Two 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? 

ANOTHER 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

The Stories People Tell to make sense of the world - part VI of a series

Political parties in the US and UK apparently used to be broad coalitions but have become (at least on the right) ideological sects. And that certainly seem confirmed in the nominations presented yesterday for the UK Prime Minister – a position which has become vacant due to Boris Johnson’s long-awaited resignation.

As readers know, I try to avoid comment on so-called “current affairs” but it is simply worth noting that the extremist faction of the Conservative party (very much encouraged by Johnson) has now gained such a powerful hold on the party that all eight candidates who yesterday secured nominations are devotees of the “small state” idea. 

More in Common is an interesting organisation with teams in France, Germany, UK and US which develop communication strategies that can help unite people across the lines of division and strengthen people’s sense of belonging and common identity. One of their recent reports divided the UK population into the following 7 groups (with the percentage indicating the importance of the group) 

-Progressive Activists (13%): A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth and other forms of privilege. They are politically-engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and environmentally conscious.

–Civic Pragmatists (13%): A group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics. They are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.

–Disengaged Battlers (12%): A group that feels that they are just keeping their heads above water, and who blame the system for its unfairness. They are tolerant, insecure, disillusioned, disconnected, overlooked, and socially liberal.

–Established Liberals (12%): A group that has done well and means well towards others, but also sees a lot of good in the status quo. They are comfortable, privileged, cosmopolitan, trusting, confident, and pro-market.

–Loyal Nationals (18%): A group that is anxious about the threats facing Britain and facing themselves. They are proud, patriotic, tribal, protective, threatened, aggrieved, and frustrated about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

–Disengaged Traditionalists (17%): A group that values a well-ordered society and takes pride in hard work, and wants strong leadership that keeps people in line. They are self-reliant, ordered, patriotic, tough-minded, suspicious, and disconnected.

–Backbone Conservatives (15%): A group who are proud of their country, optimistic about Britain’s future outside of Europe, and who keenly follow the news, mostly via traditional media sources. They are nostalgic, patriotic, stalwart, proud, secure, confident, and relatively engaged with politics 

Each of these groups tells – or frames - a story of the world as it understands it. And human beings have told stories since Adam and Eve. But it’s the modern world – and the advertising of the past century – which has really made us aware of this. And it was sociologist Erving Goffman’s “Frame Analysis” of 1974 which introduced the term. It was a decade later before I heard the term for the first time – when I was taking the UK’s very first course in Policy Analysis. I can still remember the impact it made. But somehow its secret was guarded in the halls of marketing power for another couple of decades and it was 2004 before “Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate” by George Lakoff made an appearance - Lakoff was an undergraduate at MIT under Noam Chomsky, and was already well established as a linguist by the mid-1970s when he was one of a handful of pioneering academics establishing the foundations of cognitive linguistics, a discipline that brought an understanding of the brain to bear on theories of language and meaning. In cognitive linguistics, the meaning of a word is not just a simple dictionary definition but a cognitive frame associated with a particular word in a particular language community. Other mechanisms, such as metaphor and prototyping, can also be involved

Framing Public Issues (US Frameworks Institute 2006) quickly followed. But it is Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) which I find the most satisfactory account of the meaning and development of Frame Analysis. It’s a 120-page report issued by Oxfam and the Department for International Development on how a more effective marketing strategy could be used by charities in their funding appeals to the general public. And it’s linked to another report Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010). The second chapter of “Finding Frames” looks at social values - 

Perhaps the best known and certainly the most widely applied and validated of the values frameworks, comprises 56 principal value ‘labels’ that can be boiled down into just ten value types (Schwartz and Boehnke 2004) which can best be understood in terms of the degree to which they are compatible or in conflict with one another. People find it difficult to hold certain combinations of values at the same time, whereas other combinations are relatively easy to hold simultaneously - eg people who rate wealth and status as important tend not to rate social justice and living in a world at peace as equally important. 

Storytelling – bewitching the modern mind by Frenchman Christian Salmon (2014) puts the issue in the wider political context it needs. 

The more recent Framers – human advantage in an age of technology and turmoil  K Cukier, F de Vericourt and V Schonberger (2021) initially disappointed me since it didn’t seem to offer the analytical elements I had been expecting. It seemed simply to string a series of stories together in a rather undisciplined way. And then, as I flicked to the middle of the book, I alighted on a story which made me realise that the story-telling was in fact a far more powerful method than the analytical approach. As the intro puts it - 

Framing is so fundamental to human cognition that even those who study the workings of the mind rarely focused on it until relatively recently. Its importance was overshadowed by other mental capabilities, such as sensing and memory. But as people have become more aware of the need to improve their decision-making, the role of frames as fundamental to choosing and acting well has moved from the background to center stage.

Reflections on national cultures - part V

This series of posts took an interesting turn when I read Howard Wiarda’s “Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance” from 2014 which offers a fascinating account of how (over 2000 years) people have tried to convey a sense of the moral meaning of their collective lives. Almost all studies of political culture begin after the 2^nd World War and are academic in nature. The beauty of Wiarda’s book is he devotes and entire chapter to much earlier efforts to describe other worlds.

It was this which encouraged me to  start my list of texts with Madame de Stael but it could (and should) have gone back, if not to Plato (as Wiarda does) to Montesquieu whose Persian Letters (1721) gave some great insights into the mores of upper-class French society in the period before the French revolution. 

Modern academics have three problems in dealing with national cultures –

·       they assume they have to quantify everything (the great weakness of Basanez’s book);

·       they are, for the most part, specialists and

·       they lack a soul and therefore the sensitivity to grasp the essence of things

The one exception to the last generalisation are the historians – of whatever sort. Of necessity they have to cover all aspects of life. That’s why a cultural historian like Peter Gay’s book on the Viennese middle-class is in the list – and also the intellectual historian Daniel T Rodgers’ Age of Fracture about the 4 US decades after 1970.

And Kristan Kumar – whose The Idea of Englishness; English culture, national identity, social thought figures as a must-read - is a sociologist who, as a breed, still manage to keep their fingers on the pulse of nations. 

Perhaps my next project might be to identify the title which best conjures up the soul of each nation. “Natasha’s Dance – a cultural history of Russia” wold probably be my selection for Russia - although that country’s indigenous music, poetry and so many of their own writers have had such incredible talent as to make it easier to go for a general compendium such as Orlando Figes’. Perhaps only the Germans can compete with this richness – although few of us know much about the Chinese….

On Culture – part IV of a series (2008 to the present)

Three of today’s books are particularly interesting. I’ve already quoted from Wiarda’s 2014 book so I can leave it and turn first to “The Culture Map” which came out the same year. It’s not an academic text – based rather on the intensive work (not least listening) which the author has done with global clients and at INSEAD, the management training centre in France. Her job has been to help prepare managers for the inter-cultural work they are or will be doing in foreign places.

Basically she looks at 8 elements which profoundly affects the effectiveness of teams which consist of different nationalities - 

·       Communicating: the ease of which depends on the extent to which team members use direct or indirect language or what is known as “low-context vs. high-context”

·       Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback

·       Persuading: deductive (principles-first) vs. inductive (applications-first)

·       Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical

·       Deciding: consensual vs. top-down

·       Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based

·       Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation

·       Scheduling: order vs. flexibility 

She references Richard Nisbett and makes this interesting comment – 

Chinese people think from macro to micro, whereas Western people think from micro to macro. For example, when writing an address, the Chinese write in sequence of province, city, district, block, gate number. The Westerners do just the opposite—they start with the number of a single house and gradually work their way up to the city and state. In the same way, Chinese put the surname first, whereas the Westerners do it the other way around. And Chinese put the year before month and date. Again, it’s the opposite in the West. 

The table which heads this post is a famous one which she also uses. As someone who worked for some 20 years with multi-cultural teams, I find her analysis and insights very helpful. Indeed, in its stress on the importance of thinking about how each of us might behave more appropriately when faced with cross-cultural problems, it reminded me of “The Art of Thinking” by A Harrison and R Bramson (1982) which made me realise that we all think in different ways. The book identifies 5 styles (synthesist, idealist, pragmatist, analyst and realist) and at least 10 combinations (the full book can be accessed here). We too easily attribute differences in thought processes to stupidity; and more of us need to be aware that these differences (whether in styles of thought or indeed cultures) are real and legitimate. 

The third book of interest I’’ keep for another post 

Book Title	Author	Takeaway
Remaking Management – between global and local	ed Smith, McSweeney and Fitzgerald 2008	Management academics A rare book which disputes the de Hofstede thesis
Age of Fracture;	Daniel T Rodgers (2011)	Intellectual historian A tremendous analysis of the development of the US zeitgeist in the 4 decades from 1970
The Culture Map; Erin Meyer (2014)	INSEAD consultant	A pop management book which will annoy academics since it doesn’t seem to be based on theory. It focuses on 8 processes – leading, deciding, trusting, conflict, scheduling, persuading, evaluating and communicating
Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance;	Howard Wiarda (2014)	Political scientist - a fantastic intellectual history of the field doing justice from Montesqeuieu, Comte, Marx, Weber, Almond and the moderns - and not forgetting more popular writing. A delightful read
The Idea of Englishness; English culture, national identity, social thought	Kristan Kumar 2015	A follow-up to his 2003 book which must be the best source book for this strange nation. Very accessible and surveys all the relevant literature
A World of Three Cultures – honour, achievement and joy;	M Basanez (2016.	Political scientist Not an easy read – with a large number of tables
The Patterning Instinct;	Jeremy Lent (2017)	how worldviews develop and can change history
Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ;	Ronald Inglehart (2018)	Inglehart, a political scientist, has been at the heart of discussion about cultural values for the past 50 years – both the book and this article summarise that work.
Culture, Crisis and Covid-19 – the great reset	Trompenaars and C Hampden-Turner (2021)	Management consultants A curious book which doesn’t seem to rest on any analytical base. Strong on opinion – and starts with a strange assertion that private enterprise knows best; strange because Asian governments did best in the Covid Crisis.

 

What is Culture?

Culture is a confusing term – covering both artistic pursuits and a set of societal values. A culture is what we grow up in – it’s our parents’ values and the class they inhabited. It’s the generation into which we were born - which will always reject some parental values. So nothing is static; we can move into a different class and many have; although it has become increasingly difficult to do - as Fiona Hill’s memoir superbly recounts 

I started this series of posts with a list of texts which, I now realise. were essentially academic if not technocratic. Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance made me appreciate the insights from books which appeal to the general reader of whom academics are far too dismissive.

So the new list of some 30 books covers all genres – cultural historians like Peter Gay, intellectual historians such as Daniel T Rodgers, popularisers such as Richard Lewis and Erin Meyer as well as the more technocratic political scientists, social psychologists and anthropologists

The early works mentioned in the last post were intuitive and impressionistic. Survey work was one of the strengths of the Frankfurt School which showed the face of Nazism after the war – Almond and Verba‘s “The Civic Culture” (1963) paved the path for systematic comparative work. Big data has transformed the field in the last 3 decades. Wiarda gives us a nice conclusion - 

I have been thinking about this matter of culture, really political culture, for some time. Here are my conclusions—so far!

1. Culture is one of the three great explanations in the social sciences, the others being structuralism (by which is usually meant class analysis) and institutionalism in its several forms.

2. Some analysts (Weber and Landes interpretively; Inglehart empirically) see culture as the most important explanatory factor. That may yet prove to be correct, though it is still not proven.

3. Social structure and class analysis are especially important in the Middle East or Latin America; structuralism, in its broader sense, meaning trade preferences and favored access to US markets, was especially important in explaining Japan’s, Taiwan’s, and South Korea’s economic take-offs in the last half of the twentieth century.

4. I see culture, along with geography and resources, as a key variable initially in explaining why some countries and areas forged ahead (Northwest Europe, North America, and eventually East Asia) while others (Latin America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East) lagged behind.

5. At this early stage, institutions are less important. Remember Bolivia: beautiful laws and constitutions but very little democracy. As countries develop, getting their institutions and policies right becomes more important.

6. But even as institutions acquire greater importance, culture remains an important variable. Witness the ongoing differences between Southern Europe (clientelistic, patronage dominated, and high corruption) and more efficient, rationalized Northern Europe.

7. Political-cultural explanations often have a number of weaknesses: vagueness, imprecision, stereotyping, and lack of clear definition or methodology. They also tend to ignore both class/structural factors and outside, international, or globalization factors.

8. But political culture also has its strengths. It gets you at first causes, the essence of things, the basics. And in Almond and Verba’s or Inglehart’s work, it gets you closer to an empirical, scientific explanation.

9. Studying political culture is both hard work and fun to do. It enables you to travel, go abroad, and learn about other countries and cultures.

10. While political culture is important, it is not, in my view, the only explanation. Other factors, as above, are also important. So political culture should not be reified or elevated into an exclusive or single-causal explanation. Political culture explains a lot but not everything. My own preference is for a more complex, multi-causal explanation. Culture should thus be used in combination with other explanations: geography, social structure, resources, and institutions. These factors can now best be weighed and evaluated through correlations and multi-variate analysis. Such analysis can give us the explanatory weight of each factor or variable.

11. At the same time, we must recognize that cultures do change. They are not deterministic or fixed for all time. They adjust, adapt, get altered, even undergo at times revolutionary transformations. Societies change; modernization and globalization go forward; and culture change both drives and is a product of these other changes. After all, culture is mainly a human and a societal construct; it has not yet been proven that it is genetic, inherited, and organic. As cultures change, so also will societies and political systems.

12. These are my views on political culture from a macro level. That is, from the point of view of the overall importance of political culture as an independent variable and its relations to other variables.

Wiarda 

My list of 30 books has been chronological - and this next one covers the decade from 1995 

Book Title	Takeaway
Value Change in Global Perspective P Abramson and R Inglehart (1995)	One of Inglehart’s early books – after the marker he put down in his 1988 article The renaissance of political culture
When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard D Lewis (1996) The diagram is from his book	Lewis is a linguist who has made cross-cultural management his field. The book which introduced most of us to the subject – and gave us marvellous if somewhat superficial/untheorized vignettes of the strange habits of almost all countries of the world
Culture matters – essays in honour of Aaron Wildavsky (1997)	“Grid-Group” theory was developed by another anthropologist, Mary Douglas and basically suggests that we all identify with one of 4-5 “worldviews” or collection of values which are almost ideological The approach is best summarised here
Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997)	the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s mantle teams up with a Brit – it’s pretty good introduction to the field which lays a lot of emphasis on how different cultures deal with dilemmas.
Culture Matters – how culture shapes social progress; ed L Harrison and S Huntington (2000)	For my money, this is one of the most interesting books – although some of the authors are no longer considered to be politically correct. But at least the authors feel free to express what they think!
Schnitzler’s Century – the making of middle class culture 1815-1914 Peter Gay 2002	Political culture is an analysis of social values  This is the remarkable biography of a class.
The Geography of Thought – how westerners and Asians think differently and why; Richard Nesbitt (2003)	An American social psychologist offers a thought-provoking book which seems a bit excessive in its argument that different continents have a different thought process
Developing Cultures - Essays on Cultural Change Lawrence Harrison and Jerome Kagan (2006)	A collection of essays by various authors which explores the role and influence of parenting and educational practices in various parts of the world – but pretty schematic
The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture and save it from itself; Lawrence Harrison (2006)	A book which both supports the idea that political cultures are distinctive but argues that they are capable of change
Adventures in Research vol 2 Howard Wiarda 2006	A delightful-looking text which has elements of a travelogue as Wiarda recounts his stays in so many countries