Earlier this month I tried to do a post on what I had learned about power – but it rather petered out when I realised how many of the books to which I had given hyperlinks I had actually gone on to read. And I then compounded the felony by adding a few more relevant book titles I had come across. My only excuse, as I mentioned in the last post, is that publishers deluge us with too many books and that authors lack discipline and are too long-winded.
In fact I have learned more than I let on – as this short video clip about the core theories of International Relations reminded me. The academic, one Steve Smith, makes the useful point that such theories are like coloured lens through which we look at and make sense of the world. He mentions four such perspectives -
School |
explanation |
Realism |
Struggle for power |
Liberalism |
Belief in consensus, in rules and norms |
Marxism |
Economic interests, class position |
Postmodernism |
Socially determined – depending on how we look at the world |
Of course this is too cryptic and Smith and other authors have explained this further in their big book on the subject.
I readily confess that, for much of my life, I was a typical social democrat/liberal too hypnotised by ideas - and it is only fairly recently that my eyes have been opened to the scale of economic interests ruling the world. It was probably J Michael Greer who helpd awake me from my dreamworld – you can still find his blogs archived here
I owe the references in the early part of the post to one of the most original books I have come across in the past few years Change and the politics of certainty (2019). The author, Jenny Edkins , was a physicist but then changed, after her children grew up, to the world of social science and is now a Professor of Political Science. Her book is an amazing mixture of memoir and provocative analysis which very clarly sides with the opressed – as was evident in her 2004 book Sovereign Lives – power in global politics. One quotation conveys the thrust of the book's argument
We need to consider the possibility that famines happen because the social and political system in which they are embedded is working all too well rather than because it has failed.
Bonus Video; I loved this commencement speech about the idiocy and cruelty around these days and the need for empathy
