Individually lucky, collectively powerful: a response to friends

ABSTRACT

This paper responds to commentators on the reissue of Keith Dowding, Rational Choice and Political Power. I discuss how powerlessness depends upon collective action problems, the nature of systematic luck, and their interaction with individual responsibility. I defend measurement in conceptual analysis, discuss vagueness and ambiguity and the incoherence of some social concepts. I defend power as a simple notion whose context suggest different extensions. I discuss the conceptual and predictive use of models. I defend ‘rationality’ as consistency which stands for lawlike regularity. Finally, I discuss the problems raised with my account of persuasion in terms of manipulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective action
• concepts
• manipulation
• models
• power

Acknowledgments

I would like to thanks Anne Gelling, Enzo Lenine and Alex Oprea for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this response.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. That is why, of course, friends talk and enemies fight. Which is not completely irrelevant to our main topic – a point I return to in Section 6.

2. I do not query the utility of various power indices in other contexts.

3. ‘Unprivileged’ is genuine but little used term. ‘Privilege’ denotes a special right or advantage granted or available only to a particular person or group. The usual antonyms to ‘privilege’ in this context, such as ‘disadvantaged’, ‘misfortune’, ‘handicap’, ‘inferior’, either do not capture the opposite or are, in the last case, ambiguous.

4. A white male friend, now a senior economist, was mistaken for a cleaner at his first academic job at Birkbeck College, London, and was mildly amused rather than outraged.

5. These are serious issues, not just fine analytic ones. In my career as a teacher, female students have asked for my help with regard to sexual harassment by some of my (I am happy to say former) colleagues or students. Every time I said that I can do little, unless you make a formal complaint. All I could really do was to alert others; and in my experience student union counsellors were the most useful people to alert. We might also see how, when the oppressed do fight back, such as through the Black Lives Matter movement, how racism and power of their oppressors is revealed through actions, both personal and institutional.

6. Sen (2009, pp. 307–8) refers to ‘plural’ understandings, leaving open whether an overriding definition could capture all aspects. I prefer to call them ‘incoherent’ as I think we can each identify with the plural values or dimensions, but cannot consistently put them together. Calling a concept ‘plural’ suggests different views each of which might be internally consistent.

7. I do not want to claim that republican liberty ‘is’ such an intersection of liberal ‘liberty’ and claim-rights, though I do think such that a plausible claim could be made about some accounts of republican liberty seen as legal status.

8. Some theoretical terms are identified by what they measure: the centre of gravity, for example. Power in use is also identified by what it measures (the change it effects). The power that agents hold (dispositional power) is identified by their resources.

9. I would like to point out this measurement problem is not unique to social science. Precise measurement is problematic with convective heat transfer, for example, but that does not stop engineers designing a variety of devices. Measuring in theory might seem ‘vague’ but concepts such as force or temperature lack precise definitions but are extensively measured and mobilized in a variety of theoretical and concrete problems.

10. This is another sense in which I am a realist and not a positivist as usually understood.

11. I won’t go into this here, but I distinguish invariant generalizations – ‘laws’ that are explanatory – from empirical generalizations, which are patterns in need of explanation.

12. For shorter accounts, see Dennett (1998) or Ross (2000).

13. Even babies only a few months old already have a theory of causation, expressing surprise when the world does not follow the causal patterns they expect (see for example Gopnik et al. 1999).

14. See Hartman (1999) for an example.

15. I am now pursuing this in joint work with Alex Oprea.

16. I guess this constitutes Whitfield’s higher-order reason. I don’t really see it in ordering terms, rather when pressed people try to justify themselves, and this might form the justification.

17. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 2013, p. 280).

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Keith Dowding

Keith Dowding has published over 90 research articles and 70 chapters in political science, political philosophy and philosophy of social science. His most recent books include It’s the Government, Stupid (2020), Power, Luck and Freedom (2017), The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science (2016).