Power has many forms and faces
GRAMMATICALLY CHALLENGED Donald Trump: “My twitter has become so powerful”. Charmer Nigel Farage: the American Jewish lobby “is very powerful”. Margaret Thatcher: “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
“Power” and “powerful” are words we can all use and understand.
Except, like most concepts, once you start to analyse it, power turns out to be more complex than it first appears. A starting point for anybody who wants to understand power is the book Power: a
published in 1974. The author, sociologist Steven Lukes, is now based at New York University but he began his academic career in the UK.
At its most basic, power is the capacity to bring about consequences. Think of the boss who demands that you undertake a piece of work. Power is linked to but not identical to authority. The climate-change scientist who tells us that we should be cutting back on carbon emissions has authority over us, but not power.
In the early definitions of power, it was thought that power had to be observable. You don’t want to do a job, your boss tells you to do it, so you do it. Your boss has been shown to have power over you. But a much-discussed article from 1962 argued that there must be a second dimension to power. There’s the question of who sets the agenda — in other words, what gets to be debated. Imagine a town in which one polluting company is economically dominant and in which air quality is never discussed by the local council. The company exercises power, but it’s not strictlyspeaking observable — it takes place behind closed doors.
But Professor Lukes was still not satisfied. He identified a third dimension to power. This is the power to persuade or manipulate. Think of the wealthy newspaper owner able to use the paper’s pages to convince readers of the desirability of a low-tax economy — that’s a kind of power, an ideological power. Another example might be the way women have been persuaded over the years to privilege their appearance.
There’s an obvious link here with a Marxist view of “false consciousness”, in which people come to believe things that are not in their interests. A brilliant book by Lukes, published in 1985, Marxism and Morality, addressed
Steven Lukes
an apparent contradiction at the heart of Marx. If morality, as Marx claimed, was merely a bourgeois creation to control the masses, then how come he, Marx, splatters moral judgments throughout his writings (to see how the paradox is resolved you’ll have to read the book).
Professor Lukes has had a lifelong preoccupation with another thinker — the French sociologist Émile Durkheim. One of Durkheim’s best-known books was about suicide, which seems on the face of it the most individual of acts: but what intrigued the Frenchman was how the decision was shaped by social forces — he noted, for example, that suicide was more common in Protestant than Catholic societies. Again, it’s not hard to spot a connection between this and Lukes’ fascination with power and ideology.
Durkheim’s Jewish background — and the abandonment of his religious faith— was one reason Professor Lukes felt an instinctive empathy for him. Steven Lukes was raised in Newcastle by a mother who was a refugee from Nazi Germany and a father whose family came from Eastern Europe. There was some Jewish ritual at home, but when, as a 12-year-old boy, he began to prepare for his barmitzvah, his father quietly took him aside and told him that “it was all nonsense”. “That,” says Lukes, “did religion for me”.
Although he had a plum job as Fellow in politics and sociology at Balliol College, Oxford, aged 45 Professor Lukes decided he didn’t want to grow old as an Oxford don, and he and his wife uprooted to the European University Institute in Florence — where they spent more than a decade.
This peripatetic sociologist then moved to Sienna and later the US. Where is home? “I never ask myself this question.”
His father said religion was all nonsense
@DavidEdmonds100