by Phil Parvin
Dig deeper
Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
Matt Cavanagh, Against Equality of Opportunity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter? (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
John Roemer, Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Fact-check
1 An employer only hires people who attended the same expensive boys’ private school as he did. What sort of equality of opportunity is this?
A Non-discrimination
B Meritocracy
C Affirmative action
D None of the above
2 An employer disregards race, sex and disability when hiring. What sort of equality of opportunity is this?
A Non-discrimination
B Meritocracy
C Affirmative action
D None of the above
3 An employer prefers to hire people from disadvantaged backgrounds. What sort of equality of opportunity is this?
A Non-discrimination
B Meritocracy
C Affirmative action
D None of the above
4 An employer chooses her employees by using an aptitude test. What sort of equality of opportunity is this?
A Non-discrimination
B Meritocracy
C Affirmative action
D None of the above
5 Which of the following are ascriptive characteristics?
A Preferences and tastes
B Talent and effort
C Sex and race
D Religion and lifestyle
6 Which of the following criticisms best applies to equality of opportunity as non-discrimination?
A It is not easy to identify someone’s ascriptive characteristics
B Ascriptive characteristics are sometimes relevant to the job
C Some people like to discriminate
D Some members of disadvantaged groups have not themselves suffered disadvantage
7 Which of the following criticisms best applies to affirmative action?
A It is not easy to identify someone’s ascriptive characteristics
B Ascriptive characteristics are sometimes relevant to the job
C Some people like to discriminate
D Some members of disadvantaged groups have not themselves suffered disadvantage
8 What should be taken into account when hiring people, according to meritocrats?
A Their sex and race
B Their talent and effort
C Their religion and lifestyle
D Their tastes and preferences
9 Which of the following criticisms best applies to meritocracy?
A It is not easy to identify someone’s merit
B Merit is sometimes relevant to the job
C Some people like to discriminate on merit
D Some people with merit have not themselves suffered disadvantage
10 Why is merit a myth, according to Young?
A Because everyone has equal merit
B Because merit is inefficient
C Because judgements of merit are often biased or inaccurate
D Because merit violates liberty
5
Power
Politics, it is sometimes said, is all about power. Hence, the study of politics is the study of power.
Political philosophers throughout history have sought to determine who should wield ultimate political, coercive power in a society, why they should hold it and not others, and what limits it is appropriate to place upon this power. But there is more to power than that held by rulers and states. Many contemporary political philosophers, informed by insights provided by social theorists, have suggested that power does not just reside in the hands of those who occupy formal positions of power or even in the observable behaviour of those people, but can be seen, too, in the many relationships that we have in our public and private lives, and in the very language that we use to describe the world around us and make sense of our own identities and desires. Power, that is, is often invisible, pervasive and experienced in ways that we may not easily measure or comprehend. This approach to the study of power is primarily associated with approaches such as post-structuralism, feminism, critical theory and Continental philosophy, but can also inform analytic philosophy.
We will discuss the normative question of who should rule in the chapter on democracy. In this chapter, we discuss the concept of power.
Some initial thoughts
We can identify two understandings of power in everyday language:
1 Power may be interpersonal: it may be something that one individual (or group) has over another individual (or group). This understanding of power leads to statements like ‘the Prime Minister has power over the Cabinet’ or ‘the employer has power over the employee’.
2 If a person is able to do something, we may say that they have power. Thus we might say ‘I have the power to lift this box’ or ‘the Prime Minister has the power to make policy decisions’.
What these two uses of the term ‘power’ have in common is that they both demonstrate that the powerful person can achieve certain goals, that she can act so as to make something happen. So, a first attempt at a general definition of power might be ‘one is powerful when one makes things happen’.
However, not all cases where a person makes something happen will count as power. For the first part of our investigation into power, we need to consider three elements of powerful action: intentions, counterfactuals and capacities.
INTENTIONS
People can make things happen in all sorts of ways, many of which do not seem to show that they have power. Imagine that you are playing a game of hide-and-seek, and that it is your turn to hide. You are therefore trying to be very quiet. But, as bad luck would have it, your nose tickles and you are unable to suppress a sneeze. Hearing the sneeze, the seeker opens the wardrobe door and finds you. Now, in sneezing you have made something happen. But you don’t have power. You have made something happen that you neither wanted nor intended. In fact, it looks as though you are powerless: you were unable to suppress the sneeze.
As our first qualification of the concept of power, then, we could say that a person is powerful if she makes something happen that she wants to happen. She is powerful if she gets what she wants.
If we look at this definition a little closer, however, we can see that it too has problems. Imagine that you enter the lottery. It just so happens that your numbers come up. In winning the lottery, you have got what you want. But it does not seem right to say that you are powerful. This is because it was pure chance that you won, and that chance had nothing to do with any action of yours. It was not in your control to determine whether or not you won. You have got what you want, but you have not exercised power.
It seems, then, that power must be about actively exercising some sort of control to bring about what you want. In order to be powerful, you must get what you want not as a matter of chance, but as the result of some definite action.
COUNTERFACTUALS
This brings us to the second element of power. One way of capturing this idea of power as involving some form of control is to say that, if a person is to be powerful, she must cause something to happen that would not have happened otherwise. It cannot just be a matter of simply getting what you want. Instead, you must bring it about in some way, and one way of measuring this is to consider what would have happened if you had not acted in the way that you did. Only if getting what you want depends on you doing something can we think of you as powerful.
But this cannot be a sufficient criterion for power either. We could say that winning the lottery depended on an action by you. If you h
ad not bought the lottery ticket, and if you had not chosen those particular numbers, then you would not have won the lottery. In this sense, winning the lottery was crucially dependent on your actions. As we have seen, it also meant that you got something that you wanted. So why doesn’t it count as an instance of power?
CAPACITY AND CONTROL
The third element of power alerts us to the fact that the powerful person must have some sort of control. If one is to be powerful in relation to something, one must have the capacity to control that thing. So, if winning the lottery is supposed to demonstrate your power, then you must be able to ensure that you win the lottery. It cannot just have been a lucky occurrence, a matter of chance. One way of determining whether you have the capacity to control the outcome might be to see whether you are able to bring about the same outcome again, and whether you are able to predict accurately what will happen when you are supposedly exercising power. If you are unable to repeat or predict your powerful action, we might suspect that it was not really powerful at all.
‘The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.’
James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Convention, Richmond, Virginia, 2 December 1829.
The issue of capacity also alerts us to another factor of power. If power is a capacity to act, the ability to control or at least affect an outcome, then one could be powerful without actually doing anything or making anything happen. That is because one can have a capacity without actually exercising it. So, for example, the employer might have power over the employee in the sense that the employer has the capacity to sack the employee. The employer has this power whether or not she actually exercises it. Even when the employer is not sacking anyone, she is still able to do so, and is thus powerful.
These three elements, very briefly described, form part of the concept of power. Different thinkers disagree about the relative importance of each element, and therefore about what should truly count as an instance of power. Let us now consider what a number of different philosophers have said about power, and how they have weighed these three elements.
‘Every communist must grasp the truth; “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”’
Mao Tse Tung, ‘Problems of War and Strategy’ [1938], Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 224.
Lukes and the three dimensions of power
We have seen that power, in its most general sense, might be defined as the ability of a group or individual to deliberately cause something else to happen, or to influence a particular course of events. A person might be said to have power if she is able to bring about certain events, or cause others to make certain decisions, as a result of her interventions.
However, this definition only gets us so far. Events or decisions may be influenced in all kinds of different ways, only some of which are obvious and measurable. In fact, the more we examine any particular event or decision, the more difficult it may become to establish causal links between actors in a social or political context. Furthermore, decisions can be influenced by social forces or structures. Social theorists from Durkheim, Weber and Comte to Marx and Bourdieu have emphasized that power can reside in social norms and structural factors like class, socio-economic status and education: factors that shape our decisions, preferences and actions.
Thus we might think of power not as a single phenomenon but as one which can be defined and exercised in different ways in different contexts. This is the approach taken by Steven Lukes in his book Power: A Radical View (1994). Lukes outlines three conceptions (or ‘dimensions’) of power. Let us look at each in turn.
ONE-DIMENSIONAL POWER
One-dimensional power describes those most straightforward cases of influence: cases where we would easily recognize that an actor had affected an outcome. Examples might include a pupil following the instructions of a teacher, or a soldier following orders given by an officer. In Robert Dahl’s words: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ (Dahl 1957: pp. 202–3). Importantly, the actors involved are people and the exercise of power is observable in the behaviour of those involved. In particular, it is observable in the context of decision-making. By observing the outcome of the decision-making process, we can gain some insight into forms of influence. Where actors have expressed disagreement on their preferred courses of action, and where one actor’s preference prevails, we can infer the existence of one-dimensional power. Thus, as Lukes puts it, ‘this first, one-dimensional view of power involves a focus on behaviour in the making of decisions on issues over which there is observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as express policy preferences, revealed by political participation’ (Lukes 1994: p. 15).
A paradigmatic example of one-dimensional power relates to government. If we were trying to work out who had one-dimensional power in the process of government, we would see who wins in cases of policy disagreement. So, our method would be to compare the policy preferences of different groups with the outcomes of the policy-making process. The group whose preferences most coincide with outcomes is deemed to be most powerful.
The one-dimensional view has the benefit of being clear and measurable. But there are three main problems with this concept of one-dimensional power, all of which will be discussed in more detail. The first problem is that it ignores the question of why and how it is that some issues become relevant and others do not: it ignores questions of which issues are introduced into the decision-making process and which are not. The second problem is that it falls foul of what Keith Dowding called the ‘blame fallacy’. The third problem is that it does not deal with the question of why certain decisions are reached, or what incentives the decision-makers face. Why is it that some groups want certain things, and other groups want other things?
The first and third problems can be understood more clearly in relation to the two- and three-dimensional views of power.
Case study: The ‘blame fallacy’ and systematic luck
One way of understanding power is as the capacity to intentionally control events in order to make something happen. One way in which political scientists have measured power, therefore, has been to identify who benefits from particular outcomes and generalize trends from their findings. If it can be shown that public policies tend to favour the interests of big business over local communities, for example, then we might feel it reasonable to conclude that big business exerts greater power in the policy-making process than local community groups.
However, Keith Dowding points out that such a conclusion is too hasty (Dowding 1991a). While it may be true that looking at who benefits from a particular outcome, or who wanted the outcome, gives us some guidance as to who is powerful, it does not tell us anything definitive about power. For the people who benefit from a policy or decision may not actually be very powerful. They may be very lucky instead – their desired outcome may have come about without them actually doing anything. In general, Dowding warns us that we must avoid committing the blame fallacy. The blame fallacy occurs when we ask the question ‘who benefits from a (supposed) power structure?’ and conclude that the beneficiary must be the one exercising power.
While some people are lucky rather than powerful, other people or groups are what Dowding calls ‘systematically lucky’. Dowding defines systematic luck as getting what you want without having to act because of the way that society is structured. The example that he gives is capitalists in a democratic society with regular elections. Politicians in such societies have to seek regular re-election. In general, politicians’ and governments’ chances of re-election depend on the state of the economy. If the economy is strong, the government is likely to be re-elected, but if it is weak, the government will probably fail. As a result, Dowding argues, all governments will try to ensure that the economy is strong, and this means that capitalists are thriving. Simply because it is in their own personal interests, politicians will work in the interes
ts of capitalists. Capitalists in this situation do not have to do anything to persuade the government to act in their interests. In this sense, capitalists are just lucky. However, they are lucky as a result of the way that society is structured. A system of regular re-elections in an existing capitalist society will always mean that politicians have an incentive to act in the interests of capitalists. This organization of society means that capitalists will always be lucky. As Dowding puts it, they are systematically lucky.
TWO-DIMENSIONAL POWER
Two-dimensional power is an attempt to take into account the fact that not all issues are aired in the policy-making procedure and, as such, not all issues are decided upon. It is the power that some individuals or groups have to set the political agenda: to decide which issues are discussed and which are not. To illustrate this idea, Lukes cites Matthew Crenson’s work on air pollution (Crenson 1971). Crenson’s claim is that, given that all citizens have an equal interest in breathing non-polluted air, one would assume that cities with comparable levels of air pollution would spend comparable levels of legislative and executive time debating the issue. However, Crenson shows that this is not the case and that in some cities the issue is hardly discussed at all. From a one-dimensional viewpoint, this means that no one has power as regards air pollution. As no decisions are made concerning it, we cannot tell which group is more powerful. Indeed, as there are no debates on the issue, a one-dimensional theory might assume that there is no conflict of interest on air pollution, that everyone is happy with the status quo.
However, Crenson argues that the issue of air pollution is kept off the political agenda in those cities in which industry is prominent. Dominant industrial companies are able to use their reputation for power – that is, their reputation for employing large numbers of people and making large contributions to the local economy – to prevent the issue of air pollution from being raised at the explicitly political level. Lukes suggests that industry is exercising two-dimensional power: the power to influence the decision-making process. One way of putting this is that two-dimensional power is the power of non-decision-making. If you can prevent a decision from being made, that is a form of power – even though, by one-dimensional power standards, nothing has happened and so no power can be observed.