Some preliminary remarks on the study of power
Published by Ben Samuel Nelson August 28th, 2006 in PhilosophyThere are a couple of different ways to look at power.
Sociology is supposedly divided into two camps: “conflict” theorists and “consensus” theorists. As far as I can tell, this means that some people enjoy describing society at large as an eternal struggle for egoistic benefits, and others enjoy describing it in terms of voluntary agreement. No doubt they will have things to say about power relationships. Well, these are both, I think, fairly unserious characatures so long as they pretend to be exclusive theoretical claims.
We have some other, related suggestions.
1. On the one hand, we have the idea that power is trust (or acquiescence), as Matt Wood recently suggested. I think there’s a lot going for this outlook; it seems to be able to account for group power, and community power, in a way that other traditions haven’t. But ultimately it’s still incomplete without discussing depedency and fear.
2. Another bundle of theories include the exchange theories of power, which are a cousin of contract theories of government. Such theories explain the emergence and structure of power as being based upon voluntary relationships which occur in order to secure mutual rewards.
One candidate for explanation along the lines of personal exchange has been the power-dependence tradition. According to the preliminary work in this tradition, a person (A) is said to be powerful when others (B) are more dependent upon A for certain rewards than A is dependent upon B.
The theory has the advantage of making a testable (and successful) prediction: asymmetry in dependence leads to an asymmetry in benefits. However, it also seems to have difficulty with explaining acquiescence and community norms, and how these are shaped by power-relationships. Moreover, the preliminary work in the tradition seems to underplay the role of fear and coercion, in favor of a view based on positive exchanges, rewards, and opportunity costs.
3. Later work in the power-dependence tradition investigates power as originating out of both rewards and punishments. So we can just as easily speak of bartering tomatoes as we can of blackmail. This seems less arbitrary. The language of “voluntariness” is exchanged for a more realistic picture, and the label of “dependency” is stretched pretty thin. Also, it loses out on the insight that trust is (or can be) a part of power.
4. Still other theories understand power as the product of domination and terror. This doesn’t need to be the same thing as dependency theory, because all that is required is the subject’s personal terror, not necessarily needing the threat of harm.
If we take all of these suggestions seriously, the emerging picture tells us that fear, dependence, and trust are different spheres of influence, and that each plays some role in an overall picture of what it means to have power.
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This is interesting but I would like to know some of the works that represent/illustrate the various ‘camps’ and theories (if you could, name names as it were). Personally, I’ve always found Dennis Wrong’s Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses (1988 ed.) to be helpful. Has it been superseded by other stuff? Admittedly I haven’t read in this literature for some time.
Where do, roughly, ’spatialist’ theories of power fit in? I’m thinking here of the French poststructuralists (especially Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard). See, for example, the relevant discussion in Todd May’s The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). It’s not that I’m particularly fond of the poststructualist perspective on power, it’s just that it reminds us that fundamental conceptions of power at bottom reduce to ‘power to…’ and ‘power over…’ which of course seems to fall out along a continuum, with the voluntary conceptions at one end and the coercive models at the other, power conceivably taking the myriad forms possible along the continuum. This would then overlap in some measure with attributions of responsibility and accountability, from the individual to the collective. I know this is rather crude, but I have to start somewhere by way of making sense of what you’ve posted here in lieu of further explanation or elaboration. I trust, then, if I seem rather dense or unacquainted with the requisite literature you’ll forgive me.
Patrick, the brunt of the research on power-dependency theory in this post can be found in the article, “The Structure and Use of Power: A Comparison of Reward and Punishment Power” by Linda Molm (Social Psychology Quarterly). That was written in 1988, so it may be dated. In any case, she also mentions certain punishment theories which are certainly staples in select areas of social psych (not to mention folk sociology), like conflict spiral theory and deterrence theory (both of which, if I’m not mistaken, connect quite neatly to the power-dependence theory which Molm endorses).
Also interesting, though certainly dated, is Bertrand Russell’s “Power: A New Social Analysis”. In it, he sets out a research agenda, along with some comments and historical examples on the forms and sources of power. I’d be very interested to learn more of Wrong’s examination to see how it compares to Russell. I’ve been told that Russell isn’t very much read in political philosophy circles, though that seems intuitively baffling to me. (”What! Not read Russell?! That’s crazy!”)
Raven and French have their own ideas about the bases of power, and their expectations for a robust theory of power seem to match (or exceed) my own. They list: a) Promise of reward (or positive exchange), b) coercion through threat (negative exchange), c) referent power (power of groups and conformity), d) legitimate power (when authority matches a social role), e) information, and f) expertise. It seems to me that many of these categories can be amalgamated into one another, and so match more closely the expectations I made in my initial post; but that sort of analytic tinkering will have to wait for a more appropriate occasion.
I guess in the end what I wanted to say here is that we need to follow a more nuanced model, like those above, than models based on simple ideas like “conflict” or “consensus”. Though there’s a second danger: those who try to exhaust a study of power in terms of economics (as Marx seems to have done early on in his career), and those who try to exhaust the analysis in terms of ideas.
I must admit almost total ignorance of poststructural theses. I enjoy reading Lyotard — he really was just a good rhetorician — but have so far not come away with much beyond surface impressions. Still, one issue which is rightly brought up time and again in those works which I’ve read (albeit usually with a dose of hyperbole) is the power of words and conventions over one’s sense of reality; i.e., in Baudrillard. The underlying research interest seems to be to dissect hegemony, and hegemony certainly has to do with popular worldviews and implicit paradigms; so that’s to the good. And yeah, it’s important to keep in mind the idea that a theory of power will just have to be one part of a general theory of influence.
The danger is running into virtualistic theories. My former professor, Douglas Mann, wrote a treatise endorsing a kind of “Structural idealism”, where the ideas of actors exhaust the structure of the social world. It’s fascinating, but on the surface of things, is worth viewing with a lot of skepticism. (Russell makes a warning in “Power…” about how easy it could be to make an idealistic sort of argument, but how we should resist, and I tend to follow the old bean’s way of thinking on this kind of issue.)
Anyway, the products of research into power could exhaust, not just how we study how people make attributions, but (as Russell suggested) how we understand everything that there is to study in the social sciences. I have my doubts about that, but still it’s certainly something to spur further investigation.
Thanks, Ben, for both the sources and elaboration. I look forward to reading the material you cite.
I understand ‘bases’ of power to be equivalent to ‘resources,’ so I suppose the capacity to make threats or promises amounts to the possession of a ‘resource’ of sorts…. ‘Referent power’ sounds as if it can be further reduced to a capacity or resource, although I’m not sure what that would be.
While Russell’s political activism and views were often exemplary (and not, I think, sufficiently appreciated), I don’t think his philosophical acumen was applied to social and political philosophy in the same way it was applied say, to the philosophy of language or of mathematics (or his work in analytic philosophy and logic more broadly). That does not leave his writings in areas outside those domains without merit, indeed, one of their virtues was an accessibility to a public(s) that would not spend its leisure time reading Principia Mathematica. Russell possessed the virtues of both a professional philosopher and an engaged public intellectual, a combination conspicuous these days by its absence (yes, I know, there are exceptions…).
Incidentally, it is not correct that Marx attempted to ‘exhaust a study of power in terms of economics’ ‘early on in his career.’ Marx’s early writings were clearly both more philosophical and wider in range than his later works on political economy proper (Grundisse and Capital were among his later writings; the two remaining volumes of Capital were worked on by Marx up until his death, with Engels editing and publishing them in 1884 and 1893 respectively).
I agree with the need for nuance, and believe that while simple models have analytical and explanatory virtues, descriptive and normative models of power will probably be rather complex if they are to do justice to the myriad sources and types of power in contemporary society, particularly insofar as such power is not always obvious, manifest, naked, what have you….
Finally, I think any theory or model of power needs to keep human agency at the center of the picture, remaining true to at least the spirit of methodological individualism in Elster’s sense, even if one, with Harold Kincaid (in his Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences, 1996), believes such a methodology is seriously flawed.
Well, enough said for now. Thanks again for taking the time to reply to my concerns.
Patrick, it seems to me that you’re right to consider referent power as a kind of basis for power. In that case, dependency theory would seem to be a complete system, and its lack of anything to say about acquiescence at the core of the doctrine would not be an argument against the theory itself. Indeed, if we consider “referent power” (and more generally, power stemming from acquiescence) to be a basis for power, and apply it to the power-dependency theory, then we can easily understand referent power to be both a natural reward and punishment. But we can only arrive at this conclusion if we assume that people are conformist beings, that is, there is a natural inclination toward imitation and acquiescence to one’s peer group. And that assumption seems airtight, despite a few other niceties that counterbalance it (i.e., the fact that agency is an incorrigible value).
In that case, we’d be in a position to ask, “What are the bases of power?” Ala Russell, some fairly elementary remarks can be made, something like as follows. Power over people can be accomplished indirectly through power over inanimate objects and/or directly through influence. Influence can be accomplished through rational persuasion (including “(e) information”, particularly what an earlier Russell might’ve thought of as knowledge through acquisition) and/or express emotional appeal.
As Matt has helped emphasize, one form of express emotional appeal is acquiescence. It seems to me that acquiescence, including trust and apathy, seems to be a kind of positive dependency, though the goods being exchanged are pseudo-goods, like “peace of mind” or “not having to worry so much about so-and-so”. However, the grim realities of Stockholm syndrome show us that an argument could be made that trust and apathy are sometimes related to negative power.
Legitimate power is power acquired by group acquiescence to some doctrines or other which allow so-and-so a seat at the head of the table (one of the things Weber might have called traditional authority), group acquiescence to the rule of so-and-so (akin to charismatic authority), and/or group acquiescence as a result of biological and evolutionary compulsion (if any). The power of “(f) expertise” is really just a form of legitimate power, restricted to a particular sphere of influence (information).
Another kind of express emotional appeal, of course, is naked power, which is pretty well understood.
The above is not overly simple, somewhat analytic, and descriptively powerful enough to let us talk about many interesting subjects in social science and ethics. I won’t claim it’s exhaustive, but at the very least, it rearranges the Raven-French model in an economical way, and makes everything compatible with the dependency-theory of power.
Your thoughts on agency are welcome. Indeed, one possible shortcoming is a lack of explanation and description when it comes to agency. Agency is, at minimum, certainly a prerequisite for power. You can’t exercize power without exercizing your will, and thus, agency. Agency can also be involved as a basis for power, especially when it comes to certain kinds of trust. But this of course is not serious philosophical investigation, and I can’t claim exhaustiveness in treatment of the role of agency in all this.
I agree with you about Russell’s social philosophy being not quite as analytic as one might hope. His categorization scheme in “Power…” is a bit sloppy, and he doesn’t use it very much in the whole analysis. I’ve spent the earlier part of this summer trying to reconstruct what he might have said about the topics he raised if he had applied the apparatus he invented in the opening chapters, but I continually resort to revising the apparatus itself in order to make sense of anything.
I suppose it would be most proper of me to claim agnosticism about the Marx question, but some evidence from The German Ideology compels me to say something about the matter. I’d appreciate your insight into how to interpret sections like this without thinking of economic determinism: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.”
I began my researches with a strong desire to stick to methodological individualism, and continue to have a strain of that in my thinking. But lately I’ve wondered whether or not that gives us an obvious route to talk about the really big (though ill-defined) subjects — culture, society, institutions, etc. I have some thoughts, but I’ll have to revisit the founders of methodological individualism before I make any rash pronouncements pro or con.
Ben,
Marx’s philsophical anthropology, especially as evidenced in his early works, was not at all characterized by ‘economic determinism.’
Re German Ideology extract: Conditioning is not tantamount to economic determinism and I would take Marx here to be simply speaking to something like the intentionality of consciousness, in this case consciousness as inexetricably bound up with the materiality of daily life (hence the occasional assertions of the primacy of ‘being’ over consciousness), it is, in other words, unavoidably and primarily the consciousness OF material things as experienced by the sensual individual in the daily round (one instance of how this might occur as regards early childhood development–rather extreme I grant you, but no less provocative for all that–see Derek Melser’s The Act of Thinking [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; Melser’s account might be termed materialist and neo-behaviouralist]. Recent expositions of ‘embodied cognition’ typically go back to or are at least inspired by Merleau-Ponty, but I think there’s much of Marxist pedigree here as well.
To paraphrase and quote from Allen Wood, although Marx believed people are often ‘controlled or tyrannized by “alien” economic conditions,’ he could only come to that conclusion in light of his normative account of self-realization, of what man (as a species) is capable of living by way of a fulfilled life, here the ‘free actualisation and externalisation of the powers and the abilities of the individual’ (for more on this, see Jon Elster’s ‘Self-realisation in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,’ in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism, 1989).
I don’t have the stamina right now for Marxist exegesis except to state it is more accurate or plausible to accuse Marx of some sort of historical determinism. The best discussions here include those by Wood (Karl Marx, 2nd ed., 2004) and Elster (Making Sense of Marx, 1985), as well as G.A. Cohen’s Marx’s Theory of History (2000 ed.).
Thanks Patrick, I’ll keep a look out. I had this same discussion with Brian not long ago where he made some convincing points, but especially in light of your interpretations, I may have to revisit the issue.
It seems clear and uncontroversial to me that Marx’s emphasis was on the dependence of ideas and ideology upon material reality. But it now seems that the question is really whether or not he believed the reverse, namely, that ideas had no effect on material reality, which is what would seemingly make him a genuine economic determinist. If he was just making a claim about embodied minds, then many empiricists would just nod along with their thumbs up high in the air.
On the one hand, use of language like “phantoms”, “efflux”, and especially the maxim “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” are what drive the eco-deterministic interpretation. On the other hand, in favor of your interpretation, they’re all caged in terms of “the first stage”, the “first step”, and so on, by which I take it he means something like “on first blush”, and which would seem to leave room for ideas to play an active role in determining material realities. And of course his work on “false consciousness” and the remarks he made later in life are also in favor of the interpretation you favor.
Maybe this is all discussed in the material you cited. If so, I apologize for the redundancy. I just wanted to make clear that I wasn’t making the original claim unselfconsciously.
Also, I’ve been reading the work you cited in another thread called “Fasionable Nonsense”, the one in reply to Prof. Winter’s work. I’ll have to ask him if he’s read it…
‘But it now seems that the question is really whether or not he believed the reverse, namely, that ideas had no effect on material reality, which is what would seemingly make him a genuine economic determinist.’—
Well, why did he write and work, especially as feverishly as he did near the end of his life, if he did not believe the converse (i.e. that ideas have an effect on material reality)?!
I admit, it sounds puzzling.
But that’s not to deny that there are grounds for the eco-deterministic interpretation, either. Even a defender of Marx’s, Andrew Gelder, writing in “Modern China” (1977), seems to admit that there are isolated passages where Marx really seems to be espousing eco-determinism: “Many of my criticisms of Marxism in Asia seem also to have been misinterpreted, with the core issues consequently being obscured. I cannot deny that numerous predictions, assertions, and rhetorical flourishes, some implying an ironclad necessity about historical events and many of which are contradictory, can be culled from Marx’s journalistic and historical tracts. When I object that Marx’s writings on India … do not make the events Marx was describing “predetermined,” the fundamental point is not that Carrere and Schram have misrepresented these passages. The core of the critique, rather, is that these Marxian assertions and predictions appearing in the New York Tribune and elsewhere cannot be presented as a theory that formed a well-integrated facet of Marx’s theoretical writings at any stage of their development.” Essentially, at least from what I can gather, he seems to be saying that Marx has made eco-deterministic remarks, but they shouldn’t be confused with his more nuanced and serious approaches in “Capital” etc.
I’d be willing to go this way. I’d also be willing to say, “Hey, maybe something was lost in translation from German”. And I’d be willing to interpret the ‘German Ideology’ remarks as being “on first blush”. But I’m not willing to ignore the words themselves, which is asking a person to go far beyond charity in their interpretations.
Whoops: I should have said, ‘Far be it from me…’
Ben,
I commented to the above (hence the ‘whoops’ thing) but it appears to have been eaten. If I find the time over the next few days I’ll re-write my reply.
All the best,
Patrick
I hate it when that happens! When I need to write longer posts these days, I tend to do it in notepad and save them (Microsoft Word takes forever and a day to load).
Ben,
I’ll invoke the argument OF authority (vs. the argument TO authority) by way of attempting to clear up once and for all the charge of economic determinism or determinism of any sort (e.g. historical) in Marx’s writings in toto:
As Allen Wood deftly explains, while Marx argues the economic basis of society determines the ’superstructure,’ this did not amount to a denial that the superstructure may, in turn, ‘react on or reciprocally influence the basis, so he may recognize within the economic basis that social relations may exert influence on social technology even if they are determined by society’s productive forces.’ In effect, Marx is claiming that ‘one of several INTERDEPENDENT FACTORS is more powerful historically and more basic explanatorily than the others.’
Wood elaborates the nuances intrinsic to Marx’s discussions ‘about forces and relations of production:’ ‘For one thing, economic relations are less immediately influenced by productive forces than work relations are. Even more important, productive forces for Marx are only the most prominent factor determining production relations, and not the sole factor. The economic structure of a society depends on the productive forces it possesses, but only against a background which includes the historical circumstances and social forms in which these powers happened to be acquired: “the conditions in which men find themselves…the social form which exists before them,” or, as Engels puts it, “the remains of earlier economic stages of development which have in fact been handed down and survived, often through tradition or vis inertiae.” [….]
On Marx’s theory, given the material and social circumstances of Western Europe at the end of the middle ages, the productive forces of an industrial society could only be acquired and employed through the adoption of capitalist social forms: commodity production, private property in the means of production, the relation of capital to wage labor. In this sense, Marx holds that capitalist production relations in modern Europe were necessitated by these productive forces. But it is NOT Marx’s view that these same productive forces inevitably require capitalist institutions for their growth and employment, whatever the historical circumstances.’ [….]
Among the items that make up society’s Produktivkrafte, one finds ‘not only tools, raw materials and other physical concomitants of production, BUT ALSO THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS OF THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO PRODUCE. [….] The Poverty of Philosophy speaks of “the revolutionary class itself” as a productive power. The German Ideology says: “A determinate mode of production or industrial stage is always united with a determinate mode of cooperation or social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a ‘productive power.’”
Wood proceeds to explain how ‘the belief that historical materialism involves a species of causal determinism about human actions probably derives from the erroneous idea that the “determination” of production relations by productive power and of the social superstructure by its economic basis are cases of efficient causes determining effects,’ an idea Wood has now disposed of in the course of several chapters. At this juncture, Wood can address the question of what ‘might lead us to think that historical materialism is committed to causal determinism. Marx says that economic relations are “independent of the will” of those who enter into them, and he often asserts or implies that people are controlled or tyrannized by “alien” economic conditions. But no philosophical determinism is implied in these claims. Marx holds that economic circumstances dominate people by placing obstacles in the way of their achieving a fulfilling way of life and by subjecting them to illusions which prevent their setting meaningful goals for themselves. [….] One of Marx’s primary objectives is to free people as much as possible from the social relations and ideological illusions which dominate and imprison them. If Marx’s belief that people in class society are so dominated is a species of determinism, then it is not the causal determinism of a necessary law of nature, but a determinism that is historically contingent, and it is one of Marx’s chief practical aims that it should cease to operate.’
So, far be it from me to urge or suggest you ‘ignore the words themselves’ or go beyond the principle of charity. Few people today endeavor to tackle Marx’s oeuvre, let alone the creme de la creme of the exegetical literature. I would suggest the following by way of coming to a fair, judicious, and sophisticated understanding of what Marx bequeathed to us:
Bottmore, Tom, ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991, 2nd ed.
Carver, Terrell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Cohen, G.A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, expanded ed.
Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism. London: Verso, 2002.
Eatwell, John, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, eds. Marxian Economics. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990.
Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Elster, Jon and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Miller, Richard W. Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Nielsen, Kai and Robert Ware, eds. Exploitation. New York: Humanities Press, 1997.
Pfeffer, Rodney G. Marxism, Morality and Social Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Przeworski, Adam. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Roemer, John, ed. Analytical Marxism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
Wertheimer, Allan. Exploitation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Wolff, Jonathan. Why Read Marx Today? Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Wood, Allen W. Karl Marx. New York: Routledge, 2004, 2nd ed.
Patrick, thank you many times for that enlightening post. I think the quote from “The German Ideology” which you provided gives me good reason to dispatch the earlier quotes from that text as being rhetorical flourishes. What would really make the case solid is if those passages were reinterpreted in a non-eco-deterministic way.