Power and Politics

Power is an important issue for those working in the classical liberal tradition. Classical liberalism contrasts power and market, arrangements rooted in coercion and those rooted in consent. Classical liberalism also has an argument about the practical consequences for freedom that follow from individual property rights. Property rights allow for diversity in the holding of property, and this diversity in turn can secure freedom for individuals and their beliefs.

Each of these notions has a history and a theory.

The history is of vital importance: intellectual history (the history of the diverse streams of thought that led to these ideas), and also economic, social, political, and legal history. These tell us how institutions that we often take for granted came into being, and about the transformations that they underwent. They tell us of the rise and decline of states and of the rise and decline of liberty. They serve also as material against which hypotheses may be tested, and over which we may argue about the merits and demerits of different approaches to social organization. In this respect, they are continuous with empirical work in the various social sciences.

The theory involves many different disciplines—philosophy, political thought, economics, sociology, social anthropology, and law. Here, the different arguments within the liberal approach each raise different characteristic problems. If we are concerned with the difference between systems resting on voluntary choice and those resting on coercion, we must answer those who question whether voluntary choice can really bear the weight we put on it. We must also answer questions about how voluntary choice and its consequences relate to other goals and ideals. These may include the concerns of, say, those who champion communitarian ideas. But questions may also be raised about whether the consequences of voluntary action will always furnish those institutions and distributions of property that are needed if classical liberalism’s argument about the consequences of freedom is to be convincing. And this in turn will bring us back to the importance of empirical and historical work.

Power consists of an introduction by Steven Lukes and essays by or selections from the works of Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, Robert Dahl, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Talcott Parsons, Nicos Poulantzas, Alvin Goldman, Georg Simmel, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michel Foucault, Gerhard Lenski, and Raymond Aron. The contributions are almost exclusively theoretical rather than historical or empirical in their concerns.

The collection is a good representation of the discussion about power in the mainstream of sociological and political theory in this century. The “community power” debate, however, is not represented, and there is little here that is even close to the classical liberal tradition (a selection from de Jouvenel’s On Power [Boston: Beacon Press, 1962] would have been a useful addition).

Many of the pieces discuss how the concept of power should be defined, and how—or whether—it should be differentiated from other concepts. But the authors usually put the cart before the horse. How we understand power, and what we distinguish it from, will in the end be determined by which explanatory and normative theories concerning the social world are acceptable, rather that by the analysis of concepts. The social scientist, historian, and philosopher should be concerned primarily with argument about the respective merits of these competing theories rather than with trying to define their terms.

Habermas’s approach, however, also puts weight on the idea that individuals can and should be involved in intellectual exchanges with one another—that it is important that they participate in an intellectual public forum. In this, Habermas seems correct; he also pinpoints something that is needed by classical liberals. At the very least, a society organized on the principles of classical liberalism requires that, at some level, its own rationale can be legitimated to individuals through argument and discussion.

Habermas develops his views in the essay in this volume as an extension of those of Hannah Arendt. She is represented here by a piece entitled “Communicative Power,” extracted from her On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). Her work is influenced by her affection for the public forum of the classical polis. This leads her to what, in my judgement, is an inflated opinion of the virtues of civic participation. In view of the realities of modern participatory politics, and the arguments of both “pluralist” political theorists and public-choice economists, this would seem a striking example of the triumph of hope over experience—and even over common sense.

In the extract Arendt distinguishes sharply between power and violence. Power she defines as essentially a property of the group and as inherent in the existence of any political community. At times it seems close to the notions of opinion and ongoing consent, but she also speaks of power in connection with acting in concert.

I find two problems in all this. First, what are these communities doing when they are acting? Arendt, admirably, wants to limit the scope of politics (for which she is criticized by Habermas). But one problem for the civic-humanist tradition of which she is a part is that it places so much emphasis on the political community, while giving it nothing to do once a free society has been established. And, as we’ll know from costly experience, the Devil makes work for idle hands. The second problem concerns how the notion of intellectual exchanges in a public forum is to be realized in the sort of large-scale society in which most of us wish to live. Here again the liberal view of private property as allowing for experiments in living has an important role to play as a surrogate for such dialogue (compare the “utopia” section of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia [New York: Basic Books, 1974]). But for experiments in living to play such a role, they may need to be complemented by some kind of more direct intellectual accountability to one another, and this brings us back to the concerns of Arendt and Habermas, albeit in an attenuated form. What this would mean in institutional terms in a classical liberal setting I am not sure. But Stephen Macedo of Harvard University assigns a somewhat similar function to argumentation about law in a liberal social order. (See for example his The New Right v. The Constitution [Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1986] and “The Public Morality of the Rule of Law: A Critique of Ronald Dworkin,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 1985.)

The collection also contains a most suggestive extract from Georg Simmel. He discusses the way in which, in most situations that people would usually consider coercive, there is actually a fair amount of freedom for the person being coerced. This leads Simmel to discuss how the cooperation of the person being coerced is required for the successful exercise of authority, and how a leader in turn must be responsive to the led. But this insight must be tempered by a point well made in Gerhard Lenski’s contribution to the volume. Those who seize power by force must move quickly to legitimate their rule, and they can do this by such means as changing the content of the law. Their aim will be the production of a new consensus that secures their dominant position. Simmel’s ideas, to which Lenski refers, are still very much to the point. But the issues that Lenski highlights may have implications for classical liberal ideas about consent: ideas and institutions that are rooted in power and that legitimize a form of power may become so familiar as to be taken as a matter of course by us all.

This brings us to Michel Foucault. A short extract sets out some of the methodological ideas that underlie his work. These include his ideas about the role of power in structuring discourse in the sense (to oversimplify somewhat) that those involved on either side of some discussion share presuppositions that stem from power relations. Foucault’s own ideas about power are centered on structures and processes and the way in which human agents are formed by them, rather than on intentional action undertaken by human agents. While his theoretical ideas seem to me open to many objections, his writings present interesting challenges to classical liberals. In particular, Foucault’s substantive historical discussion (see, for example, his Discipline and Punish [New York: Random House, 1979]) is unusually provocative and unsettling, and sometimes raises challenging questions that demand to be addressed by others who—like myself—do not always find his approach convincing.