Confronting New Forms of Power

All political theory is concerned with the conundrum of power. Two questions can be asked with regard to power. First, how does it function? Borrowing an old definition, we can say that power is the ability of individual A to make individual B do something that B would not otherwise have done. It turns out, on closer inspection, that this process is anything but straightforward and that there are all sorts of strange and unexpected ways in which individuals exercise power over others. This first question —the "how" of power—is the one Foucault is most interested in.

The second question is asked most frequently in traditional treatments of political theory such as those provided by Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Rawls, Habermas, and others: What makes the functioning of power legitimate or acceptable? What (good) reasons convince us to accept this or that operation of power? Parents discipline children and see to it that they are educated. Good reasons can be adduced that legitimate such exercises of power—which is not to say that these good reasons cannot be called into question or their specific applications criticized.

Once justifications for the exercise of power are shown to exist, we see the simultaneous emergence of rational restrictions on power. If power is justified because it gets us on our way to widely desired goals, then power is unjustified when it is exercised without regard to those goals. For instance, a range of coercive measures is available to parents so that they may redirect the behavior of children in ways that, it is argued, benefit them. But punishment meted out not for the good it does but only to satisfy the parent's desire for raw and unrestricted exercises of power is not justified. It is "illegitimate" and can be rationally and justifiably opposed.

Consider now the same phenomenon first in relation to government and then in the context of what is often called civil society. Both Hobbes and Locke imagine a "state of nature" where formal governmental powers do not yet exist. They then ask what reasons individuals might have for exiting this state of nature. Both conclude that individuals in the state of nature will agree to establish governments to protect their interests in preserving their lives and property. The power thus conferred is legitimate for two reasons: it results from the common agreement of the members of society, and its purpose is to protect the interests of the members of society.

In the traditional liberal model, power's origins and goals are publicly acknowledged and understood. The way in which exercises of power might be unacceptable are equally clear. Power that does not have its origins in the consent of the governed or that violates the purposes for which it was erected is illegitimate.

Of course, many have found this classic liberal account of political power to be incomplete at best. John Stuart Mill is perhaps the best-known theorist—but by no means the only one—who worried about the kinds of power exercised informally by society over its members. Mill believed it would be unfortunate if unpopular opinions were restricted by law, but even when the law respected minority and individual views, one had to be concerned about the harmful effect of public opinion on free thought. In democracies, majorities made up the ruling class. The potentially tyrannous effects of majority rule could, in fact, be more easily curbed by statutory or constitutional fiat than throughout society as a whole. Government action could be effectively restrained through a conscious effort to undermine its efficiency. This restraint is part of the purpose of constitutions and the American "division of powers" concept of governance. Something like the American Bill of Rights could also be used to restrict government's fields of action with regard to private individuals and groups. But there is no way to legislate against popular disapproval of minority viewpoints and lifestyles and ostracism or discrimination as weapons against nonconformity. In this area of culture and lifestyle, then, there existed a kind of power that was not subject to legislative restrictions.

We need to notice the opposing assumptions and effects of the two kinds of power reviewed above—governmental and societal. In the social contract tradition, individuals are aware of themselves as individuals with rights and property to defend. They know why they are entering into a contract with others. The aims of the political association they agree to form are publicly acknowledged. If goals other than those agreed to are pursued by the newly created governmental power, the social contract is breached. We have, then, a group of individuals with clearly perceived interests who wish to enter into an association with one another for obvious reasons so as to achieve the equally obvious goals of security and peace. Power's origins and purposes are pellucidly clear.

But no one "agrees" to the functioning of nongovernmental social powers. Indeed, the interests and rights of the individual are not at all the standard by which this form of power regulates itself. The particular danger associated with this form of power is that it in part shapes the subjective states of the individuals it affects. One of democracy's insidious effects is its tendency to reduce large numbers of individuals to the same intellectual level. Under the "old regime" an elite class — such as the nobility or the monarch and his or her court — set the cultural standard for taste and intellectual and artistic achievement. In a democracy, the ruling class still sets the standard, but it is no longer a minority elite with high standards but a common majority class with moderate or low standards. It was this kind of power—one that can decisively influence the subjective self-assessment of the individuals it affects—that Mill (Tocqueville can also be mentioned here) wanted to make us conscious of and therefore capable of resisting.

In classic liberal theory, then, there is a consciousness of the kinds of power that escape the original formulations of power by Locke and Hobbes. What was lacking in Mill's argument, however, was a discussion of how these two forms of power—nonformal social control and state power—-supported and interacted with each other. This deficiency was made up by members of the Frankfurt School, who argued that through both a kind of widespread bribery and an active suppression of oppositional ideological elements, potentially rebellious factors in Western societies were robbed of the capacity to resist what was in fact an...