Power, emotion, cognitive bias and legitimacy: an editorial

When the power debates started with the work of Robert Dahl (1957), power was measured relative to its overt manifestation, which is the exercise of power. In the work of Lukes (1974), the analysis of power was significantly deepened to take account of the epistemic effects, and with the work of Foucault (1979) these effects also included the social ontological predispositions of social subjects, who are shaped through processes of managed socialisation, including discipline (Haugaard 2012). In their emphasis upon critique, both Lukes and Foucault focused upon domination, neglecting power-to, or power as agency. They also tended to view both epistemic and ontological aspects through a rationalist lens of elites realising their interests. Even if 3-D power made people lose sight of their real interests, or 4-D made social subjects machine-like, there was a certain logical elite-centred reason-bound sense to it. In contrast, in contemporary theory, domination is frequently tied to empowerment, so the binary opposition of domination versus empowerment (or emancipation), is no longer self-evident. Furthermore, social-ontological epistemic bias and socio-ontological transformations are no longer assumed to have a rational logic, even relative to the interests of elites. Rather they entail emotion, irrationality and cognitive selection based upon the arbitrary preferences of subjective tastes, shaped by the cacophony of Internet virtual reality.

This issue opens with an essay by Manuel Cruz Ortiz de Landázuri, which explores the transition from bio-politics, as theorized by Foucault, and psycho-politics, as theorized by Byung-Chul Han and Zygmunt Bauman among others. Bio-politics was suited to characterising a world of hard bureaucratic modernity, while psycho-politics conceptualizes societies of liquid modernity. Psycho-politics is based upon emotional associations, as exemplified by likes on the Internet. Interests are obscured through an illusion of transparency, where interpretation becomes uncontested self-evident facts, therefore immune to critique. Agency no longer has any clear structural or teleological objective. Rather, agency becomes realised though a world of associations, which do not cohere, resulting in a sense of meaninglessness, akin to anomie.

In the world of hard modernity, emotion was deemed irrational and to be supressed, while in the late, liquid, modern world, organisations take emotions as given. As explored by Maria L Araújo and Ace V Simpson, this raises the complex issue of how to manage compassion, as considered integral to organisational management. They use a typology based upon Habermas’ distinction between the life-world and the system rationality. While Habermas saw these spheres as separate cognitive-cum-emotional worlds, Araújo and Simpson view them as scalar and overlapping. This allows for hybrids, such as strategic compassion and institutional compassion. Theoretically, this fusion means that Habermas’ critique of the colonisation of the life-world is no longer an issue of negative normative concern. The coming together of the two ways of thinking can be conceptualized in ways that are normatively desirable (as fusion, not colonisation). This fusion allows for a less utopian, non-binary way of thinking, more characteristic of contemporary, late, modernity.

Anger and rage are typically seen as paradigmatic of irrational emotions that are best supressed. However, as argued by Warren D. TenHouten, anger is not an obstacle, or extraneous, to the agency of social actors. Rather, anger is the primary emotion for overcoming obstacles and blockages necessary to repairing, defending, preserving, and asserting power in the social world. While it constitutes an emotion, anger has cognitive aspects that are fundamental to triggering agency. Like compassion, anger is not external to power relations, rather constitutive of them.

Emotions are often associated with dissonance. As argued by Alexandre Bohas, emotion is often tied to cognitive associations that are embedded in early socialisation, which are outmoded relative to current late modern global social life. The big brand companies, such as Volkswagen and Audi, are global organisations. Yet, they use the imagery and associations from a world of nation-states to market their product. The use of ‘Das Auto’ and ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ in advertising are markers of German identity, which conjures up associations of reliability and quality. In a world of globalized liquid modernity social actors are looking for meaning and ontological security in symbols of a past, solid, state-centered, modernity. This disjuncture of emotional security rooted in a past world-order, within the context of a global present order, is suggestive of profound social anomie.

In contemporary society we live in a social world that esteems meaning through transparency. Statistics are a way of making society transparent, and thereby policy appears to speak for itself. Transparency conjures up images of a de-politicized social order. However, as argued by Arkan Akin and Elisa Banfi, statistical indicators are not actually transparent facts-in-themselves. Arkan and Banfi critically examine one such system of transparent measurement: the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics’ Indicators of Integration. This is a tool used to measure social integration of immigrants. What is chosen as a variable, the process of social integration, presupposes the perception of a problem, which constitutes a political and normative choice. The implicit normative agenda is a right-wing evaluative concern with the ‘over-foreignization’ of Switzerland. Even if the statistics make transparent high levels of integration, the perception of integration as an issue, presupposes an evaluative agenda, which is not self-evident, although it appears transparently scientific.

The rise of a transparent society is linked to a legitimacy crisis for democracy. Populations perceive of politicians as technocrats maintaining the status quo, thus as out of touch with the ideals of ordinary people. As argued by Luke Zaphir, in the context of politicians perceived as distant elites, the idea of direct democracy, as opposed to representative parliamentary democracy, appears attractive. However, as the Brexit referendum has demonstrated, referenda have their own dangers. In a world of memes and likes, popular decision-making can easily become mere subjective preferences that are divorced from the complexity of the consequences of decisions. Based upon Burnheim (2006), Zapir argues for a modified version of direct democracy, called demarchy, which is a form of deliberative democracy based upon random selection. Essentially, small groups of ordinary citizens are selected to work together and inform themselves on specific issues. In Zapir’s theory, citizen’s assembly constitute an adjunct (not substitute for) to the parliamentary process and/or referenda. They constitute a conduit for the voices of ordinary people. However, this representative sample are informed and educated in the complexity of the issues at hand, so they make informed decisions. In this regard the Brexit referendum is compared to the Irish Repeal the Eighth (abortion) referendum. The latter referendum was informed by such a citizen’s consultative forum, while the former was not. Consequently, the outcome of the Irish referendum was a coherent implementable outcome, while the meaning of the Brexit referendum result was too incoherent to be directly applicable to policy.

This issue of the Journal concludes with an article by Ivan Bakalov on the subject of soft power. He argues that soft-power literature is divided between concept-driven and case-centred studies. Bakalov provides a bridge between the two. One of the issues that confounds soft-power analysts is the desire for quantification, whereby the sources of soft power can be listed in much the same way as the resources of hard power. However, if soft power arises from ‘such resources as cultural and ideological attraction…’ (Nye 1990, p. 168) this has all the intangible qualities of subjective disposition, informed by emotion and contingent cognitive framing, all linked to perceptions of legitimacy. Emotion and subjective preferences do not lend themselves to specific quantification or named lists of resources.

I would argue that, in a sense, the concept of soft power is the ugly duckling of IR theory, within the context of a liquid, late, modern international order. Soft power is suspect (an ugly duckling) to those schooled in the implicit modernist positivism of Realism because it points towards subjective and (so-called) irrational elements that the Realist model does not provide conceptual space for. Yet, because it highlights what is traditionally left out of IR theory (emotion and cognitive bias), it has explanatory power. Thus, from the perspective of a liquid late modern international (dis)order, soft power constitutes a swan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.