Accept Mess To Understand Power
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology programme at Newspeak House, open to faculty, fellows, and fellowship candidates only.
Session by Faculty member John Evans
I am a big fan of Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power. There is a first edition of volume 1 (prehistory to 1760 AD) in the Newspeak House Library and I recommend reading the first few chapters to understand the theory of social power that Mann puts forward so that you can apply it to your analysis of social power in the situations that you encounter. Chapter 1 is the theory and then it's an applied narrative after that. It's very readable.
The basics are that "Society" is not a bounded object that can be analysed. It's simplest to think about this geographically, if you consider the island of Great Britain, the people here participate in an ideological network with the United States, an economic exchange with continental Europe and China, a military alliance system that opposes China and a political hierarchy that is limited to just this island and a portion of the neighbouring one - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
To make sense of this, we put aside the impossible task of analysing "Society" and get stuck into understanding particular organisations by way of their dimensions of social power i.e. what is it that this organisation compels people to do, and how does it do that. The theory of social power outlines 4 ideal types of ways organisations induce action by people, and every organisation uses some mixture of the 4, with 1 of them usually being primary: Ideology, Military, Economic and Political.
My ideal session to study this would start by just looking out the window and describing the forms of social power we can see, and then moving on to analysing your individual contexts to see what insights we can unearth.
Recording: the whole session will be recorded.