Power and critique

KAZAKH ABLAI KHAN UNIVERSITY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND WORLD LANGUAGES

FACULTY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Chair of International Relations

Specialty 050202 - International Relations

Discipline – Sociology

Lecture №8

Theme «Sociological Theory. Old and new directions»

ALMATY 2008-2009

Lecture №8

Theme «Sociological Theory. Old and new directions»

Power and critique

Constituting society. Ideal types

Mediation

Power and critique

The problem about social relations is that they don’t work just as any one person would like, not even when we are of one will with each other. Sociology has dwelt on many of the paradoxes of these unintended consequences of collective action. The most famous is probably Robert Michels’ account of how a political party dedicated to equality and justice like the German Social Democratic Party at the beginning of the century should have generated a powerful oligarchy at the centre.

A cynic might say that it is because people are deceitful and self-seeking. Michels illustrates how with the best will in the world large organisations involve the concentration of power in a few hands. We may want one thing and yet it is another which prevails. In fact we may have a better chance of fruitful change if we disagree with each other, or at the least allow one another to go our own way. Social relations persist and they are embedded in the world so that we tend to reproduce them. Marx’s social relations of production in industrial society depended on capital, which in turn reflected the level of development of technology at the time.

So the persistence of social relations depends on material conditions, and the extent to which ideas can penetrate these is limited. Invention can create new conditions, ideals can inspire resistance, but more often than not they seem to reflect the interests of those who gain the advantages from existing social relations, the problem of ideology.

These are famous dilemmas of the human condition, most of which come down to arguments about power. There is a case for saying that this is the most important of all social science concepts, except that it is so pervasive that it appears everywhere. Max Weber complained that it was too amorphous for scientific use, but this can only mean that it is lodged in reality as a major topic not as a technical term.

We need to reflect a little on this amorphousness. If we define power at its simplest as the ability to get something done, we immediately face a distinction between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’. ‘Power over’ people or things may be negative. It can mean denying people their desires or rights. It can mean burning trees or driving recklessly. ‘Power to’ looks forward, suggests projects and achievements in which people may be co-opted rather than coerced.

Either way we see immediately that power involves a complex network of links between people, things and projects. As such it is a dimension of humankind’s relations with the world and not just a matter of society. What we will find in the discussion which follows of how society is constituted is that power comes in at every juncture, in our use of the mass media, in our personal contacts, in machines, in markets and communities.

With each of these we can talk of ‘its power’ as well as ‘our power’ in respect of it. This must be so. They are features of the facticity of the world. Our realisation as human beings involves coming to terms with this at every juncture in our lives. Every science, then, is concerned with power. Even astronomy is concerned to find life in outer space. Sociology’s interest in power comes into play at a series of special points. It appears in accounts of technology, ideology or markets, in states and organisations, parties and armies, as coercion or authority, violence or control, domination or hegemony. All are phenomena of power and its exercise.

Power is involved in all social relations, though interestingly it is not necessarily transferable from one kind of relation to another. This is a great area for ironic observations: Citizen Kane, the media mogul, actually motivated by childhood insecurity. ‘Dating Agency Founder died a reclusive alcoholic’; so business success does not translate into personal success. Or, on the other hand, we have the cynical observation when power does translate from one field to another, as with the Hollywood casting couch. Power may or may not transfer across these types of social relations, but our interest in it, ironic or cynical, is equal, both when it does and when it doesn’t.

Famously, Karl Marx treated the power of social classes as the most important kind in human history. In the twentieth century as it has become apparent that classes are not the only or even the dominant agents in human history some have tried to treat human power itself as the subject of history. Michel Foucault was most influential in promoting this view. The problem with this is that it detaches power from any particular agency and removes the points of resistance. It means that only something as generalised as power itself can provide a counterweight. Critique is one main candidate for this position.

Aside from God, from whom science has preferred to keep its distance, critique has been the main hope of intellectuals seeking a source of relief from power. Critique is not the same as criticism or being critical. It is the application of reason to reality, including the use of reason itself. It reveals first principles, but also conflicts of first principles.

It is an idea which goes back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment with its faith in human reason, and then of course back to the Greeks. Marx scorned the idea that reality depended on ideas but he retained ‘critique’ as a term for any account which showed how reality could be otherwise than it was. In other words critique was to undermine the ideas of a ruling class, their ideological hold on society. Thus it would then open up the possibility of instituting the classless society.

The notion of critique has come to have the meaning of any account which suggests radical alternatives to the status quo. These should be possible futures too; critique does not produce utopias. In this form the idea of critical sociology has come to be popular. In fact we shall see that sociology is inherently critical in the sense that it reveals the limits and possibilities which society provides for humankind.

When we point to the way social relations shape our economy, our environment, the way we dress, how we vote and even our sexual behaviour then we point to the essential necessity for it to be possible that things could be otherwise than they are. Sociology does not have to do anything special to be a critique of society. It just has to show it how it is—dependent on effort, resistant to change, threatening to get out of control, always capable of improvement.

The illusion of modernity was that society could be created as the perfect homeland of humanity. It was Plato who dreamed that dream, it inspired Utopia, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. In all those cases we find genuine insights into how society works, and then the vain hope that we can make it as we wish. On the basis of those vain hopes interest in society may turn into despair, revolution or, in its tepid form, social criticism. But sociology is not social criticism even if social critics draw on its findings.

In the French Revolution abstract values inspired by pure reason, ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, became revolutionary slogans with the idea that society could be shaped to realise them. But they came to incite actions which shamed their advocates. Utopia echoed to the sound of the guillotine’s blade. Violence completed the degradation of these values which began when they became slogans.

It has taken a century of sociology to reinstate values like liberty, equality and fraternity—not as goals but as the guiding criteria for sociological research. They are both moral values and cognitive criteria for accounts of society. In other words they belong to science as much as to morality and politics. We turn to that science now.

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