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”!!