Showing papers by "Mark Haugaard published in 2017"

What is authority

Abstract: This article theorizes authority from sociological and normative perspectives. It opens with the work of Weber, Arendt and Raz. This is followed by a sociological analysis of authority as a capacity for action, power-to and power-over, which are linked to felicitous performative action within epistemic interpretative horizons. Normatively, it confronts the anarchist challenge that authority is inimical to freedom by distinguishing between dispositional and episodic power. Bureaucratic and political power-over authority is theorized as normatively defensible when it confers dispositional power-to. This article concludes by discussing the mismatch between sociological authority, as a social fact, and normatively desirable authority: how the practices of charismatic, bureaucratic and democratic authority are often normatively problematic.

A conversation on power and republicanism: an exchange between Mark Haugaard and Philip Pettit

Abstract: In this exchange Haugaard and Pettit begin by discussing power and agency. They agree that while many inequalities are linked to deliberate agency, a significant number of inequalities comprise structural effects that are the unintended effect of social action. These are of normative concern: to prevent arbitrary domination and create a society in which everyone can pass the eyeball test. Some of these structures are naturalized, or reified, which often makes them appear less contestable. This includes private property, which is presented as part of the natural order of things, thereby often naturalizing domination. From these beginnings, the authors discuss the nature of the eye-ball and tough-luck tests, including: how they apply to culture, parent–child power, gender, and economic inequalities.

Power-to, power-over, resistance and domination: an editorial

Abstract: This issue of the Journal of Political Power opens with a sophisticated article, by Francesco Battegazzorre, on the relationship between power-to and power-over. This article is framed against an exchange that took place in this journal between Peter Morriss and Pamela Pansardi (Morriss 2012, Pansardi 2012a, 2012b). Under the influence of Weber’s conflict-based definition of power or Macht, which was conceptualized in terms of one actor overcoming the resistance of another (Weber 1978, p. 53), in the power literature there has been a tendency to emphasize power-over at the expense of power-to. Morris and Pansardi both redress this imbalance by pointing out that power-over presupposes power-to, in the sense that power-over is premised upon agency, the capacity for action, hence power-to. However, this perception raises issues whether, in fact, power-to is the primary form of power, and/or to what extent the two aspects of power are coterminous. This is a complex conceptual issue, to which Battegazzore adds significant nuance by exploring the extent to which the two phenomena coincide relative to a host of combinations of unilateral, bilateral and top-down asymmetric relationships. Power-over is not only in a complex relationship with power-to but is also directly related to power as a constitutive force. Building upon Honneth’s work since The Struggle for Recognition (Honneth 1995), Marco Angella explores normative issues concerning the relationship between authority-based power-over and constitutive power. In particular, he explores the extent to which power-over impacts positively and negatively upon those subjected to constitutive power. Possibly the archetypal relationship of power-over leading to constitutive power is the parent-child relationship, which can either be emancipatory or dominating. For normative desirability what is key is a level of mutual reciprocity and reflexivity combined with an orientation toward freedom. In general, those exercising subjectifying power-over must be reflexively aware that they are powerful in the relationship. Simultaneously, they should direct their constitutive endeavor toward increasing autonomy, and therefore potential freedom, of those in their power. In Honneth’s work there exists a tendency to link the significance of autonomy with an implicit narrative of democratic progress, in which society becomes increasingly rational. However, as explored by Prince Osei-Wusu Adjei, Abrefa Kwaku Busia and George Bob-Milliar in their article, the underlying principles of democracy are often thwarted by modernist assumptions of progress. Weber assumed that traditional authority was an irrational – thus a regressive form of authority. This assumption has informed much of democratic theory, with the result that the institutionalisation of democracy is often tied to the dismantling of traditional authority structures. In the European experience this meant facilitating democracy by dismantling feudal structures. In contrast, in Ghana the traditional authority of chieftains constitutes a way of articulating local needs within a habitus, or tacit interpretative horizon, that resonates with the everyday social practices of that society. Since democratisation entails a form of modernisation that disarticulates political institutions from the habitus of citizens, these institutions are no longer democratic, in the deep sense of constituting an appropriate vehicle for expressing the will of the people. So, structures and institutions that in other contexts, such as Western Europe, may be democratic, once introduced into this alien cultural habitus lose their democratic credentials.

Robert A. Dahl: an unended quest

Abstract: This special issue of the journal is devoted to the work of Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) whose immensely productive scholarly career spanned more than half a century. His first book was published in ...

Power and meaning

Abstract: This volume is the tenth of the Journal of Political Power. The very first issue of this Journal opened with an article co-authored by Steven Lukes and Clarissa Hayward (2008). Similarly, this volume opens with an article co-authored by Lukes, in collaboration with David Jenkins this time, entitled ‘The power of occlusion’. Jenkins and Lukes open with the following observation: ‘To not be right is one thing, but to be told that what one says or believes is ‘not even wrong’ is an even harder pill to swallow’. This is followed by a discussion of Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams 1995), where the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the meaning of life and the universe, and replies that it is ‘42’. We, the readers, do not know the meaning of life or the universe. Yet, we do know that the answer cannot be ‘42’. That is not even wrong, it is so wrong as to be unquestionably wrong. The answer 42 has a startling effect upon the reader in much the same way that quotation from the (purported) Chinese Encyclopaedia, which Foucault quotes in the opening of the Order of Things (Foucault 1970, p. xv). It unsettles the reader, because we do not understand how it is possible to think that. The third dimension of power covers epistemic elements of domination, which includes a broad range of phenomena. Lukes and Jenkins theorize the phenomenon they are describing as category mistake, drawing from the work of Gilbert Ryle. Being influenced by Kuhn, I tend to think of this phenomenon also in terms of the paradigms that inform social life. These are not just the big scientific paradigms but, also, the paradigms of everyday life. As emphasized by Goffman (1971) and Weber (1978), in their accounts of various forms of action, all social situations entail a local interpretative horizon, which is made to count for a given situation. Who gets to decide which system of meaning counts also determines what is considered locally reasonable. In that sense, to use Jenkins and Lukes’ example, Hayek’s claim that the economy is a spontaneous order and therefore cannot include justice is an attempt to validate a paradigm that would make the welfare state appear an irrational or inappropriate social construct or a category mistake. The capacity to exclude by rendering invisible, Jenkins and Lukes refer to as the power of occlusion. Emphasizing spontaneous order is a will to power through occlusion, with the aim of making social justice invisible, and irrational. As argued by Haugaard and Pettit, in ‘A conversation on power and republicanism’, establishing the dominance of a local paradigm, or system of thought, is a complex process. Those whose interests are served by that paradigm must somehow convince the less powerful that the interpretative horizon in question represents the natural order of things. When a social norm is interpreted in this manner, social actors conclude (mistakenly) that this is the only possible description of things, and that there is a perfect correspondence between concepts and reality. They reach that conclusion, even when it is contrary to their interests to do so, and thus become compliant in their own domination, in the desire to remain rational. To accomplish this interpretative incorporation, techniques of reification are often required. Nature, science and religious belief are the most common armoury for these defensive (status quo) or offensive (in the case of social change) strategies. It is precisely in this manner that the science of economics reproduces the perception of the market as some kind of natural spontaneous order.

The vocabulary of power: a review of Power and international relations: a conceptual approach, written by David A. Baldwin

Abstract: Power and International Relations opens with an account of Robert Dahl’s theory of power, followed by an analysis of the implications of this perspective for international relations (IR). The latte...