On structural power

Abstract

This article engages Rainer Forst’s account of structural power, as elaborated in Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification. Its central claim is that structural power works, not only through what Forst calls ‘justificatory narratives’, but also through institutionalized and objectified social norms. When norms are institutionalized, they define incentive structures, which people internalize as motivational systems. When they are objectified, they produce intersubjectively shared, practical know-how, which people learn corporeally. Forst’s commitment to a cognitivist account of power limits his capacity to explain structural power, since social structures work, not just through, but also around human cognition.

Keywords:

• Domination
• structure
• narrative
• institutionalization
• objectification

Notes

1. Pettit has moved away from this view in more recent work, acknowledging that inter-agentive domination ‘is often possible only because of the practices and institutions of the wider society and world: the culture, economy, or constitution under which a people live’ (Pettit 2014, p. 53).

2. The quote is from a commentary published in the Chicago Tribune. See Grossman (1989, p. 169). The discussion in this section of the early twentieth century racial narrative of American peoplehood draws on Hayward (2013, ch. 2).

3. It was during this era that scientists converged on a new understanding of what, in the nineteenth century, had been held to be unchanging, and categorical, racial differences: differences that could be read off phenotypical variations among people. By the new view, differences in skin color, hair texture, and the like were the product of slow genetic shifts, which themselves were produced by evolutionary processes that unfolded in geographically (and hence reproductively) isolated subpopulations. See Banton (1998).

4. The first racial zoning ordinance was passed in Baltimore in 1910. Soon after, the state of Virginia passed an act enabling cities to zone comprehensively according to race, and a host of Virginia cities and towns, including Norfolk, Richmond and Roanoke passed racial zoning laws. So did Birmingham, Dallas, Louisville, St. Louis and other American cities, especially in the South. Seven years after the first racial zoning law was passed, the US Supreme Court ruled that racial zoning violates the Fourteen Amendment. See Buchanan v. Warley (1917).

5. Lukes ([1974] 2005, pp. 41, 42) characterizes the common assumption that power’s exercise is necessarily intentional as an ‘unfortunate’ assumption that is ‘built into our language’ and writes: ‘I propose to abandon [this assumption] and to speak of the exercise of power … whether [conscious] or not’.

6. In developing the notion of ‘schemas’, Haslanger draws on Sewell (1992).

7. Haslanger underscores that, in a given social context, there is never a single social reality. Instead there are multiple social ‘worlds’, or ‘milieus’, which are constituted by and constitutive of corresponding schemas. Hence, even if there is a dominant social reality, which is internalized at least partly by most of the people whose social relations it governs, there are also different milieus and hence different norms, conventions and standards, which define schemas that depart from and perhaps compete those that are dominant.