what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label SM Wolin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SM Wolin. Show all posts

Monday, November 26, 2018

We need to talk about……..Power

Oborne’s book was interesting because, rightly or wrongly, it seemed to identify a turning point – that the way the British system of government operated had changed significantly (and for the worse) in the 1980s……He was not the only person arguing this – a year before, Simon Jenkins’ Thatcher and Sons; (2006) had conducted the same analysis but without using such dramatic terms as “new political class” and “manipulative populism”..

And even political scientists had been remarking that the much-famed “Westminster model” (of dominant political power) seemed to have been replaced with a much more consensual one of networked “governance”. Rod Rhodes – whom I briefly met in the 1970s - had been the foremost proponent of this view with his concept of “hollowed out government
My table included a 2006 textbook British Politics – a critical introduction by Stuart McAnulla which nicely captures the sort of debate going on in those days in these academic circles……with McAnulla taking issue with both the traditional and reformist schools of thought and suggesting that we needed to extend our understanding of power beyond the political..…

It is, of course, nothing less than astounding that it took a global financial crisis to force academia to consider that government agendas are shaped by more than political manoeuvrings – and McAnulla’s is still a fairly lonely voice in his profession….The commercial links of New Labour were memorably exposed by George Monbiot in his 2001 expose The Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain But, astonishingly, only 2 of the 500 pages of The UK’s Changing Democracy – the 2018 Democratic Audit have anything to say about corruption

Wolin’s Democracy Inc questioning the scale of commercial funding of American political personalities was distinctive only for it being produced by an academic (one of the most respected) and came out ten years ago. Neither it – nor the various studies of the significance of lobbying activity and resources at the European level – seem to make any impact on our discussions about democracy….Here is a rare 2014 academic contribution to the question of how consistent capitalism now is with democracy

We seem indeed averse to talking about “power” and its various facets…although most of us tend to have our own little conspiracy theory….I grant you that books on the subject tend to be rather specialised and daunting…..although Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power is a very good read…..if focusing rather too much on individual rather than systemic or structural factors.
When we look for books about power, we invariably find that they are written by sociologists, a group hardly famed for its clarity - one honourable exception being the recent Vampire Capitalism (2017).

Probably the best book about the subject is Steven Lukes’ slim Power – a radical view (2005) which starts with the simple story of how the post-war argument about the structure of power basically got underway with an American (Dahl) being upset with how 2 colleagues (C Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter) were portraying a power elite that seemed impervious to accountability – at both national and local levels…
Inevitably, however, even this book is guilty of the dreaded compartmentalisatio of which academia is so guilty and fails to mention the classic work of Amitai Etzioni who in the 1960s classified organisational power in terms of “coercion, economic assets or normative values”.. Sticks, carrots and moral persuasion we would call it.....
And if you’re wondering what “moral persuasion” is when it’s at home, Joseph Nye’s “soft power” will tell you more than Antonio Gramsci’s “hegemonic power”!!

Friday, November 23, 2018

Controlling the Masses

Second-hand bookshops do not get enough credit – first for their shelter from the juggernaut marketing of fashionable titles and then with the delight of a text found which has languished unappreciated after a decade or so…..

Two titles caught my eye this week in a new downtown outlet opposite Bucuresti University – the first Who Runs this place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century (2004) was the final contribution of a famous journalist, Anthony Sampson, who was of south African origin and had started in 1962 what became a series of efforts to capture the anatomy of the UK power structure. ….Extracts can be read here. Sampson himself became so ensconced in his role as voyeur that he almost became one of the institutions of which he wrote – as can be seen in this tribute. New Labour was half-way through its 13 years as he was drafting the book and the impact of its media manipulation was already in evidence. But a quick skim suggested that it might suffer from being a tad incestuous – with the references consisting of either newspaper articles or political biographies. Not a solitary academic reference

The Triumph of the Political Class by journalist Peter Oborne (2007)  was the other (smaller) bargain which I swept up – first read and blogged about in 2014. It has a much more powerful tale to tell - of the destruction by Thatcher in the 1980s of the traditional power of trade unions, universities, local government, the judiciary and the civil service. And of the huge rise under Blair et al since 1997 of the power of the political class and media – and the further emasculation of parliament, the Cabinet and the civil service. Interestingly, he coins the phrase “manipulative populism” – and identifies the significance of Peter Mair’s writing to the fate of the Western political party

The nature and location of power fascinated me from an early age – I had studied Elite theorists in the early 1960s on my political sociology course at University. Although Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) had led the way, it was Robert Michels’ (1876-1936) Political Parties (1911) which made the lasting impression on me - with his close study of trade unionists and social democrat politicians and derivation of “the iron law of oligarchy”.

For more than a century, one of the central issues of our time has been that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in an age of democracy….These authors, thoroughly “Real” in their “Politik”, hardly suggested that the political and commercial elites had much to worry about – but this did not prevent writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) from conjuring up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here
The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was also a favourite of mine – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites that all would be well….

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties on this count amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy
One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008) – reviewed here. And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work…..

Since starting this post, I’ve noticed quite a few new books on this topic and will do an annotated reading list shortly of the dozen or so more interesting of these….