The Oversocialized Conception of Man by Dennis H. Wrong

Author:Dennis H. Wrong [Wrong, Dennis H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351303385
Google: FyFWDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-17T03:37:18+00:00

TEN

Problems in Defining Power

THE MOST GENERAL USE of the word “power” in English is as a synonym for capacity, skill, or talent. This use encompasses the capacity to engage in certain kinds of performance, or “skill” in the strict sense, the capacity to produce an effect of some sort on the external world, and the physical or psychological energies underlying any and all human performances—the “power to act” itself, as it were. Sometimes the word is used in the plural to denote the total capacities and energies—or “faculties”—of a human being, as in reference to the increasing or failing “powers” of a person. When power refers to the energies released by human actions, it merges into the physical concept of energy as the capacity to do work or to move matter, as in steam or electrical power. Applied in this sense to human energies, power is equated with potency, or an actor’s general ability to produce successful performances.

The notion of controlling or acting on resistant materials is implicit in the idea of power as skill or capacity. Some writers have equated power in this general sense with mastery, or with the ability “to produce observed modifications in the external world.”1 In the case of complex physical or mental skills, the recalcitrant materials to be mastered are the actor’s own body and mind rather than objects in the external environment. The actor exercises a power over himself that we usually call “self-discipline” or “self-control.” Freudian writers, beginning with Freud himself, habitually employ political metaphors to describe intrapsychic processes: the “tyrannical” superego, the “imperious” id, the “bargaining” or “compromising” ego.

Power as potency and, though less unambiguously, as mastery is unmistakably a “dispositional” term in Gilbert Ryle’s sense, referring not to an actual performance but to the capacity, latent in the actor even when not being exercised, to produce a particular kind of performance.2 When we are concerned with power as a social relation between actors, it is important, as I shall argue in more detail below, to retain the dispositional sense of the term, although the sociological concept of power must not imply that it is an attribute of an actor rather than a relation between actors, whether individuals or groups.

Two famous British philosophers, separated by nearly three centuries, defined power similarly. Thomas Hobbes defined it as “man’s present means to any future apparent good,”3 while to Bertrand Russell, power was “the production of intended effects.”4 Hobbes’s definition is clearly a dispositional one, for a man may obviously possess the means to attain a future good even when he is not engaged in employing them to that end. Russell’s definition, however, lends itself to being understood as “episodic”5 rather than dispositional, unless one adds the phrase “the capacity for” in front of “the production of intended effects.”

But both definitions identify power with potency or mastery and are therefore too general if one’s interest is in power as a social relationship, for both cover power over the self and over nature as well as the power of men over other men.

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