Three Books on Power - Why I judge books by their reading lists

At a time when Europe as a whole is suffering from extreme heat, it seem appropriate to turn to an eminent environmentalist, Richard Heinberg, whose Power – limits and prospects for human survival (2021) I have been trying to read. I was attracted by its opening pages which posed three crucial questions - 

·       How has Homo sapiens, just one species out of millions, become so powerful as to bring the planet to the brink of climate chaos and a mass extinction event?

·       Why have we developed so many ways of oppressing and exploiting one another?

·       Is it possible to change our relationship with power so as to avert ecological catastrophe, while also dramatically reducing social inequality and the likelihood of political-economic collapse? 

And the introduction continues - 

There is a fundamental correlation between physical power and social power. Social scientists sometimes tend to downplay this point. But throughout history, dramatic increases in physical power, derived from new technologies and from harnessing new energy sources, have often tended to lead to a few people having more wealth than everybody else, or being able to tell lots of other people what to do.

The “will to power,” about which German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is real—but it isn’t everything. We humans have other instincts that counteract our relentless pursuit of power. Efforts to limit power are deeply rooted in nature’s cycles and balancing mechanisms, and have been expressed in countless social movements over many centuries, including movements to curb the power of rulers, to abolish slavery, and to grant women political rights equal to those enjoyed by men. 

But the claim in the opening pages that “no book has systematically examined the sundry forms of power and investigated how they are related” took me aback since this book, unusually, contains no reading list to allow me to check what particular study this environmentalist has undertaken – particularly in the psychological and political fields. Regular readers will know that I have various tests to allow me to judge whether a book is worth reading – and this is one of them. The most thorough study of power is that in Michael Mann’s opus (extending to 3 volumes and more than 1000 pages) and this does indeed get a (brief) mention – but the index makes no mention of the classic work on the subject by Steven Lukes – Power, a radical view (1986) 

I have another reason for being disappointed with my skim of the book - we are, these days, overwhelmed with books. I do my best to keep up but I have taken recently to issuing appeals to publishers and authors for some self-discipline. Heinberg’s book is some 500 pages and starts with detail (about the origins of life) which I did not find particularly interesting or relevant. At one level his use of diagrams and sidebars suggests he understands the problems most readers will have in wading through a 500 page book – but whatever happened to good old self-discipline? 

A second BOOK which disappointed was Corruptible – who gets power and how it changes us by Brian Klaas (2021) who presents us with different possibilities - 

       power makes people worse — power corrupts.

·       it’s not that power corrupts, but rather that worse people are drawn to power—power attracts the corruptible.

·       the problem doesn’t lie with the power holders or power seekers, it’s that we are attracted to bad leaders for bad reasons, and so we tend to give them power.

·       focusing on the individuals in power is a mistake because it all depends on the system. Bad systems spit out bad leaders. Create the right context and power can purify instead of corrupting.

 

These hypotheses are potential explanations for two of the most fundamental questions about human society: Who gets power and how does it change us? This book provides answers.

Klaas seems to have travelled the globe in his search of shady characters to illustrate his theme but, very curiously in the light of all his travels and effort, he doesn’t appear to have done the basic thing – which is to look at how other people have dealt with these questions. When I apply my test  it’s to discover that the book lacks even a short list of useful or recommended reading and his index ignores most of the literature on the subject – the most important of which, for me by a long chalk, is Leaders we Deserve produced almost 40 years ago by Alistair Mant which I was delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive. 

It makes you wonder – how on earth can a writer even imagine he can do justice to an issue when he demonstrates that he hasn’t even bothered to read some at least of the relevant literature? Predictably, Machiavelli gets only one entry in the Index – and Madoff (Bernie) two! And, equally predictably, Robert Michels who, arguably, started the modern interest in what power does to people with his “Political Parties” (1911) and “the iron law of oligarchy” doesn’t figure in the index – nor do Hitler, Lenin or Stalin – although, curiously, Mussolini gets 2 pages! My advice therefore to readers is to use the tests I’ve pointed to in this post – particularly

https://elizabethjpeterson.com/2020/12/how-to-never-read-another-boring-book/

https://every.to/superorganizers/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books-580014

There is, however, a third book I wholeheartedly recommend Good and Bad Power - the ideals and betrayals of government by Geoff Mulgan (2006) and you can read it in full thanks to the Archive link in the title - but iy allows viewing only for one hour (renewable)