The Power Elite and the State

G. William Domhoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351476645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume presents a network of social power, indicating that theories inspired by C.Wright Mills are far more accurate views about power in America than those of Mills's opponents.Dr. Domhoff shows how and why coalitions within the power elite have involved themselves in such policy issues as the Social Security Act (1935) and the Employment Act (1946), and how the National Labor Relations Act (1935) could pass against the opposition of every major corporation. The book descri bes how experts worked closely with the power elite in shaping the plansfor a post-World War II world economic order, in good part realized during the past 30 years. Arguments are advanced that the fat cats who support the Democrats cannot be understood in terms of narrow self-interest, and that moderate conservatives dominated policy-making under Reagan.

1

SOCIAL NETWORKS, POWER, AND THE STATE

Introduction

By the early 1980s, contrary to the pious hopes I had expressed at the turn of the decade for continuing dialogue and innovation (1980:15), the debate on power in America triggered by Hunter and Mills had become depressingly predictable. There were said to be three general theories—pluralist, institutional elitist, and Marxist—and three basic methods—decisional, positional, and reputation. There were also three main indicators of power—who decides, who sits, and who benefits. Attempts were made to show that the three theories could be in part synthesized if they were understood as different levels of analysis (e.g., Alford and Friedland, 1985), and I argued that the three methods were not as different or as tied to any one theory as sometimes claimed (Domhoff, 1978: Chapter 4), but the holy trinities were in place, and it was proving difficult to dislodge them.

From the very outset, it had been my aim to combine an institutional analysis with a class analysis. I tried to do so by seeing if Mills’s institutionally based power elite could be grounded in the upper (capitalist-based) class. I redefined the power elite in such a way that it included active, working members of the upper class and high-level employees in private institutions controlled by members of the upper class, and then explored the extent to which the members of this power elite overlapped with those encompassed by Mills’s concept. I found that the overlap was nearly perfect, and then showed how these people dominated policy-making in the executive branch of the federal government through a variety of direct and indirect means.

Despite this explicit attempt at transcending the usual categories, the taxonomists of the 1980s insisted that everyone had to be put in one category or another. One textbook in political sociology had me listed as a Marxist (Marger, 1981), another decided that I was an institutional elitist (Sherman and Kolker, 1987). Alford and Friedland had me down as an elitist in an early version of their

manuscript, then decided that I was a class theorist who worked at the individual level of analysis (1985:301). For me, the research tradition started by Mills and Hunter, and invigorated by the activists and plain Marxists of the 1960s, had become as sterile and polemical as the old mainstream literature on power. The orthodoxies of the structural Marxists and state autonomy theorists only added to the problem.

It was in this context that I encountered Mann’s new theory of social power. As a British sociologist who had immersed himself in the study of history over the previous ten years, he was one step removed from many of the controversies that were polarizing studies of power in America. He certainly was alive to the key general issues at stake, but he was not caught up in the details and personal politics of the American debate. His work, then, offered an opportunity for a new look, a fresh start.

Mann begins by doing away with the usual notion of a “bounded society” or a “social system.” Since there is no “totality,” there can be no “subsystems,” “levels,” or “dimensions.” Instead, social organization must be understood in terms of four “overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power” (1986:1) that run off in different directions and have varying extensions in physical space. This is music to the ears of those who analyze American power structures as networks of people and institutions. Network analysis is no longer a mere “methodological strategy” for studying power structures defined as “a network of people and institutions who differentially benefit from the functioning of the social system,” as I claimed in the 1970s (Domhoff, 1978:133), but a theoretical stance as well.

These four interacting networks—ideological, economic, military, and political—are conceptualized as organized means of attaining human goals. Mann’s concern is with the “logistics” of power (1986:9–10, 518). No one of the networks is more fundamental than the others. Each one presupposes the existence of the others, which fits nicely with Russell’s (1938:10–11) point that power cannot be reduced to one basic form. Thus, there can be no “ultimate primacy” in the “mode of production” or “the normative system” or “the state.” Since the emphasis is on people acting through social networks, the distinction between “social action” and “social structure,” which also happens to underlie the debate over “instrumental” and “structural” theories of the state, is simply abolished. There no longer needs to be a periodic revival of the “agency vs. structure” debate. Since the four networks have different and constantly changing boundaries that vary with the invention of new technologies and the emergence of new organizational forms, the old division between “endogenous” and “exogenous” factors in the understanding of social conflict is discarded as “not helpful” (Mann, 1986:1). It is a freeing set of conceptualizations, the best thing since Mills (1962: Chapter 6) briefly stated his alternative to Marxism as a prolegomenon to the worldwide historical comparison of social structures that he was working on at his death in 1962 (Horowitz, 1963), only better. Mann’s summary statement on his overall framework is as follows:

A general account of societies, their structure, and their history can best be given in terms of the interrelations of what I call the four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP) relationships. These are (1) overlapping networks of social interaction, not dimensions, levels, or factors of a single social totality. This follows from my first statement. (2) They are also organizations, institutional means of attaining human goals. Their primacy comes not from the strength of human desires for ideological, economic, military, or political satisfaction but from the particular organizational means each possesses to attain human goals, whatever they may be (1986:2).

Mann defines the ideology network in terms of those organizations concerned with meaning, norms, and ritual practice (1986:22). It generates “sacred” authority and intensifies social cohesion. Its usual manifestations are in organized religion, and its most prominent historical power actor was the Catholic Church.

The economic network is that set of institutions concerned with satisfying material needs through the “extraction, transformation, distribution and consumption of the objects of nature” (1986:24). The economic network gives rise to classes, defined in terms of their power over the different parts of the economic process from extraction to consumption. But there is not always class struggle, which has been important only in certain periods of history, such as ancient Greece, early Rome, and the capitalist era. The term “ruling class” is defined as “an economic class that has successfully monopolized other power sources to dominate a state-centered society at large” (1986:25). Geographically extensive classes arose only slowly in Western history, for they were dependent upon advances in infrastructure made possible by developments in the other power networks. For the first 2500 years of Western civilization, economic networks were extremely localized, especially in comparison to political and military networks.

The military network is defined in terms of organized physical violence. It is the power of direct and immediate coercion. Military power had a greater range throughout most of history than either political or economic power. Even so, we often forget that until very recently an army could only carry enough food for a 50–60 mile march, which forced it to rely on the local countryside in extensive campaigns. Military power was central to the theorizing of many nineteenth-century thinkers, but “has been neglected of late in social theory” (1986:26).

The state is defined as a political network whose primary function is territorial regulation (1986:26–27). Its usefulness in laying down rules and adjudicating disputes in specific territories is the source of its uniqueness (Mann, 1984). This unique function is the basis for its potential autonomy, but it gains further autonomy due to the fact that it interacts with other states, especially through warfare (Mann, 1986:511). The state can take on other functions besides territorial regulation and has had varying degrees of influence at different phases of Western history (1977, 1986:514). There is a tendency for present-day social scientists to project the state’s great importance in the contemporary world back to earlier times when its powers were weak.

Most theorists regard military power as one aspect of state power, but Mann provides four pieces of evidence for distinguishing the two. First, the original states did not have any military capability. Second, most historical states have not controlled all the military forces within the territory they claim to regulate. Third, there are historical instances where conquest was undertaken by armies that were not controlled by the states where they reside. Fourth, the military is usually separate from other state institutions even when it is officially controlled by the state, making possible the overthrow of the political elite by military leaders (Mann, 1986:11).

Looking at the growth and development of the four networks in Western history, Mann concludes that our theoretical goals as social scientists must be tempered by a respect for the complex realities of history. The historical record does not bear out the claims of any one “grand theory.” There are too many exceptions. Lower-level, contingent generalizations are the best we can do. There seems to be a pattern in Western history, but only barely, and this pattern is conditioned by a number of historical accidents, not by some inevitable and immanent societal principles (1986:531–532). The “European miracle,” meaning the tremendous growth in power resources over the past several hundred years, is seen as “a series of giant coincidences” (1986:505).

Even the rise of independent civilizations in only four or five separate places was in good part due to a concatenation of relatively rare geographical coincidences, not evolutionary inevitability. Mann shows that in many times and places prehistorical social groups reached a level of social development that seemed to suggest that civilization—defined in terms of cities, ceremonial centers, and writing—was about to appear, only to fall back or remain at the same level. Significantly, one factor in this “failure” to develop civilizations may have been the ability of ordinary people to control the actions of their leaders: they seemed to fear the development of full-fledged power structures (1986:38–39, 67–68). Only where river flooding allowed the possibility of alluvial agriculture, in conjunction with close proximity to geographical areas that encouraged different but complementary networks, did the “caging” of populations make possible the development of the fixed power structures of domination and exploitation that have characterized all civilizations (1986: Chapter 3).

Furthermore, comparative studies are far more limited in their usefulness than most social scientists believe because there really aren’t enough separate social systems to make meaningful comparisons, and comparisons back and forth in historical time can be downright silly due to the vastly different levels of power development at different historical epochs (1986:173, 501–503, 525). For the most burning questions, historical studies of specific countries or systems of nation-states are the best we can do. This historical emphasis recalls Mills’s (1962:119–126) similar admonitions, and it justifies the kind of detailed studies that have characterized research on contemporary power structures.

Mann underscores his general point about the interacting and intersecting nature of the four power networks by noting “the promiscuity of organizations and functions” (1986:17). That is, the four networks can fuse and borrow from each other in complex ways. Once again, we are on wonderfully empirical ground, for everything varies from time to time and place to place. For example, medieval European states were “overwhelmingly, narrowly political” (1986:17) and they were autonomous, but states in modern capitalist societies are both political and economic, and they usually are not autonomous.

In all, then, Mann’s innovative and flexible theory is an ideal framework for the findings on the American power structure over the past 40 years. It is network based, historically focused, and empirical. The only reservation I have about the theory, one that is tangential to the concerns of this book, relates to Mann’s claim that human nature expresses an unchanging “rational restlessness” (1986:4). In this, Mann is following Max Weber, whom he calls “the greatest sociologist” (1986:4), but in my view Sigmund Freud is far and away the greatest social theorist of the past 200 years. Shorn of such unnecessary metatheoretical concepts as the life and death instincts, id—ego—superego, and oral—anal—phallic, and placed on an interpersonal basis (e.g., Chodorow, 1978; Stern, 1985), Freud’s clinical insights about repression and unconscious processes provide the starting point for a theory of culture as a group defense mechanism against infantile fears and anxieties. The key to understanding human nature and society is not in instincts, desires, or rationality, but in the repressions, ambivalences, and projections that are an inevitable product of a long infancy within the family structure that evolved in the context of primate group living. It is in long infancy and the repressions that result in order to make family living possible that we find the “material” basis for Mann’s ideology network, as well as the basis for understanding such strange phenomena as human sacrifice, initiation ceremonies, and the origins of priestly city-states, as I have argued elsewhere (Domhoff, 1969a, 1970a,b). But all this is a separate story from the one I want to focus on in this book, and it must be saved for another time and place. For now I only want to register my dissent from all those social scientists and historians who start their theorizing with a rational utilitarian ego psychology, whether derived from Adam Smith, John Locke, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, or Max Weber, and place my bets on Freud (1913, 1921, 1927, 1930) and those who brilliantly developed his basic insights on social structure and culture (Roheim, 1943, 1945, 1950; LaBarre, 1954, 1970). Human beings are best characterized by a restless discontent that is irrational, not rational, and “human nature” is not fixed and unchanging, but variable in terms of the changing relationship between the repressed and consciousness. There is thus a dimension of irrationality involved in power and subjugation that is untapped in our most honored theories (cf. Gregor, 1985; Benjamin, 1988).

Liberalism, Marxism, and State Theory

Mann’s four-network theory of social power rather obviously challenges many orthodoxies of the past and present, including the Weberian one from which he draws his insights about the organizational basis of power. However, his main targets are what he calls liberalism (and Americans call pluralism), rooted in good part in neoclassical economic theory, and Marxism—the same two theories that were contested by Hunter and Mills from their own organizational perspectives. In this section I will draw together his main criticisms of these two theories and of state autonomy theory as well, leaving aside his comments on theories that have not been part of the American debate. In addition, I will add a few critical points of my own on Marxian state theory. Then, in the following section, I will show how Mann applies his theory to the rise of capitalism and the state in Western history.

Liberalism is found wanting because the historical record does not sustain its view that all of history is essentially “capitalism writ large” (Mann, 1986:534). Individuals did not scratch out private property and then decide to create the state as umpire and regulator, as in the myth of the social contract. Markets have not been the only avenue to new economic developments, and military empires of the past are not merely parasitic hindrances to economic growth, but sometimes stimulative of such growth. Moreover, liberal theory fails to understand that a framework of normative regulation is required before markets can develop:

Regulated competition is not “natural.” If competition is not to degenerate into mutual suspicion and aggression and so result in anarchy, it requires elaborate, delicate social arrangements that respect the essential humanity, the powers, and the property rights of the various decentralized power actors (1986:534).

Given its great limitations, Mann renders a very harsh judgment on liberalism–pluralism: “In the light of world history, neoclassical theory should be seen as bourgeois ideology, a false claim that the present power structure of our own society is legitimate because it is natural” (1986:534).

Mann finds Marxism in all its varieties equally wanting. The idea that all power is rooted ultimately in the ownership and control of the means of production, with the ensuing class struggle providing the motor of history, does not fit the origins of civilization in the years 3000 to 2300 B.C. , when most property was held by the state and there was no class conflict; nor the 2500 years of empires of domination, when military networks were in the ascendancy; nor the 900 years after the fall of the Roman Empire, when the ideology network called “Christendom” combined with the independent armies of the nobility to create the framework within which a class-ridden capitalism and a closely intertwined system of nation-states began to rise to the fore. In short, there have been great stretches of history when economic forces, no matter how broadly conceived to rescue the Marxian claim about the primacy of the “mode of production,” were not primary in either the first or last instance, and other epochs where the activities of the ruling class were far more important in understanding new developments than any “class struggle” with direct producers, who were far too localized and lacking in organizational infrastructure to challenge the dominant class, let alone to be considered a class themselves.

But it is on the relationship between states and social classes, the crucial issue of this book, that Mann is most critical of all previous theories, not just liberalism and Marxism. At one extreme, all the non-Marxian theories have a tendency to see states and social classes as inherently in opposition. This includes state autonomy theory. In Mann’s words, “in modern thought classes and nations are usually regarded as antithetical” (1986:529). This can be seen very clearly in the usual liberal theory:

Liberalism views property rights as originating in the struggles of individuals t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Social Networks, Power, And The State
• Chapter 2. Does It Matter Who Governs?
• Chapter 3. Business Leaders, Experts, And The Social Security Act
• Chapter 4. The Wagner Act And Class Conflict, 1897-1948
• Chapter 5. Defining The National Interest, 1940-1942: A Critique Of Krasner’S Theory Of American State Autonomy
• Chapter 6. The Ruling Class Does Rule: The State Autonomy Theory Of Fred Block, And The Origins Of The International Monetary Fund
• Chapter 7. State Autonomy And The Employment Act Of 1946: An Empirical Attack On A Theoretical Fantasy
• Chapter 8. Class Segments And Trade Policy, 1917-1962: A Challenge To Pluralists And Structural Marxists
• Chapter 9. Which Fat Cats Support Democrats?
• Chapter 10. The Decline Of Disruption And The Return To Conservatism
• Envoi
• Bibliography
• Index