power is dangerous essay

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The Dangers of Power

One scholar shows how you can gain more power, and why you should be leery.

July 27, 2016

Do you know how to manage your power? | Reuters/Mike Segar

If life focuses on the pursuit of happiness, work focuses on the pursuit of power. We angle for those promotions, negotiate for raises, or eye the corner office.

But success extends beyond pursuing power — we must also learn how to manage it, says Stanford GSB professor Brian Lowery .

“You have to be careful with power,” he says. “Think of it as fire. It’s useful, but it’s also dangerous.”

As part of a Stanford Executive Program course , he describes different sources of power, simple ways people can obtain more of it, and the fallbacks of mismanaging that power.

Sources of Power

Society naturally orders into hierarchy, Lowery says. Some is pre-established: We know from a business organizational chart who’s in charge. But hierarchy also develops quickly among complete strangers. How does one person in a group of strangers influence others? Lowery cites six sources of power.

Reward : We give people what they want.
Coercion : We use fear to get people to do what we want them to do.
Information : We earn power when we know something others don’t.
Legitimate : In formal legitimate power, we have power because we’re the CEO, for example, and our subordinates do what we tell them to do. For informal, consider how children have power over their parents because responsible parents must feed and take care of them.
Expert : If we are the only engineer in a new organization, for example, we wield a lot of power.
Referent : We gain power through fame, status, and charisma — people like us and want to follow us.

Reward and coercion are sometimes the least efficient, Lowery notes. Law enforcers coerce people by threatening jail, but they can only enforce that power through surveillance. That can be time-consuming and costly. And reward can backfire if goals aren’t aligned. If you offer more money to an engineer to encourage her to code faster, for example, you may get more code, but it may be worse quality. Her goal — to make more money — conflicts with your goal — to have more high-quality code.

Increasing Your Power

An easy way to increase the likelihood that people will perceive you as powerful is through dominance moves:

Look large. When someone seems large or imposing, they seem more powerful. Take up more physical space.

Gaze directly at others, especially while talking. Avoid tilting your head.
Use strong hand gestures.
Furrow your brows.
Interrupt others.
When something goes wrong, react with anger rather than sadness. Anger is seen as the more powerful emotion of the two.
Speak loudly.
Reduce interpersonal distance. Walking into someone’s personal space is considered a high-power move.
Physically connect with lower-powered people in an appropriate way. Asymmetrical contact — the CEO patting you on the back, for instance — seems friendly and inviting, as well as powerful. This doesn’t work in reverse, however.

Managing Power

Power doesn’t always have a positive effect, Lowery says.

On the one hand, the powerful feel action-oriented, are less inhibited, and have heightened senses of optimism and control. But they’re also more likely to see people as tools and lack perspective outside their own.

Quote You have to be careful with power. Think of it as fire. It’s useful, but it’s also dangerous. Attribution Brian Lowery

“When you put these together, you can get inappropriate behaviors as a function of power,” he says. The powerful might rely on their own sense of morality in a decision, but if they’re already less inhibited and more inclined to think optimistically, they can run the risk of doing something illegal or dangerous, hurt negotiations, or harm their reputations.

“What I would strongly suggest is, as your power grows, you have people to help you check your own behavior,” Lowery says. “Don’t rely on yourself as a good person to check your behavior because you could end up missing what’s going on.”

For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom .

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Power — The Dangerous Side of Power

The Dangerous Side of Power

Categories: Power

About this sample

Words: 661 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 661 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

Center for Strategic and International Studies. (n.d.). Smart power: A concept. Retrieved from https://www.csis.org/programs/smart-power-initiative/smart-power-concept
Gates, R. M. (2008). A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age. Foreign Affairs, 87(1), 154-164.
Nye, J. S. (1990). Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Basic Books.
Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Public Affairs.
Nye, J. S. (2011). The Future of Power. Public Affairs.
Nye, J. S. (2012). The future of American power. Foreign Affairs, 91(6), 2-10.
Nye, J. S. (2014). What China and Russia Don't Get About Soft Power. Politico Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/joseph-nye-what-china-and-russia-dont-get-about-soft-power-104205
Nye, J. S. (2018). The power to lead: Soft, hard, and smart. Oxford University Press.
Nye, J. S., Jr. (2009). Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power. Foreign Affairs, 88(4), 160-163.
Pells, D. (2017). Soft Power: Joseph Nye and the Utility of American Power. In W. R. Thompson & C. A. Kuklick (Eds.), Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (pp. 223-234). Stanford University Press.

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Why Power Corrupts

New research digs deeper into the social science behind why power brings out the best in some people and the worst in others

Christopher Shea

“Power tends to corrupt,” said Lord Acton, the 19th-century British historian. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” His maxim has been vividly illustrated in psychological studies, notably the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which was halted when one group of students arbitrarily assigned to serve as “prison guards” over another group began to abuse their wards.

But new scholarship is bringing fresh subtlety to psychologists’ understanding of when power leads people to take ethical shortcuts—and when it doesn’t. Indeed, for some people, power seems to bring out their best. After all, good people do win elective office, says Katherine A. DeCelles, a professor of management at the University of Toronto, and no few business executives want to do good while doing well. “When you give good people power,” DeCelles says she wondered, are they more able than others “to enact that moral identity, to do what’s right?”

In a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology , DeCelles and her co-authors found that the answer is yes. People’s sense of “moral identity”—the degree to which they thought it was important to their sense of self to be “caring,” “compassionate,” “fair,” “generous” and so on—shaped their responses to feelings of power.

DeCelles and her colleagues developed moral identity scores for two groups, 173 working adults and 102 undergraduates, by asking the participants to rate how important those ethically related attributes were to them. The researchers had some participants write an essay recalling an incident in which they felt powerful, while others wrote about an ordinary day. Then the participants took part in lab experiments to probe how they balanced self-interest against the common good.

The undergraduates were told they shared a pool of 500 points with other people, and they could take between zero and ten points for themselves. The more points they took, the better their odds of winning a $100 lottery. But if they took too many—there was no way of knowing what that tipping point was—the pot would empty and the lottery would be called off.

The participants who had just written about an ordinary day each took roughly 6.5 points, regardless of their moral-identity score. But among those who had been primed to think of themselves as powerful, the people with low moral-identity scores grabbed 7.5 points—and those with high moral-identity scores took only about 5.5.

In surveys, the last group showed a greater understanding of how their actions would affect other people, which is the crucial mechanism, DeCelles says. Power led them to take a broader, more communally centered perspective.

The experiment involving the adults found a similar relationship between moral identity, ethical behavior and innate aggressiveness. Assertive people who scored low on the moral-identity scale were more likely to say they’d cheated their employer in the past week than more passive types with similar moral-identity scores. But among those with high moral-identity scores, the assertive people were less likely to have cheated.

In sum, the study found, power doesn’t corrupt; it heightens pre-existing ethical tendencies. Which brings to mind another maxim, from Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

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How Power Corrupts the Mind

Pity the despot.

While at Columbia University, Andy J. Yap set up a simple experiment . After manipulating his subjects into powerful or weak states (in the lab, psychologists are the most powerful ones of all), Yap asked them to guess the height and weight of others both in person and from photographs.

"When people feel powerful or feel powerless, it influences their perception of others," said Yap, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. According to their understanding, w e judge the power of others relative to our own: When we feel powerful, others appear less so --and powerlessness and smallness often go together in our minds.

It is true that CEOs tend to be taller than the average person, and there are estimates that for each inch a person is above average height, they receive $789 more a year. Sure enough, in the study, the powerful people judged others to be shorter than they really are.

Yap's conclusion nicely illustrates what we've always known anecdotally: Power gets to our heads. A decade of research on power and behavior show there are some predictable ways people react to power, which can be simply defined as the ability to influence others. While power in governments and across the world can come at incredible costs, in a lab, it's surprisingly simple. Asking a person to recall a time he or she felt powerful can get them in the state of mind. There's also the aptly named "dictator game," in which a participant is made powerful by putting them charge of doling out the compensation for another participant.

Researchers have even found you can make someone feel power just by posing them in a dominant, expansive body position. Like athletes, for example: Arms outstretch , back arched . Even blind athletes have been known, upon victory, to strike the same pose . They didn't learn it by seeing anyone do it. There's something fundamental.

Power isn't corrupting; it's freeing, says Joe Magee, a power researcher and professor of management at New York University. "What power does is that it liberates the true self to emerge," he says. "More of us walk around with kinds of social norms; we work in groups that exert all pressures on us to conform. Once you get into a position of power, then you can be whoever you are."

This manifests in several different ways. For one, the powerful are seen to be less likely to take into account the perspective of others. In one experiment participants were primed to feel powerful or not, and then asked to draw the letter "e" on their foreheads. The letter can be drawn so it looks correct to others, or correct to the person drawing. In this case, high-powered people are two to three times more likely to draw an "e" that appears backwards to others. That is, they were more likely to draw a letter that could only be read by themselves.

Power lends the power holder many benefits. Powerful people are more likely to take decisive action. In one simple experiment , it was shown that people made to feel powerful were more likely to turn off an annoying fan humming in the room. Power reduces awareness of constraints and causes people act more quickly. Powerful people also tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences. Powerful people are less likely to remember the constraints to a goal. They downplay risks, and enjoy higher levels of testosterone (a dominance hormone), and lower levels of cortisol (a stress hormone).

"People who are given more power in the lab, they see more choice," Magee says. "They see beyond what is objectively there, the amount of choice they have. More directions for what actions they can take. What it means to have power is to be free of the punishment that one could exert upon you for the thing you did." Which paves the way for another hallmark of the powerful--hypocrisy. Our guts are right about this one. On a survey , powerful study participants indicated that they were less tolerant of cheating than the less powerful. But then when given the opportunity to cheat and take more compensation for the experiment, the powerful caved in. The authors explain how these tendencies can actually perpetuate power structures in society:

This means that people with power not only take what they want because they can do so unpunished, but also because they intuitively feel they are entitled to do so. Conversely, people who lack power not only fail to get what they need because they are disallowed to take it, but also because they intuitively feel they are not entitled to it.

Where there's hypocrisy, infidelity seems to follow. While stories of politician infidelity are high profile and more therefore salient -- think Mark Sanford flying to South America to be with a lover while telling aides he was hiking the Appalachian trail, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's secret son -- there is evidence that the powerful are more likely to stray into an affair. In a survey of 1,500 professionals, people higher ranked on a corporate hierarchy were more likely to indicate things like "Would you ever consider cheating on your partner?" on a seven-point scale (this was found true for both men and women). Dishonesty and power go hand-in-hand. In his most recent research, Yap found that just by posing people in the outstretched, power position, they would more likely to take more money than entitled for their time. (Posing like this for two minutes was also found to increase testosterone and lower cortisol hormone levels. So if you want to feel powerful, make yourself big.)

Though it's not that the powerful are bad people. "There is a tendency for people to assume power holders are uncaring, they're cold, they don't care about the little people," says Pamela Smith, a power researcher at the University of California San Diego. But that's not always the case. It depends on who gets the power. "You put someone in an experiment, temporarily, in a high-powered role, and what you find is that people who say they have pro-social values, the more power they have, the more pro-social they are. The people who say they have more self-centered values tend to be more selfish the more power they have."

So what can the most powerful among us do with this information? The researchers I spoke with suggested that it could at least create self-awareness. If we realize, when in power, what it might be doing to our minds, perhaps we can correct ourselves. Perhaps.

About the Authors

Boss says, Put that stuff over there. Photo by Ed Hidden/E+ via Getty Images. Model released.

Dacher Keltner Dacher Keltner

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Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-science-behind-why-power-corrupts-and-what-can-be-done-to-mitigate-it

The science behind why power corrupts and what can be done to mitigate it

Editor’s Note: For a recent Making Sen$e segment , economics correspondent Paul Solman spoke with Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley known for his research on power. His new book is “The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence.” In a previous post, Keltner and Paul discussed how people gain power and esteem in the eyes of their peers. Today, Keltner explains the paradox part — why once we gain power, we lose the very skills that got us there and take more than our fair share. You can watch the full report below.

— Kristen Doerer, Making Sen$e Editor

Dacher Keltner: Power, new studies in economics have shown, comes from sharing resources and bringing out the welfare of others. Power comes from a kind of humble language. There are actually new studies showing if you are humble and respectful, people respect you more. So that’s the rise to power. Here’s the problem: When we feel powerful, we have these surges of dopamine going through our brain. We feel like we could accomplish just about anything. That’s where the power paradox begins, which is that very sense of ourselves when feeling powerful leads to our demise, leads to the abuse of power.

Paul Solman: That’s Paul Piff’s experiment that I participated in playing Monopoly . I was simply designated the more powerful person, and I began to behave in relatively anti-social ways.

Dacher Keltner: You’re a special case, Paul…

Paul Solman: But it was true. He was calling me on it, saying, “Look how you’re talking.” I had a sense of that I was going to win the game and that I was stronger than he, all because I got $200 when I passed “Go” and he got $100. It absolutely affected my mood.

Dacher Keltner: This is what’s striking when you bring people into the lab, and you randomly give them power. You say, “You’re in charge,” or in that case with the monopoly game, “You have more money,” or perhaps you get to evaluate other people and allocate rewards. Just the random assignment of power, and all kinds of mischief ensues, and people will become impulsive. They eat more resources than is their fair share. They take more money. People become more unethical. They think unethical behavior is okay if they engage in it. People are more likely to stereotype. They’re more likely to stop attending to other people carefully. It’s just this paradoxical quality of power, which is the good in human nature gets us power, and then power leads to the bad in human nature.

Paul Solman: So power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely?

READ MORE: Why Those Who Feel They Have Less Give More

Dacher Keltner: Well, I think Lord Acton was on to something which is that there are dozens of studies showing who’s more likely to speak rudely within an organization? High power people or low power people? High power people. Who’s more likely to have sexual affairs? High power people or low power people? High power people. Who’s more likely to take more resources that aren’t theirs? High power people. You go down the list. It kind of looks like an absolute story.

Paul Solman: What kinds of studies show that people with more power take a lion’s share of the resources?

Dacher Keltner: That’s where I really began my studies of power, Paul. People have this deep sense of fairness. They really have a preference if people have roughly the same amount. And if you look out in the world, you can’t help but notice that people with power seem to be enjoying more resources right? Wealthy nations eat more of the world’s protein. A lot of people are really concerned about executive compensation. Why should this person make 10 million bucks a year and I make 12 bucks an hour?

And I was thinking about how we demonstrate this in the lab, and so we did this crazy study that gained a lot of traction and has come to be known as the “Cookie Monster Study.” We bring three people to the lab, and we randomly assign one person to the role of leader. We say you’re in charge, and then over the course of the experiment, these three students have to write policies for the university. They bring together facts, they write policies, they submit them, and we gather these written products. Half-way into the experiment, we bring a plate of five delicious chocolate chip cookies. We put them down and that’s actually where the experiment really begins. So everybody takes a cookie. They eat very happily and are grateful for it. All groups leave one cookie on the plate because they don’t like to take that last cookie, because you don’t want to be the person who takes the last piece of food. So the key question is who takes that fourth cookie, and indeed, it’s our person in the position of power who reaches out and grabs the cookie and says that’s mine.

Paul Solman: Is it every time that it’s the leader?

Dacher Keltner: Most of the time. Two-thirds of the time it’s our person in the position of power who unconsciously feels entitled to take more of the sweets. One of my grad student came to me and said, “You know, I’m convinced that they’re eating differently.” So we spent several months coding the videotapes of people eating, and we found our person in power is more likely to eat with their mouths open, limps smacking, crumbs falling down on their sweaters. And that set in motion this whole exploration. And it’s so fundamental. Humans are this balance of impulse and our ego, our sense of morality and our sense of what other people think of us, and power shifts this balance. Suddenly when I feel powerful, I can eat the cookies however I want to. I can swear at my colleagues. I can touch people in a way that feels good to me, but not necessarily worry about how it feels to them. That really set in motion this idea that power leads people to feel entitled to take more resources.

READ MORE: Why the secret to gaining power is different today

Paul Solman: Are there other examples?

Dacher Keltner: One really interesting area of research is work in organizations. We know you create a better team if as a leader you speak in a respectful way. You compliment. You bring out the best, you praise people. You ask good questions. And so researchers have been asking who is more likely to swear in a rude fashion at their work colleagues. And three out of the four acts of rudeness come from people in positions of power in organizations in different sectors. If you’re going to be told you’re an idiot, it’s going to probably come from people in positions of power.

Here’s one of my favorites. I could not believe this finding. Investigators were interested in who’s more likely to shoplift. Shoplifting costs America over $10 billion a year. So the question is who is likely to walk into the store and pocket something that they don’t pay for, and indeed, it is high power, wealthier people who are more likely to shoplift. There are famous car studies with Paul Piff that look at who’s more likely to blaze through a pedestrian zone on the road and think that their time is more important than the safety of the pedestrian? It’s people driving more high power, wealthier cars.

Everywhere you turn, you see this finding that power makes us feel entitled to more.

Watch the viral Making Sen$e report on Paul Piff’s famous car study above.

Paul Solman: So what do you do about it?

Dacher Keltner: I think that that’s the great question of societies. Studies are finding — and it’s very intuitive — that if you make people feel accountable, and you say, “Paul, a committee is evaluating how you allocate these resources,” and you’re in a position of power and now allocate the resources, you become more ethical in how you allocate resources.

Paul Solman: If I think somebody’s watching.

READ MORE: How do humans gain power? By sharing it

Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and the sense of accountability or the sense of being scrutinized is so powerful. All you have to do in studies now is actually place a geometric arrangement of dots, with two dots at the top and the little dot at the bottom, that kind of resembles the human face. If I am have sense of being watched, I become less greedy and less entitled in taking resources in positions of power. Accountability is really important.

Paul Solman: So if you’re the designated leader in some experiment and you’re beginning to lord it over the others, and there’s a picture that has four dots kind of in the array of a face in the room, you’re less likely to do so?

Dacher Keltner: Yes. Let’s say that I’m in an experiment and I have an opportunity to use resources to my benefit to the cost of other people. If I’m simply aware that other people are going to know of my actions, I act in a much more ethical fashion. I avoid the abuses of power. There are studies that show if I have a chance to take resources, and there’s this geometric arrangement of dots that looks like a human face, I take fewer of the resources for myself. I leave more for the public good. It’s very powerful.

There’s a concern right now that the wealthiest in our society are beyond scrutiny. No one even knows who they are, these people making $300 million a year. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know how their wealth generates, and that basic social condition spells trouble, and it spells a greater likelihood for the abuse of power.

As we think about inequality in the United States, one of the really interesting developments is the efforts that have sprung up to scrutinize the people with the most power. The journalist Michael Massing just wrote this nice essay about why there should be journalism about the one percent and what they’re really doing so that we as a country know what they’re doing with the resources and what we can make of it.

Paul Solman: So your belief is that to the extent that there’s journalism about the top 1 percent and how they behave, it will modify their behavior?

Dacher Keltner: Yes. This really interesting new literature shows that when I’m aware of what other people think of me, when I’m aware of my reputation, I cooperate more in economic gains. I am more likely to sign up for environmentally efficient services. I am more likely to pay taxes. Just this sense that my actions are being scrutinized and my reputation is at stake produces better behavior for the public good or the greater good. And I think that one of the ironies is that if we build up more awareness of the most powerful and the sense that their reputations are at stake, they’ll actually engage in more noble actions. They’ll be more giving to society. They’ll feel better about it. There’s a rich literature behind that, and so there are benefits for them as well.

READ MORE: Money can buy happiness, especially when you invest it in others

Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of "The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence" and "Born to Be Good" and a co-editor of "The Compassionate Instinct."

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The Subject and Power

— Foucault, Michel. “ The Subject and Power.” In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 208-226. The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

This essay was written by Michel Foucault in 1982 as an afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow

“ Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject” was written in English by Foucault;
“ How Is Power Exercised?” was translated from the French by Leslie Sawyer.

Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject

The ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, ﬁrst of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectiﬁcation which transform human beings into subjects. The ﬁrst is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire générale , philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this ﬁrst mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call “ dividing practices.” The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the “ good boys.” Finally, I have sought to study —it is my current work— the way a human being turns himself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality —how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of “ sexuality.” Thus, it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research. It is true that I became quite involved with the question of power. It soon appeared to me that, while the human subject is placed in relations of production and of signiﬁcation, he is equally placed in power relations which are very complex. Now, it seemed to me that economic history and theory provided a good instrument for relations of production and that linguistics and semiotics offered instruments for studying relations of signiﬁcation; but for power relations we had no tools of study. We had recourse only to ways of thinking about power based on legal models, that is: What legitimates power? Or, we had recourse to ways of thinking about power based on institutional models, that is: What is the state? It was therefore necessary to expand the dimensions of a deﬁnition of power if one wanted to use this deﬁnition in studying the objectivizing of the subject. Do we need a theory of power? Since a theory assumes a prior objectiﬁcation, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. But this analytical work cannot proceed without an ongoing conceptualization. And this conceptualization implies critical thought — a constant checking. The ﬁrst thing to check is what I shall call the “ conceptual needs.” I mean that the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object-the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization. We need a historical awareness of our present circumstance. The second thing to check is the type of reality with which we are dealing.

A writer in a well-known French newspaper once expressed his surprise: “ Why is the notion of power raised by so many people today? Is it such an important subject? Is it so independent that it can be discussed without taking into account other problems?” This writer’s surprise amazes me. I feel skeptical about the assumption that this question has been raised for the ﬁrst time in the twentieth century. Anyway, for us it is not only a theoretical question but a part of our experience. I’d like to mention only two “ pathological forms” —those two “ diseases of power”— fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so puzzling is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality. What we need is a new economy of power relations —the word “ economy” being used in its theoretical and practical sense. To put it in other words: since Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment —that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society— the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality, which is a rather high expectation. Everybody is aware of such banal facts. But the fact that they are banal does not mean they don’t exist. What we have to do with banal facts is to discover —or try to discover— which speciﬁc and perhaps original problem is connected with them. The relationship between rationalization and excesses of political power is evident. And we should not need to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the existence of such relations. But the problem is: What to do with such an evident fact? Shall we try reason? To my mind, nothing would be more sterile. First, because the ﬁeld has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Second, because it is senseless to refer to reason as the contrary entity to non-reason. Last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist. Shall we investigate this kind of rationalism which seems to be speciﬁc to our modern culture and which originates in Aufklärung ? I think that was the approach of some of the members of the Frankfurt School. My purpose, however, is not to start a discussion of their works, although they are most important and valuable. Rather, I would suggest another way of investigating the links between rationalization and power. It may be wise not to take as a whole the rationalization of society or of culture but to analyze such a process in several ﬁelds, each with reference to a fundamental experience: madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, and so forth. I think that the word “ rationalization” is dangerous. What we have to do is analyze speciﬁc rationalities rather than always invoke the progress of rationalization in general. Even if the Aufklärung has been a very important phase in our history and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our own history. I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and ﬁnd out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. For example, to ﬁnd out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the ﬁeld of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the ﬁeld of illegality. And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations. As a starting point, let us take a series of oppositions which have developed over the last few years: opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. It is not enough to say that these are anti-authority struggles; we must try to deﬁne more precisely what they have in common.

They are “ transversal” struggles; that is, they are not limited to one country. Of course, they develop more easily and to a greater extent in certain countries, but they are not conﬁned to a particular political or economic form of government.
The aim of these struggles is the power effects as such. For example, the medical profession is not criticized primarily because it is a proﬁt-making concern but because it exercises an uncontrolled power over people’s bodies, their health, and their life and death.
These are “ immediate” struggles for two reasons. In such struggles people criticize instances of power which are the closest to them, those which exercise their action on individuals. They do not look for the “ chief enemy” but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expect to ﬁnd a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle). In comparison with a theoretical scale of explanations or a revolutionary order which polarizes the historian, they are anarchistic struggles. But these are not their most original points. The following seem to me to be more speciﬁc.
They are struggles which question the status of the individual: on the one hand, they assert the right to be different, and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way. These struggles are not exactly for or against the “ individual” but rather they are struggles against the “ government of individualization.”
They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualiﬁcation: struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. There is nothing “ scientistic” in this (that is, a dogmatic belief in the value of scientiﬁc knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all veriﬁed truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power. In short, the régime du savoir .
Finally, all these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientiﬁc or administrative inquisition which determines who one is.

To sum up, the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much “ such or such” an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power. This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “ subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: either against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); against forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce; or against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission). I think that in history you can ﬁnd a lot of examples of these three kinds of social struggles, either isolated from each other or mixed together. But even when they are mixed, one of them, most of the time, prevails. For instance, in the feudal societies, the struggles against the forms of ethnic or social domination were prevalent, even though economic exploitation could have been very important among the revolt’s causes. In the nineteenth century, the struggle against exploitation came into the foreground. And nowadays, the struggle against the forms of subjection —against the submission of subjectivity —is becoming more and more important, even though the struggles against forms of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Quite the contrary. I suspect that it is not the ﬁrst time that our society has been confronted with this kind of struggle. All those movements which took place in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book —all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity. I know what objections can be made. We can say that all types of subjection are derived phenomena, that they are merely the consequences of other economic and social processes: forces of production, class struggle, and ideological structures which determine the form of subjectivity. It is certain that the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside their relation to the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. But they do not merely constitute the “ terminal” of more fundamental mechanisms. They entertain complex and circular relations with other forms. The reason this kind of struggle tends to prevail in our society is due to the fact that, since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. This new political structure, as everybody knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality or, I should say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That’s quite true. But I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies —even in the old Chinese society— has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures. This is due to the fact that the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power. First of all, a few words about this pastoral power. It has often been said that Christianity brought into being a code of ethics fundamentally different from that of the ancient world. Less emphasis is usually placed on the fact that it proposed and spread new power relations throughout the ancient world. Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a church. And as such, it postulates in principle that certain individuals can, by their religious quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers, benefactors, educationalists, and so on but as pastors. However, this word designates a very special form of power.

It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the next world.
Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacriﬁce itself for the life and salvation of the ﬂock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacriﬁce from its subjects to save the throne.
It is a form of power which does not look after just the whole community but each individual in particular, during his entire life.
Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.

This form of power is salvation oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth —the truth of the individual himself. But all this is part of history, you will say; the pastorate has, if not disappeared, at least lost the main part of its efﬁciency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish between two aspects of pastoral power —between the ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at least lost its vitality since the eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical institution. An important phenomenon took place around the eighteenth century —it was a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power. I don’t think that we should consider the “ modern state” as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very speciﬁc patterns. In a way, we can see the state as a modern matrix of individualization or a new form of pastoral power. A few more words about this new pastoral power.

We may observe a change in its objective. It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word “ salvation” takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is, sufﬁcient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of “ worldly” aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate, all the more easily because the latter, for various reasons, had followed in an accessory way a certain number of these aims; we only have to think of the role of medicine and its welfare function assured for a long time by the Catholic and Protestant churches.
Concurrently the ofﬁcials of pastoral power increased. Sometimes this form of power was exerted by state apparatus or, in any case, by a public institution such as the police. (We should not forget that in the eighteenth century the police force was not invented only for maintaining law and order, nor for assisting governments in their struggle against their enemies, but for assuring urban supplies, hygiene, health, and standards considered necessary for handicrafts and commerce.) Sometimes the power was exercised by private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors, and generally by philanthropists. But ancient institutions, for example the family, were also mobilized at this time to take on pastoral functions. It was also exercised by complex structures such as medicine, which included private initiatives with the sale of services on market economy principles, but which also included public institutions such as hospitals.
Finally, the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual.

And this implies that power of a pastoral type, which over centuries —for more than a millennium— had been linked to a deﬁned religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing “ tactic” which characterized a series of powers: those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Kant wrote, in a German newspaper —the Berliner Monatschrift — a short text. The title was “ Was heisst Aufklärung?” It was for a long time, and it is still, considered a work of relatively small importance. But I can’t help ﬁnding it very interesting and puzzling because it was the ﬁrst time a philosopher proposed as a philosophical task to investigate not only the metaphysical system or the foundations of scientiﬁc knowledge but a historical event —a recent, even a contemporary event. When in 1784 Kant asked, “ Was heisst Aufklärung?”, he meant, What’s going on just now? What’s happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words: What are we? as Aufklärer, as part of the Enlightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere at any moment. But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant’s question appears as an analysis of both us and our present. I think that this aspect of philosophy took on more and more importance. Hegel, Nietzsche… The other aspect of “ universal philosophy” didn’t disappear. But the task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “ double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.

How Is Power Exercised?

For some people, asking questions about the “ how” of power would limit them to describing its effects without ever relating those effects either to causes or to a basic nature. It would make this power a mysterious substance which they might hesitate to interrogate in itself, no doubt because they would prefer not to call it into question. By proceeding this way, which is never explicitly justiﬁed, they seem to suspect the presence of a kind of fatalism. But does not their very distrust indicate a presupposition that power is something which exists with three distinct qualities: its origin, its basic nature, and its manifestations? If, for the time being, I grant a certain privileged position to the question of “ how,” it is not because I would wish to eliminate the questions of “ what” and “ why.” Rather, it is that I wish to present these questions in a different way: better still, to know if it is legitimate to imagine a power which unites in itself a what, a why, and a how. To put it bluntly, I would say that to begin the analysis with a “ how” is to suggest that power as such does not exist. At the very least it is to ask oneself what contents one has in mind when using this all-embracing and reifying term; it is to suspect that an extremely complex conﬁguration of realities is allowed to escape when one treads endlessly in the double question: What is power? and Where does power come from? The little question, What happens?, although ﬂat and empirical, once scrutinized is seen to avoid accusing a metaphysics or an ontology of power of being fraudulent; rather, it attempts a critical investigation into the thematics of power.

1. “ How” not in the sense of “ How does it manifest itself?” but “ By what means is it exercised?” and “ What happens when individuals exert (as they say) power over others?”

As far as this power is concerned, it is ﬁrst necessary to distinguish that which is exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them —a power which stems from aptitudes directly inherent in the body or relayed by external instruments. Let us say that here it is a question of “ capacity.” On the other hand, what characterizes the power we are analyzing is that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between groups). For let us not deceive ourselves; if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term “ power” designates relationships between partners (and by that I am not thinking of a zero-sum game but simply, and for the moment staying in the most general terms, of an ensemble of actions which induce others and follow from one another). It is necessary also to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication which transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply an aspect of the former. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a speciﬁc nature. Power relations, relationships of communication, and objective capacities should not therefore be confused. This is not to say that there is a question of three separate domains. Nor that there is on one hand the held of things, of perfected technique, work, and the transformation of the real; on the other that of signs, communication, reciprocity, and the production of meaning; and ﬁnally, that of the domination of the means of constraint, of inequality, and the action of men upon other men. It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end. The application of objective capacities in their most elementary forms implies relationships of communication (whether in the form of previously acquired information or of shared work); it is tied also to power relations (whether they consist of obligatory tasks, of gestures imposed by tradition or apprenticeship, of subdivisions and the more or less obligatory distribution of labor). Relationships of communication imply ﬁnalized activities (even if only the correct putting into operation of elements of meaning) and, by virtue of modifying the held of information between partners, produce effects of power. They can scarcely be dissociated from activities brought to their ﬁnal term, be they those which permit the exercise of this power (such as training techniques, processes of domination, the means by which obedience is obtained) or those, which in order to develop their potential, call upon relations of power (the division of labor and the hierarchy of tasks). Of course, the coordination between these three types of relationships is neither uniform nor constant. In a given society there is no general type of equilibrium between ﬁnalized activities, systems of communication, and power relations. Rather, there are diverse forms, diverse places, diverse circumstances or occasions in which these inter-relationships establish themselves according to a speciﬁc model. But there are also “ blocks” in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted systems. Take, for example, an educational institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organized there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own function, his well-deﬁned character —all these things constitute a block of capacity-communication-power. The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the “ value” of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy). These blocks, in which the putting into operation of technical capacities, the game of communications, and the relationships of power are adjusted to one another according to considered formulae, constitute what one might call, enlarging a little the sense of the word, “ disciplines.” The empirical analysis of certain disciplines as they have been historically constituted presents for this very reason a certain interest. This is so because the disciplines show, ﬁrst, according to artiﬁcially clear and decanted systems, the manner in which systems of objective ﬁnality and systems of communication and power can be welded together. They also display different models of articulation, sometimes giving preeminence to power relations and obedience (as in those disciplines of a monastic or penitential type), sometimes to ﬁnalize activities (as in the disciplines of workshops or hospitals), sometimes to relationships of communication (as in the disciplines of apprenticeship), sometimes also to a saturation of the three types of relationship (as perhaps in military discipline, where a plethora of signs indicates, to the point of redundancy, tightly knit power relations calculated with care to produce a certain number of technical effects). What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather, that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after —more and more rational and economic —between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations. To approach the theme of power by an analysis of “ how” is therefore to introduce several critical shifts in relation to the supposition of a fundamental power. It is to give oneself as the object of analysis power relations and not power itself —power relations which are distinct from objective abilities as well as from relations of communication. This is as much as saying that power relations can be grasped in the diversity of their logical sequence, their abilities, and their interrelationships.

2. What constitutes the speciﬁc nature of power?

The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate ﬁeld of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures. This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few (which does not prevent the possibility that consent may be a condition for the existence or the maintenance of power); the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus. Is this to say that one must seek the character proper to power relations in the violence which must have been its primitive form, its permanent secret, and its last resource, that which in the ﬁnal analysis appears as its real nature when it is forced to throw aside its mask and to show itself as it really is? In effect, what deﬁnes a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize it. On the other hand, a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “ the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole held of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up. Obviously the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent; no doubt the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time. But even though consensus and violence are the instruments or the results, they do not constitute the principle or the basic nature of power. The exercise of power can produce as much acceptance as may be wished for: it can pile up the dead and shelter itself behind whatever threats it can imagine. In itself the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difﬁcult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term “ conduct” is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the speciﬁcity of power relations. For to “ conduct” is at the same time to “ lead” others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open held of possibilities. The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. “ Government” did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered or calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible held of action of others. The relationship proper to power would not, therefore, be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. When one deﬁnes the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men —in the broadest sense of the term— includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a held of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination). The relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot, therefore, be separated. The crucial problem of power is not that of voluntary servitude (how could we seek to be slaves?). At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an “ agonism” of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.

How is one to analyze the power relationship?

One can analyze such relationships, or rather I should say that it is perfectly legitimate to do so, by focusing on carefully deﬁned institutions. The latter constitute a privileged point of observation, diversiﬁed, concentrated, put in order, and carried through to the highest point of their efﬁcacity. It is here that, as a ﬁrst approximation, one might expect to see the appearance of the form and logic of their elementary mechanisms. However, the analysis of power relations as one ﬁnds them in certain circumscribed institutions presents a certain number of problems. First, the fact that an important part of the mechanisms put into operation by an institution are designed to ensure its own preservation brings with it the risk of deciphering functions which are essentially reproductive, especially in power relations between institutions. Second, in analyzing power relations from the standpoint of institutions, one lays oneself open to seeking the explanation and the origin of the former in the latter , that is to say, ﬁnally, to explain power to power. Finally, insofar as institutions act essentially by bringing into play two elements, explicit or tacit regulations and an apparatus, one risks giving to one or the other an exaggerated privilege in the relations of power and hence to see in the latter only modulations of the law and of coercion. This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead, I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution. Let us come back to the deﬁnition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the held of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted “ above” society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible —and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the “ agonism” between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. The analysis of power relations demands that a certain number of points be established concretely:

The system of differentiations which permits one to act upon the actions of others: differentiations determined by the law or by traditions of status and privilege; economic differences in the appropriation of riches and goods, shifts in the processes of production, linguistic or cultural differences, differences in know-how and competence, and so forth. Every relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and its results.
The types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others: the maintenance of privileges, the accumulation of proﬁts, the bringing into operation of statutary authority, the exercise of a function or of a trade.
The means of bringing power relations into being : according to whether power is exercised by the threat of arms, by the effects of the word, by means of economic disparities, by more or less complex means of control, by systems of surveillance, with or without archives, according to rules which are or are not explicit, ﬁxed or modiﬁable, with or without the technological means to put all these things into action.
Forms of institutionalization: these may mix traditional predispositions, legal structures, phenomena relating to custom or to fashion (such as one sees in the institution of the family); they can also take the form of an apparatus closed in upon itself, with its speciﬁc loci , its own regulations, its hierarchical structures which are carefully deﬁned, a relative autonomy in its functioning (such as scholastic or military institutions); they can also form very complex systems endowed with multiple apparatuses, as in the case of the state, whose function is the taking of everything under its wing, the bringing into being of general surveillance, the principle of regulation, and, to a certain extent also, the distribution of all power relations in a given social ensemble.
The degrees of rationalization : the bringing into play of power relations as action in a held of possibilities may be more or less elaborate in relation to the effectiveness of the instruments and the certainty of the results (greater or lesser technological reﬁnements employed in the exercise of power) or again in proportion to the possible cost (be it the economic cost of the means brought into operation or the cost in terms of reaction constituted by the resistance which is encountered). The exercise of power is not a naked fact, an institutional right, nor is it a structure which holds out or is smashed: it is elaborated, transformed, organized; it endows itself with processes which are more or less adjusted to the situation.

One sees why the analysis of power relations within a society cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions, not even to the study of all those institutions which would merit the name “ political.” Power relations are rooted in the system of social networks. This is not to say, however, that there is a primary and fundamental principle of power which dominates society down to the smallest detail; but, taking as point of departure the possibility of action upon the action of others (which is coextensive with every social relationship), multiple forms of individual disparity, of objectives, of the given application of power over ourselves or others, of, in varying degrees, partial or universal institutionalization, of more or less deliberate organization, one can deﬁne different forms of power. The forms and the speciﬁc situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one of the forms or speciﬁc situations of the exercise of power —even if it is the most important— but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control (although this state control has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial, economic, or family systems). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word “ government,” one could say that power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions.

Relations of power and relations of strategy.

The word “ strategy” is currently employed in three ways. First, to designate the means employed to attain a certain end; it is a question of rationality functioning to arrive at an objective. Second, to designate the manner in which a partner in a certain game acts with regard to what he thinks should be the action of the others and what he considers the others think to be his own; it is the way in which one seeks to have the advantage over others. Third, to designate the procedures used in a situation of confrontation to deprive the opponent of his means of combat and to reduce him to giving up the struggle; it is a question, therefore, of the means destined to obtain victory. These three meanings come together in situations of confrontation —war or games— where the objective is to act upon an adversary in such a manner as to render the struggle impossible for him. So strategy is deﬁned by the choice of winning solutions. But it must be borne in mind that this is a very special type of situation and that there are others in which the distinctions between the different senses of the word “ strategy’~ must be maintained. Referring to the ﬁrst sense I have indicated, one may call power strategy the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it. One may also speak of a strategy proper to power relations insofar as they constitute modes of action upon possible action, the action of others. One can therefore interpret the mechanisms brought into play in power relations in terms of strategies. But most important is obviously the relationship between power relations and confrontation strategies. For, if it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible ﬂight. Every power relationship implies, at !east in potentia , a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not super-imposed, do not lose their speciﬁc nature, or do not ﬁnally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its ﬁnal moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries), when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions. Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others. For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the ﬁxing of a power relationship becomes a target —at one and the same time its fulﬁllment and its suspension. And in return, the strategy of struggle also constitutes a frontier for the relationship of power, the line at which, instead of manipulating and inducing actions in a calculated manner, one must be content with reacting to them after the event. It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by deﬁnition, are means of escape. Accordingly, every intensiﬁcation, every extension of power relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power. The latter reaches its ﬁnal term either in a type of action which reduces the other to total impotence (in which case victory over the adversary replaces the exercise of power) or by a confrontation with those whom one governs and their transformation into adversaries. Which is to say that every strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power, and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development and comes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy. In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of “ domination” which are present in a large number of human societies. Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramiﬁcations and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most recalcitrant ﬁbers of society. But at the same time it is a strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries. It can certainly happen that the fact of domination may only be the transcription of a mechanism of power resulting from confrontation and its consequences (a political structure stemming from invasion); it may also be that a relationship of struggle between two adversaries is the result of power relations with the conﬂicts and cleavages which ensue. But what makes the domination of a group, a caste, or a class, together with the resistance and revolts which that domination comes up against, a central phenomenon in the history of societies is that they manifest in a massive and universalizing form, at the level of the whole social body, the locking together of power relations with relations of strategy and the results proceeding from their interaction.

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Does Power Corrupt Everyone Equally?

“Any man can withstand adversity; if you want to test his character, give him power.” — Abraham Lincoln

I recently watched the movie adaptation of the Stanford Prison Experiment . Like most reviewers , I found it harrowing. But as a psychologist, I also found it revealing. With my eyes glued to the screen in rapt attention, heart racing, I became obsessed with understanding what really was going on, and the lessons we can glean from such an experiment gone so horribly wrong.

The standard story, given by the experimenter Phillip Zimbardo , is that the experiment is a lesson about how everyday people (and groups consisting of everyday people), when given too much power, can become sadistic tyrants. In a recent article for The New Yorker , Maria Konnikova casts some doubt on that conclusion, arguing that the real lesson is the power of institutions to shape behavior, and how people are shaped by those preexisting expectations.

While this is certainly a valuable lesson, I believe another crucial variable at play—rarely mentioned by commentators of the prison experiment or even in psychology textbooks—is the person. Yes, power corrupts. But power does not corrupt everyone equally.

There’s no way the small group of participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment represented the full range of human personality variation. For one, these were young males. Already, there is going to be higher levels of testosterone, on average, than most other populations. But there’s also the issue that these participants actively sought out participation in a study having to do with prison. Research published in 2007 found that people who responded to an ad to be part of a study on “prison life” scored higher on tests of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and lower on measures of empathy and altruism.

But even among the small sample of young male participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, there was great variability in how people responded to power. Some guards were particularly cruel, whereas others could barely take the cruelty and offered to go on errands, while still others were actively kind to the prisoners, fulfilling their requests. Let’s also not forget the hero of the film, Zimbardo’s graduate student Christina Maslach, who recoiled in horror at the sight of how the participants were treated in the experiment.

I fear it’s all too easy for us to focus our attention on that one loud, brash person who abuses power while ignoring the majority who were not nearly as cruel. Zimbardo has remarked that he was afraid he would be in for a very long and boring experiment. I suspect that if “Cool Hand Luke” didn’t sign up for the experiment, the experiment would indeed have lasted the full two weeks. People would have generally followed the rules, and we probably wouldn’t have had a movie made after it.

Power isn’t good or evil

Since the Stanford Prison Experiment, we’ve learned a lot more about the psychology of power. Here’s something we’ve found: power isn’t inherently good or evil.

Yes, it’s true that power fundamentally alters perception. As Adam Galinsky and colleagues put it , “powerful people roam in a very different psychological space than those without power.” Power increases confidence, optimism, risk-taking , sensitivity to internal thoughts and feelings , goal-directed behavior and cognition , and creativity .

But these are not necessarily bad outcomes. Put to good use, power can have an incredibly positive effect on people. There are so many compassionate teachers, bosses, politicians, humanitarians, and others who wield power, who genuinely want to make the world a better place.

I think a really important point here is that power amplifies the person . It gives already existing personality dispositions and tendencies a louder voice, and increases the chances that these tendencies will be given fuller expression. Thus, we must consider interactions between the person and the situation. As Galinsky and colleagues point out , “the situation loses its suffocating hold over the thoughts and behavior of the powerful… and they are left with their own opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and personalities to drive their behavior.”

Research shows that activating the concept of power in men with an already-existing disposition toward sexual harassment or aggression increases objectification of women. There’s also an emerging line of research on the “ Dark Tetrad ,” which consists of the darker personality dispositions of narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, and everyday sadism. One study found that when given the opportunity, everyday sadists (those with a higher appetite for cruelty) killed bugs at greater rates than nonsadists, and were more willing to work for the opportunity to hurt an innocent person. Similarly, when narcissists have their ego threatened (e.g., are insulted), they are much more likely to become aggressive , even against innocent bystanders .

Not just anyone put in a position of power will hurt others, however. Serena Chen and colleagues found that those with an “exchange relationship orientation” (who focus on tit for tat) engaged in more self-serving behaviors when given power, whereas those with a “communal relationship orientation” (who take into account other people’s needs and feelings when making a decision) demonstrated greater generosity when given power.

Putting prosocial goals in charge

About the Author

Scott barry kaufman.

Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., is scientific director of The Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He conducts research on the measurement and development of imagination, creativity, and play, and teaches the popular undergraduate course Introduction to Positive Psychology. Kaufman is author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined and co-author of the book Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (with Carolyn Gregoire).Follow on Twitter @sbkaufman .

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The Psychology of Political Power: Does Power Corrupt or is it Magnetic to the Most Corruptible?

In January 2022, I attended a conference on ‘Political Power, Morality and Corruption’. A Socratic dialogue with fellow scholars led me back to one question that epistemologically haunts political theory and philosophy to date—Does power corrupt or is it magnetic to the most corruptible? The cornerstone that this question posits on is antithetical to the idea of power duality as malefic or benefic. Instead, this problem statement is trying to explore and exact the fundamentals of political power. While the former part of the question is striving to deconstruct the soma of power itself, the latter construct of the question is focusing on the agency of an individual with political power.

Now, if you have read Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse Dune (1920 – 1986), he writes, “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.” Rather than saying absolute power corrupts absolutely, Herbert reveals a common metaphysical denominator: corruptibility, that fundamentally connects all those with political power. However, his sematic interpretation gives birth to more questions than answers. Suppose we take Herbert’s argument in consideration and assume that the most corruptible are indeed attracted to power. In that case, the global political infrastructure as we know today, is then built on the building block of corruption by its very virtue. For example, the 4th edition of the Global Corruption Index (GCI 2021) covered 196 countries and territories, and provided a comprehensive overview of the state of corruption around the world based on 43 variables. This extensive data revealed that only 52 countries have a low corruption index, with Finland and Norway leading the way. On the other hand, the rest 144 countries are suffering from profane corruption. Using Herbert’s interpretation of power and corruption, should we conclude that political corruption, which is about privatization of average citizens and the use of the public sphere to promote private interests, is the foundational political infrastructure of these 144 countries? And if this assertion is true, does it mean that every government representative of these 144 countries are fundamentally corrupt? Herbert’s simplistic interpretation of the problem statement creates a moral conundrum of either this or that, rather than exploring the connection between the two variables—power and corruption.

Power does not corrupt. It amplifies and reveals a leader’s predispositional traits .

For decades, social psychologists were convinced that power corrupts. One of the key demonstrations of this assertion was the classic Stanford Prison Simulation Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971), where volunteers were randomly assigned to play the role of prisoners or prison guards. As the day passed by, it was observed that the students who were given the role of prison guards became sadistic and exercised their power to subjugate prisoners by taking away their clothes and forcing them to sleep on concrete floors. This subduing was absolute barbaric and callous in nature. The results were shocking. However, the Stanford Prison Experiment failed to explore one crucial variable—the behavioural and cognitive pattern of students who willingly participated and were recruited to be a part of ‘study of prison life.’ So, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland (2007) conducted an experiment, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty?” They wanted to study what kind of people participate and are drawn to the likes of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The research revealed that “volunteers for the prison study scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism, two qualities inversely related to aggressive abuse.”

What Carnahan and McFarland’s experiment revealed was that power doesn’t corrupt, but it is a phenomenon that is monopolized by the agency of an individual. Power amplifies and exposes cognitive and behavioral predispositions that already exists within you. It merely reveals your innate tendencies, but it does not corrupt. Let’s take another example of a democratic statesman who wants to introduce a new healthcare bill for his people, but is unexpectedly confronted with an ethical conundrum—he can either strengthen his political power and wealth by collaborating with pharmaceutical giants and increase the prices of the medicines in concern (demand-supply chain), or he can metamorphosize his proposed bill into reality and benefit his subjects. What will he do? Since he already has procured political power and is deliberating on actualizing his healthcare bill to empower people, power here has not corrupted him. In fact, the argument that power corrupts collapses because if power indeed corrupts, this democratic statesman would not have proposed a healthcare bill for the welfare of his people to begin with. However, if he decides to enact the bill in favor of pharmaceutical moguls to increase his wealth and political status quo, it would be due to his predispositioned behavioral and cognitive schema for corruptibility. How he responds to this ethical conundrum will mirror his political psyche. It has nothing to do with power being essentially corruptible. Power only amplifies and exposes a leader’s predispositioned traits.

Friedrich Hayek makes a similar point in his chapter ‘Why the worst get on top’ in The Road to Serfdom (1943), where he highlights that individuals who rise to the top in the government are those who want to wield power and those who are most ruthless in using power. He writes, “Neither the government administration of a concentration camp nor the Ministry of Propaganda is suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet, positions like these create a totalitarian state. So, when a distinguished American economist concludes that the probability of people in power disliking the possession and exercise of power is low, is similar to falsely assuming that the probability of an extremely tender-hearted person to desire a position of a whipping-master in a slave plantation is high.”

Recently, psychologists have re-investigated this phenomenon and theorised that rather than being a corrupting influence, power amplifies leaders’ innate tendencies. For example, extensive research in ‘Leader corruption depends on power and testosterone’ by Samuel Bendahan, Christian Zehnder, Francois P. Pralong, and John Antonakis used incentivized experimental games to manipulate leaders in power. Here, leaders had complete freedom to decide monthly pay-outs for themselves and their followers. Now, leaders could have made a prosocial decision to benefit the public good. However, they chose to abuse their power by invoking antisocial decisions, which reduced the total pay-outs of their followers but boosted the leaders’ earnings with a high margin. The researchers write, “In Study 1 ( N = 478), we found that both amount of followers and discretionary choices independently predicted leader corruption. Study 2 ( N = 240) examined how power and individual differences (e.g., personality, hormones) affected leader corruption over time; power interacted with endogenous testosterone in predicting corruption, which was highest when the leader power and baseline testosterone were both high. Honesty predicted initial level of leader’s antisocial decisions; however, honesty did not shield leaders from the corruptive effect of power.”

Concluding with Caligula—The Mad Roman Emperor!

After years of witnessing the most barbaric purges, treason laws, exiles, execution, and corruption of all time during Tiberius’s rule, Caligula (37—41 AD) was seen as a breath of fresh air when he took the throne. After going through despondent years of constant fear, Caligula’s initiation was perceived as a hope for a flourishing Roman republic. At first, Caligula lived up to the expectations of the Roman people. He brought back many people exiled by Tiberius and ceremoniously burned the records of the infamous Treason Trails held by Sejanus under the order of Tiberius. This act was celebrated and made Caligula popular and well-liked among the Senate. He then took a step further and eliminated unpopular hefty taxes, initiated constructions of harbors that created massive employment opportunities for Roman citizens, and staged lavish events like chariot races, gladiator shows, and theatre plays to entertain his people. He was indeed a breath of fresh air after Tiberius.

But, after seven months of his rule, things changed for the worst. Caligula started to use and abuse his political powers so dauntlessly that it pushed Rome into a dark age of political and economic instability. He went on a rampage of committing murder, adultery, and acts of debauchery. His eccentricities became more murderous, including restating the very Treason Trials that he had ended. Dressed in silk robes and covered in jewels, Caligula pretended he was a god. He made it mandatory for his senators to grovel and kiss his feet and seduced their wives at lavish dinner parties. He wanted his statue to be erected in the temple at Jerusalem, which at the point, would have been highly controversial in a region that was already prone to revolt against the Romans. Luckily, Herod Agrippa, who ruled Palestine then, convinced him not to do so. Additionally, since Caligula was spending vast amount of money on his lavish lifestyle, he emptied Rome’s treasury. To reverse this damage, he started blackmailing Roman leaders and senates, and confiscated their properties and wealth.

There is no denying that there was a method to Caligula’s political madness, but power didn’t corrupt him. If it did, the first initial seven months of ruling Rome after Tiberius, Roman republic would not have experienced economic, political, and cultural growth. However, power certainly did amplify and expose his innate characteristics of corruptibility and debauchery. Caligula’s madness of abusing political power and tyrannical reign grew out of control. An assassination plot structured against him and he was murdered after being stabbed over 30 times by a cabal of Praetorian guards in 41 A.D. This reminds me of what Robert Caro mentioned in his book The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012), “Power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. But, as soon as the man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.” To conclude, it is not that the power corrupts or is magnetic to the most corruptible. The truth is—power only reveals who you truly are.

Parul Verma

Parul Verma is a political analyst and a human rights activist. Using political philosophy, her work analyses power relation between State-subject, transnational conflict, peace-building and peace-keeping in relation to Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland and Kashmir. She has also written extensively on corporate governance and violence against women in India. Her work has been published in more than 20+ academic journals and international media establishments. Her part-time job involves talking gibberish to her two naughty rabbits – Whiskey and Beer! For any query or feedback, contact her at parul_edu[at] icloud.com .

Editor: Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen
Frank Herbert
Philosophy of Psychology
political power
social psychology

Philosophy and current affairs: the russia-ukraine war, hannah arendt’s conception of responsibility, the irrational status of the natural, recently published book spotlight: inquiry under bounds, are you anthropomorphizing ai, defining and determining human death.

It would seem that power is an intoxicant like alcohol, reducing the inhibitions against anti-social behavior. But politicians are also embedded in a more structured system than simple social interaction and they have gradually built that system to increase their power.

Politicians over the decades have built a warehouse of intoxicants and in the past two years they have been drunk on that power.

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys” as the P. J. O’Rourke wrote. This is not simple cynicism. Those in power tend to think that their moral and intellectual superiority make them eminently qualified to do what they think is best, with decisions made in that alcohol laden warehouse of government. They have also funneled power to other institutions in order to amplify their own power. The last two years have revealed just how little power the individual has in the face of political power. Power emasculates restraint – just like alcohol.

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.” – Karl Popper

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IMAGES

The Dangerous Side of Power: [Essay Example], 661 words GradesFixer
Louisa May Alcott Quote: “Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that
Louisa May Alcott Quote: “Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that
Louisa May Alcott Quote: “Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that
Edward Abbey Quote: “Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the
Edward Abbey Quote: “Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the

VIDEO

High Voltage Hazard: The Power Pole That's Putting Lives at Risk
Is Black Power Dangerous For The Black Community?

COMMENTS

The Dangers of Power | Stanford Graduate School of Business
The Dangers of Power. One scholar shows how you can gain more power, and why you should be leery. July 27, 2016. | by Shana Lynch. Do you know how to manage your power? | Reuters/Mike Segar. If life focuses on the pursuit of happiness, work focuses on the pursuit of power.
The Dangerous Side of Power: [Essay Example], 661 words
He argued that there are three ways to exercise power: to coerce through threats, to induce behavioral change with payments or to attract and co-opt. The first two, coercion and inducement through payment, are forms of hard power; soft power is the ability to obtain proffered outcomes through attraction.
Why Power Corrupts | Smithsonian
New research digs deeper into the social science behind why power brings out the best in some people and the worst in others.
The Power Paradox - Greater Good
True power requires modesty and empathy, not force and coercion, argues Dacher Keltner. But what people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power.
How Power Corrupts the Mind
Power reduces awareness of constraints and causes people act more quickly. Powerful people also tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences.
The science behind why power corrupts and what can be ... - PBS
Power comes from a kind of humble language. There are actually new studies showing if you are humble and respectful, people respect you more. So that’s the rise to power. Here’s the problem: When...
On power and its corrupting effects: the effects of power on ...
As noted in Figure 1, power can dramatically change ordinary people’s behavior causing them to abuse it thereby making cumulative small mistakes that reach a dangerous threshold or a single significant mistake that ultimately leads to their loss of power.
The Subject and Power – Michel Foucault, Info.
It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “ subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.
Does Power Corrupt Everyone Equally? - Greater Good
Power increases confidence, optimism, risk-taking, sensitivity to internal thoughts and feelings, goal-directed behavior and cognition, and creativity. But these are not necessarily bad outcomes. Put to good use, power can have an incredibly positive effect on people.
The Psychology of Political Power: Does Power Corrupt or is ...
Rather than saying absolute power corrupts absolutely, Herbert reveals a common metaphysical denominator: corruptibility, that fundamentally connects all those with political power. However, his sematic interpretation gives birth to more questions than answers.