Power and the Social

Dr Sallie Westwood, Sallie Westwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134714940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Looking at the different ways power has been theorised from Hobbes to Giddens, this book analyzes the ways in which the theories have been applied. By bringing together theory and substantive analysis, this invaluable introductory text provides a clear and imaginative account of power and power relations. Processes and structures of power are analyzed within key areas of sociological concern, including: * the history of power
* race
* gender
* class
* sexuality
* the spatial and visual.Investigating a wide range of cases from across the globe, including the 'underclass' in Britain, the power of the military in Latin America, the untouchables in India and the politics of new reproductive technologies, Dr Sallie Westwood adopts a popular approach to the subject, looking at the processes of power as well as structure and at how they function in everyday life.

1

A brief history of power

Power is the shadow of freedom and, as an Arab proverb says, one cannot jump outside one’s own shadow. We can certainly free some social possibilities but only at the price of repressing others. The relationship between power and freedom is one of permanent renegotiations and displacement of their mutual frontiers, while the two terms of the equation always remain. Even the most democratic of societies will be the expression of power relations, not of a total or gradual elimination of power.

(Laclau, 1996:52)

Power still rules society; it still shapes, and dominates, us.

(Castells, 1997:359)

…the principles of general sociology should be concluded with the proposition: all social relations are relations of power.

(Touraine, 1981:33)

The attempt to theorise and define power has consistently been one of the major areas of concern in sociological analysis. Similarly, constituting the social as the object of sociological enquiry has been an ongoing problem, which has recently been foregrounded in work on the body, sexualities and the re-visioning of the binaries natural/social, virtual/real. This book is an intervention in these debates in the light of the recent revival of interest in the theorisation of power and the ways in which work on gender and ‘race’, for example, has brought the issue of the relationship between the natural and the social into sharp relief. This chapter, as the title suggests, provides a brief history of the ways in which some theorists have conceptualised power, beginning with very early accounts from Aristotle and Plato and then providing a more detailed analysis of the work of premodern theorists like Hobbes and Machiavelli who are considered to be central to the sociological account of power. Moving via Marx towards the sociological imagination, the chapter then considers the work of Foucault and the important distinction between power and violence. The overview presented in the pages that follow is then re-ordered as a series of modalities of power, the primary modes of the exercise of power that are explored in the later chapters of this book.

However, theorising power as the philosophers in this chapter have done, although in part defining the sociological imagination, is not the preserve of sociology and the social sciences more generally. Importantly, sociological accounts of power are only one set of discourses within a vast literature in which power is a central motif. The classical Hindu texts, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, told and re-told as tales and through the medium of television, are in themselves constructions from a largely oral tradition, which as van der Veer (1993:40) notes: ‘…resulted from the interaction between the orientalist production of “Ur”-essences and Brahminical ideology’ which produced ‘a “history”, established by modern science..’ and available as a narrative of a ‘glorious Hindu past’ disturbed by the Muslim invasion. The narratives are interwoven with issues of morality, of duty, honour, renunciation and spiritual redemption, and the thread that binds these accounts together is the discourse on power, its varieties and manifestations, in the relations between human beings and the deities and between human beings themselves. The Mahabharata recounts the epic battles of Krishna and Arjuna, and the struggles between brothers, father and son and their forms of resolution in relation to the strategic acumen of Arjuna, whose periods of exile involve a multitude of adventures with the gods and ‘men’. The enduring popularity of the epic lies not only in its revival for latter-day political ends but in the passion, seductions, dilemmas and conflicts between individuals and across generations, ending ultimately in violence and death. The compelling quality of these narratives and the struggles that unfold are bound to the notion that, like Greek tragedies, the Old Testament stories and Shakespeare, the reader or viewer is reading the mysteries of the ‘human condition’. These are in the structuralist sense the binaries of human existence, good versus evil, duty versus freedom, etc., that make a connection between the reader of today and the characters as embodiments of the great struggles of life for all human beings. The essentialism of this construction is, in fact, tempered by the understanding that the ‘human condition’, understood in this way, is social-bound to the spaces between individuals and, of course, the gods or destiny. Further, this understanding suggests that the ‘spaces of the social’ are not empty spaces but filled with the power plays, strategic encounters, passion and violence of the epics. At a commonsense level, we come to understand the indivisibility of the social and power. Power is the invisible architecture of the social. But, as this book elaborates, power and the social are neither transparent nor homogeneous. How then are we to understand their indivisibility and their complexity? As the pages of this book attest, this is not a new question, but one which has exercised philosophers, political and social theorists since the inception of an understanding of the distinction between the social and the natural. But, the notion of the ‘human condition’ suggests that the natural and the social are constantly interwoven, and a slippage between the natural and the social is very common. Both the distinctiveness of the natural versus the social and the bridge between the two are explained in relation to moral categories in the pre-modern period, and notions like the inherent qualities of human beings are still in circulation today. The relationship between the natural and the social is important for the analysis of power relations because the distinctions allows us to make the substance and exercise of power in social relationships transparent rather than assuming that excessive use of power, for example, is just one part of human nature or the human condition. Instead, it is our task to excavate the forms of power and social context in which power is exercised.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote on a huge variety of subjects including biology and, in relation to our concerns with power, followed and criticised Plato (c. 428–347 BC) in his attempt to delineate the forms of government necessary for order and well-being. Aristotle, like Plato, viewed such discussions as the means whereby ethics and politics were brought together. For Aristotle, as well as Plato, the overriding concern was to promote stability and harmony. This was to be achieved for Plato in his famous text The Republic by the prolonged training of a special cadre who would form the ruling elite. There was no impulse to democracy within Plato or Aristotle and, indeed, Aristotle was not impressed by the idea of an intellectual elite as the ruling guardians of society. Both were committed to hierarchy and notions of natural aptitudes that translated into social positions including enslavement, which was viewed as socially useful. Plato, in particular, was concerned with governance and the mode of authority best suited to order rather than democracy. Plato’s discussion of democracy in the Greek city state was romanticised by Hegel and nineteenth-century philosophers and poets as the model of democracy. But, it was a democracy organised around an exclusionary notion of the citizen who was male, not enslaved and lived in Athens.

Some centuries later, but similarly concerned with issues of harmony and stability in social life, the historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), in a monumental work, sought ways in which to explain the decline of North African societies. The answer, he suggested, was to be found in an understanding of solidaristic ties that constitute the social as communitarian and encourage social stability. Larger social units are an unstable form of the social without the power of cohesion necessary to survival and reproduction. The issue of power and power relations was central, but subsumed in a discourse on authority, the city state, or forms of social change, bound in Ibn Khaldun’s model to universal laws of change. There is no doubt, however, of the importance of the fourteenth-century Arab writer to sociological discourses as they developed. His concern with modes of authority, social order, urban forms and laws of social change pre-empted many of the preoccupations of the later ‘founding fathers’.

Precursors to the modern period

Debates on the nature of power in sociological discourses usually turn initially to the work of Hobbes (1588–1679), Locke (1632–1704) and Machiavelli (1469–1527) as precursors to the modern period. Later writers have emphasised one or other of these early theoreticians: Clegg (1989) uses the differences between Hobbes and Machiavelli to trace distinctively different accounts of power, whereas Hindess (1996) uses Hobbes and Locke in relation to a more Parsonian account of power as capacities. What is of concern here is not only the differing approaches and definitional emphasis within and between Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli, but the ways in which for each of these writers there was an account of power in relation to a construction of the social. In part, I would argue this is, indeed, what marks the work of these three philosophers as precursors of modernity and sociological enquiry. The writings of Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli were not concerned with simply defining power, but addressing the issues raised by the exercise of powers, the relations between state and ‘people’, governance and, most importantly, the moral questions bound to the exercise of power, responsibility and freedom. Hobbes and Locke struggled, most especially, with the key conundrum for latter-day sociologists, i.e. the relationship between subjectivities and the social, presented in their writings, in the distinctions between nature and passions, ‘man’ as social and part of a collectivity or social formation.

Sociologically, it was Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century, who directed attention to the problem of order, and who suggested that all subjects exchange a degree of personal power for social stability in a social contract with the sovereign. This was the alternative to the famous life of man as, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Macpherson (1962) has characterised Hobbes’ views as those attuned to the then developing capitalism of Europe in which his deliberations on the nature of ‘men’ and ‘selfish’ morality were, in effect, a theory of ‘possessive individualism’, well suited to the specific phase of capitalist development. Although there is no simple correspondence between discourses and economic development, Macpherson’s reading of Hobbes is still cogent, and relates well to Hobbes as a social philosopher trying to think through the upheavals, political, economic, social and religious, of his time. Hobbes was a radical, a self-professed atheist, at a time when religious sentiments were not questioned, apart from which camp an individual belonged to. Here was Hobbes, ruminating on the nature of human life, its passions, loves and the role of reason. Thus, in his work, a notion of the social is elaborated against the war of all against all. The social here is identified not simply with the sovereign and the problem of order but also with the notion of civil society. The idea that barbarism rules without civil society has been re-visited recently by Keane (1996) in his Reflections On Violence. Equally, as Clegg (1989) suggests, the Hobbesian tradition has strong moral overtones but a mechanistic notion of power, and one which is very much part of the ‘modern’ accounts of nations, states and institutional frameworks. Thus, Durkheim (1858–1917) raised the problem of social order and sought ways to re-define the Hobbesian solution, looking instead to the division of labour in society as the basis for a new moral order and the generation of consensus.

Clegg (1989) contrasts Hobbes’ account of power with that of Machiavelli, wrongly cast as the villain of the piece, in the way in which the notion of ‘Machiavellian’ has come into common usage. In fact, it is not so far removed from Machiavelli’s fascinating account of power plays and strategies. Writing in The Prince (1513), Machiavelli offers us an ethnography of power as it is constituted and re-constituted in the network of relations in the palace. Power is not an absolute, nor is it vested in the Prince or sovereign. Power is simply the effectiveness of strategies for generating a wider scope of action, vis-à-vis other people who must then operate within these arenas. Machiavelli uses military metaphors, suggesting a keen awareness of the role of violence in the exercise of power. For Machiavelli, there are effective and failed strategies; the judgments are not moralistic but based on efficacy in relation to the goal of the Prince, which was to stay in power.

Hindess (1996), writing more recently, appears to offer little credibility to Machiavelli as a theorist of power, and dismisses him more as a lieutenant to the powerful Prince. Instead, Hindess concentrates on the Hobbes of Leviathan and the work of John Locke as an alternative account of freedom and responsibility, suggesting that although Locke introduces a series of complexities in the account of power and its exercise, these are ultimately based on the notion of consent shared with Hobbes and the idea of a dispersal of powers as regulatory mechanisms in society. It is this consensus that is at issue for Foucault (Hindess, 1996:140). The Hindess thesis is, however, hampered severely by his emphasis upon power as capacity and power as right, which ties his account to the discourses of liberal theory as they developed through the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, in the era of state formation. In his attention to these facets of the debates around power, the discourses that turned ‘natural man’ into ‘social man’ for Hobbes, Machiavelli and Locke are noticeably absent. The importance of these distinctions lies in their groundwork for the development of a sociological space in which the social could be thought and theorised as distinctive.

Among these thinkers, what is noteworthy is the way in which the emphasis upon instrumentalism in human affairs defines ‘rational’ actors (cf. Hobbes, 1650, Human Nature, p. 90) which coincide with conceptions of the person (Hobbes, [1651] 1968:106). The strategist and the person are separated from nature by reason, and it is reason that is the invisible thread of the social. Hobbes, the atheist, lived within a material world which, although he acknowledged the power of love, gave precedence to reason. However, this materiality was also an embodied world in which corporeality was not separated from the social in the way that it came to be in later attempts by sociologists to define the social. Thus, Hobbes could discuss the strategic deal done between the subjects and the sovereign in which subjects exchanged freedoms for security, but also implicit in Hobbes’ account was the ever-present threat of violence as both an aspect of the human condition and the state of nature.

Although, as Hindess (1996:141) suggests, Hobbes recognised the variability of power and its heterogeneity, he did not recognise the significance of this for the theorisation of both power and the social. It was only much later, after Nietzsche, that Foucault could expand this notion to the point where the general, all inclusive notion of power became superfluous. In terms of a conception of the social, however, these three writers are crucial. Hobbes, with his notion of a social contract, conceived a collectivity that could be thought beyond the individual, whereas Machiavelli, with his ethnography of power, placed the individual in relation to others. Locke, more importantly, conceived a notion of laws, rights and responsibilities (as did Hobbes) that placed a premium on a conception of the social good, eventually turned into the ‘felicific calculus’ of Benthamite social philosophy. These philosophers were, of course, empiricist and the precursors to one variant of the developing concern with the social that eventually, two centuries later, produced sociology. These concerns were historically placed in the time and space of merchant capitalism and the growing urbanisation of parts of Europe. Within this context, these theorists of power could differentiate forms of power. Locke, for example, elaborated a distinction based on legitimation that produces tyranny when absent. Equally, there are different forms of legitimation that may invoke paternal control and power when dealing with minors or those who are incapacitated.

Unfortunately, I can dwell only briefly on the complexity and richness of the works of Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli, but their importance for this text is in part their insistence on the complexities of power, its differentiations and nuances. Equally, their texts demonstrate the ways in which, from the earliest attempts to theorise power, power has been bound to theorisations of the social. This has occurred, in part, in relation to the separation natural/social and in the construction of ‘social man’ against ‘natural man’. However, in the latter case, conceptions of human nature as violent, in the case of Hobbes, or ‘wicked’, in the case of Machiavelli, have persisted to the present day alongside a commitment to the cause of reason and rational man. It was this latter cause that became the hallmark of the ensuing Enlightenment both in France and in Scotland.

The modern project

The importance of the Enlightenment in European thought has been rehearsed many times, and I want to only briefly emphasise again the major motifs of the shift in worldview that occurred. The first of these, as I have suggested, was the foregrounding of reason as a way of being and knowing the world, but as Hawthorn (1987:9) writes: ‘Hence the insistence on supplementing the much vindicated faculty of reason by experience and experiment.’ It was this combination that provided the impetus for sociology and a conception of the social as intelligible through laws, measurement and empirical verification. However, French intellectual life was less wedded to empiricism, and this persists today. The different philosophical traditions produced the different emphases in the developing states of France, England and Germany; whereas, in Scotland, the importance of the social was writ large in the work of Millar (1735–1801), Ferguson (1723–1816) and Smith (1723–90) (see Swingewood, 1980; Rattansi, 1982).

In part, the importance of the social as distinctive and intelligible was related to the opposition between natural/social set up by the writers of the time. How, and through which mechanisms, the social was to be constituted and man’s natural tendencies curbed because of the defects with human nature was the issue explored in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws published in 1784. Law was the embodiment of reason, but as Hawthorn (1987:15) suggests,‘…what was rational was held to be natural and what was natural was held to be rational’. This suggested a notion of natural justice and a universality to the law. However, Montesquieu (1689–1755) was equally aware that law interacted with specific cultures and customs, thus it was also specific. These specificities were related to the somehow innate characteristics or sensibilities of specific groups or nations. This was, of course, a very common feature of writing at the time, whether the speculations in a proto-anthropology or the musings on mental health and illness.

For Montesquieu it was the esprit in each country that should be honoured and to which reason brought stability and relevant laws. He did not have a conception of a developing continuum for societies—they were different and should remain so. Equally, the notion of a human nature was bound to society because individuals did not exist outside of the nexus of relations of power within society, whatever the type. Contradictory and conservative, the laws emphasised the immutability of ‘national’ characteristics and located politics with ethics and the fit between reason, ethics and cultural specificities.

In opposition to Montesquieu, Rousseau’s (1712–78) writings suggest a romanticisation of the ‘state of nature’, the opposite of the Hobbesian nightmare. He also adopted a more evolutionary view of the development of societies through a conception of stages. Although all was well for ‘natural man’, the answer to the ills of the world lay not in nature but in society. Man enters the moral universe through society which, of course, also introduces notions and practices which are evil and reprehensible. The task lies in creating moral man and ‘the best’ of human beings and in generating the ‘best’ form of government, including the issue of order and the role of the law in society. For Rousseau, the answer lay in ‘the social contract’, which was a trade of liberty for the individual against the security of the general will. It is within these conditions that the moral individual is created and sustained. Thus, the twist in the tale, as Hawthorn (1987:26) adds, is that Rousseau had not so much solved the problem of the individual versus society but that he had re-framed the definitions of individual and society in a modern way.

Power in these accounts lay with reason and science, and their coming together in the rational ordering of human affairs. Although the forms of government were not necessarily at issue, there was the enormous impact of the French Revolution and the growing sense tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A brief history of power
• 2 Racialised power
• 3 Class and power
• 4 Engendered power
• 5 Sexualised power
• 6 Spatial power
• 7 Visual power
• 8 Conclusion: Power and the social
• Appendix: major theorists of power
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Index