On Power

This will be the first in a series of blogs going into a little more detail to outline our Themes. Each Theme is intended to be a kind of mega-series, allowing for quite broad interpretation of a single core idea across a range of disciplines. To kick us off, let me try and explain what I was thinking when I selected Power to be one of our initial Themes.

I suspect there are two types of people who are particularly fascinated by power – those who desire to wield it, and those who would seek to avoid being subject to it as much as possible. Then again, perhaps most of us are one or both of those to some degree. For that matter, they may simply be two sides of the same coin. Certainly I find questions about power and agency fascinating. How, for example, is it possible to not only operate the machinery of government, but to create it, or to cause it to change course? How does the exercise of power evolve from the application of direct coercive force into useful fictions like legitimacy and justice?

 For our purposes I’m talking about the kind of power defined as “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” (Oxford languages, via Google). The contexts for this that tend to come to my mind first are political history and geopolitics. Much of political history is, after all, bound up with questions of who had the power to do what, how they came by that power and how they were able to exercise it. Similarly, much of geopolitics boils down to questions of which Powers, by coercion, persuasion or both, are able to compel which other Powers to conform to their desires – and which Powers are able to pushback against such efforts. These are questions of agency and possibility, but also questions of the mechanics of politics and policy. It can be tempting to imagine kings and emperors who are able to rule their dominions purely by decree, but even in the most totalitarian of regimes this has never been possible. The exercise of power has always required the agency of lieutenants, minions, chamberlains, chancellors, sheriffs and any number of other plenipotentiaries. Conversely, democratic constitutions can be drawn up and set into law, and appear to constrain the power of leaders, but in the end these constraints are dependent on the will of the relevant officeholders to enforce them, and on the availability of means with which to do so. If some of this sounds like I’m alluding to contemporary political events, that’s certainly no accident, but the issues run much deeper than today’s current affairs. Rather – contemporary events are reminding us that rules, institutions, conventions and so on are not intrinsically powerful or immutable in and of themselves.

So much for the more straight-forward interpretation of this theme (and I absolutely welcome book ideas that interrogate the sorts of ideas I’ve touched on here so far), but what I also want to illustrate is the potential breadth available to us under this theme. There are all sorts of potential angles of approach, such as policy implementation, leadership, persuasion, attraction, advertising, ideology, management, or story-telling just to list a few. It is very much an intentional feature of all of our Themes that they invite this latitude for interpretation. I’d love to see books looking at the relationship between power and the development of civilization; analysing the extent to which individuals have been able to genuinely exercise power (rather than just turning the cogs in a machine that would have operated just the same with someone else in charge); and whether it is possible to organise resistance to power without creating rival power structures. More than this, I’d love to be surprised by things I’d never thought of, but which will be fascinating new ways of understanding this Theme.