There are a couple of themes that thread through this issue of the Journal of Political Power. One is the justification of power, which is the core theme of Rainer Forst’s reply to his critics. The other is the sources of power. Where does power come from? This is discussed in Risto Heiskala’s majestic work of theory building. I will use these threads to weave together these papers.
The first article is Forst’s reply to his critics and interlocutors (Albena Azmanova, Pablo Gilabert, Mark Haugaard, Clarissa Rile Hayward, Matthias Kettner, Steven Lukes, and Simon Susen). This discussion began as a special issue, 11(1), and in issue 11(2) there was a further article (Kettner), while this issue 11(3) contains Forst’s reply.
Core to Forst’s model of noumenal power is the significance of justification. He argues that power hinges around justification, which takes the form of reason-giving. These justifications are cognitive events (thus noumenal happenings) that cause the reaction of the responding social actor, as an exercise of power. From a sociological perspective, these forms of justification can be rational relative to instrumental or normative criteria, as well as normatively undesirable, manipulative, emotive and irrational in any number of respects. In essence a full spectrum of justification stretches from rational-cum-considered, on the one hand, to irrational and emotional, on the other.
Heiskala opens with a discussion and defence of grand theory. He expands Mann’s four sources of power to an NACEVP model, which stands for Natural, Artefactual, Cultural, Economic, Violence-related, and Political sources of power. Heiskala demonstrates the workings of this model by operationalizing it relative to three case studies, as follows: an environmental problem, gender construction, and the rise of populism. This richly textured analysis demonstrates the extent to which phenomena that may appear causally singular always have multi-dimensional aspects, whereby outcomes are over-determined by a complex interweaving of the six sources of power.
In his article, Per Jansson conceptualizes the idea of smart power. This constitutes a much used, yet elusive, concept, to which centrist foreign policy experts pay lip service but have difficulty articulating as a policy method. Traditionally, smart power is conceptualized as a balance of soft and hard power. However, without further elaboration this constitutes Pollyanna-speak. Jansson demonstrates that soft power entails sensitivity to the multiplicity of the sources of power. So, all six sources of power, as elaborated by Heiskala, interplay but not necessarily in balance. In any situation, the correct use of the sources of power entails the capacity to know when to let one come to the fore, with the other sources ready to be mobilized as appropriate. This requires the use of the faculty of reason and an ability to mobilize emotion, feeling, and the full cornucopia of faculties. This combination constitutes prudence, which is an overarching faculty akin to the abilities of the conductor to draw an orchestra together in harmony.
In understanding governance it is important to be aware of the complexity of justification and sources that mobilizes social actors. As argued by Elizabeth Frazer, a phenomenon as apparently irrational as magic can be an effective source of authority. For Hobbes, and the followers of Enlightenment, the project of a replacing theocratic justification with a secular politics presupposed justification through scientific reason. In contrast, Shakespeare’s dramas articulate scepticism about these, supposedly, rational justifications of sovereignty. Magic and supernatural forces are sources of power that are mobilized by effective charismatic leaders to augment their power; equally these forces cause their tragic downfall. As observed by Weber, charismatic domination concerns the attribution of extraordinary, often supernatural and semi-divine, powers to a leader. As a source of power, this is a cultural ideational resource rooted in the beliefs of social actors. Belief is unstable, leading to successive empowerment and collapse, as the aura of magic waxes and wanes.
In their analysis of organisations, Miguel Pina e Cunha et al start from the observation that there is a tendency to view organisations either as macro cultural logics or as inhabited socio-cultural sites. This form of dualism divides people into cognitive cultural dupes who follow institutional logic, thus are instrumentally rational, or persons with an emotional component (driven by heart), which is often interpreted as a free-floating external variable. For Pina e Cunha et al emotion is linked to the lived biographical experiences of actors, which shapes how they reproduce institutional structures. This process is explored through the case study of Colombia’s presidential transition period from Uribe to Santos in the decade of the 2010s. They demonstrate that personality was key to the complex interweaving and framing of institutional structuration with emotional content.
Katrina Gaber demonstrates how official narratives, justifying the social construction of the nation, are often at variance with the lived reality of the nation because it is persons, with their own identities and emotional loyalties, who structure the imagined community of a nation. The temple of Khao Phra Wihan, while officially belonging to Thailand, has a long history as disputed territory between Thailand and Cambodia. The border that officially divides these two nations cuts through an area characterized by a complex tapestry of cultures, ethnicities, religions and traditions, which have little resonance with the imagined communities of Thailand and Cambodia. Along the section of the border near Khao Phra Wihan the official nationalist Them and Us discourse is constantly imposed from above upon persons who have more loyalty to one another, across the border, than they do to their state-imposed dividing imagined national differences.
The building of the nation presupposes the creation of a social subject. As argued by Mona Lilja, in Foucault’s work the project of self-making and resistance are interlaced. As we are ordering interpretative beings, part of this entails the social construction of time. For instance, the process of modernization was one where the advancement of the cultural sources of power entailed the compression of time, making the human subject efficient relative to the demands of industrial production. Time became a cultural resource intertwined with economic resources. As a political resource this use of time becomes a point of resistance, with phenomena such as work to rule. The social construction of the social subject as predisposed to efficient use of time can be theorized as the systemically rational use of time. In contrast, slow time, which modernists construe as the misuse use of time, constitutes resistance that stems from the emotional idiosyncrasies of the persona welling up against the system. Again, emotion is seen as the irrational element thwarting the rationally planned ordering of the sources of power.