Property and Power in Social Theory

A Study in Intellectual Rivalry

Dick Pels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415187800
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134660834
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Property and power perform a key role in social and political theories of class inequality and social stratification, however, theorists have yet clearly to define these concepts, their mutual boundaries and scopes of application. This book answers the property/power puzzle by undertaking a broad historical inquiry into its intellectual origins and present-day effects through a series of case studies, including: Marxism vs. anarchism * the fascist assertion of the primacy of the political * social science as power theory * the managerial revolution * the knowledge society and the new intellectual classes

1
THE LIBERAL DICHOTOMY
AND ITS DISSOLUTION

FALSE TRANSPARENCIES

If we wish not to be used by the words we use, we must be prepared to reinspect our tacit language routines, in order to be able to preserve or desert them in a rationally controlled manner. However, as soon as we probe further into the daily grammar of property and power, both concepts instantly demateri-alize. ‘Power, like love’, says Roderick Martin, ‘is a word used continually in everyday speech, understood intuitively, and defined rarely: we all know what the “power game” is’ (1977:35). In the entire lexicon of sociological concepts, Robert Bierstedt complains, ‘none is more troublesome than the concept of power. We may say about it in general only what St. Augustine said about time, that we all know perfectly well what it is—until someone asks us’ (1970: 11). ‘Power’, considers R.H.Tawney, ‘is the most obvious characteristic of organised society, but it is also the most ambiguous’ (cit. Lynd 1968:103). And Daniel Bell tersely concludes: ‘Power is a difficult subject’ (1968:189).

The everyday notion of power more or less coincides with what several writers refer to as the ‘simple’ or ‘primitive’ notion, which in turn does not differ dramatically from the average dictionary definition. According to Steven Lukes, ‘the absolutely basic common core to, or primitive notion lying behind “power” is that A in some way affects B in a non-trivial or significant manner’ (1974:26). To Dennis Wrong, power is basically the capacity to produce an effect of some sort on the external world (1979:1). This is not far from Bertrand Russell’s familiar definition of power as ‘the production of intended effects’ (1940:35), which in turn recollects Thomas Hobbes’ equally general view (‘The Power of a Man [to take it Universally] is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good’) (1968:150). The Penguin English Dictionary adheres to the same generality: power is ‘ability to do something; strength, force, vigour, energy; ability to control and influence others, ability to impose one’s will’. Power is the ‘ability to do or act’, an ‘active property’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary), ‘vermogen om iets te doen’ (Van Dale), ‘possibilité d’action d’une personne, d’une chose, droit d’agir, capacité de produire certains effets’ (Lexis/Larousse), ‘faculté, possibilité, propriété, possibilité d’agir sur qqnn, qqch’ (Petit Robert), ‘ability to compel obedience, capability of acting or producing an effect, faculty, talent’ (Webster’s New Third International Dictionary).

As such a summary review makes apparent, the primitive notion of power does not yet distinguish clearly between the positive or ‘developmental’ dimension (ability to do, to act) and the dimension of repression or constraint (ability to compel obedience). The latter aspect is emphasized by Robert Dahl, whose ‘intuitive’ idea of power is this: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ (1969:80). This, of course, is the traditional, more restricted scope of Max Weber’s celebrated definition: ‘Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests’ (1978:53). At this level of generality, we do not yet separate power from close cognitive relatives such as control, influence, or authority; nor is there room for debate on the instrumental vs. the relational quality of power, its ‘residential’ or ‘performative’ nature, the consensual/productive vs. the conflictual/distributive view of it, the differential depth and width of power relations, the immense structural variety of ‘power houses’, or the equally limitless variety in the identity of their residents, the power-holders. In other words, we have still not moved very far beyond true but definitionally empty assertions that there is no society without the regulation of power, that power is many-sided and ambiguous, and that it is some sort of active property or capability of being able to control or influence others.

What, on the other hand, is property? Proudhon’s celebrated question is answered by experts and dictionaries in the same variegated manner. The deceptive transparency of the common-sense notion is possibly even greater than in the previous case. Just like epistemology studies all utterances which contain the copula ‘to be’ in order to question their truth value, the theory of property rights spans the entire range of Mines and Thines, in order to examine the validity of a multicoloured spectrum of claims in the possessive mode. ‘Ownership’, says Lawson, ‘would seem to the layman to be a simple notion. It is a simple question of meum and tuum. If the thing is mine I own it, if it is not, I do not’ (1958:6). The classificatory genitive appears sufficient for all purposes. But R.H.Tawney is again quick to censure the layman:

Property is the most ambiguous of categories. It covers a multitude of rights which have nothing in common except that they are exercised by persons and enforced by the State. Apart from these formal characteristics, they vary indefinitely in economic character, in social effect, and in moral justification.

(1920:56–7; cf. Waldron 1988:28)

Proudhon’s question is taken up by the dictionaries as follows: property is a ‘quality or trait belonging to a person or thing; special power or capability; something that is or may be owned or possessed; wealth, goods, exclusive right to possess, enjoy and dispose of a thing’ (Webster’s), ‘droit d’user, de jouir et de disposer d’une manière exclusive et absolue sous les restrictions établis par la loi; bien-fonds possédé en propriété; qualité propre’ (Petit Robert). As in the case of power, we are saddled with truisms which are more sensible than enlightening. Human life, it is repeated, is impossible without disposition over material goods, and every society regulates this disposition and determines the scope and duration of their tenure. Karl Renner has restated this position with comprehensive clarity:

Whatever the social system, disposal of all goods that have been seized and assimilated must be regulated by the social order as the rights of persons over material objects. Only thus can the continuous and undisturbed process of production be ensured. Every stage of the economic development has its regulations of goods as it has its order of labour. The legal institutions which effect this regulation, subject the world of matter bit by bit to the will of singled-out individuals, since the community exists only through its individual members. These legal institutions endow the individuals with detention so that they may dispose of the objects and possess them.

(Renner1949:73)

Pitched at this level of generality, ownership is still indistinguishable from disposal, detention, or possession (terms variably preferred by Renner, Proudhon, Duguit, and others) and may cover any sort of relationship between humans and individually or socially acquired objects. There is as yet no room for distinction between physical possession and enforceable claims or rights, as there is no ideological contest between developmental or productive property (Locke) and distributive or exploitative property (Marx). The borderline between what I call my own and what belongs to others may be seen as easily passable or as relatively obstacled, excluding specific parties or specific claims. Owners may be individuals, kinship groups, cliques, corporations, states, or supranational bodies; objects owned can be tangible or intangible, separable or non-separable from the person; property can embrace the object in its entirety, or be divided up into a scatter of partial rights. In its most general sense, then, ownership is about the allocation of ‘values’ to specifiable persons, and the object of the law of property is to provide security in the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposal of such ‘valued things’.

Both property and power, in sum, denote bundles of chances, competences, or rights which, if we may borrow Hobhouse’s phrase, admit of ‘variation in several distinct directions’. In view of such protean flexibility, we do not advance very far if we proclaim their sociological or anthropological ubiquity ‘side by side’ as it were, without worrying too much about logical compatibility. If property or power arrangements are loosely defined as social universals, necessary to any conceivable ordering of society, we have a double truism on our hands which is neither definitionally helpful nor, for that matter, ideologically innocent. As may be gathered from some of the previous definitions, property and power display various conjunctions and overlaps, but also tend to be demarcated in tensionful opposition—which together makes for an intricate play of distinction and identity, rapprochement and divergence. Our major definitional puzzle, I therefore suggest, does not so much arise from a simple addition of the indeterminacies of both concepts, but rather from their unclarified, taken-for-granted reciprocal relationship. This implies that problems of definition on either side will remain difficult to resolve unless the two sets of issues are brought face to face; or otherwise put, unless the concepts of property and power are analysed as Siamese twins.

For a start, we may note the sheer difficulty of drawing a proper line of distinction between property and power as they are conventionally described. They have a curious habit of reappearing in each other’s definitions, and are often characterized in terms of one another without an independent definition of either. Property, for instance, is frequently designated as a power or a bundle of powers, a form of domination or Gewalt, whereas power is regularly identified as a property (in the sense in which one ‘has’, ‘possesses’, or ‘wields’ power). This blurring of definitional boundaries is enhanced by the fact that, in many languages, property has retained the dual meaning of ‘right to things’ and ‘faculty’ or ‘trait’ (property is from the Latin proprius), whereas power in its most general sense is indiscriminately made to refer to persons and objects. In this respect, terms such as ‘capacity’, ‘faculty’, ‘competency’, ‘disposition’, Eigenschaft, or Vermögen offer points of confluence of the historical connotations of both concepts.¹

Property and power, however, also regularly officiate as each other’s limiting cases or points of negative demarcation. Power is often circularly defined as ‘that which is not property’, as something less than the fullness of command which is commonly associated with rights of ownership. Many modern theorists of power contrast an acceptable view of power-as-relation with a non-acceptable one of power-as-property (Lasswell and Kaplan 1950: 75; Easton 1953:143; Foucault 1980:88–9, 198; Clegg 1989:207). The metaphorics of power, on the other hand, often serve to indicate that private property relations have been progressively hedged in by social and political prescriptions or have disappeared altogether. Many modern theorists of social stratification for example observe that, across the last century, the axial determinant of social inequality has shifted from property to power, which in this case is often taken as broader in scope than the mere title to dispose of materially productive assets. In this context, managerial power or economic control is usually identified as the core element of property: this is what is left when the property bundle is stripped of secondary incidents such as beneficial enjoyment or heritability.²

The heart of the complexity produced by such overlaps and cross-demarcations seems to be that property and power are principally considered as ‘domanial’ media, which most primitively relate to tenure of things or action towards people, and are hence taken to organize distinct types or fields of social behaviour (e.g. economics vs. politics), while they also have a larger metaphorical application that transcends these connotations and fields, and severs the double linkage between property/things and power/ people. Different actions and tenures can themselves be described in property-like or power-like terms, in so far as controversy arises with regard to their essentially thinglike or residential vs. their relational or performative nature— a conceptual opposition which is often expressed in terms of ‘static’ possession vs. ‘dynamic’ action (or power exercise). Anticipating part of the argument of this and the following chapter, this complex interference between the domanial references of property and power and their metaphorical extensions may be visualized in the four-square layout given in Table 1.

THE SPLIT WORLD OF LIBERAL THEORY

Given this intriguing simultaneity of definitional overlaps and contrasts, it is imperative to explore further the demarcation line between property and power and the theoretical no man’s land through which it is drawn. As we may begin to see, the majority of technical definitions show the rudiments of a fundamental prima-facie distinction, which is even more forcefully present in everyday usage, where it has hardened into an almost ineradicable stereotype. This venerable dichotomy axiomatically sets the logic of power at right angles to that of property, and separates their areas of jurisdiction as a matter of ontological course. It can be summarized most simply as the ‘propertyless’ nature of power and the ‘powerless’ nature of property. This deep structure dualism, which is partly descriptive of a real historical configuration but is simultaneously fictional and performative, constitutes a grounding principle of liberal social theory in its classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form. With due precaution, it can be taken as partly coincident with the much-disputed sectoral cleavage between the domains of state and civil society—in the classical bipolar view according to which the former is interpreted as the superstructure of political organization and the latter as the infrastructure of economic production or market relationships (cf. Keane 1988; Cohen and Arato 1992).

Table 1 Static and dynamic theories of property and power

Although expressed most uncompromisingly in classical liberalism, the contours of this bipolar division were already manifest in many of its ideological precursors. Long before prepared, it marked a provisional culmination of a century-long process of theoretical fissure, which was initiated by the eleventh-century rediscovery of Roman jurisprudence and the subsequent revival of Aristotelian political philosophy at the newly founded universities and clerical schools of the West. In the course of an extended process of semantic decomposition—which we shall trace in sufficient detail later—the inclusive feudal conception of dominion or domain gradually split up into a political and an economic compartment. As rights of property were defined in a more absolute and exclusive manner, they were ever more clearly demarcated from and profiled against rights of sovereignty, which were subjected to a process of concentration and substantialization which mirrored in its essential features the parallel institutional fortification of property rights. The scalar, parcellarized structure of feudal dominion gave way before a polar regrouping of power relationships in the narrower sense of public authority over citizens, and of property relations in the narrower sense of the exclusive detention of things (Anderson 1974:19–27). At the culminating point of this largely synchronous process of divergence, classical liberal theory came to embody the self-evident conviction that exercise of power and disposition over material goods constituted distinct domains and different concerns, and that there existed a natural line (and law) of demarcation to separate them (Figure 2).

This modern distinction between property, the rule over things by the individual, and sovereignty, the rule—as it was originally conceived—over all individuals by the prince, was absent from the doctrines of the church fathers, whose conception of dominion still reflected the highly fragmented, stratified, and interfused system of personal obligation and land tenure which had developed after the economic contraction and political disintegration of the Roman world. The essence of a theory of dominion, McIlwain has written, is a

Figure 2 The fissure

hierarchy of rights and powers all existing in or exercisable over the same objects or persons, and the fundamental relationship of one power over another in this hierarchy is the superiority of the higher to the lower, rather than a complete supremacy in any one over all the others.

(McIlwain 1932:355; Anderson 1974:19–20)

No one within the feudal compass could claim to exercise the concentrated, ‘pointlike’ sovereignty which became a familiar conception only at a later period; no one could claim to own the land in the typically Roman sense of holding property as an absolute and exclusive privilege against all the world. Everyone, from the king down to the meanest peasant, exercised a portion of dominion over it, without anyone holding it in full severalty, i.e. as a walled-in area forbidden to all others.

But since the legists of Renaissance Bologna first rebuilt the edifice of Roman law, and reanimated the typically Antique distinction between dominium and imperium, property and sovereignty were characteristically relegated to discrete realms of factuality and seen as governed by essentially dissimilar principles. With amazing regularity and concord, political thinkers...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF INTELLECTUAL RIVALRY
• 1. THE LIBERAL DICHOTOMY AND ITS DISSOLUTION
• 2. INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION
• 3. MARXISM VS. ANARCHISM
• 4. FASCISM AND THE PRIMACY OF THE POLITICAL
• 5. SOCIAL SCIENCE AS POWER THEORY
• 6. POWER, PROPERTY, AND MANAGERIALISM
• 7. INTELLECTUAL CLOSURE AND THE NEW CLASS
• 8. TOWARDS A THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL RIVALRY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY