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”!!
