A response to Pamela Pansardi

Abstract

In her article in this journal, Pamela Pansardi makes a number of important and original points about the relation between power to and power over. I here try to draw a somewhat different lesson from these points. I argue that her stress on our interdependence is making an important substantive, not conceptual, point; as a result, the concept of power as an ability concept is unaffected. I also suggest that our understanding of power over needs to be formulated more narrowly, and that we need a richer conceptual vocabulary to describe power in human interactions. Finally, Pansardi usefully draws attention to the difference between the terms power and ability, but does not succeed in demonstrating the redundancy of my distinction between ability and ableness.

Keywords:

• power to
• power over
• Pansardi
• ability
• ableness

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the University of Pavia for organising the Workshop on Power and Freedom at which Pamela Pansardi presented an earlier version of her article here; and to the organisers of the workshop for their excellent hospitality during my visit to the workshop. Part of this article was written whilst a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University.

Notes

1. Pansardi follows Rawls in describing these as two conceptions of the concept of power. I do not find that distinction helpful, but nothing here hinges on it (which does somewhat support my view that it does not help).

2. For instance, Dowding (1991).

3. This point was anticipated by Adrian Mitchell (1975), in his novel Man Friday, based on an earlier play of the same name. After returning home, ‘Friday’ tells his version of the story of his adventures to his fellow islanders. He has heard much about England from Crusoe; one of the most incredible of Crusoe’s stories is that even though England is a much colder place, people can only live indoors if they can afford to pay someone to do so.“Are they so foolish that they can’t build huts of their own?” asked the [tribe’s] doctor.“I asked the same question. Master [Crusoe] said they could not build huts of their own because they did not own the land to build them on. The land belonged to the lords of the land. So the England tribe must pay … for a place to live.” (p. 101)The tribe (who do not recognise private property in land) find that truly ridiculous.

4. It is a point that does need to be made, though; for instance, against followers of Robert Nozick, who systematically overlook it. It also needs to be made against less intelligent ignoramuses, such as one of the property developers whose greed has brought my country (Ireland) to ruin, who argued recently that the state could not seize his palatial house, in part payment of the huge debts he owes, since he had built it himself; I wish Pansardi had been there to put him right.

5. Dowding, p. 48.

6. She also discusses, and dismisses, the view that power over can be defined as necessarily carrying a negative meaning; I agree with her criticisms of this approach.

7. The behaviour of those who like haggling with car sellers, and are good at it, might indeed be somewhat like that of the highway robber, if they do alter, to some extent, the seller’s incentive structure; but I think we can assume that professional car sellers, at least, have a price which they will not sell below, and do not sell below that price—even if that price is considerably less than their initial asking price.

8. This statement needs to be tightened up if we are considering your power to make a series of purchases: you might, for instance, have the (purchasing) power to buy one of many cars sitting on the forecourt, but not the whole lot. I discuss these intricacies in my Power chapter 12. It is more difficult to formulate such an aggregation of powers using a concept of power over, precisely because your powers over B and over C might not be capable of being combined: you might have the power to buy B’s car or C’s car, but not both together. What then is your power over B?

9. Of course, such a spatial metaphor might be a peculiarity of English and not present in other languages. If so, then power terms in those other languages might have slightly different meanings from English; there is no need to believe that all languages are fully intertranslatable. It is English that we are concerned with here. However, research on other European languages has suggested that in them there are strong connections between power and vertical spatial metaphors and images. See Schubert (2005) (on German) and Luodonpää-Manni and Viimaranta (2010) (French and Russian).

10. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, chap. 4).

11. Power; see index entries for ‘ability; ableness contrasted with’.

12. Power p. 83.

13. For a – now very outdated – survey, see Power (chaps 22 and 23). This distinction is known in the voting literature as the difference between a priori and a posteriori power: see Felsenthal and Machover (1998, p. 2, pp. 19–21) for an introduction.