Some reflections on the power to/power over debate

Abstract

Among the most prominent and interesting issues discussed by students of power is the conceptual divide between power to and power over. The discussion of this topic has been revived in an exchange between Pamela Pansardi and Peter Morriss hosted in the pages of the Journal of Political Power. Pansardi defended a strong position which involved denying the usefulness – if not the logical possibility – of distinguishing between power to and power over. In his reply, Morriss defended the distinction by pointing out a pertinence argument in support of his own favoured way of distinguishing between the two concepts. Unfortunately, the exchange between the two authors was inconclusive. In this paper, I discuss the merits and limits of the two proposals and I put forward an intermediate position which, I hope, adds some clarity to the debate over the two conceptions of power.

Keywords:

• Power to
• power over
• social exchange
• domination
• interdependence
• autonomy

Notes

1. In saying so, I’m referring principally to Morriss’ treatment of the concept of power to contained in his previous work on power (Morriss 2002). In his reply to Pansardi, Morriss reaffirms his position and adds some useful but minor adjustments. His main argument against Pansardi I shall discuss below.

2. But, as we will see later, Morriss’ concept is broader, including also all the instances of power over.

3. And this attitude obviously must be known by B, on the basis of previous actions by A, whether towards B himself or towards other agents. In short, to have a true power relation, B must be able to make a realistic anticipation of A’s future behavior. ‘We would not say that the residents of a street had power over a man with paranoid delusions who refused to leave his house because he feared attack by his neighbours’. Wrong (1988, 9).

4. I owe the drive towards clarifying this point to a discussion with Ian Carter. Although this discussion did not eliminate our disagreement, I hope it has been nonetheless useful to visualize and perhaps circumscribe its area. I am ready to concede to him that his concept of freedom (Carter 1999), as the sum of all of the actions (positive and negative) that are compossible for an agent, will include as a subset those actions that an agent has the power to perform in Morriss’ sense. But I’m not willing to concede to him that this subset is in fact coextensive with the entire set of freedoms.

5. Perhaps the best way of expressing this identity relation is by borrowing G.A. Cohen’s use of the verbal form to match (Cohen 1978, 236–240).

6. By relation I mean a state of affairs by which an individual (or group) stands or acts with respect to another individual (or group), as expressed in propositions such as ‘Smith is taller than Jones’ or ‘Smith has power over Jones’; by relationship I mean the complex of relations involved in two (or more) particular people engaged in repeated interactions, being colleagues or friends or members of a more or less durable group or community.

7. I must here concede that what is true under Dowding’s definition would not be true under Lukes’ older definition of power (over) (Lukes 1974). Indeed, the latter, not the former, seems to me a very narrow definition of social power, circumscribing the semantic boundaries of the concept to a relationship where A’s action determines an action by B against B’s interests. In effect, in the revised edition of this book (Lukes 2005), the author has substantially amended and enlarged his definition of the concept (see Ch. 3).

8. One might suspect that the notion of an ‘exchange of powers’ contains an oxymoron. But it is noteworthy that, in order to trace a conceptual distinction between exchange and power as two nouns referring to different types of social facts, one has to qualify exchange (for ex. by introducing the requisite of voluntariness: see Blau 1964; see also, for an instance of the opposite purpose of enlarging the concept so as to embrace all forms of social behavior, the notion of ‘autistic exchange’ advanced by Ludwig von Mises in order to accommodate his concept to the practice of making unilateral gifts: von Mises 1949). In my view, social ‘power’ (like ‘love’) describes a relation, whereas ‘exchange’ is the substantivate form of a verb describing a specific property of a relation implying a co-activity. Upon the idea of a horizontal exchange of power(s) Bruno Leoni grounded his conception of the ‘political’, designating the political aspect of a relation, as distinct from both its economic (exchange of goods and services) and its legal aspects (exchange of claims) (Leoni 1961).

9. See also Pansardi 2013.

10. Some conceptions of power (over) explicitly state this fact. See e.g. that of Carl Friedrich: power arises from ‘several [human beings] possessing and, therefore, being able to provide something which others would like to have’ (Friedrich 1963, 163). Statements like this may appear a rose-tinted version of reality, but highlight an aspect that inheres in all forms of power, and relates to the fact – too often dismissed or forgotten – that the decision about complying or not with a given command falls into B’s hands, and entails an act of willingness (B could deny compliance on condition of suffering the consequences). Of course, a voluntary act doesn’t amount to a deliberate act, and still less to a free act (recall the Latin formula coactus volui sed volui). The importance of B’s compliant behavior for an act of power to succeed was brilliantly expounded by the French political philosopher B. de Jouvenel: ‘the man who speaks to others and carries them to the actions he desires: there is the man who makes history. Yes, but there is one who decides whether our ‘hero’ shall indeed make history: it is the man spoken to’ (De Jouvenel 1963, 83).

11. In making this point I gratefully aknowledge my debt to Mario Stoppino, whose long-life reflections on the power phenomena greatly influenced my thinking. See especially the chapter Potere, scambio, dominio (‘Power, Exchange and Domination’) in his book Potere e teoria politica (Stoppino 2001).