Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell (1st imp. London 1938, Allen & Unwin, 328 pp.) is a work in social philosophy written by Bertrand Russell. Power, for Russell, is one's ability to achieve goals. In particular, Russell has in mind social power, that is, power over people.: "Nevertheless, he recognizes that it is sensible to speak of power over things as well as over people. For example, modern industrial technology improves a person's ability to deal with a wide variety of materials."
The volume contains a number of arguments. However, four themes have a central role in the overall work. The first theme given treatment in the analysis is that the lust for power is a part of human nature. Second, the work emphasises that there are different forms of social power, and that these forms are substantially interrelated. Third, Power insists that "organisations are usually connected with certain kinds of individuals". Finally, the work ends by arguing that "arbitrary rulership can and should be subdued".
Throughout the work, Russell's ambition is to develop a new method of conceiving the social sciences as a whole. For him, all topics in the social sciences are merely examinations of the different forms of power – chiefly the economic, military, cultural, and civil forms .This four-part formulation of social power bears some similarity to the AGIL Paradigm of sociologist Talcott Parsons. Eventually, he hoped that social science would be robust enough to capture the "laws of social dynamics", which would describe how and when one form of power changes into another. As a secondary goal of the work, Russell is at pains to reject single-cause accounts of social power, such as the economic determinism he attributes to Karl Marx. However, this attribution is highly controversial among Marx scholars. See, for example: .
The Content The new social analysis examines at least four general topics: the nature of power, the forms of power, the structure of organisations, and the ethics of power.
Nature of power Russell's view of human nature, like that of Thomas Hobbes, is somewhat pessimistic. By Russell's account, the desire to empower oneself is unique to human nature. No other animals besides Homo sapiens, he argues, are capable of being so unsatisfied with their lot, that they should try to accumulate more goods than meet their needs. The "impulse to power", as he calls it, does not arise unless one's basic desires have been sated. Then the imagination stirs, motivating the actor to gain more power. In Russell's view, the love of power is nearly universal among people, although it takes on different guises from person to person. A person with great ambitions may become the next Caesar, but others may be content to merely dominate the home.
This impulse to power is not only "explicitly" present in leaders, but also sometimes "implicitly" in those who follow. It is clear that leaders may pursue and profit from enacting their own agenda, but in a "genuinely cooperative enterprise", the followers seem to gain vicariously from the achievements of the leader.
In stressing this point, Russell is explicitly rebutting Friedrich Nietzsche's infamous "master-slave morality" argument. Russell explains:
"Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy... Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. '".
The existence of implicit power, he explains, is why people are capable of tolerating social inequality for an extended period of time.
However, Russell is quick to note that the invocation of human nature should not come at the cost of ignoring the exceptional personal temperaments of power-seekers. Following Adler (1927) – and to an extent echoing Nietzsche – he separates individuals into two classes: those who are imperious in a particular situation, and those who are not. The love of power, Russell tells us, is probably not motivated by Freudian complexes, (i.e., resentment of one's father, lust for one's mother, drives towards Eros and Thanatos (Love and Death drives, which constitute the basis of all human drives, etc.,) but rather by a sense of entitlement which arises from exceptional and deep-rooted self-confidence.
The imperious person is successful due to both mental and social factors. For instance, the imperious tend to have an internal confidence in their own competence and decisiveness which is relatively lacking in those who follow. In reality, the imperious may or may not actually be possessed of genuine skill; rather, the source of their power may also arise out of their hereditary or religious role.
"I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims." Bertrand Russell (1938:11)
Non-imperious persons include those who submit to a ruler, and those who withdraw entirely from the situation. A confident and competent candidate for leadership may withdraw from a situation when they lack the courage to challenge a particular authority, are timid by temperament, simply do not have the means to acquire power by the usual methods, are entirely indifferent to matters of power, and/or are moderated by a well-developed sense of duty.
Accordingly, while the imperious orator will tend to prefer a passionate crowd over a sympathetic one, the timid orator (or subject) will have the opposite preferences. The imperious orator is interested mostly in a mob that is more given to rash emotion than to reflection. The orator will try to engineer two 'layers' of belief in his crowd: "a superficial layer, in which the power of the enemy is magnified so as to make great courage seem necessary, and a deeper layer, in which there is a firm conviction of victory". By contrast, the timid will seek a sense of belonging, and "the reassurance which is felt in being one of a crowd who all feel alike".
When any given person has a crisis in confidence, and is placed in a terrifying situation, they will tend to behave in a predictable way: first, they submit to the rule of those who seem to have greater competence in the most relevant task, and second, they will surround themselves with that mass of persons who share a similarly low level of confidence. Thus, people submit to the rule of the leader in a kind of emergency solidarity. The phrase "emergency solidarity" will not be found in Russell's work. It has been placed here for the sake of giving a name to a discrete concept.Despite the fact that emergency solidarity is one basis for organizational cohesion, Russell stresses that it is not its sole basis. For instance, he argues that economic organizations and the internal bureaucracies of governments both flourish in spite of external danger and not because of it.
Forms of power To begin with, Russell is interested in classifying the different ways in which one human being may have power over another – what he calls the "forms of power". The forms may be subdivided into two: influence over persons, and the psychological types of influence. The latter category is one to which Russell never gives a name, and merely refers to as "a very necessary distinction" or "the distinction" .
To understand how organisations operate, Russell explains, we must first understand the basic methods by which they can exercise power at all – that is, we must understand the manner in which individuals are persuaded to follow some authority. Russell breaks the forms of influence down into three very general categories: "the power of force and coercion"; the "power of inducements", such as operant conditioning and group conformity; and "the power of propaganda and/or habit" .A more commonly recognized work in the social sciences is French and Raven (1959)'s study into the "bases of power".
To explain each form, Russell provides illustrations. The power of mere force is like the tying of a rope around a pig's belly and lifting it up to a ship while ignoring its cries. The power of inducements is likened to two things: either conditioning, as exemplified by circus animals which have been trained to perform this-or-that trick for an audience, or group acquiescence, as when the leader among sheep is dragged along by chains to get the rest of the flock to follow. Finally, the power of propaganda is akin to the use of carrot and stick to influence the behaviour of a donkey, in the sense that the donkey is being persuaded that making certain actions (following the carrot, avoiding the stick) would be more or less to their benefit.
Russell makes a distinction between traditional, revolutionary, and naked forms of psychological influence. These psychological types overlap with the forms of influence in some respects: for instance, "naked power" can be reduced to coercion alone. But the other types are distinct units of analysis, and require separate treatments.
Naked and economic power
When force is used in the absence of other forms, it is called "naked power". In other words, naked power is the ruthless exertion of force without the desire for, or attempt at, consent. In all cases, the sources of naked power are the fears of the powerless and the ambitions of the powerful. As an example of naked power, Russell recalls the story of Agathocles, the son of a potter who became the tyrant of Syracuse.
Russell argues that naked power arises within a government under certain social conditions: when two or more fanatical creeds are contending for governance, and when all traditional beliefs have decayed. A period of naked power may end by foreign conquest, the creation of stability, and/or the rise of a new religion.
The process by which an organisation achieves sufficient prominence that it is able to exercise naked power can be described as the rule of three phases. According to this rule, what begins as fanaticism on the part of some crowd eventually produces conquest by means of naked power. Eventually, the acquiescence of the outlying population transforms naked power into traditional power. Finally, once a traditional power has taken hold, it engages in the suppression of dissent by the use of naked power.
For Russell, economic power is parallel to the power of conditioning. However, unlike Marx, he emphasises that economic power is not primary, but rather, derives from a combination of the forms of power. By his account, economics is dependent largely upon the functioning of law, and especially, property law; and law is to a large degree a function of the power over opinion, which cannot be entirely explained by wage, labour, and trade.
Ultimately, Russell argues that economic power is attained through the ability to defend one's territory (and to conquer other lands), to possess the materials for the cultivation of one's resources, and to be able to satisfy the demands of others on the market.
The power of (and over) opinion