Customer Reviews

Power

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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Bertrand Russell's Power is very ambitious in scope. Support for his thesis that the taming of power should be of chief concern to thinking people (his favorite audience in the three Russell books I've read) includes support from references to ancient China, medieval Europe, Machiavelli, the American businessman, the rise of the Catholic Church, American reverence for the Constitution, causes of the Protestant Reformation, ancient Greece and Rome and their governments, and more. As is to be expected of Lord Russell, his writing is an edifying, entertaining glimpse into the mind of a genius.

Russell's descriptions of the motivations behind power seeking individuals and organizations, the appeal of leaders, types of power and the basis for authority are compelling. The means for acquiring and exercising power are described by Russell in a systematic, conspiratorial manner. By understanding its appeal and the methods by which it is attained, Russell argues, mankind can hope to tame power. I felt that in this book Russell sought to deliver a "world-view" a la Karl Marx, whose communist ideas were based on the belief that the source of conflict in the world was man's alienation. With a twist, Russell might say that man's (and man's organizations, which he grants develop an organic life of their own) grasping for power is the chief cause of pain, stifled freedom, and stunted progress.

It's important to keep in mind that this book was first published in 1938 - though it's not hard to do while reading since Russell continuously warns of an impending great war. He refers to WWI as the "War" and an imminent WWII as the "Great War." I think, perhaps, the great motivation for writing it may have been to explain the rise of despotic and totalitarian governments during the era preceding its publication. A defining quote is:

"No other organization rouses anything like the loyalty aroused by the national State. And the chief activity of the State is preparation for large-scale homicide. It is loyalty to this organization for death that causes men to endure the totalitarian State, and to risk the destruction of home and children and our whole civilization rather than submit to alien rule."

Russell is my favorite philosopher and I'm planning to read many more of his books. I strongly recommend his History of Western Philosophy and The Conquest of Happiness. Russell wrote so many books on such a wide variety of subjects. My qualms with Power are its over ambitious reach, the frenetic pace of the writing and Russell's disdain for business and economics. Enjoy!

Russell intended this book to found a new science, of human power, in the societal sense. Power meaning 'the production of intended effects'.

Although this book is well worth reading, five stars for breadth of content, there are innumerable difficulties; which I'll try to sketch out... starting from the chapter headings -

I THE IMPULSE TO POWER/ II LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS
These chapters try to synthesis practical needs (e.g. houses have to be built somewhere) with giving and taking orders. 'Some men's characters lead them always to command, others always to obey; between these extremes lie the mass of average human beings..' He regards people as being influenceable in three ways - direct force, economic effects - goodies vs fines - and beliefs. He goes on to look at variations on these themes...

III THE FORMS OF POWER/ IV PRIESTLY POWER/ V KINGLY POWER/ VI NAKED POWER/ VII REVOLUTIONARY POWER/ VIII ECONOMIC POWER/ IX POWER OVER OPINION
Russell identifies 'power' as a central concept, like energy in physics, presumably derived in the same way by slowly noticing phenomena have things in common. Quite often he uses metaphors evidently based on things like kinetic energy, or stored energy. It's never quite clear whether his examples are idiosyncratic, one-off, unrepeatable illustrations which are only used e.g. to show power coalescing into ever-larger units, or whether the processes they illustrate are in principle considered to be capable of recurring. For instance, he says at one point that given a totalitarian state, all the forms of power he's considered become outdated and only of historical interest. He says somewhere else China has 'always been an exception to all rules'.

His category of 'revolutionary power' was no doubt influenced by the USSR. He includes early Christianity, the Reformation and 'rights of man' revolution, I hope not too optimistically. This category incidentally also shows Russell assumes things will evolve for the better - his whole book shows developments as tending to be beneficial. Thus he says e.g. 'Monarchy consequently remained weak until it had got the better of both the Church and the feudal [i.e. Germanic] nobility'. Russell is weak on the actual physics of the world: he doesn't consider e.g. Europe as subdivided by mountains and other obstacles, and thus packed with 'defensible space', as opposed to say the steppes of Russia or prairies of north America. He is in my view weak on economic power; he regards credit as the ability to transfer a consumable surplus from group A to group B, but doesn't mention the time element - which could be centuries. Incidentally he talks about 'coloured labour': 'Let us consider.. the power of the plutocracy in a democratic country. It has been unable to introduce Asiatic labour in California, except in early days in small numbers...' For some reason, he splits 'power over opinion' from creeds. It's worth noticing this is a Christian outlook, as many 'creeds' are not of a nature that can be separated from actions - Judaism, Islam, Confucianism interlock with their followers' habits.

X CREEDS AS SOURCES OF POWER/ XI THE BIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS/ XII POWERS AND FORMS OF GOVERNMENT/ XIII ORGANIZATIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Russell considers 'The classic example of power through fanaticism is the rise of Islam' which added nothing to Arabic economic power or technique, but nevertheless 'won'. It's a typical example from history taken from these not very satisfactory chapters. Russell was trying to decide whether fanaticism is likely to succeed, and come up with the classic liberal denial of this possibility: 'the cases in which fanaticism has brought nothing but disaster are much more numerous than those in which it has brought even temporary success. It ruined Jerusalem in the time of Titus, and Constantinople in 1453 ... It brought about the decay of Spain.. through the expulsion of the Jews and Moors ... the most successful nations, throughout modern times, have been those least addicted to the persecution of heretics. ... it is necessary to find a compromise between two opposite truisms. The first.. is: men who agree in their beliefs can co-operate more whole-heartedly than men who disagree. The second is: men whose beliefs are in accordance with fact are more likely to succeed than men whose beliefs are mistaken. ..'

On organisations, Russell regards law and medicine purely as professions with internal rules, but is not aware of the possibilities of legal frauds and corruption and medical frauds. In Britain in the 1930s, they were unthinkable, or at least unspeakable.

XIV COMPETITION/ XV POWER AND MORAL CODES/ XVI POWER PHILOSOPHIES/ XVII THE ETHICS OF POWER
Four more chapters dealing with (roughly) peoples' attitudes to power. 'Competition for power is of two sorts: between organizations, and between individuals for leadership within an organization. Competition .. only arises when they have objects which are more or less similar, but incompatible'.

Much of this material is 1930s-specific: Spanish Civil War, Stalin, Italy, and so on. Russell always takes the conventional 'western' side, which sits uneasily with philosophical objectivity. Thus there's a section on Mussolini fire-bombing in Abyssinia (but not on the British bombing Iraq at the same time). His comments are Jews are completely convention (and yet he has seen for himself Jewsih groups taking over and inventing the USSR). Hitler and Stalin are regarded as worshipping Wotan and Dialectical Materialism (in this way Russell is spared the examination of their actual deeds). 'It would be a mistake to suppose that big business, under Fascism, controls the State more than it does in England, France, or America. On the contrary, in Italy and Germany the State has used the fear of Communism to make itself supreme over big business as over everything else.' He loathes the German philosopher Fichte, and yet many British 'thinkers' had essentially similar ideas.

XVIII THE TAMING OF POWER
Russell has four preconditions - political, economic, and propaganda (shouldn't one of these be force?); and the psychological condition of people.

Russell had some mathematical skill, so it surprises me he didn't to find try some method of predicting quarrels and perhaps countering them. If group A has power measures as 100 units, and B has 75, and if A fights B, the relative and absolute power balances are likely to change. There's scope for group C to benefit, too. The great advantage of history as a guide is that the events did actually happen - if it's reliable history. Nobody uses a theoretical model of human behaviour to guess.

NB a new edition has a painfully embarrassing cover design - with an electric power plug!

All I have read by Bertrand Russell is wonderful and this is no exception. Although written years ago seem up-to-date and Powerful (pun) and his views on how powers were being considlated was on the mark in my opinion. Not since THE PRINCE have I read anything that even comes close to explaining everything I wanted to know about POWER. HarOLD

Power: A New Social Analysis is a work in social philosophy written by Bertrand Russell. Power, for Russell, is one's ability to achieve goals. In particular, Russell has in mind social power, that is, power over people

Throughout the work, Russell's ambition is to develop a new method of conceiving the social sciences as a whole. For him, all topics in the social sciences are merely examinations of the different forms of power --chiefly the economic, military, cultural, and civil forms (Russell 1938:4). Eventually, he hoped that social science would be robust enough to capture the laws of social dynamics, which would describe how and when one form of power changes into another. (Russell 1938:4-6) As a secondary goal of the work, Russell is at pains to reject single-cause accounts of social power, such as the economic determinism he attributes to Karl Marx. (Russell 1938:4, 95)

Good book.

I feel this book has too much vague history, e.g. in the village there was autocracy/democracy/fill in the blank. I agree with his thesis that power is a fundamental quantity that should be studied, like energy in physics, and that it's better to talk about desire for power than just economic power or political power. I also liked how he says that religious leaders are not really power abdicating unless we don't know about them; if I make a point of starting to spread my creed then I'm really not someone who wants to retire from the world. Kind of like how if you make a donation in your name, then it's partly inspired by love of respect. Followers follow a leader because they feel it's the best way to get a share of power. Devolution of government is a good way to solve problems whenever possible.

The following page numbers refer to the Allen & Unwin edition of the book.

p. 139: "If, in the name of Reason, you summon a man to alter his fundamental purposes- to pursue, say, the general happiness rather than his own power- you will fail, and you will deserve to fail, since Reason alone cannot determine the ends of life."
p. 299: "The temper required to make a success of democracy is, in the practical life, exactly what the scientific temper is in the intellectual life. Truth, it holds, is neither completely attainable nor completely unattainable; it is attainable in a certain degree, and that only with difficulty."
p. 300: "Expose children to the most vehement and eloquent advocates on all sides of every question, past and present! Then have the children summarize the arguments used. This will gently show that eloquence is inversely proportional to solid reason. Learn from advertisers, who have led the way in the technique of producing irrational belief. Education should counteract this natural credulity, the habit of believing an emphatic statement without reasons, and of disbelieving an unemphatic statement even when accompanied by the best of reasons. Give them sweets, one with awesome ads and one with scientific data; or vacations, etc. Warn them that all of them, unless they are very carefull to cultivate a balanced and cautious judgement, may fall overnight into a similar madness at the first touch of government incitement to terror and bloodlust."
p. 302: "Through music or poetry, history or science, beauty and pain, the really valuable things in human life are individual, not such things as happen on a battlefield or in the clash of politics. Community life is necessary, but as a mechanism not as something to be valued on its own account. This is analogous to what all the great religious leaders have spoken of. We all reach our best in different ways, and the emotional unity of a crowd can only be achieved on a lower level."

As always, Russell shines with his clarity and unwavering good sense, but most of the book is pretty dry. The last chapter is by far the most interesting (in which he describes how to tame power) and some of his suggestions are novel even for today. I thoroughly enjoyed the last chapter but it couldn't make up for the many chapters of tiring text before it.