Warning: this post is even more essayistic than most. A lot of speculation as I drunkenly weave through a variety of topics and musings.

The previous posts on disparate economies have tried to consider how economies of status, love/sex, and fame are structured.  What is the “good” or “goods” that such markets make available, and what are the terms under which those goods are acquired, competed for, and exchanged.  Finally, what power enforces the structures and the norms that keep a market from being an anarchic free-for-all.  Markets (or specific economies among the multiple economies that exist—hence my overall heading “disparate economies”) are institutions, by which I mean they a) have discernible organizational shape, along with legitimated and non-legitimated practices by human agents within them; b) are not the product of any individual actor or even a small cadre of actors but are socially produced over a fairly long span of time; and c) change only through collective action (sometimes explicit as in the case of new laws, but much more often implicitly as practices and norms shift almost imperceptibly through the repetitions of use.)  Institutions exist on a different scale than individual actors—or even collective actors.  A sports team exists within the larger container of the institution that is the sport itself, just as a business corporation exists within the market in which it strives to compete.

It is a well recognized fact that power is among the goods that human compete for.  In one sense, this fact is very odd.  Here is one of Hobbes’ many reflections on power:

The signs by which we know our own power are those actions which proceed from the same; and the signs by which other men know it, are such actions, gesture, countenance and speech, as usually such powers produce: and the acknowledgment of power is called Honour; and to honour a man (inwardly in the mind) is to conceive or acknowledge, that that man hath the odds or excess of power above him that contendeth or compareth himself . . . and according to the signs of honour and dishonour, so we estimate and make the value or Worth of a man. (1969 [1640], 34–35) The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. London: Frank Cass and Co.

Hobbes, sensibly it would seem, focuses on what power can “produce.”  For him, power is a means not an end.  Power is capacity.  We know someone is powerful when he is able to produce the ends toward which he aims.  This is power to, the possession of the resources and capabilities required for successful action.  Such power, Hobbes goes on to say, also produces, as a by-product, “honor.”  The powerful man is esteemed by others; in fact, Hobbes states, power is the ultimate measure by which we determine a person’s “value or worth.”  Since, presumably, we want others to esteem us and to think of us as worth something, as having value, it makes sense that we would seek power not only because it yields the satisfaction of accomplishing our aims, but also because it gains us the respect of our peers.

Still, power is instrumental here; it is valuable for what it enables one to get.  There is no sense of power as an end-in-itself.  In that respect, power is like money.  Human perversity is such that something (money or power) which has no intrinsic value of its own, but is only a means toward something else that is of intrinsic value, nonetheless becomes the object of one’s desires.  Power, like money, is stored capacity—and, like money, one can devote oneself to increasing one’s store.  Yes, spending power, like spending money, has its own pleasures, but there is an independent urge, an independent compulsion, to increase one’s holdings.  And that urge can become a dominant, even over-riding, compulsion.

Of course, money and power can be converted into one another. Still, the insanities of current-day American plutocracy illustrate that the conversion is not easy or straight-forward.  Think of the Koch brothers (or any other number of megalomaniac billionaires).  The Kochs think their money should allow them to dictate public policy.  Why, as Gary Will asked many years ago, are these rich people so angry?  Why are they so convinced that their country is in terribly bad shape—when they have done and are doing extremely well?  They don’t lack money, but they believe their will is being thwarted. Their money has been able to buy them power—but not the kind of absolute power they aspire to.  They meet obstacles at every turn, obstacles they can only partially overcome.  And from all appearances, it seems to drive them crazy.  They want to be able to dictate to the nation in the same way they can dictate to their employees.  The thrill of being able to say “you’re fired.” Donald Trump on The Apprentice. Apparently, just the thrill of watching some one else exercise that absolute power is a turn-on for lots of people.

Which reminds us that power is not only capacity, power to, but also domination, power over.  Returning to the issue of “an economy,” in this matter of power, the competition is over the resources necessary to possess power.  On the one hand, power to depends on assembling enough resources (time, money, health, opportunity, freedom) to set one’s own goals and accomplish them.  On the other hand, among the resources one can require, especially for complex enterprises, is the cooperation of others.  One person alone cannot accomplish many of the things humans find worth aiming for.  How to ensure the contributions of others to one’s projects?  Being the person who controls the flow of resources to those people is one solution.  Help me—or you won’t be given the necessities for pursuing your own projects.  Hegel famously reduces this dynamic to its most fundamental terms.  Your project is to live—and unless you do my bidding, you will not be given the means to live.  The calculus of power over, of mastery over another human being, is based on life being valued—and thus serving as the basic unit of exchange—in struggles for mastery.

I have in my previous posts on these different economies attempted to specify the norms (or rules in more formal economies) that structure competition and exchange in each case.  And I have tried to indicate the power(s) that enforce those norms/rules.  Thus in the sex/love market there is an ideal of reciprocity; the partners to an exchange freely and willingly give to each other.  Where that norm is violated (most frequently in male coercion of women) family and/or the state will, in some cases, intervene.  The deck is stacked against women because family and state intervention is imperfect and intermittent.  But there are still some mechanisms of enforcement, even if they are not terribly effective, just as there are recognized ideal norms even if they are frequently violated.  Similarly, the billionaire may have gained his wealth through shady means, but he has still operated in a structured market where violation of the rules can lead to prison (even if it seldom does).  Outright theft, just like rape in the sex/love market, is generally deemed a crime.

How to translate these considerations over into the competition for power? It would seem that slavery is the equivalent of rape and theft—something now universally condemned as beyond the pale.  But it seems significant to me that the condemnation of slavery is not even 200 years old—while slavery as a practice persists.  Of course, rape and theft persist as well.  And I guess we could say that minimum wage laws and various labor protecting regulations/statutes also aim at limiting the kinds of resource withholding that allows one to gain power over another.  So there is some attempt to avoid a Hobbesian war of all against all, with no holds barred.  Still, within any economy that enables—and mostly allows—large inequalities, the ability of some to leverage those avenues to inequality into power over others will go mostly unchecked. 

Where there is no structure and no norms, the result appears to be endless violence.  From Plato on, the insecurity of tyrants has been often noted.  Power might be accumulated as a means to warding off the threat that others will gain the upper hand.  In this free-for-all, no one is to be trusted.  Hence the endless civil wars in ancient Rome and late medieval England (as documented in Shakespeare’s plays among other places), along with the murders of one’s political rivals—and erstwhile allies.  From Stalin’s murderous paranoia to Mafia killings, we have ample evidence that struggles for power/dominance are very, very hard to bring to closure.  Competition simply breeds more competition—and the establishment of some kind of modus vivendi among the contenders that allows them to live is elusive.  Power does seem, at least to the most extreme competitors in this contest, a zero sum game.  If my rival has any power at all, he is a threat. 

In his life of Mark Antony, Plutarch has this to say of Julius Caesar:  “The real motive which drove him to make war upon mankind, just as it had urged Alexander and Cyrus before him, was an insatiable love of power and an insane desire to be the first and greatest man in the world” (Makers of Rome, Penguin Classics, 1965: p. 277.)  There’s a reason we think of men like Caesar—or like some of today’s billionaires—as megalomaniacs.  They harbor an “insane desire” for preeminence over all other humans. If power equals preeminence, then, in their case, it is an end-in-itself.  They desire that all bow before them—which is what power over entails.  There is still the suspicion, however, that power is the means to the “honor” of being deemed “the first and greatest man in the world.”  And there is certainly no doubt in Plutarch’s mind, as there was no doubt in Hegel’s, that killing others is a requirement for gaining such power.  Only a man who “makes war upon mankind” can ascend to that kind of preeminence.

For Nietzsche, of course, the desire for power is primary.  But even in his case, it’s not clear if power is an end or merely a means.  What is insufferable to Nietzsche is submission.  Life is a struggle among beings who each strive to make others submit to them.  It would seem that “autonomy” is the ultimate good in Nietzsche, the ability to be complete master over one’s own fate.  That’s what power means: having utter control over one’s self.  Except . . .  everything is always contradictory in Nietzsche.  At times he doesn’t even believe there is a self to gain mastery over.  And there is his insistence that one must submit completely to powers external to the self; amor fati is the difficult attitude one should strive to cultivate.  We are, he seems to say, ultimately powerless in the face of larger, nonhuman forces, that dwarf us. In short, I don’t think Nietzsche is very helpful in thinking about power.  His descriptions of it and of the things that threaten it are just too contradictory.

Machiavelli is, I think, a better guide.  His work returns us to the issue of security.  When I teach Machiavelli, I always have some students who say he is absolutely right: it’s a dog eat dog world.  Arm yourself against the inevitable aggression of the other or you will be easily and ignominously defeated.  I think this is a very prevalent belief system out there in the world—usually attached to a certain brand of right wing politics.  To ventriloquize this position: It is naïve to expect cooperation or good will from others, especially from others not part of your tribe.  They are out to get you—and you must arm yourself for self-protection (if nothing else).  Your good intentions or behavior is worth nothing because there are bad actors out there.  It is inevitable that you will have to fight to defend what is yours against these predators.  

This right wing attitude often goes hand-in-hand with a deeply felt acknowledgement that war is hell, the most horrible thing known.  But it’s sentimental and weak to think that war can be avoided.  It is necessary—and the clear-eyed, manly thing is to face that necessity squarely.  Trying to sidestep that necessity, to come to accommodations that avoid it (appeasement!) are just liberal self-delusions, the liberal inability to believe in the existence of evil.  Power in this case is the only surety in an insecure world—and even power will still get involved in the tragedy of war, where the costs will be borne by one’s own side as well as by the evil persons one is trying to subdue.  Power cannot fully insulate you from harm. (I think John McCain embodied this view–along with the notions of warrior honor that often accompany it.)

It is a testament to the human desire (need? compulsion?) to structure our economies, our competitions, that there are also “rules” of war.  On the extreme right wing, there is utter contempt for that effort.  There are no rules for a knife fight, as we learn in Butch Cassidy.  It’s silly to attempt to establish rules of war—and crazy to abide by them since it only hands an advantage to your adversary. And certainly it is odd, on the face of things, to try to establish what counts as legitimate killing as contrasted to illegitimate killing when the enterprise is to kill so many people that your adversary can no longer fight against you, no longer having the human resources required to continue the fight. 

I don’t know what to think about this.  Except to say that the specter of completely unstructured competitions scares humans enough that they will attempt to establish rules of engagement even as they are involved in a struggle to the death.  But I guess this fact also makes clear how indispensable, how built in as a fundamental psychological/social fact, morality has become for humans.  On very tricky and speculative grounds here.  But it seems to me that any effort to distinguish between murder and non-murder means that some kind of system of morality is in play.  Murder will be punished, whereas non-murder will be deemed acceptable.  The most basic case, of course, is that soldiers are not deemed guilty of murder.  The killing they do falls into a different category.  What I am saying is that once you take the same basic action—killing someone—and begin to sort it into different categories, you have a moral system.  The rules of war offer one instance of the proliferation of such categories as moral systems get refined; differentiations between degrees of murder, manslaughter, self-defense and the like offer another example of such refinements.  My suspicion (although I don’t have all the evidence that would be required to justify the universal claim I am about to make) is that every society makes some distinction between murder (unsanctioned and punished) and non-murder (cases where killing is seen as justified and, then, non-punishable.)  At its most rudimentary, I suspect that distinction follows in-group and out-of-group lines.  That is, killing outsiders, especially in states of war, is not murder, whereas killing insiders often is.  The idea of a distinction between combatants and non-combatants comes along much later.

Similarly, worrying about “just” versus “unjust” wars also comes much later.  Morality is no slouch when it comes to generating endless complications.

I may seem to have wandered far from the issue of an economy in which the good that is competed for is power.  But not really.  War is the inevitable end game of struggles for power if Hegel is right to say that life is the ultimate stake in the effort to gain mastery over others.  If the economy of power is utterly anarchic, is not structured by any rules, then conquest is its only possible conclusion.  It is the ultimate zero-sum game.  The introduction of rules is an attempt to avoid that harsh zero-sum logic.  Putin out to conquer the Ukraine and Netanyahu out to destroy Hamas are zero-sum logics in action.  As is the Greek practice of killing all the male inhabitants of a conquered city while taking the women off into slavery.  The rules—like negotiated peace deals—try to leave both parties to the conflict some life, to avoid its being a fight to the total destruction of one party. 

The alternative (dare I say “liberal”) model is the attempt to distribute power (understood as the capacity to do things that one has chosen for oneself as worth doing) widely.  This is not just an ideology of individual liberty, of equal worth and its right to self-determination free from the domination of others.  It is also about checks and balances, on the theory that power is only checked by other powers—and that all outsized accumulations of power lead to various abuses.  Various mechanisms (not the least of which is a constitution, but also some version of a “separation of powers”) are put in place to prevent power being gathered into one or into a small number of hands.  The problem, of course, in current day America is that there are not parallel mechanisms to prevent the accumulation of wealth into a few hands—and there are no safeguards against using that wealth to gain power in other domains, including the political one.  That’s why we live in a plutocracy.  Our safeguards against accumulations of power are not capable of effectively counteracting the kinds of accumulation that are taking place in real time.

Recently, on the Crooked Timber blog, Kevin Munger offers this nugget (it appears to be a quote from somewhere, not Munger’s own formulation.  But he does not offer a source for it.)

“There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.”

On this pessimistic reading, power, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Any situation in which authority/power is dispersed (as it is in the ideal liberal polity) will be experienced as unstable, unsettling, and chaotic.  The desire for order will triumph over the liberties and capacities for self-determination that the “overthrow of authority” enables.  Authoritarianism, the concentration (centralization) of power into a few hands, will rise again. Liberalism is always only a temporary stop-gap between authoritarian regimes. Humans, in this pessimistic scenario, simply prefer the certainties of domination to the fluidity (“drifts and doubts”) generated by less hierarchical social orders.  Just keep your head down and let those insane for power fight it out among themselves, hoping they will mostly leave you alone and let you focus on the struggles of your not-very-capaciously resourced life. 

Unfair as a characterization of a certain form of political quietism that skews rightward?  I don’t know.  But many people are content to not strive terribly hard for riches, power, or fame—and think their moderation of desire is the only sensible way to live.  They just want to be left in peace to make of life what they can with the extremely modest resources available to them.  Here we see yet another great divide in current-day American politics.  (It is hardly the only divide and not, I think, among even the three most important divides between left and right in our time.  But it still exists.) Namely, the idea that it is authoritarian government that will give them the peace they desire, get government off their backs, and curb the chaos of social mores that they feel threatens their children.  Liberal permissiveness, along with the liberal coddling of the unworthy, is the real danger to the country and to their “values”—and a healthy dose of authority is just the remedy we need.