Three Faces of Power

Rating:
Summary: A liberal genius trip
Review: Kenneth E. Boulding did not just write this book. He also used it as a text for an evening course which contained a large number of adult students ("More than half the students had fulltime jobs in a great variety of fields" p. 258), and he asked each student to review the book. Fall of 1989 was such a modern time, most of them were subject to "the very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light. The internal search for the way in which the various forms of power have been exercised by a person and upon a person may have effects resembling a mild psychoanalysis." (p. 259). Though this book does not suggest that anyone should try to write a review before reading the book, a comment, "we miss a great opportunity in our teaching by not encouraging students to read--and write--reviews, which sometimes save us the time it would take to read the book." (p. 260). I have often spent more time reading a book than writing a review, but the larger share of my time has been devoted to ranting and raving about power issues on which I have firmly made up my mind, and my surprise that others are not in the same boat, on the same trip.

Threats are considered in a Chapter on "Organizations for Destruction," justified mainly as "a counterthreat strategy--`You do something nasty to me and I will do something nasty to you.' The legitimacy of national military organizations in recent decades has come to rest much more on the claim that they ensure the defense of existing structures than on claims of conquest and empire." (p. 145). Written long before a plane crashed into the pentagon on September 11, 2001, this approach did not rule out that police tactics would be nasty about any organization's assets if some money from those organizations had ever been used to support certain aliens in the United States in violation of some identity or immigration limitations. For those who suddenly find themselves involved, this might be described as a whole new ball game, hardly like "Saint Paul, after all, although a Jew, was a Roman citizen and free to travel all over the Roman empire. No doubt he paid taxes to it. This partial submission to the Roman threat system is one reason why the Christian church survived and grew." (p. 144).

The irony in this book is mainly between the lines. I expect that organizations which continue to conform to their expectations have a tremendous advantage over the surprise produced by the bankruptcy of Enron, which produced the shocked reaction that anyone who pretended to be so rich and powerful could safely be stripped and left for dead as soon as it started to shred any documents that were likely to show that someone had been fooling people. THE THREE FACES OF POWER is not called *The Three Faces of Richard M. Nixon* and does not (he was still living when the book was written) even mention him three times, though the one time in Chapter 7, Personal Integrative Power, in a section on "Social Change Dominated by the Dynamics of Legitimacy" might be enough for the vultures who view disgrace primarily for its entertainment value to be satisfied. Lo and behold, "He transgressed the expectations of presidential behavior in the Watergate case and had to resign. . . . A scandal may result in the loss of integrative power on the part of the perpetrator, but what constitutes the scandal depends very much on the history, the norms, and the legitimacy structure of a society. I myself have lived through the virtual collapse of the legitimacy of political empire; the strong but not complete collapse of racism and sexism; a noticeable erosion of the legitimacy of centrally planned economies, although by no means their collapse; and some subtle erosion in the legitimacy of the military." (pp. 113-114).

The tricky thing is how fast these rules changed after September 11, 2001, with a quick stop in Afghanistan and a presidential "State of the Union" speech about a government which employed professional torturers and rapists before the perpetual sexism of Middle Eastern society was confronted in Iraq, where the fear of an increase in the number of rapes is keeping women in their homes far more than was expected before the American liberation of Iraqi society from government domination. We are rapidly approaching "Every human being is different, every network is different, and it is not easy to formulate a simple model that applies to all cases." (p. 114).

The goal with which this book was started in 1989, of providing a framework for thinking about things which have moved philosophers, but which philosophers have largely failed to control whenever they have tried, Plato to Heidegger being a trip similar to many others, is most unsettling in our future (2003 being my own personal hang-up at the moment) when even the items of common sense which it contains have been disregarded by anyone exercising authority for a short period of time, as anyone in a democracy may, if they are willing to take orders themselves. I might not know enough to read this book. A comparison of similar nations, Australia and Argentina, ends with Argentina in an economically disadvantaged position due to "the tradition of revolutionary violence and militarization in Argentina, which Australia somehow escaped, at least internally. There was, of course, the catastrophe of Gallipoli, a human sacrifice almost parallel to that of the Aztecs, but a long way off." (p. 151). I'm guessing "a long way off" means just on the other side of Turkey from Iraq. Perhaps I have lived longer than a lot of soldiers who died there, but that can't keep the president from saying, "Bring 'em on."