Phenomena of Power

Authority, Domination, and Violence

Heinrich Popitz, Gianfranco Poggi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544566
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

In Phenomena of Power, one of the leading figures of postwar German sociology reflects on the nature, and many forms of, power. For Heinrich Popitz, power is rooted in the human condition and is therefore part of all social relations. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, he identifies the elementary forms of power to provide detailed insight into how individuals gain and perpetuate control over others. Instead of striving for a power-free society, Popitz argues, humanity should try to impose limits on power where possible and establish counterpower where necessary.

Phenomena of Power delves into the sociohistorical manifestations of power and breaks through to its general structures. Popitz distinguishes the forms of the enforcement of power as well as of its stabilization and institutionalization, clearly articulating how the mechanisms of power work and how to track them in the social world. Philosophically trained, historically informed, and endowed with keen observation, Popitz uses examples ranging from the way passengers on a ship organize deck chairs to how prisoners of war share property to illustrate his theory. Long influential in German sociology, Phenomena of Power offers a challenging reworking of one of the essential concepts of the social sciences.

1

THE CONCEPT OF POWER

The aim of the following considerations is to construct a general frame of reference for the analysis of power phenomena.

In the first place, I seek to identify the historical premises of the problematization of power. In what presuppositions is our understanding of power grounded, both currently and for the foreseeable future?

It appears obvious: we can assume that power constitutes a universal element of the human condition, fundamentally affecting the very essence of human sociability. On the basis of this assumption, we must also ask: On what grounds does human power rest? On what capacities for action, what conditions of existence? These questions lead us to distinguish between four fundamental anthropological forms of power. Together with some additional comments, these forms may in turn serve as analytical signposts of the discourse that follows.

HISTORICAL PREMISES OF THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF POWER

How do we problematize power? Which aspects of it do we take for granted, and which do we question? Duly addressing historically these questions (to the extent that they lend themselves to historical treatment) would require a comprehensive history of both the problem and the concept. And yet it is possible to briefly identify some premises almost universally agreed to, which are particularly consequential for the way in which we perceive power phenomena.

POWER ORDERS ARE HUMANLY PRODUCED

The first and fundamental premise is the belief in the nature of power-based orders as humanly produced realities. These are not divinely ordained, predetermined by myths, imposed by nature, or derived from sacrosanct tradition. Rather, they are the product of human activity. In the same way as they have been brought into being, they can also be refashioned.

This idea that social orders are the products of human agency is one of the incomprehensibly abrupt and radical discoveries of the Greek polis. If anything deserves to be called the “idea of the political,” this does. It renders the overarching political ordering of collective human existence something open to fashioning and modifying. In this manner, the status quo is experienced from the distance suggested by the fact that it can be imagined differently. It is now viewed as a result of human capacity.

The status quo can be imagined differently when contrasting it with the imagination of something better. The idea of the political entails the belief in the possibility of designing a good order, “for the sake of the good life,”1 according to Aristotle. And, should it not be possible “to achieve the best, the good legislator and the true politician must know both what is best absolutely and what is best in the circumstances.”2

In a quest for the best constitution, whether the absolutely best or the best possible one, postulates were formulated that have ever since accompanied the idea of the political, whenever it was given new life in the course of history: the postulates of justice, the rule of law, equality before the law—since “law became the lord and king of men, not men tyrants over the law”3—and the understanding of the polis as the “society of the free”4 or an aggregation of citizens who “see that happiness depends on freedom.”5

The presence in close proximity to one another of the diverse political orders of Greek city states—all experiencing in various ways the precariousness of any constitution, as well as war and civil war, tyranny and revolt—must have inspired the making of comparisons. The awareness that political orders can be designed and their improvements controlled was accompanied by a relativizing skepticism, for “everything that comes into being must decay,”6 Thus the first comprehensive theories of political power systems came into being as comparative theories of constitutional forms like those of Plato and Aristotle, the intensity of which remained unmatched until Montesquieu.

The second great historical phase of the belief in the possibility of the purposive production of power relations begins with the bourgeois revolutions of the modern era. Here too, as previously during the heyday of the culture of the polis, that belief is one aspect of a general assumption that one can produce changes and improvements through methodical action—an aspect of an overriding “consciousness of ability.”7 Characteristically, in the modern era this creative certainty expressed itself in the same domains of action as in antiquity: besides the ordering of political affairs, it was also in the knowledge of nature and metaphysics, navigation, architecture, the art of war, and education. Here, again, the prospecting of political-institutional changes eventuates in democratic constitutional designs.

An example may suffice to characterize the idea of the political that was emerging from new conditions. In the first article of The Federalist Papers, which recommended to the electors of New York the adoption of a draft constitution for an American federal state, Alexander Hamilton writes in the year 1787:

It has been frequently remarkedb that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Not making the right decision would “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”8 Now is the time to make that decision and that for everyone.

As happens also in France at the same time, an acute sense of the moment’s epochal significance for humanity finds expression here, transcending national boundaries. The belief in the power of reason that inspires this pathos is not naive—various risks are considered and debated—but at the end of the day it remains unshaken. Chance and violence can be overcome if we find the right concept. A constitution for free citizens is a matter of design, and that design can be put into being: we can do it.

Today, we may share neither the confidence nor the enthusiasm of the American Founding Fathers. We may disagree about the scope for variation and the degree of urgency of new institutions. None of this affects the certainty that one can do things differently, and can do them better. One of the taken-for-granted premises of our understanding of power is the conviction that power is “made” and can be remade otherwise than is now the case.

UBIQUITY OF POWER

A second premise of our historical understanding of power is the assumption that power is ubiquitous.

The awareness of this, too, emerges with the bourgeois revolutions. One no longer senses, as under absolutism, that all power phenomena converge toward the institutions of the modern state, that power is intrinsically a property of the state itself. On the contrary, power is now perceived as a property of society itself.9 New classes develop power potentials of their own. The educated bourgeoisie focuses on the power of public opinion, claims the power of reason, the power of ideas.10 The property-owning bourgeoisie establishes the “power of mobile property,” the power of money, “the supremacy of the bankers,” the “force of property” (Marx).11 Within the proletariat emerges “the elemental force of the popular masses” as a counterpower (Engels).12 These new powers oppose the old ones: nobility, landowners, the Catholic Church.

The bourgeois configuration of societal powers does not disempower the state. Externally the nation-state enforces new interests in territorial expansion, internally new rights of intervention. But “the” power is no longer concentrated within political institutions. Tensions arising from power conflicts pervade the whole society.

The two vital human relationships, that between man and woman and that between parents and children, are also increasingly understood as power relationships. Behind every tension between the genders and between the generations, one detects a question of power, and wrong answers to that question occasion the breakdown of the relationship. It is presumed as a matter of course that the power at stake here is in principle of the same kind as the political power of making decisions, or the economic power of disposal over material resources.

In a competitive society, power conflicts become a constant experience for the individual. Under conditions whereby the individual’s life course revolves around the opportunity for status gain or the risk of status loss, around success or failure in the competition with others, the individual’s own biography must be perceived as a sequence of voluntary or involuntary power conflicts won or lost. The more society appears open to processes of vertical mobility, the more strongly power experiences become individualized and the more individual experiences are interpreted in terms of power.

When the critique of power reaches the private sphere, a process comes to conclusion that can be called the generalization of the suspicion of power. Every association, every personal bond is now exposed to the suspicion of either maintaining conventional power inequalities or breeding new ones. Power lurks behind everything—all one needs to do is to see it. It does not matter whether this view is advanced as a theoretical claim or is only emotionally supposed in the form of a generalized suspicion of power: power is assumed to be a component of all social processes. It is ubiquitous. A search for a power-free space or for a domination-free discourse appears as merely a subject for academic speculation. There ought to be a power-free space, somewhere—but where? It should be possible for communication to be free of domination—but how?

Let us remember Max Weber’s definition: “Power means any chance, within a social relationship, of giving effect to one’s own will even against opposition, whatever such chance rests on.” Within any relationship, for whatever reason. Weber’s comment underlines the point once more: “All conceivable qualities of a person and all conceivable combinations of circumstances may put him in a position to impose his will in a given situation.”13 The assumption of the ubiquity of power is not expressly articulated here, but the independence of power from context is strongly emphasized. Power is not bound to relations having any particular content, it can associate itself with relations of whatever sort, and it intervenes everywhere. This definition is not, as it may seem, out of touch with the real world. It reflects the historical process that has eventuated in the generalization of the power suspicion.

LIMITATION OF FREEDOM BY POWER

The third premise of the understanding of power is based on the contrast between power and freedom. All exercise of power is a limitation of freedom. On this account, all power needs justification.

Wherever a new, more sensitized consciousness of freedom makes itself felt, power relations are called into question. The times when consciousness of freedom became more acute and intense were also the times of the great theories of power. Once again, the most significant examples are offered by the Greek polis and by the modern, bourgeois revolutions.

In 1802, in “The Constitution of Germany,” the young Hegel remarks: “Given that over the last ten years Europe as a whole has become aware of an awful struggle of a people for freedom, and Europe as a whole has been put in motion, unavoidably concepts regarding freedom have undergone a change and have attained clarity beyond their previous emptiness and indetermination.”14 What did the new content and the new determination consist in? To begin with, they express a will to liberate oneself. The initial impulse behind this new striving for liberty is the emancipation of consciousness. In Germany, Kant has famously formulated this as “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”15 Marx goes one step further: “We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.”16

So this is the first half of the equation: “catharsis” of the concept of freedom from its “previous emptiness and indetermination” means the demand for self-emancipation, a call to come of age. The freedom movements inspired by the Enlightenment are movements toward awakening.

The other half of the equation is that this new process of liberation is decisively characterized as a power struggle intended to subvert the existing power relations....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Concept of Power
• Part I: Forms of Enforcement
• Part II: Forms of Stabilization
• Notes
• Index
• Series List