributions of authors whom, over the years, I have found useful in seeking to establish to my own satisfaction (and that of my students) what one might reasonably mean by ‘power’, and by ‘social power’ in particular.

Herbert Rosinski’s contribution

Let me begin with an argument inspired chiefly by Herbert Rosinski’s Power and Human Destiny.⁵ This book appeared in 1965; its author, a German scholar long active in the United States, and known chiefly as a specialist in military history, had died three years earlier, leaving the work unfinished and unedited. He had written it largely from within a German intellectual tradition, that of ‘philosophical anthropology’, which at the time had very little resonance in English-speaking countries. (Things have not changed that much, considering the not hugely dissimilar fate, in the 1980s, of the American translation of a masterpiece from the same tradition, Arnold Gehlen’s Der Mensch).⁶ At any rate, Power and Human Destiny attracted very little notice, and apparently quickly passed into total oblivion. This is an undeserved fate, for, in my view, if what one seeks to articulate is a very broad concept of power (as I am seeking to do in the first instance), the book’s argument appears most relevant.

Rosinski, to begin with, does mean what his title says. That is, he considers power a phenomenon that belongs to the very essence of the human species, which characterizes its very position in the order of nature. In fact, humans – to adopt a noteworthy formulation of Helmuth Plessner, another contributor to the German philosophical anthropology tradition⁷ – are ‘ex-centrically positioned’ in that order. Considered purely as parts of nature, human beings possess biological equipment apparently insufficiently adapted to the rest of nature; humans are unable to sustain their own existence except via a form of activity distinctive to the species, and grounded of course in its biological equipment, but not completely programmed by it. In this context, that form of activity – we might call it ‘action’, and propose Homo agens as a kind of primary characterization of the species – amounts to a kind of self-programming. That is, through action, the species on the one hand avails itself of the relative indeterminacy of its position in nature, on the other hand surrenders that indeterminacy by finding expression, unavoidably, in determinate – that is, limited and of definite scope – arrangements and preferences.

We may clarify this by considering a few other characterizations of the species, all of them more usual than Homo agens, but in my view compatible with it – for instance, Homo sapiens, faber, loquens, ludens, or videns. They are all enlightening, but each points up only a potentiality, that is, the capacity to know, make, speak, play or see, and thus leaves open a very important series of questions – respectively, what does the human being know, what does it produce, how does it speak, which games does it play, what does it see. Only the answers given to those queries settle, for a given human group, the position it takes in nature.

In other terms, in order to survive the human species must make a difference: make a difference to nature, which will not sustain it unless intervened upon by the members of that species themselves; and make a difference to itself, for the manner of that intervention will in turn shape the mode of existence of those men and women, impart to it a more or less distinctive bias, and differentiate it from the mode of existence of other men and women.

The widest meaning of ‘power’, then, is the ability to make such a difference; and this ability must be seen as belonging to the very essence of the species. Homo potens, indeed, is an expression that might appropriately be added to more usual species listed above. It focuses on the fact that, by its very constitution, the human being is uniquely enabled, or condemned, to self-determination, in the etymological sense of assigning boundaries (termini) to itself and locating itself in the world. If power is thus understood, the human being is implicated in power through and through; and the phenomenon of power turns out to be closely associated with that of liberty, although on the face of it liberty and power may appear to be intrinsically at loggerheads with one another.

In his opening chapter, Rosinski emphasizes a somewhat narrower meaning of ‘power’, bearing again on the human species’s relation to the rest of nature, and I shall follow him in this preference. This meaning focuses on the fact that from very early on (see for instance the myth of Prometheus, the hero who stole fire from the gods of Olympus) the human intervention in nature takes the form of gathering, controlling and deploying natural energies; here, power in a sense becomes the human ability to turn nature against itself (by burning bits of it, in Prometheus’s case) in order to make it serve human interests. The energies in question are to begin with those built into the human skeleton and musculature by nature; but they go on to encompass the calorific energy of plants and trees, the motorial energy of animals, and so forth. This energy-focused concept of power has been developed by Richard Adams.⁸ It is apparently straightforward, but it has some interesting implications, bearing on a broad theme I shall repeatedly emphasize in this book – the contradictions and dilemmas attendant upon power, in all its manifestations.

Gehlen, for instance,⁹ points out that over the millennia, as the prime energy forms stored and deployed by humans developed from their own muscular energy all the way to nuclear energy, this progression in the absolute amount of natural power at the service of human beings was accompanied by their increasing intellectual and emotional estrangement from the sources of such power. The more the progression advances, the less we understand its successive objects, at any rate in the sense of being empathetically aware of what is going on as we put each new energy source to use, and the less we can plausibly take a caring and nurturing attitude toward it. Thus, for instance, we have a less keen sense of what goes on when we burn fossil fuels than when we burn wood; and our ability to comprehend, and thus to control, nuclear energy rests on exceedingly sophisticated and abstract knowledge of natural processes very remote from intuitive understanding, which relatively few people can master intellectually, and with which probably nobody can empathize.

Rosinski, whose sustained concern with what I have called the dilemmas and contradictions of the power phenomenon largely inspires my own, focuses it specifically on power as a critical feature of the relationship between human beings and nature, and particularly, again, on the storage and deployment of natural energies. Integrated by additional considerations, his treatment of this topic can be summarized as follows.

Dilemmas and contradictions of power in general

In the first place, the accumulation of power tends to become an end to itself. For a familiar example, let me invite the reader to look at me right now, at work (using the term loosely). The computer I am using is a superb machine, into which the makers have built what is by any standards a lot of power – the speed of the processor, the size of the memory, the complexity and sophistication of the operating system, the quantity and variety of the software it gives me access to. As it happens, however, I use the machine almost exclusively for word processing, and for this I need at most 20 per cent of its speed (I know this because that was the processor speed in the first computer I used, which performed quite efficiently exactly the same operations); besides, I never have any use for most of the bells and whistles of my fancy word processing package, let alone the rest of the available applications. Thus a lot of the machine’s power is useless to me, as I suspect it would be to the great majority of other users; yet I long nursed a passionate desire for this machine, having previously learned to despise and to feel humiliated by my previous one, despite its adequacy for my needs; and I am desperate to acquire a still more powerful one, which I will buy as soon as I can afford it. I have, in other terms, become hooked on power. The design of my car, the number of electrical plugs around my house and of the attendant gadgets, my yearly expense for fuels of various kinds, testify to the same fact; and the same things can probably be said, quite plausibly, of my reader.

In the second place, in most cases the accumulation of power (still meaning here the storing of deployable natural energy) entails dangers, many of them directly related and (at least) proportionate to its uses. Consider here the case of a character from one of James Thurber’s stories, which I read long ago and which unfortunately I have been unable to locate. The character is one of Thurber’s numerous eccentric relatives, an uncle – a total recluse, but obviously a man of genius, for during his years of isolation, thinking and tinkering away in his attic, without any communication with the outside world, he has invented all manner of wondrous things, beginning with the wheel. As the uncle’s lonely, relentless search for scientific and technical advance veers in the direction of chemistry, his admiring and devoted relatives become very anxious; and rightly so, because at the end of the story he turns his hand to developing explosives, and blows himself up.

Let me stop playing with homely examples – real or fictional – and remind readers of the wreck of the Torrey Canyon tanker and the ensuing ecological disaster of 1967, or the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. What is at work is in each case a redoubtable ‘fix’ which, with reference to social power arrangements, Cicero sharply pointed out in a discussion of a Roman magistracy, the tribunate. He wrote: ‘I would say that there is something evil inherent in this magistracy; however, without such evil it would not be possible for us to benefit from what is good about it.’¹⁰ Possibly echoing this source, Rosinski writes, in a passage encompassing both power over nature and social power: ‘All power, all capacity to exercise effort and to influence the course of events, is by nature ambiguous, “open”, and neutral or indeterminate in its implications. Were it not equally potent for good or for evil, it would not be power at all.’¹¹

A closely related point is that power accumulations, whatever their positive significance, have negative side-effects. Our awareness of this third aspect of the power phenomenon has been much increased over the last few decades, but the intensity and visibility of the damage inflicted on the environment by human artefacts tended to increase our hold upon natural resources. Over the last few decades, the Three Mile Island incident, for instance, or the wreck of the Exxon Valdez tanker, have made this point most dramatically; but this same point is implicit also in the slower, more insidious impact that (as we have become aware) large dams have upon their natural settings, by destroying the habitats of animal and vegetable species, and sometimes by unbalancing irreversibly the geological structure itself of the environment. In 1963 both this point and the previous one were evidenced by what happened in a locality in the Italian Alps. Over the years, the building and subsequently the existence itself of a big hydroelectric dam had set in motion slow, hidden geological shifts which suddenly resulted in a huge landslide down the side of a mountain. As a gigantic mass of rock toppled into the artificial lake formed by the dam, a large quantity of the lake’s water overflowed the dam’s rim and instantly poured into the valley below, where it destroyed a village, Longarone. The dam in fact held (if it had not, the damage would have been immeasurably more severe) but both the environmental danger represented by the power accumulation upstream and the irreversible erosion of the dam’s setting were strikingly demonstrated. The current Chinese plans for damming up the Yangtze river hold promise of further such damages, multiplied tenfold.

A further point barely needs mention. Power over nature generates dependency; the more a human group invests in mastering the resources of its natural environment, and the more it counts on them to satisfy its needs, the greater the stake it acquires in the maintenance of those arrangements and the greater the damage it can suffer from their disruption. The American historian McNeill makes this point in an essay where he notes that during the twentieth century American agriculture reached spectacular levels of mechanization that made it outstandingly productive by world standards.¹² This productivity, in turn, allowed most of the settled rural population in the US to escape from the position of social and economic inferiority and of cultural isolation in which almost everywhere, even in the late twentieth century, country-dwellers stood in relation to town-dwellers. McNeill rounds up the essay, however, by noting that this American success story is largely based on the lavish employment of gas-and diesel oil-fuelled engines and machines, and for the same reason it could be instantly jeopardized – to the disadvantage, of course, not just of the rural population but also that of the cities – if those fuels became unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

Finally, the natural capacities of human individuals became fixed into a stable biological template many thousands of years ago, whereas over the same span our power (in the sense of the term assumed so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Homo Potens
• 2 Power Forms
• 3 Political Power
• 4 Ideological/Normative Power
• 5 Religious Power and the State
• 6 Creative Intellectuals and the State
• 7 Economic Power
• 8 Business and Politics
• 9 The Economic Costs of the State
• 10 Military Power
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Back Page