GOVT3993 POWER

Year 2, Semester 2

calista kumala
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................................3

1.1 LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVES CHAPTER 13: THE FORMS OF POWER BY BERTRAND RUSSELL......................4

2. ELITE VS PLURALISTIC POWER................................................................................................................7

2.1 COMMUNITY POWER DEBATE (CPD)..........................................................................................................7

2.2 DISTRIBUTION OF POWER: FRAGMENTATION OR CONCENTRATION.............................................................9
2.2.1 Dahl: Fragmented power (Pluralism)....................................................................................................9
2.2.2 C Wright Mills: Concentrated power (Elite Theory).............................................................................9
2.3 ELITE ACCOUNTS OF POWER DISTRIBUTION...............................................................................................10
2.4 PLURALIST ACCOUNT OF POWER................................................................................................................11
2.4.1 Kenneth Newton (1969: 212): Focus on responsiveness of decision-makers to others.......................12
2.5 WHAT COUNTS AS PROPER EVIDENCE........................................................................................................13
TUTORIAL:................................................................................................................................................................14

3. FACES OF POWER: DAHL, BACHRACH AND BARATZ, AND LUKES.............................................14

3.1 DEFINING POWER: 3 FACES OF POWER.......................................................................................................16

3.1.1 Robert Dahl: Power observable where there is direct conflict between A and B (1957)....................16
3.1.2 Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz: Power may be covert through the means of controlling the
agenda (1962;1970)............................................................................................................................................16
3.1.3 Steven Lukes (John Gaventa): Power exercised when B is having their wants and desires shaped by
A and they don’t even realise (1974)..................................................................................................................17
3.2 POLITICAL SCIENTIST’S FOCUS..................................................................................................................17
3.2.1 Robert Dahl: First Dimension..............................................................................................................17
3.2.2 Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz: Second Dimension.....................................................................18
3.2.3 Steven Lukes (John Gaventa): Third Dimension..................................................................................19
3.3 EVIDENCE: HOW TO TEST FOR POWER AND THE METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH.......................................20
3.3.1 SYSTEMATIC ATTEMPTS TO IDENTIFY TWO- AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL POWER IN THE CPD...................21
3.4 TUTORIAL DISCUSSION..............................................................................................................................22

4. CHARISMA AND OTHER TYPES OF AUTHORITY...............................................................................23

4.1 FORMS OF AUTHORITY...............................................................................................................................24

4.2 WEBER, AUTHORITY AND CHARISMA.........................................................................................................25
4.3 MAX WEBER: DOMINATION AND LEGITIMACY (READING).......................................................................28
 4.4 TUTORIAL DISCUSSION..............................................................................................................................29

5. POWER AND CULTURE................................................................................................................................31

5.1 CULTURAL FORMS OF POWER IN [Link], SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY...........................................32

5.1.1 How does the study of culture address problems of power?................................................................32
5.1.2 Anthropological interpretations of power: Geertz...............................................................................35
5.2 UNPACKING CULTURAL FORMS OF POWER.................................................................................................36
5.2.1 Benedict Anderson ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’.............................................................37
5.2.2 Could cultural approaches apply to ‘us’, or just to ‘them’..................................................................38
5.2.3 Moreton-Robinson, Indigenous belonging and whiteness as power....................................................39
5.2.4 Criticisms of Geertzian approach........................................................................................................41
5.2.5 Alternative approaches: Anthropologists identify solutions to coordination problems.......................42
TUTORIAL DISCUSSION.............................................................................................................................................44

6. POST-STRUCTURALIST ON POWER........................................................................................................47

6.1 READING: POWER/KNOWLEDGE LECTURE TWO BY MICHEL FOUCAULT..................................................47

6.1.1 Methodological Precautions................................................................................................................47
6.1.2 Theory of Sovereignty...........................................................................................................................48
6.1.3 Disciplinary Power...............................................................................................................................48
6.2 READING: RETHINKING THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF POWER BY MARK HAUGAARD.................................50
6.2.1 First Dimension of Power....................................................................................................................51
6.2.2 Second Dimension of Power.................................................................................................................52
6.2.3 Third Dimension of Power...................................................................................................................55
6.2.4 Fourth Dimension of Power.................................................................................................................57
6.3 READINGS: DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH – THE BODY OF THE CONDEMNED BY MICHEL FOUCAULT............60
6.4 POST-STRUCTURAL APPROACHES TO POWER.............................................................................................62
6.4.1 ‘Post-‘ = The limitation of modernist and structuralist perspective as starting point.........................63
6.5 FOUCAULT AND POWER IN THE 4TH DIMENSION..........................................................................................65
6.5.1 Governmentality: The conduct of conduct  4th Dimension of power................................................72
6.6 DISCIPLINARY POWER, BIOPOWER AND QUEER THEORY............................................................................73
6.6.1 Disciplinary power...............................................................................................................................73
6.6.2 Biopolitics.............................................................................................................................................75
6.6.3 Queer Theory Examples.......................................................................................................................76
6.6.4 Criticisms of post-structuralist theories of power................................................................................78
6.7 TUTORIAL DISCUSSION...............................................................................................................................79
7. FEMINIST POWER.........................................................................................................................................82

7.1 READINGS: CONTINUED DEVALUATION OF BLACK WOMANHOOD...........................................................82

7.2 READING: AMY ALLEN ‘RETHINKING POWER’..........................................................................................91
7.3 INTRODUCTION OF THE FEMINIST CHALLENGE TO THE STATE..................................................................91
7.3.1 Feminism’s Challenge to the State.......................................................................................................93
7.3.2 Feminism’s challenge to the state: Pateman and the sexual contract.................................................94
7.4 UNDERSTAND ALLEN AND FEMINIST APPROACHED OF POWER-OVER, POWER-TO AND POWER-WITH......95
7.4.1 Unpacking Power-Over........................................................................................................................96
7.4.2 Unpacking Power-To............................................................................................................................96
7.4.3 Unpacking Power-With........................................................................................................................97
7.5 NUANCING AND CRITIQUING FEMINIST APPROACHES TO POWER.............................................................97
7.5.3 Feminist theory in combination with other power approaches............................................................99
7.5.4 Criticisms of feminist theories of power.............................................................................................100
7.6 TUTORIAL DISCUSSION............................................................................................................................101

8. MARXIST THEORY......................................................................................................................................102

8.1 MARXIST CHALLENGE TO THE STATE......................................................................................................103

8.1.1 Theories of power as a guide to political action................................................................................103
8.1.2 Is class domination more fundamental than other dimensions or sources?......................................103
8.2 MARXIST APPROACHES TO POWER:..........................................................................................................104
1. Economic domination..............................................................................................................................104
2. State domination......................................................................................................................................105
3. Ideological domination...........................................................................................................................106
8.3 CRITICISMS TO MARXIST APPROACH TO POWER:.....................................................................................109
8.4 TUTORIAL DISCUSSION............................................................................................................................110

9. ANARCHISM, RESISTANCE AND HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS..............................................................112

9.1 ORIGINS OF ANARCHIST FORMS OF POWER.............................................................................................112

9.1.1 Positioning our power theorists.........................................................................................................113
9.1.2 Anarchist approaches to Power.........................................................................................................114
9.2 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TRANSCRIPTS AND FORMS OF EVERYDAY RESISTANCE......................................115
9.2.1 Anarchist approaches to power: An ‘anarchist squint’ – Power as viewed from below...................116
9.2.2 The State seeks to expand legibility to aid its purposes:....................................................................116
9.2.3 Open and ‘everyday’ resistance: Public and Private transcripts......................................................118
9.2.4 Dynamics of Domination and Resistance...........................................................................................120
 9.3 ANARCHIST APPROACHES WITH SOME COMPARISONS TO OTHER APPROACHES......................................121
9.3.1 Thinking about Scott’s analysis c.f. Weberian terms…......................................................................121
9.3.2 Thinking about Scott’s analysis c.f. other state challenging theory…...............................................122
9.3.3 Thinking about Scott’s analysis in Foucauldian terms…...................................................................123
9.3.4 Criticisms of Anarchist theories of power..........................................................................................124
9.4 READING: FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS OR LAYING IT ON THICK, JAMES C SCOTT.......................................125
9.5 READINGS: EVERYDAY FORMS OF PEASANT RESISTANCE, JIM SCOTT...................................................130
9.6 TUTORIAL DISCUSSIONS...........................................................................................................................134

10. POWER IN MOVEMENTS......................................................................................................................136

10.1 INTERDEPENDENT POWER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION...................................136

10.1.1 ‘Interdependent power’.................................................................................................................137
10.1.2 Positioning our power theorists: Social movements.....................................................................138
10.1.3 Introducing starting concepts: Social movements.........................................................................140
10.2 ‘REPERTOIRES OF CONTENTION’ OVER TIME............................................................................................141
10.2.1 Ways of demonstrating opposition, presenting demands..............................................................142
10.2.2 From the old regime to the national (Tilly)...................................................................................143
10.2.3 Transnational/multi-institutional/network power?........................................................................145
10.2.4 Criticisms.......................................................................................................................................147
10.3 READING: SPEAKING YOUR MIND WITHOUT ELECTIONS, SURVEYS, OR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.............148
10.4 READING: CAN POWER FROM BELOW CHANGE THE WORLD, FRANCES FOX PIVEN (2007)...................152
10.5 TUTORIAL DISCUSSION............................................................................................................................156

1. Introduction
Agency vs Structure problem
 Power of agents
o The ability of individuals or collectives to act
 Power of structures
o The constraints that act upon agents and limit their ability to act
o Pervasive element of a structure of society that operates outside the control of
agents
  Agency vs Structure Problem = How we assign power to one or the other
o How much importance we place on either one
o Power to do something or Power over an individual
 Professor Keith Dowding, ANU
o “If we concentrate upon the set of relationships that constrain and enable then we
privilege structure; if we concertante upon how those relationships constrain or
enable the agents to do what they want, that is we concentrate attention upon
individual agency, we examine the power of individuals. The structural forces of
1 account constitute the full set of resources of the other account”

1.1 Leadership Perspectives Chapter 13: The Forms of Power by Bertrand Russell

Power over human beings classified by the manner of influencing individuals:

1. By direct physical power over person’s body
 Examples:
o When he is imprisoned or killed
o A pig with a rope round its middle is hoisted squealing into a ship
o Military and police power
 In important organizations  The army and the police exercise coercive power
over the body
2. By rewards and punishments as inducements
 Examples:
o In giving/withholding employment
o Performing animals, in whom habits have been formed by rewards and
punishments  The power of ‘education’
 In important organizations  Economic organizations use rewards and
punishments as incentives and deterrents
3. By influence on opinion
 Examples:
o Propaganda
 o Opportunity for creating desired habits in others (Eg. By military drill)
o Proverbial donkey follows the proverbial carrot, we induce him to act as
we wish by persuading him that it is to his interest to do so
 In important organizations  Schools, churches, and political parties aim at
influencing opinion

Traditional power
 Force of habit
o Associated with religious or quasi-religious beliefs
o Rely upon public opinion
 Consequences
o Feels more secure but end up not on the lookout for traitor and is likely t avoid
much active political tyranny
o Where ancient institutions persist, the injustices to which holders of power are
always prone have the sanction of immemorial custom

Naked power
 Usually, military power
o Take the form of either internal tyranny or of foreign conquest
o Based on other forms of power: Wealth, technical knowledge, or fanaticism

Revolutionary authority
 Example: America in the War of Independence
o When traditional form of power comes to an end by a revolutionary authority
commanding the willing assent of the majority or a large minority of the
population
 Requires much more vigorous and active popular support than is needed by a traditional
authority
 Example: Chinese Republic
o Men of foreign education decreed a parliamentary Constitution
 o But public was apathetic  Showing or feeling no interest
o Regime quickly became one of naked power under warring Tuchuns (military
governors)

Differences:
 Traditional power must command respect which is partly due to custom
o As respect decays, traditional power passes over into naked power
 Revolutionary power depends upon a large group united by a new creed, programme, or
sentiment
o Eg. Protestantism, Communism or a desire for national independence
 Naked power results merely from the power-loving impulses of individuals or groups
o Wins from its subjects only submission through fear, not active cooperation

Power of organizations vs Power of individuals

 Way in which they acquire power
 Interrelatedness
o If you wish to be Prime Minister, you must acquire power in your Party, and your
Party must acquire power in the nation
 Different types of organizations bring different types of individuals
1. Hereditary power
o Notion of a ‘gentleman’
 Best manners include courteous behaviour towards equals as an
addition to bland self-assertion in dealing with inferiors
o Only where power is hereditary that men will be judged by their
manners
2. Power through learning/wisdom, real or supposed
o Example: Pope Silvester II
 He was reputed a magician because he read books and was
consequently able to increase the power of the Church by
inspiring metaphysical terrors
 o The intellectual is a spiritual descendant of the priest, but the spread of
education has robbed him of power
 Science has destroyed the belief in magic, and the respect for the
intellectual
3. Power through large economic organizations
o New type of powerful individual: ‘The Executive’
 Man of rapid decisions, quick insights into character and iron
will
 Must be able to inspire respect in equals and confidence in
subordinates who are by no means nonentities
4. Political power
o Successful politician
 Must be able to win the confidence of his machine, and then
arouse some degree of enthusiasm in a majority of the electorate
o Success varies according to the character of the times
 In quiet times: Give an impression of solidity and sound
judgement
 In times of excitement: Requires an impressive speaker, a person
who is determined, passionate and bold; Needs no power of
reasoning, no apprehension of impersonal facts, and no shred of
wisdom; Must be able to persuade the multitude that what they
passionately desire is attainable

Power behind the scenes

 Examples:
o Power of the courtiers, intriguers, spies, and wirepullers
 Acquire influence over the leaders by personal methods
o Put friends, quietly, into key positions and so, in time, they can control the
organization
 In our time, currency and foreign policy
 2. Elite vs Pluralistic Power
2.1 Community Power Debate (CPD)

 A debate between (primarily) American scholars in the mid-20th century

o Focus analysis upon power in US communities
o Local/municipal politics: Simplifies political system and political issues, making
collecting evidence more tenable
 Roots (Baldwin, 2021)
o ‘Some would include Aristotle’s discussion of oligarchy or Machiavelli’s advice
on governing, since both were concerned with smallish communities. Other who
have called attention to governing elites including Marx, who characterized
government as ‘the executive committee of the bourgeoisie’, and the Italian
school elite theorists, including Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfred
Pareto
 What was debated?
o The nature, scope and distribution of power  How do we define power, what is
power, what is its scope, how is it distributed in society, how does it operate 
Theoretical question
o The methods required to study and prove accounts of power  What is the
evidence that we need, what does our evidence say, does our evidence back the
claim we are making  Methodological question
 Several phases of CPD
1. Elite vs Plural accounts
2. 1st, 2nd and 3rd faces of power
3. 4th faces of power

Positioning our theorists: Power in post-war America

  What is American society in this period? US as a beacon of democracy and liberalism VS
US as conformist, repressive and deeply divided
o Robert A. Dahl:
 US democracy is a good thing
 Think about American democracy in a normatively positive way, separate
branches of government (checks and balances), no one group of people
have complete power, people have the opportunity to organise and
influence decision makers
 Power is pluralistic (dispersed)
 How American democracy works as it should, as it says it works, power is
fragmented
o C. Wright Mills:
 US society in a macro scale, power is concentrated in the top tiers of the
political executives, business community and military, if not in the group,
you cannot affect society
 American society does not operate in a way that it says it does, America
has an oligarchy where power is concentrated
 Main differences:
o Theory: Concentrated vs fragmented
o Methods: Macro-scale and qualitative vs micro-scale and quantitative

2.2 Distribution of power: Fragmentation or Concentration

2.2.1 Dahl: Fragmented power (Pluralism)
o Power is fragmented
o Distributes power across groups
o Groups compete for power in a democratic system
 Mobilise support/resources for a particular course of action regarding
policy/politics
 Organised group pressure elites
 o Elites exist, but no one coherent group dominates all branches of
government, all the time
 Elites compete for power, no one group have power over everything
 Need to be responsive to pressure from groups to maintain their grip
on power
2.2.2 C Wright Mills: Concentrated power (Elite Theory)
o Power is concentrated
o This concentration centres on an elite of political, business and military
leaders
o Elite is defined by their institutional position
o Competition between groups is limited
 They share a common understanding underpinned by their elite
position

2.3 Elite accounts of Power distribution

Earlier Elite theorist: Floyd Hunter

 Power theory in Atlanta
 Reputational analysis
o He identified people he thought was powerful + snowballing sampling
o He mapped power elite in Atlanta

The ‘higher circles’ of US power

 Business, government, military: Elites defined by institutional position
o Ability to affect decisions of national/international consequence and the people
have little influence
o Criticism: Lack of clear definition what is the true nature of power
 People who have power capture institutions and have power because of them
 Distribution of power is concentrated in the power elite
o Power elite is separate from other spheres of society
 o There are middle levels of power (eg. Celebrity) but they can’t affect the decision-
making of the power elite
o Celebrities distract the public and may be able to gain the ear of those who do
occupy power
 No longer separate interests balancing each other but integrated
 Eisenhower’s ‘military industrial complex’

2.3.1 Mills: Focus on national level

 Thick qualitative description
o Describes the operation of power in the power elite sphere
 Pile up evidence for his case in his entire book
o Not tallying, but giving all the detail
o In giving all detail, he loses precision (trade-off)

2.4 Pluralist account of power

‘Who governs?’ by Ronald Dahl

 Quantitatively analysing New Haven politics
o Trying to understand nature of power more generally emerging from a micro-
scale
 Test whether the city of New Haven, Connecticut, is run by a single-elite group
o To do so, he longitudinally examines the role of various local actors in areas
where important public decisions are made (Issue analysis)
o He finds unequal distribution of resources in his city
o But his data suggests that no single elite group dominates local policy making
o And only the democratically elected major has some influence in all issue areas
 Dahl argues that power in New Haven is pluralistic and power is dispersed in a number of
competing groups, rather than in one elite group
 Claim Dahl makes: This is what power looks like in American mid-21st century period
o Is it representative of America?
 o New Haven is a university city where Yale University is located
 Methodology for study:
o Examine many cases
o Tally up overtime
o Done in a quantitative manner

Key points
 Resources are widely distributed
o People can mobilise different resources
o Eg. Wealth, access, education
 People can form groups to exercise power
o People don’t have power because they are not in groups
 There are multiple channels of access
o Separation of power in a presidential system
o Divisions of power between federal government and other governments in state
levels
 Groups draw upon a range of power resources
o Groups exist in competition  Don’t work towards the same goals, or doing the
same things
o Groups can influence decision-makers
 There are elites, but they diverge
Does pluralism fully account for the nature of power?
 Focuses on level of dispersion of power among decision-makers
 To identify an elite, need to meet these conditions:
a. The hypothetical ruling elite is a well-defined group
b. There is a fair sample of cases involving key political decisions in which the
preferences of the hypothetical ruling elite run counter to those of any other
likely group that might be suggested
c. In such cases, the preferences of the elite regularly prevail

2.4.1 Kenneth Newton (1969: 212): Focus on responsiveness of decision-makers to others

 Need to look at whether decision makes respond to others

o Different in terms of findings (From Dahl)
o Importance of pluralist political system lies, not in the number/competitive nature
of elites, but in the extent to which elites are responsive and responsible to the
non-elites
 Not sufficient to just look at dispersion of power because the system does not distribute
power equally and the system favours some groups/sections of society over others
o Need to look at dispersion of power more broadly
o Look at systematic and structural constraints which act upon groups and prevent
them from influencing decision makers

2.5 What counts as proper evidence

1. Issue analysis and decision making (micro-scale by RA Dahl et al)
2. Thick qualitative description (macro-scale by Mills)

Which is better?
 Quantitative evidence, inferential statistical method can say something  Show big
picture, generalisable view of a political phenomena
o But doesn’t describe everything that goes on
 Sometimes, qualitative analysis gives a richer picture
o Unpacks things for us and shows what is going on in detail

Tutorial:
1. Who puts forward the more persuasive case (Mills or Dahl)? Why?
2. Who ‘won’ the elite theory vs pluralism debate
3. Which power theory best describes the operation of power in recent 2020 US presidential
election: Pluralism or Elite theory
4. Drawings from Week 1

Pluralism vs Elite
 Pluralism
o Groups with power are in contestation with each other
o But elite are held accountable for their actions
o Problem: His research group was very small
 Elite
o Easier to see day to day
o Problem: Does not define ‘power’ and who is the ‘elite’

For the election: Which is better:

 People choosing between 2 elites
 o Doesn’t change who’s in power
 Elite
o We can witness it more in real life

3. Faces of Power: Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz, and Lukes

Positioning our theorists: Power in the Vietnam War era
 Robert A. Dahl: “Who Governs?”
o Groups existed
o People had the opportunity to influence decision-makers
o All they needed to do was organise
o Power is observable and can be tested and used
 Bachrach and Baratz: “Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice”
o Studied in Baltimore (African American Community) in 1960s
o African American interests were kept off the agenda
o Public agenda was systematically presented to be a white one
 Steven Lukes: “Power: A Radical View”
o Power can operate in this 3rd face to shape the wants and desires of people and
they may not even be aware of what’s happening

Is power central to a science of politics?

 So-called ‘behavioural revolution’, particularly in the USA
o Political science systematic empirical analysis
o Opposed to normative theory and ‘hyperfactualism’
o Power as the unit of measurement
o Eg. How to people vote, what motivates that

Common types of power

 Force/Violence
 Coercion
  Inducement/Reward
 Persuasion
 Manipulation
 Authority

Ultimately, these different variety of concepts (common types of power) are all versions of an
actor doing something that they would not have done had they not been acted upon by another
(whether it be influence or authority or force)

3.1 Defining Power: 3 faces of power

3.1.1 Robert Dahl: Power observable where there is direct conflict between A and B (1957)
 ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B
would not otherwise do’
 Dahl and Stinebrickner (2003)
o Power (influence) is ‘… a relation among human actors such that the
wants, desires, preferences, or intentions of 1 or more actors affect the
actions, or predispositions to act, of 1 or more actors in a direction
consistent with – and not contrary to – the wants, preferences, or
intentions of the influence-wielders’
3.1.2 Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz: Power may be covert through the means of
controlling the agenda (1962;1970)
 ‘…Power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or enforcing
social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the
political process to public consideration only of those issues which are
comparatively innocuous to A’
o Introduce agenda-setting: Agenda systematically organised to only put
certain issues onto the agenda and keep other issues off the agenda
 ‘… A power struggle exists, overtly or covertly, either when both sets of
contestants are aware of its existence or when only the less powerful party is
aware of it’
o Power holders may not even be aware that they are organising the
agenda in such a fashion as to systematically put preference to their own
interests
o People who are having the power exercised over are very much aware
o Eg. African American communities are well aware of the power
exercised over them  They are well aware that they don’t get a say in
the public agenda that is put up and that is systematically organised to
preference white people
o Power struggle exists even if one party is not aware of it

3.1.3 Steven Lukes (John Gaventa): Power exercised when B is having their wants and
desires shaped by A and they don’t even realise (1974)
 ‘A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to
do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing, shaping or
determining his very wants’
o Process of socialisation and false consciousness (Marxist terms)
3.2 Political Scientist’s Focus

3.2.1 Robert Dahl: First Dimension

 Decisions, issues and observable and overt conflict
o Reflected by political behaviour
 Interests seen as policy preferences revealed by political participation
 Observable and overt conflict
o If can’t observe, can’t test, then it is unknowable
o If it is unknowable, it is not power because it is unproven

 Can observe actors, they clearly express their interests and preferences, they mobilize
their power and act upon other actors to achieve those interests
 Occurring in the formal arena of politics
o Governments

3.2.2 Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz: Second Dimension

 Epistemological: Quasi because of quant and qual
 Not saying Robert A Dahl is incorrect, just incomplete
 Decision making and non-decision making
o Setting the agenda
o What decisions are made and what decisions are put on the agenda for
public consideration
o What decisions are not made and are kept off the agenda
  Focus on issues and potential issues
o Things that potentially could be an issue in the community but has
failed to be put on the agenda/considered in a public fashion
 Conflict is observable, overt or covert
o Not only in public arena (overt) but also covert conflicts that are
happening more broadly in the community
o But the conflicts are still observable  Can go out and find out about
them and can make empirical claims based on observations
 Focus on subjective interests seen as policy preferences or grievances
o What are not being addressed

 What kind of decisions are made/not made

 Actors are well aware of what their interests are, well aware of what they potentially can
do, and are well aware that the agenda is essentially being controlled in such a fashion
that only certain issues are being presented/decided upon in the formal arena
o B is outside the formal arena of politics, outside the institutions where decisions
are made and B is lacking access to them because they are systematically kept out
of the decision-making process

3.2.3 Steven Lukes (John Gaventa): Third Dimension

 Epistemological approach: Empirical interpretivist
 Interests are constructed
 o The powerful people shape interests
 Behavioural critique
o Focus on decision-making and control over the political agenda
o Our behavioural focus causes us to miss the full operation of power
o “In brief, it is my suggestion that the one-dimensional view of power
presupposes a liberal conception of interests, the two-dimensional
view are reformists conception of interests and the three-dimensional
view, a radical conception of interests”
 Focus on issues and potential issues
 Conflict that is observable (overt or covert), but also latent (potential) conflict
 Subjective and real interests
o Radical view because people might not even be aware of their interests
o People’s interests, wants and desires can be shaped by other actors

 A is aware of their interests and are acting upon B, who may not be aware of what their
interests are
o They are acting upon them in the formal arena to shape B’s preferences to the
extent that B’s preferences are actually A’s
 So, in the formal political arena, B’s interests are aligned with A
o The process occurs outside the formal political arena and are therefore
unobservable
 o Preference shaping of actors

3.3 Evidence: How to test for power and the methodological approach
 All involve counterfactuals
 Not direct empirical observations because it is unknown what B would
have/would not have done

1. First face:
 Had A not acted upon B, B would not have acted in the way that they did
2. Second face
 Had A not limited the scope of political action via a mobilisation of bias (systematic
organising of the agenda), B would have acted in their interests
3. Third face
 If A had not shaped their very wants and desires of B, B would have realised their
very real interests and act upon them

3.3.1 Systematic attempts to identify two- and three-dimensional power in the CPD

1. Matthew A. Crenson, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution (1971). Why don’t governments act
on air pollution?
 Comparison of Gary, Indiana and East Chicago, Illinois (both had significant steel
industry)
 Crenson showed how East Chicago enacted air pollution ordinances earlier than
Gary because vested interests had more bargaining power and because the local
population had invested in the steel companies
 In Gary, although everyone can see the benefits of clean air, they were less keen on
enacting ordinances in one city because of the cost of the ordinances especially
given the propaganda and threats of the steel corporations
 Lukes: “The theoretical framework of Crenson’s analysis lies on the borderline of
the 2 and 3 dimensional views of power. It is on the face of it, a 2-dimensional study
 of non-decision making. On the other hand, it begins to advance beyond their
position in 3 ways. Firstly, it does not interpret non-decision making behaviourally
as exhibited only in decisions, hence the stress on inaction (what US steel did not
do). Second, it is not individualistic, it considers institutional power. Third, it
considers ways in which demands are presented through the exercise of such power
from being raised”

2. John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness (1982). Why don’t poor miners demand a better
deal?
 Approach to prove 3rd dimension of power: Put forward counterfactuals
 He says that people’s real interests are actually knowable and can be observed
 People’s preferences, wants and desires have been shaped in such a fashion to be
contrary to what their real interests actually are
 Other contexts: Potentially counterfactuals for preference shaping is American
attitudes towards universal healthcare or socialised healthcare  Seems to lecturer
that it would be in one’s real interests to remain fit, healthy and have access to
healthcare that wouldn’t make one broke. But part of American’s attitude towards
healthcare, their preferences are shaped. In US, a lot of preference shaping in
operation. Compare counterfactual between nations and preferences regarding
healthcare: Put forward the way that discourses operate in the US context
(conservative and republican politicians and actors who seek to shape preferences,
wants and desires of the American people to have their healthcare in less-than-
optimal fashion)
 Lukes: Not focused on behaviour but based on counterfactuals  People’s interests
are being shaped by other actors to the extent that their real interests are being
enacted

3.4 Tutorial Discussion

1. Briefly refresh the 3 faces of power  Key ideas/tenets
2. Consider the Australian refugee policy, from the post-war period, through to the
Vietnam War era boat arrivals, to Tampa  Apply the faces of power
 a. Systematically test the points that you have identified as key to the
theories against the evidence
b. How does your face explain what is going on?

1st face of power:

2nd face of power: Problems that the refugee faced are not usually addressed in the political
sphere/media or in public due to the severe lack of information
3rd face of power: Government makes it seem like it is best for refugees to stay in certain
islands/camps

4. Charisma and Other Types of Authority

Why obey?
 Why do people do what others want them to do?

Authority is a specific and valuable form of power

 When established, authority is relatively cheap to exercise
o Other forms of power more costly in time, effort and resources
o But once authority is lost, it is costly to replace or restore  Need to form
new relationships
 Eg. Coercion
o Need to maintain the threat
 Power between state and citizens in built on authority
o State: Institutions that we inherently obey
o Max Weber: State has authority for legitimate use of violence
 When the challenge to authority becomes more widespread, we can see
o Policy failure
o Resort to other, costlier, forms of power (coercion, etc)
o These may create their own problems
  Eg. Vaccines
o Can see how much trust in authority of the state/experts has declined
overtime regarding vaccines
o Since mid-20 century period, when there was Polio
o We got to the point where there is vaccine hesitancy
o Medical experts lose authority
o Government coercive development: ‘From 1 Jan 2016, childcare and family
payments will be denied to parents who don’t vaccinate their children’
o There is a small, but not insignificant, number of people who object from
getting the vaccine
o This is an example of erosion of authority, state power, authority of
medical experts and the need to resort to more expensive forms of power
such as coercion in order to get compliance

4.1 Forms of authority

Elements of authority
 Coercive authority
o ‘For A to obtain B’s compliance by threatening him with force, B must be
convinced of both A’s capability and willingness to use force against him’
 Authority by inducement
o ‘The counterpart of coercive authority based on inducement, or the offering of
rewards for compliance with a command rather than threatening deprivations.
Authority by inducement employs positive sanctions to bring about obedience
on the part of the power subject rather than the threat of negative sanctions’
 Competent authority
o ‘Competent authority is a power relation in which the subject obeys the
directives of the authority out of belief in the authority’s superior competence
or expertise to decide which action will best serve the subject’s interests and
goals’
 o Eg. Doctor and patient because they have the qualification (competence)
o Costly to establish
 Legitimate authority
o ‘Legitimate authority is a power relation in which the power holder possesses
an acknowledged right to command and the power subject an acknowledged
obligation to obey. The source rather than the content of any particular
command endows it with legitimacy and induces willing compliance on the
part of the person to whom it is addressed. Legitimate authority is thus distinct
from persuasion where the persuaded adopts as the basis of his conduct the
directives or suggestions of the persuader after having independently assessed
them in the light of his own goals’
o Shared norms regarding legitimacy  Shared norms: This is well understood
by the parties situated within a wider sort of meaning in the community;
because it is the source not the command that has legitimacy  Source exist
in a wider social political context
o Reliability of legitimate authority  Illegitimacy leads to disobedience  But
after establish legitimacy, it is cheap to maintain
o Power holder has the right to be giving these instructions and the people who
has power exercised over them acknowledges their obligation to obey
o Eg. Police officers, teachers vs students  Power rules accepted by society
o Imperative/compulsory nature of legitimate authority has 2 main features:
Subordinate feels obliged to obey even if he may dislike/disagree with a
particular command and the power subject is aware of the norms of the larger
collectivity of subordinates which prescribe obedience and of the disapproval
that the power subject will incur if they fail to comply with the commands

4.2 Weber, authority and charisma

Max Weber and Herrschaft

 ‘Legitimate domination’: Normatively neutral
 o Webber used the term Herrschaft to describe a situation where a subject to
domination found justifiable reason for that dominating relationship
o Multiple meanings in English: domination, dominion, rule, authority,
leadership
o Not easily translated into English, and legitimate domination sounds
oxymoronic
o Often translated as ‘authority’ in Wrong’s legitimate authority sense

3 ‘ideal types’ of authority by Weber

1. Traditional
 Summary
o Obey me because we have always been this way (Past)
o Eg. Kingship
2. Legal Rational
 Summary
o Obey me because it is the law (Present)
o Based on person’s office/role in society
o Eg. Bureaucrat roles in administering society in creating/enforcing
policies
o Office they hold, rather than their personality, gives them power
o Power doesn’t come from competency, it’s their office (the role
they fulfill)
o Holders are constrained by the rules and principles of their office
3. Charismatic
 Summary
o Obey me because I will be transformative/special mission
(Future/Change)
o Followers follow the individual because they see it as right that the
charismatic person is leading them
o “Follow me because I can transform/create something new”
 o Eg. Donald Trump

Charisma and Authority

 (Willner, 1984) Charismatic leadership can therefore be defined briefly as a
relationship between a leader and a group of followers that has the following
properties:
a. The leader is perceived by the followers as somehow superhuman
b. The followers blindly believe the leader’s statements
c. The followers unconditionally comply with the leader’s directives for
action
d. The followers give the leader unqualified emotional commitment
 Charismatic political leadership denotes a relationship between a political leader
and a segment of his following that has these properties
 (McDonnell, 2016) Populist leaders and coterie charisma  UK populist
leaders
o Relationship between charismatic populist leaders and followers
o Followers most committed to charismatic leaders
o “I set out two features which should be present if the relationship
between populist leaders and those in their parties (the coterie) is to be
consider charismatic and/or being invested with unique powers; and
followers accept the leaders’ authority unconditionally”
o Something that is testable, can say how the world works
Some complications – Trajectories of authority
 Is the history of states a movement from traditional authority to legal-rational
authority (sometimes via charismatic authority)?
 Or a cyclical history of traditional or legal-rational authority reaching a crisis
which produces a charismatic leader, whose authority is then routinised
o Increased in charismatic leaders in UK, USA, etc
 Are important elements of traditional authority still at work in contemporary
democracies?
o Continuation of Australian constitutional monarchy
o Crisis regarding sexual assault and gender-based violence  there is
an appeal in traditional patriarchal authority

Main point: Weber’s ideal types don’t give much to latch on to in terms of these
trajectories across time  Great to identify what’s going on  But not help in how it
happens and how it might progress overtime and how we might apply them as political
scientists

Some further classification complications

  Authority never appears in pure ‘ideal type’
 Are we trying to explain individual or state level authority?
 Differences between states, not just different types of authority
o States also vary on the extent to which they rely on authority rather
than coercion and instrumental rewards/punishments (Frank Parkin, p.
75-6)
 Who are the relevant followers? (Ruler and other elite figures? The ‘mass’ of
the people?)
 Why do the followers obey? Interpretation and evidence

4.3 Max Weber: Domination and Legitimacy (Reading)

 Every social group, of whatever kind, is prepared to resort to violence in the
protection of its interests
o Every powerful political community had a natural urge to expand and to
increase its sway over others

State vs Nation
 State
o Claims the sole right to use force upon anyone and everyone living within
its territorial jurisdiction
o Needed to become nations in order to lay the foundations of internal unity
o An agency of internal social control  The violence it contains is
unleased by one class upon another as part of the general process of
exploitation
 Nation
o A cultural community that was held together by the powerful bonds of
language and the moral sentiments transmitted by the mother tongue
o Needed to become states in order to defend the boundaries of the cultural
community against erosion or assault by predatory neighbours
 Types of domination
1. Monopolistic control
 Control over economic resources in the marketplace
o Rests upon the authority of office
 Exercised indirectly
o Through mediation of commodities and resources
 Formally free to act in accordance with their rational economic interests
2. Authority (Weber’s concern)
 Exercised directly over those who have a ‘duty’ to obey

4.4 Tutorial Discussion

Example of Charismatic Leaders

 AOC
 Donald Trump
 Angela Merkel
 Mao Ze Dong

In small groups, categorise your leaders and their contexts into a typology of states, at a
minimum liberal democratic vs authoritarian (but other dimensions may also be
considered, as you see fit). Then consider how charismatic authority works in these
different contexts - does it vary, or remain the same?
 Democratic
o Joe Biden
o Martin Luther King Jr
o Mahatma Gandhi
o More direct, I understand you, I am doing things in your interest
 Autocratic
o Mao Ze Dong
o Stalin
 o Hitler  I will fix your economy, I will make Germany the strongest
country  State based
 See it in Australian context and Liberal Democracy context
o But in the extreme ends, they are revolutionaries
o Some countries have fewer charismatic leaders because either they don’t
need it or it is moderate times
 Female as charismatic leaders
o Because see women as less funny
 Ethnonationalism
o Traditional ideas  Why is the appeal more towards charismatic leaders
than traditional leaders  Because charismatic leaders can capitalise on
the problems
o Something charismatic leaders can utilize
o Go more hand in hand than liberal states and charismatic  Because in
liberal states there are checks and balances
 Weber:
o These types of power can overlap
o Hitler: Charismatic + Tradition (force)

Then select one example from each of your typology categories that you developed and
apply Willner's tenets of charismatic leadership to them. Must these leaders meet all the
criteria to be considered charismatic? Why / why not? Does state-type (or other elements
of your typology) affect the applicability of Willner's tenets: why / why not?
 Trump
o Followers see him has superhuman
o Followers blindly believing his statements
 Bin Ladin
o Terrorist groups are political organisation
o The extreme version of charismatic leadership
o Terrorism is socially constructed
 Charismatic leadership can therefore be defined briefly as a relationship between a leader
and a group of followers that has the following properties:
1. The leader is perceived by the followers as somehow superhuman
2. The followers blindly believe the leader’s statements
3. The followers unconditionally comply with the leader’s directives for action
4. The followers give the leader unqualified emotional commitment

5. Power and Culture

 Culture, a contested concept  Raymond Williams – Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society
i. The independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of
intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18
ii. The independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates
a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in
general… But we have also to recognise
iii. The independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of
intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most
widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and
film

5.1 Cultural forms of power in [Link], sociology and anthropology

 Can political scientists and anthropologists be friends? Yes
o This week’s content mostly from anthropologists (Anderson, Geertz, Chwe)
and a bit of sociology (Bourdieu) and Indigenous studies (Moreton-Robinson)
o Methodology: Close observation and ‘thick description’ of anthropologists
(eg. The cock fight) generally not followed by political scientists
o Contextual interpretation of meaning and identification of broad mechanisms
versus generalisable explanatory causal laws
o This is quite different to the political science of Robert A Dahl, for instance
5.1.1 How does the study of culture address problems of power?

Political scientist
 Political scientists have tended to view politics and culture as separate
(variables)
o Culture shapes some possibilities of political power
o Explanatory or causal logic (eg. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The
Civic Culture (1965))
o Also found in Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (1977); Robert
Putnam, Making Democracy Work (1993); Ronald Inglehart and Pippa
Norris, Cultural Backlash (2018)
o But political science has tended towards the assumption that much about
power can be explained without reference to culture
o Eg. Democracy is democracy and bureaucracy is bureaucracy  ‘Don’t
need to talk about cultural aspects of these’
 Almond and Verba
o Looked at 5 democracies (US, Germany, Mexico, Italy and UK)
o Utilize Large-N interview research of about 1000 individuals in each
country (huge number of interview data)
o Ask for views on government and political life, and this idea of civic
culture was based on communication and persuasion (a culture that
allows change but also moderates it)
 Ronald Inglehart The Silent Revolution
o Coined the term post-materialism  People in western societies during
this mid to 20th century post-war period becoming more secure
materially in the emergence of the welfare state and the post war boom
o Because they had this material wellbeing, they were able to focus on
post material political values that were important to them
 Robert Putnam Making Democracy Work
 o Comparative study of 20 regional Italian governments since 1970
o They were similar institutions but have different, social, economic and
cultural context
o Culture was 1 variable amongst many in Putnam’s comparison
o Found that regional government preformed best uploading other factors
constant and worked the best when there were strong traditions and
cultures of civic engagement
o Putnam further develops this thesis on his work on social capital in the
90s period
 Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris Cultural Backlash
o Argue that populist and authoritarian leaders attract more support from
those who view societal changes (cosmopolitanism) need a negative
fashion
o They say this is generational, so it takes a lot of time

Sociologists
 Bourdieu and cultural capital
o Culture as a power resource: Capital
o Can be mobilised vis a vis other forms of capital (economic; social)
o 3 types of cultural capital:
a. Embodied
 Knowledge that is consciously and unconsciously
gained by socialisation into a culture or tradition
 Gained overtime, and unlike economic capital,
embodied cultural capital is non-transferrable
b. Objectified
 Transferrable: Made up of an individual’s property
 Works of art, scientific instruments  Can be
transmitted or exchanged (objectified)
  Can also be used symbolically to show the accumulation
of cultural capital that possession of such things signify
 But the individual’s possession of art cannot be capital
itself, individual can only consume the art and
understand its cultural meanings via the appropriate
socialization and education
c. Institutionalised
 The institutions’ formal recognition of a person’s
cultural capital
 Eg. University is imbuing you with cultural capital
 Facilitates the conversion of cultural capital to economic
capital  A symbol or heuristic of an individual’s
cultural capital to gain employment and build wealth
 ‘One particular power arena Bourdieu emphasizes in his sociology of modern
societies is the field of power, which is that arena of struggle among the
different power fields (particularly the economic field and the cultural field)
for the right to dominate throughout the social order. Bourdieu identifies
different subfields within the field of power, such as the artistic field, the
administrative field, the university field, the political field, and the economic
field. Leaders of particular subfields compete to impose their particular type of
capital as the most legitimate claim to authority. For example, artists, writers
and professors compete in the field of power against business leaders to
impose their respective capitals’1
o Cultural framing regarding trans people or in climate wars (mitigating
carbon emissions policies)
o Cultural frames competing with economic forms of capital for
supremacy and hegemony
 Culture as a resource, not a variable to explain something like political science
o Not a way of structuring meaning

1
Swartz, 2011
 o Instead, it is something that can be mobilized and something people use
and transfer (use to position yourself in a power hierarchy)

5.1.2 Anthropological interpretations of power: Geertz

 Symbolic anthropology: The dominant approach to culture
o All about interpretation
o Views culture as an independent system of meaning that can be
deciphered by interpreting key symbols, and rituals
 “Believing with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the
analysis of it to be not an experimental science in search of law but an
interpretive on in search of meaning’2
o Belief that however unintelligible they may be, becomes
understandable when understood as part of a cultural system of
meaning
o Actions are guided by interpretation: Symbolism aids the
interpretation of concepts and conceptual thinking as well as material
and tangible practices
 An intellectual descendant of Weber: Believed culture shaped politics and
economic development
o Created a more sophisticated understanding of culture than the
‘national character’ paradigm3
 “Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behaviour patterns –
customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters – as has, by and large, been the case
up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms – plans recipes, rules
instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing
of behaviour’

2
The Interpretation of Culture 1973, p.5
3
Cf. Polsci and IR: Huntington; Morgenthau  Who see culture neither as a reified, essentialised, independent
entity; nor as a psychological phenomenon
 o The Interpretation of Culture
o Similar to the 3rd understanding of culture
o About the meaning attached to certain signifiers  Important
meanings: Ways of interpreting the context, social life
 “Culture, here is not cults and customs, but the structures of meaning through
which men give shape to their experience; and politics is not coups and
constitutions, but one of the principle arenas in which such structures publicly
unfold”
o The Interpretation of Culture
o Culture is one of the important arenas in which structures of
political meaning publicly evolve
 Systematic to an extent, but not necessarily tightly structured or
systematically coherent
o ‘Tracing the curve of a social discourse; fixing it into an inspectable
form’ (The Interpretation of Cultures)
o Prefers to describe and trace  Generalise within specific cases (rather
than across them like in [Link])

5.2 Unpacking cultural forms of power

5.2.1 Benedict Anderson ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’

 For Anderson, the acquisition and exercise of political authority (in Java)
grammaticises cosmological understandings
o Start by underlining Western explanations of power: Power is abstract,
deduced from observations, can emerge from heterogenous source and its
accumulation has no inherent limits
o In Java, power is: A cosmic force that is acquired and accumulated, is
defined and concrete (something that fundamentally exist), homogenous
(from one source), sum of power is constant, and power does not raise
questions of legitimacy/moral questions
  General
o In Java, power is a cosmic force that can be acquired and accumulated
o Personal acquisition of power comes through restraint and concentration,
is lost through looseness and indulgence
o Power radiates from a centre and grows weaker towards the periphery
o A manifestation of political power is the ability to reconcile opposites and
absorb opponents

Breaking Geertz’s rules with some abstractions concerning power concepts

 Western (liberal) social scientific vs non-Western and traditional concepts of
power (after Ben Anderson)

How and Why should we apply this contextual approach to power?

 Different cultures have different assumptions about power
o This is why positionality is important
o Cannot apply western conception of power and cannot expect the same
kind of responses, cannot expect same kind of interpretations
 o Need to situate ourselves
 What people in one culture may recognise as power, people in another culture
may not see as power at all
o C.f Anderson: Imagined Communities (1983)

5.2.2 Could cultural approaches apply to ‘us’, or just to ‘them’

 Weber
o Legal rational authority arguably rests on increasingly rational conception
of the universe
o In European context, there is an overthrow of the medieval ‘Great Chain
of Being’ undermined ‘Divine Right of Kings/Queens’ and expectations of
monarchs
 Pre-legal rational forms of power live on and intersect with legal rationalism
o As described by Javanese power

5.2.3 Moreton-Robinson, Indigenous belonging and whiteness as power

 Criticisms to cultural approach
 “Australian cultural representations of mateship, egalitarianism, individualism
and citizenship are reproduced through disciplinary knowledges that are presented
and taught as though they do not have an epistemological connection to whiteness
o Book: Whiteness, epistemology and Indigenous representation
o These things are presented as cultural norms/cultural universalities in the
Australian context
o Whiteness as a hegemonical power over cultural representations
 “The Indigenous body signifies our title to land, and our death reintegrates our
body with that of our mother, the earth. However, the state’s legal regime
privileges other practices and signs over our bodies because we are underpinning
this legal regime is the Western ontology in which the body is theorized as being
separate from the earth”
o Indigenous definition of power
 o Western conception of meaning is mobilized as a type of power + Has a
power in structuring meaning, actions, politics and practice
 “The colonizer/colonized axis continues to be configured within this post
colonizing society through power relations that are premised on our dispossession
and resisted through our ontological relationship to land. Indigenous people’s
position within the nation- state is not one where colonizing power relations have
been discontinued. Instead, these power relations are at the very heart of the white
national imaginary and belonging’ (I still call Australia home)

Bushfires, culture and climate wars  The Possession of Indigeneity and continuing
whiteness
 Settler-colonial mythos played a large part in how political actors framed their
response to the Black Summer Bushfires
o These actors all used White Australians signifiers and myths to prosecute
their position in the climate wars to understand the Bush Fire crisis and
their implication on what the government should do
o How political cultures have been mobilized by political actors
 Cultural tropes of the bush myth, including the constant battle with a harsh
climate, and the heroics of martial nationalism were found to be particularly
prominent
o The environment is a harsh one and is something that needs to be
controlled/conquered
o Something that needs to be considered in public policy
o Gets back to heroics: People fighting the fires and the communities that
are affected  Bravery, sacrifice, etc
o Culture did more than frame a climate in crisis  Argued that the
reproduction of these kind of White Australian cultural motives did pretty
heavy ideological lifting  The myth of pastoralist struggle against the
wild nature through stereotyping of the Bush Man was used specially to
promote a notion of Australian Exceptionalism and how they are uniquely
equipped to fight a uniquely Australian threat of fire blaze
 o Conservative actors: Mobilized these frames (Senator Michael Roberts
representing the One Nation party)  Drew heavily on the set of colonial
folklore  Celebrate the bravery of firefighters and communities and
invoked the trope of the internal struggle with the wild and unruly Mother
Nature
 In the shadows of the white bush myth were only a few short mentions of
Indigenous peoples’ sovereignties and implicit recognition of their connection to
Country and land in pre-existing and continuing ways, in line with Australia’s
ongoing colonialism. Three of our four actors addressed Indigenous peoples
within their speech – all with a single sentence, and all within the possessive form
of ‘our’
o Ongoing dominance on white settler claim on nationalism and its power
relationships and importantly, in the shadow of the white bush myth, there
was only some short mentions of Indigenous peoples and their
sovereignties
o Very in line with ongoing colonialism
o Scott Morrison: Indigenous leaders are co-possessors of the continent
loving OUR land so much  Contested: In Indigenous ontology, there is a
particular cultural/power association with that  Emphasize
religious/spiritual connections to country but didn’t recognise claims of
ongoing sovereignty
o Malcolm Robert: Populist call  Elite don’t understand what is going on,
only people that do  Used Aboriginality for that
o These strategies attempt to assimilate and assume the symbol of
Indigeneity as in support of each actor’s support in response to the crisis
and the authority of the position they were mobilizing in response to the
crisis
o Dominant power of whiteness in the Australian context
o In sidelining the recognition of ATSI existence, agencies and
sovereignties, each actor here utilized and normalized Australian’s culture
 separate cultural hegemony at the expense of First Nation’s knowledges
and existence

5.2.4 Criticisms of Geertzian approach

 He and his many successors have never identified the mechanisms that linked
patterns of meaning with social and political action in a way that made people
anything more than passive vehicles of cultural patterns
o ‘Describing action in terms of subcultures assumes that people are
governed by forces that work behind their backs: action is reduced to
compulsive normative repetition, rendering change inexplicable’ (Diego
Cambetta, The Sicilian Mafia, p.10)
o Cf Stephen Lukes & the 3rd face of power: Power to shape people’s wants
and desires and they may not be aware of that process
 Moreton-Robinson approach (2015: 12-3)
o “It may be argued that to suggest an ontological relationship to describe
Indigenous belonging is essentialist or is a form of strategist essentialism
because I am imputing an essence to belonging. From an Indigenous
epistemology, what is essentialist is the premise upon which such
criticism depends: The Western definition of the self as not unitary or
fixed. This is a form of strategic essentialism that can silence and
dismiss non-Western constructions, which do not define the self in the
same way. The politics of such silencing is enabled by the power of
Western knowledge and its ability to be the definitive measure of what it
means to be human and what does and does not constitute knowledge.
Questioning the integrity and legitimacy of Indigenous ways of knowing
and being has more to do with who has the power to be a knower and
whether their knowledge is commensurate with the West’s “rational”
belief system. The anti-essentialist critique is commendable, but it is
premised on a contradiction embedded within the Western construction of
essentialism; it is applied as a universal despite its epistemological
recognition of difference”
 o Western approach, not fixed/unitary, has to be considered in a fluid
fashion  Recognising and silencing difference in built in Western
conceptions in their interpretation of culture

5.2.5 Alternative approaches: Anthropologists identify solutions to coordination problems

 Culture is something that can be used to solve political problems
o What is important is not symbolic meaning but symbolic sharing
o Many situations where people can mutually benefit by acting in conformity
with each other, but sometimes cannot communicate sufficiently with each
other to establish rules of coordination
o David Hume (C18): ‘Two men who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an
agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each
other’
o How would people drive if there were no laws about it? (Michael Laver,
Invitation to Politics (1984))
 Not just symbolic meaning but symbolic sharing
o Michael Chwe focuses on obedience to authority as a ‘coordination problem’:
“each person is more willing to support an authority the more others support
it”
o Culture creates patterns of authority
o Culture constitutes power by publicising common knowledge: Cultural
artefacts tell everyone what everyone else knows, and that everyone knows
what everyone else knows  There is a shared meaning but also a shared
understanding that you know that everyone else knows as well
o Public policy solutions in COVID-19 coordination: “Many have argued that
advertising ‘creates needs’ that people would not have cared about
otherwise… but perhaps it is less a matter of creating individual isolated needs
than of tapping into the deep and basic need of each individual to conform to
community standards, an ever-present coordination problem”
 o Chwe example: Bodily movements and dance as an example of a kind of
language  Symbolic symbols are communicated through a variety of
movements from 1 person to another  Group dancing also an ideal way of
creating common knowledge because if any person loses interest, this
becomes evident to everyone due to the pattern of movement being disrupted

Takeaways
 Cultural approaches to power force us to take seriously the differing contexts of power
 These differing cultural contexts may well be very different to traditional western
conceptions of power
 Having said that, this leads to a fundamental problem for cultural approaches to power:
Are we just stuck with thick description of cases?
 Chwe argues that a focus on symbolic sharing rather than just meaning can perhaps 
Generalizable power approaches and solutions

Tutorial Discussion

To begin, and as a class, reflect on the idea of positionality as researcher. How does your cultural
positionality affect your understanding of power?
 Positionality impact the researcher
o What is and isn’t legitimate authority
 Positionality as a university
o Situated knowledges
o What we believe to be true
o How we interpret things
 Social classes in university
o If more middle class then it shapes the research
o Class structure affect perspectives
 Gendered positionality
o Male perspective is seen as the default
Then, in some small groups, reflect upon what your cultural positionality brings to your
interpretation of the readings for the week – Geertz and Moreton-Robinson. Each group member
should take turns to outline how this has affected your reading of the sources. Refer to your notes
from the lecture.
 Morton reading
o Interesting to hear the story of his lived experience as a white Australian
o A lot of benefits of colonisation does not positively affect Morton
 Need to do a double take
 Australian Fiji Indian
o Ancestors Indian grew up in Fiji, and she grew up in Australia
o There was a shared colonised experience in Fiji and India
o As an Indian, she never understood Fijian occupation in India
o Because of a lot of cultural silencing
o A lot of Fiji politics covered Indian experiences  There was a national narrative
making in Fiji to silence Indians
 Geertz reading
o Westerner wouldn’t be able to observe the underlying assumptions/social norms
within the Asian countries
o Only able to observe the cockfights, not able to see the underlying ideas
o His writing preserved a lot of cultural structures
 How some country’s power/cultural structure are maintained after colonisation
 Objectified culture
o Art, things that can be moved on to other people
o White Australian cannot understand Aboriginal culture, only can be taught it so is
it an objectified culture
 Tasmanian Indigenous community destroyed
o The Tasmanian culture is not destroyed
o We are only taught that they are wiped out
o White Australians try to wipe out culture although it still exists
  Many people ignore the actualities of colonisation
o Large ignorance against post-colonisation
 Moretson-Robinson
o Ongoing colonisation, not yet post-colonial
 A lot are implicit, someone like me doesn’t have a close relationship with ancestors
o Need more to overcome the implicit power
o Is oblivious to the flip side of white power
o Need more work to identify why certain things are uncomfortable for Aboriginal
people

What do these reflections suggest about the situated and ‘thick descriptive’ empirical approach
of anthropological approaches to power vs. the generalizable case across political science? Do
either of these methods better account for the positionality that a research brings to their
analysis?
 Thick description is important
o Everyone have different experiences
o Cannot be easily generalised
o Thick description also allows the reader to understand the researcher’s
positionality
 Generalizable cases also important
o To make comparisons
o Generalizable research has to be objective (which is difficult due to biases that
people don’t recognise they have)
 Positionality
o Anthropological approach better reveals a researcher’s positionality because there
is more for the readers to explore
o Can a scientific approach tackle the issue of positionality bias? It mitigates it but a
researcher’s research will always have some level of bias
o Even with generalizable approach, it still isn’t objective
 Inherently impossible for your research to be fully objective
 o No matter what you do, you are coming to your research for a position of
knowledge
o Sometimes will leave things out by choice or just be ignorance
 There is no best way to control positionality
 How biases play a less prominent role
o Interdisciplinary work control some biases: Different perspectives in different
subjects come work together  But there is still a prioritising of certain things
over others + Methodological problems  Broadening perspectives

6. Post-Structuralist on Power

6.1 Reading: Power/Knowledge Lecture Two by Michel Foucault

 Power, right, truth
o Traditional question: How is the discourse of truth able to fix limits to the right of
power?
o Foucault’s problem: What rules of right are implemented by the relations of
power in the production of discourses of truth? What type of power is susceptible
of producing discourse of truth that in a society such as ours are endowed with
such potent effects?
 Manifold relations of power permeate, characterise, and constitute the social body
o Powers cannot be established, consolidated nor implemented without the
production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse
o Production of truth to power and cannot exercise power except through the
production of truth
 Function of discourse and techniques of right
o To efface the domination intrinsic to power in order to present the latter at the
level of appearance under 2 different aspects: Legitimate right to sovereignty and
the legal obligation to obey it
o Right: Methods of subjugation that it instigates
 6.1.1 Methodological Precautions
1. Power should be concerned at its extremities, not in their central locations
2. Not concerned with power at the level of conscious intention or decision  Should not
be considered from its internal point of view
3. Power should not be taken to be a phenomenon of one individual’s consolidated and
homogenous domination over others
4. ‘Power establishes a network through which it freely circulates’ is only true to an extent
5. Major mechanisms of power is not ideological  It is much more and much less
Summary
 ‘Direct our research on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of
sovereignty. The State apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but
towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and
the inflections and utilisations of their localised systems, and towards strategic
apparatuses
 Must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power
o Must escape from the limited field of juridical sovereignty and State institutions
o Instead, base our analysis of power on the study of techniques and tactics of
domination

6.1.2 Theory of Sovereignty

 Theory of Sovereignty
o Refer to a mechanism of power that was effective under the feudal monarchy
o Served as instrument and even as justification for the construction of the large-
scale administrative monarchies
o Used as a weapon to limit or re-enforce royal power
o Re-activated through the doctrine of Roman Law
 Now, theory of sovereignty is concerned with the construction of an alternative model:
Parliamentary democracy
 o Relationship of sovereignty encompasses the totality of the social body
o The mode in which power was exercised could be defined in its essentials in
terms of the relationship sovereign-subject

6.1.3 Disciplinary Power

 Summary
o Highly specific procedural techniques
o Completely novel instruments
o Quite different apparatuses
o Foucault believes: Also absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty
 Dependent upon bodies and what they do
o Less dependent on the Earth and its products
 It is a mechanism of power which permits time and labour
o Rather than wealth and commodities
 Is constantly exercised by means of surveillance
o Rather than in discontinuous manner by means of a system of levies or
obligations distributed over time

Existence of the Theory of Sovereignty

 Only exist as an ideology of right and as an organising principle of legal codes
 Why has it persisted?
o It is a permanent instrument of criticism of the monarchy and of all the obstacles
that can frustrate the development of disciplinary society
o It allows a system of right to be superimposed upon mechanisms of discipline in
such a way as to conceal its actual procedures and to guarantee to everyone the
exercise of their proper sovereign rights
 Sovereignty is democratised through the constitutions of a public right articulated upon
collective sovereignty
Right of sovereignty and a Mechanism of Discipline
 These 2 define the arena in which power is exercised
o Powers of modern society are exercised through and by virtue of this very
heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous
disciplinary mechanism
 Disciplines may well be the carriers of a discourse that speaks of a rule
o But this is not the juridical rule deriving from sovereignty, but a natural rule, a
norm
o Code of normalization, not of law  Society of normalisation

Non-disciplinary form of power

 Not towards the ancient right of sovereignty
 But towards the possibility of a new form of right
o One must be anti-disciplinarian but at the same time liberated from the principle
of sovereignty
 Notion of repression
o Contains an obscure reference to a certain theory of sovereignty: The sovereignty
of the sovereign rights of the individual
o Its usage introduces a system of psychological reference points borrowed from the
human sciences: From discourses and practices that belong to the disciplinary
realm
o Notion of repression remains a juridical-disciplinary notion

6.2 Reading: Rethinking the Four Dimensions of Power by Mark Haugaard

 Views of power
o Power over: Domination
o Power to: Empowerment
 Modern power is ‘positive’
o Cf: Sovereign power that works through repression
 o Power positive only on an empirical level, as constitutive of social life, not
normatively positive
 Soft power
o Power of “attraction”4 or “endearment”5
o Similar to consensual view of Arendt, Parsons, etc
o Similar to the three-dimensional view6
o Cf: Implausible since Lukes intended the three-dimensional power as domination,
not attraction7
 Hypothesis:
o The idea that the same empirical processes, which Lukes theorizes as three-
dimensional power, have the potential to be emancipating, á la Arendt
 The article present an explanatory sketch of how we might consider the four dimensions
of power from 2 opposing normative perspectives: domination and emancipation

6.2.1 First Dimension of Power

 Power over
o Interpreted normatively as domination
o Routine power over: Not reducible to domination or coercion as is frequently
assumed
 Zero-sum vs Positive-sum Power
o 0 sum: One-part gains at the expense of the other
o + sum: One party does not gain at the expense of the other  Power of both
expanded
 Power over can be empirically positive-sum and normatively commendable
o 2 types of prevailing power: Exercises of power that are effective due to the
reproduction of structural context and ones which do not depend upon
structural constraints
4
Nye, 2011a, p. 21
5
Gallarotti, 2001, p. 32
6
Nye, 2011a, 2011b
7
Gallarotti, 2011, p. 29
 o A prevails over B in an election  Presupposes mutual structural reproduction;
Motivation of B toward compliance is usually internal to the process of structural
reproduction  Actors A and B are in conflict with regard to outcomes, but they
share a commitment to the democratic process
o A prevailing over B by using a gun  The source is external through changing an
actor’s incentives with regard to the goal-oriented aspect of their action
 Foucault
o Change is characterized by a sovereign model of coercive domination replaced by
a modern power
o Modern power described as a constitutive, positive and disciplinary power8
 Elias 1994
o Modernity involves a move from obedience based upon coercion, to compliance
based upon internalized self-restraint
o AKA the ‘civilizing process’
 Haugaard
o Modern power is a move from power over which is primarily based upon
compliance due to goal-oriented aspects to compliance due to structural factors
o The ideal type modern holder of power confirms to the norm, not the exception
 In a normatively legitimate structurally constituted exercise of power over, the gain of B
is relative to future agency
o Normatively legitimate if: it can be generalized and none of the actors involved
constitute a means to an end9
o Episodic aspect of power: Focus upon specific outcomes
o Dispositional power: Constitutes the structured rules of the game, defining the
dispositions of actors over time
 How it works:

8
Foucault 1979
9
Kantian theory
 o When A and B prevail over each other in a structured contest, the episodic
exercise of power over B, contributes to the creation/recreation of the future
dispositional power of both actors
o In the episodic moment, structures are reproduced that constitute the
democratic game, which gives both actors the dispositional power to replay
o Structural reproduction entails the possibility of B exercising power over A at a
different future episodic moment
o While episodic power may be zero-sum, at a dispositional level the relationship is
positive sum

6.2.2 Second Dimension of Power

 Bachrach and Baratz10
o A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and
institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public
consideration only of those issues that are comparatively innocuous to A
 Normatively this constitutes domination
o Institutions cannot be generalizable to include the perspective of B
o As a consequence, B becomes a means to A’s ends
 Structures
o Constitute the rules of the game or dispositional power
o They are modes of limiting interaction
o Structural constraint: A preclusion that constitutes the precondition of social order
o Language is a structural constraint  It constitutes a publicly shared set of
constraints
 Garfinkel (1983): Breaching experiment
o Students instructed to overcome structural constraint  Many reported it as
traumatic
o They were instructed to speak something approach a private language
o Private in a weaker sense  Not representing publicly shared social structures

10
Bachrach and Baratz, 1962, p. 948
 o Infelicitous reactions  Acts of structuration that are systemically excluded by
others; Lack of system integration & momentary social integration for the actor
 Reproduction of social systems
o When a social actor finds their interventions either ‘politely ignored’ or eliciting
hostile responses, their structuration practices are excluded from having
legitimacy
o In doing so, structural constraint is enforced through the agency of others
o Routine socialization: A process of learning which structuration process are
felicitous, and which are deviant/private/weak
 In practice
o If A gets more votes than B: It is organized into politics that A wins the election
and organized out that B does anything other than accept defeat
o 2D power is normatively reprehensible: Not simply that issues are organised out
to the systematic disadvantage of B
o Structural constraint makes power over into a zero-sum phenomenon
o In contrast, if structural constraints are arranged to organize out political
procedures whereby actors use each other as a means to an end, by excluding
zero-end power, this is normatively commendable
o The organizing out of zero-sum power constitutes the essence of procedural
justice: Liberal tradition
 Rawls’ characterization of the veil of ignorance
o Thought experiment which describes a process where some issues are organized
into politics and others are organized out
o “No one knows his place in society”: “Principles of justice are chosen behind a
veil of ignorance”  “This ensures that no one is advantaged/disadvantaged in
his choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingencies of
social circumstances”11
o “Principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain”12

11
Rawls 1971, p.12
12
Rawls 1971, p.12
 o Policies that reflect particular contingencies of people’s lives have been
organized out of politics
o General principles of human behaviour and needs have been organized in
 Procedural exclusion may entail instances of domination
o Even the best liberal principles can contain within them instances of domination
o Must treat these devices with certain scepticism (consistent with a liberal open-
mind and critical habitus)
o It constitutes a condition of possibility for positive-sum power over, which is the
essence of democratic politics as institutionalized just conflict
 Structures that exclude the particular interests of all actors are ends in themselves
o All parties have an interest in their reproduction
o 2D power as domination has an inherent tendency towards instability made up for
with coercion
o Normatively desirable 2D power tends towards self-generating reinforcement
overtime
o It is for this reason that states with permanent minorities cannot be governed
successfully by first past the democratic procedure which usually results in
coercive confrontation because majoritarian democracy constitutes symbolic
violence as B always loses
o Procedures are only just if they yield the conditions of possibility for repeat play
in practice
 The more structuration practices are confirm-structured by B, the more stable the system
becomes
o Need for coercive supplement becomes less
o 2D power as justice is function
o Democracy has a tendency to do better functionally speaking
o Reason why there is a tendency for democracy to spread with the advance of
modernity
6.2.3 Third Dimension of Power
 Lukes and Foucault
o 3D power is the relationship between the social consciousness of social actors &
the reproduction of relations of power
o Direct mapping between the tacit social knowledge that actors use to reproduce
social structure and the reproduction of relations of domination
 Habitus: Actor’s social consciousness
o Discursive consciousness  Actors are relatively discursively conscious of: A
specific theory/model of discipline/social science
o Practical consciousness  The vast tacit knowledge which actors use to inform
their structuration practices
 Practical consciousness (Foucault)
o The more taken-for-granted order of things that structures a system of thought
o Is the source of meaning  In routine interaction, knowledge constitutes taken-
for-granted meaning
o Knowledge is not unconscious
 Democracy example: A and B stand for election
o Meaning of election goes into structuration practices: Largely practical
consciousness
o Objective of winning: Discursive
o Complex structuration practices that constitute a democratic system presuppose
shared practical consciousness
o Only if a democracy is newly established then those structuration practices begin
as discursive knowledge
o Discursive practices overtime become part of practical consciousness knowledge
 Third dimension of power is constituted relative to practical consciousness knowledge
o A prerequisite for routinized structural reproduction
o In terms of a mapping of structural inclusions and exclusions of natural attitude
practical consciousness on to structural reproduction
 o The inclusions and exclusions that structure interaction appear as part of the
natural order of things
o Make certain acts of structuration appear reasonable because they are part of
the perceived natural order of things
 Reason
o Reasonableness consists in action following logically from the meaning
reproduced
o No actor feels comfortable engaging in structuration practices that violate his/her
practical consciousness
o All systems of thought and reasonableness entails a bias towards certain forms of
distribution of power and against other distributions of power
o Reason is a form of caging of social actors based upon ontological security
 Population share practical consciousness knowledge
o Conducive to internalized self-restraint
o Means that society have a civic culture conducive to liberal democracy
 People not entirely trapped in their practical consciousness
o Can move to discursive consciousness which gives them the capacity to reflect
upon what they may previously have considered the natural order of things
o Consciousness raising: Actors reflect discursively upon the implication of
structuration practices
o By suspending their natural attitudes
o Similar to Foucault’s account of genealogy: Critique of the present, that makes
that-which-is appear as something that might not be13  Natural order of things
has been socially constructed
 Summary:
1. 3D power entails a mapping of practical consciousness knowledge onto a specific
systemic form of inclusion and exclusion, whereby certain structuration practices
are made to appear reasonable and other un-reasonable
 Potential to reinforce systems of domination or more egalitarian systems

13
Foucault, 1988, p. 36
  Mapping can be normatively desirable/undesirable
2. Actors are not trapped into a specific being-in-the-world because they can
convert practical consciousness into discursive consciousness
 Allows for change in what they consider reasonable mapping
between meanings within the habitus and structuration
practices

6.2.4 Fourth Dimension of Power

 Consists in the process of justification
o Process of objectification where social actors are made into social subjects14
 Foucault15:
o Power which makes individuals subjects
o Subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity
by a conscience or self-knowledge
o Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to
 “Discovery of man”16
o Human subject becomes an object of knowledge
o Human becomes someone who can be studied
o Norms can be established
 Panopticon
o They subject themselves to the normalizing judgements of the observer
o Once judgement in internalized, they become objects of knowledge for
themselves  Continually subject themselves to normalization
o Is coupled with discipline: Enforced routinization
o Discipline entails rigid adherence to timetables and exact positioning in space,
relative to which there emerges a whole set of new ‘abnormalities’ of crime or
discipline

14
Foucault, 1982, p.208
15
Foucault, 1982, p. 212
16
Foucault, 1970
  Kantian normative perspective
o Power appear normatively reprehensible
o Social subject used, made to fit, into a system
o Normalized and disciplined subject is clearly a means to the end of the system
 Sciences of socialization
o Human ‘civilized’ nature constitutes a product of socialization
o Panopticon was essentially a socialization machine  Constitutes an architectural
device for making social subjects
 Gellner (1983): Emergence of modern state
o Not simply a monopoly upon violence and taxation
o But also the attempted monopoly upon socialization  Control of education
o With modernity, students are socialized into a common curriculum: A significant
degree of common socialization
 Internalization of discipline
o Make actors predictable subjects of routinization
o Routinization constitute the key to structuration17
o Discipline makes structuration largely a practical consciousness reflex action
o If structuration practices are internalized through constant repetition, social actors
feel compelled to respond in a particular way to certain stimulus
o If the response is immediate & unreflective, respond is practical consciousness
o Thus people will remain constrained/caged
 Kant: What is Enlightenment?
o Enlightenment consisted in the release from self-incurred tutelage brought about
by man’s inability to make use of his understanding without the discretion of
another18
o Critique of authority: Constant questioning  A continual move of knowledge
from the realm of practical consciousness knowledge into discursive
consciousness

17
Giddens, 1984, p. 60-68
18
Kant, 1784 cited Foucault 2007
  Administering justice from the “original position”19
o Must be sufficiently self-disciplined not to be moved by personal affective
feelings/desires for goals
o If they are moved, they will move outside the original position
o Must be disciplined by having internalized massive self-restraint
 Higher the educational qualification a person has, the greater the deferral of self-
gratification
o Correlation between high positions of authority and capacity to excel in personal
self-restraint
o Not part of the Foucauldian model, this is theorized by Weber and Elias
 Key to normatively desirable power over is the acceptance of structural constraint
o In modern society, actors are continually subject to authority
o This condition is not inherently objectionable if the compliant actor B knows the
authoritative actor A is not using that authority for personal ends
o Reflexive discursive consciousness level: Makes sense for B to accept the
authority of A if:
a. Person in authority has the knowledge to execute the social role
b. One can reasonably expect that compliance to that powerful actor A
will only be used for structurally agreed purposes
o However, if B is compliant to an actor A who has internalized the self-discipline
necessary to use the power within certain structured constraints, then B is not
being used as a means to an end in the episodic moment of compliance
o Thus the self-discipline of A facilitates a relationship in which A’s episodic
power over B entails the dispositional empowerment of B

6.3 Readings: Discipline and Punish – The Body of the Condemned by Michel Foucault
 Punishment
o Tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process

19
Rawls’ characterization
 o Consequences: Leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters
that of abstract consciousness
o Effectiveness: Resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity
o It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public
punishment that must discourage crime
 Justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its
practice
o It is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative
sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial and to the sentence
o The execution itself is an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose
o Ugly to be punishable, but no glory in punishing
o Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and
the punishment it imposes
 Whole army of technicians took over from the executioner
o Today, doctor must watch over those condemned to death right up to the last
moment
o As an agent of welfare, alleviator of pain and with the official task it is to end life
o A utopia of judicial reticence: Take away life, but prevent the patient form feeling
it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free
of all pain
 Since the new penal system:
o General process has led judges to judge something other than crimes
o Power of judging has been transferred to other authorities than the judges of the
offence
o Destiny of the law to absorb little by little elements that are alien to it
 Sentencing
o Not in direct relation to the crime
o A way of treating a criminal
o We punish = Way to obtain a cure
 Punitive measures
 o Not simply ‘negative’ mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to
exclude, to eliminate
o But they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their
task to support
o Thus the definition of offences & prosecution are carried out in turn in order to
maintain the punitive mechanisms and their functions
o Example: In a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional
labour force
o Example: Forced labour appear with the development of the mercantile economy
 Systems of punishment situated in ‘political economy’
o The body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their
submission
o Power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it,
torture it, force it to carry out tasks
 Power
o Exercised rather than possessed
o Not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall
effect of its strategic positions
 Power produces knowledge
o Power and knowledge directly imply one another
o There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of
knowledge
o Nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time
power relations

6.4 Post-structural approaches to power

 Theories that don’t focus on the state, its power and legitimacy
o Foucault: In political theory, we are yet to cut off the king’s head  We have
neglected the operation of power by focusing on the state  Foucault explicitly
 rejected this analysis as reductionist  He reacted emphatically against this
intellectual oversight
o He argued that the academy placed too must emphasis on the state in its analysis
of power
o Foucault argued that power is not something that the sovereign process and wield
over society; Instead power pervaded society
 Post-structural perspective assumed (Dean, 2001: 26)
o Discourses on government are an integral part of the workings of government,
rather than simply a means of legitimation  Discourses are an integral part of
the operation of government
o Government is achieved through a diffused network of multiple sources, actors
and agencies rather than a centralised state apparatus
o We must reject any a prior distribution and divisions of power and authority
 Foucault interested in ‘How questions’
o How power operate through the ideas, drawing upon multiple fields of knowledge
and involving multiple actors
o None of which should be assumed to be organised in a particular fashion or for a
particular end
o The state is then only 1 actor that is important to note, and it isn’t a privileged one
o These genealogical projects sought to point out that the outcomes of history were
not the result of rational or inevitable trends but were historically depended on
certain shifts in terms of governing

6.4.1 ‘Post-‘ = The limitation of modernist and structuralist perspective as starting point

 Emphasis on multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings of texts, necessity of

understanding systems of knowledge that produce these meanings: Discourse
 Meaning of individual actions not fixed
o Eg. A specific exercise of power is not fixed
o Can only be found in relation to other actions
 o Created through specific politics
 Effects of texts/discourses in closing off recognition of alternative possibilities
o These kinds of ideas of ‘Hegemony’ or ‘the Other’

Main points of post-structuralist approach

 Points to the limitations of the modernist and structuralist approaches
 Emphasis multiplicity, conflicts, tensions, and contradictions
 Through the notion of discourse
o Discourse can create certain kinds of ways of knowing
o Create ways of common sense and close off alternative possibilities
 Fluid, not fixed: Created through specific kind of politics

Post-modernism
 Related with post-structuralist, but arguably not the same
o PM is a posited condition of the world: Way that the world is at the present
moment in time
o PS is a set of scholarly assumptions and procedures: A way of doing research
 Example from Jean Baudrillard: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
o Classic text about post-modernist condition that we find ourselves in
o Despite this provocative title, Baudrillard did not argue that, literally, the gulf war
did not take place
o Instead he argued that the gulf war was not really a war
o There was little direct combat, more air operation: Smart technology, precision
bombing & very few casualties  From a western perspective, nothing was made
known about Iraqi deaths and this was made possible through careful control of
information & narratives of American heroism
o Baudrillard made the argument that war was understood in purely symbolic terms
 War was a symbol because we don’t actually know anything about how the
war operated
 o Media representation made it impossible to distinguish what truly happened in the
conflict and its stylised representation
o Purpose of all this according to Baudrillard: To rehabilitate the image of the
United States military machine after the defeat in Vietnam especially for the
American public
o Baudrillard called the Gulf War the ‘perfect semblance of victory’: Doesn’t
matter if they won or not because it appeared like they have  Clean, clinical war
o Post-modernism here emphasis fluidity and fragmentation, lack of universal or
objective reality, breakdown of established binaries and grand narratives (eg
Marxism or Liberalism)

Influences on how power is viewed within political science

 It has been more influential in fields other than political science
o Post-structuralism is still viewed with some degree of suspicion from some
political scientists especially those who are more positivist (quantitative, North
American political science)
 But challenge to ‘the truth’ reverberates within political science
o Not explicitly applying post-structuralist perspective but has influence in
interpretive political science
o Interpretive political science: Interested in exploring police, languages, traditions
and practices as they appear and construct the political
o Relevant approaches include the history of ideas, constructivism, the study of
political ideology, post-structuralism, and qualitative ideology such as
ethnography
 Problematisation of power
o Especially around identity, language, difference, desire, etc
o This is what post-structuralism has added to political science  Destabilise
assumptions of what is natural or the ways that things should be done
 Emphasis on discourse, ‘discursive power’ and ‘discursive structures’
 o When people think about agency vs structure problem, they think about
something more tangible than discourse: Eg. Class, gender, etc
o Post structuralism has emphasised the discursive structures that can exist and
create particular ways of doing/knowing things and the power of those
 Impetus for much constructivist theory of power in international relations
o Post-structuralism very important in constructivist theory
 Example of how post-structuralist influence political science: PMs as intersubjective
actors that reflect and reproduce hegemonic forms of power
o Nicholas Bromfield & Alexander Page (2020) How is Australianness represented
by Prime Ministers?
o Look at the language of PM, content analysis of race, class, and gender of
Australians on Anzac Day
o Argued that these are key moments used by PMs to share, shape and reproduce an
understanding what and who is representative of Australian identity and
nationalism
o Found that despite PMs sometimes using intentionally inclusive language and
discourses, they simultaneously reproduce the classicist, hetero masculine, and
Anglo-centric Australianist
o A way of understanding the power of identity and the way they have a particular
power of constructing who or what represents being Australian
o What being Australian is represented as by PMs remains: Doesn’t mention class,
emphasise men (especially on Anzac Day), emphasise hetero-sexual relations,
very much Anglo-centric (doesn’t do much to represent difference in regard to
Indigeneity)

6.5 Foucault and power in the 4th dimension

Positioning our theorists: Michel Foucault in May ’68 in France

 Earlier stages of Foucault’s career
 o Foucault engaged more with politics and power, both in scholarship and activism,
than most other post-structuralist thinkers (particularly from 1970s)
o Some of his actual work and activism was concerned with the history of medicine,
psychology and their institutions
o Particularly he campaigned about prison and psychiatry reform, gay rights and
sexual liberation (including pederasty)
 Formative period for France: May ‘68
o A period of French civil unrest, growing leftist thought and influence
o In a broader international context: Student movements, social movements,
opposition growing to Vietnam War in the US

Foucault’s scholarship
 Rejected the notion of individual’s having universal characteristic
o He posited instead the individuals are made into subjects
o Argued that knowledge about human subject forms parts of multiple and fragment
attempts to regulate human bodies
 He studied this process through his genealogies
o Tracing of institutions across time
o Situated the subject and analysed the individual using non-economic conception
of power  Important to acknowledge
 “His alternative to an economic conception of power was development of a relational
analysis of power that understands power as a pervasive element of all social relations
and in relation to its presence in a given society and historical period”

Watch video: Ways in which Foucault challenges Chomsky’s more modernist/structuralist

perspective
 Foucault challenged empirical and normative theories of power

Chomsky
  A fundamental part of human nature is the need for creative work/inquiry for free
creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions
o It will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this
fundamental human characteristic to be realised
o Means trying to overcome the elements of repression, oppression, destruction and
coercion that exist in any existing society as a historical residue
 A federated decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well as
social institutions would be referred to anarcho-syndicalism
o “Seems to be that it is the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced
technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into
positions of tools, of cogs in a machine. In which the creative urge, that I think is
intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it
will”

Foucault:
 “I admit not being able to define, nor for stronger reasons to even propose, an ideal social
model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society”
 “On the other hand, one of the tasks that seems to me urgent and immediate over and
above all else is this:”
o “It is the custom, at least in our European society to consider that power is in the
hands of government and is exerted through a certain number of particular
institutions such as the administration, police and army.”
o “We know that all these institutions are made to transmit and obey orders and to
punish those who don’t obey”
o “But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a
certain number of institutions that seems to have nothing in common with
political power and seem independent from it, but actually not”
 Examples
o “We know the university and more generally, the whole educational system,
which appear to distribute knowledge, maintain power in the hands of a certain
social class to exclude the instruments of power of another social class”
 o “Another example is psychiatry, which in appearance is also intended for the
good of humanity and for the knowledge of psychiatrists. But in reality, it’s
another way to bring to bear the political power over a social class”
o “Justice is yet again another example.”
 “It seems to me that the real political task in our contemporary society is to criticize the
workings of institutions, particularly the ones that appear to be neutral and independent
and to attack them in such a way that the political violence, which has always exercised
itself obscurely through them will finally be unmasked so that one can fight against
them”
o “If we seek to advance right away a profile or formula of the future of society
without thoroughly criticizing all forms of political power that exercise their
power within society, we run the risk of letting them be reproduced even in the
case of the noble and apparently pure forms, such as anarcho-syndicalism”

Chomsky:
 “I would agree with that, not only in theory, but also in action”
o There are 2 intellectual tasks: one, which I was discussing, to create a vision of a
future just society and another task to understand very clearly the nature of power
and oppression and terror and destruction in our own society, and that certainly
includes the institutions you mentioned as well as the central institutions of any
industrial society, namely the economic, commercial and financial institutions in
particular in the coming periods, the multinational corporations, which are not
very far from us physically tonight”
o “Those are the basic institutions of oppression and coercion and autocratic rule
which appears to be neutral”
o “After all, they say ‘well we’re subjects of the democracy of the marketplace’”
 ‘Still, I think, it would be a great shame to lose or to put aside entirely the somewhat
more abstract and philosophical task of trying to draw the connections between the
concept of human nature which gives full scope to freedom and dignity and creativity and
other fundamental human characteristics, and relates them to some notion of social
structure in which those properties could be realised”
 o “If we are thinking of social transformation or social revolution, we should know
something about where we think we’re going, and such a theory may tell it to us”

Foucault:
 “Yes, but then isn’t there a danger here?”
o “If you say that a certain human nature exists, that this human nature has not been
given in actual society the rights and the possibilities which allow it to realise
itself”
o “If we admit this, don’t we risk defining this human nature, which is at the same
time ideal and real and has been hidden and repressed until now, in terms
borrowed from our society, from our culture?”
 “I will give an example by greatly simplifying it”
o “Marxism, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of 20th century,
admitted that in capitalist societies mankind has not reached its full capacities for
development and self-realization. That human nature was alienated in a capitalist
system. And Marxism ultimately dreamed of a liberated human nature”
o “On the other hand, what model did Marxism use to conceive, project, and
eventually realize that human nature? It was, in fact, the bourgeois model.”
o “Marxism considered a happy society a society that gave room, for example, to a
sexuality of a bourgeois type, to family of a bourgeois type, to aesthetic of
bourgeois type.”
o “It is moreover very true that this has happened in the Soviet Union. A kind of
society, simultaneously real and utopic, had been reconstituted and transposed
from a bourgeois society of the 19th century. In which humans were able to realize
their human nature”
o “The result, which you acknowledge, is that it’s difficult to conceive what human
nature is”
 “Isn’t there a risk that we will be led into error?”
o “Mao Zedong spoke of bourgeois human nature and proletarian human nature,
and for him they were not the same thing”
Chomsky:
 “Well, you see, I think that in the intellectual domain of political action, that is the
domain of trying to construct a vision of a just and free society on the basis of some
notion of human nature, in that domain we face the very same problem that we face in
immediate political action”
 “For example, a lot of my own activities has to do with the Vietnam War and a good deal
of my own energy goes to civil disobedience”
o “Well, civil disobedience, in the United States, is an action undertaken in the face
of considerable uncertainties about its effects. For example, it threatens the social
order in ways that might bring on Fascism.”
o “That would be very bad for America, for Vietnam and for everyone else”
 “So, there is a danger in undertaking this concrete act. On the other hand there is a great
danger in not undertaking it, namely if you don’t undertake it, the society of Indo-China
will be torn to shreds by American power”
o “And in the face of those uncertainties, one has to choose a course of action”
o “Similarly, in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you
correctly posed: Our concept of human nature is certainly limited partial, social
conditioned and constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of
the intellectual culture in which we exist”
o “Yet, at the same time, it is of critical importance that we have some direction that
we know what impossible goals we are trying to achieve if we are trying to
achieve some of the possible goals”
o “That means, we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on
the basis of partial knowledge WHILE remaining very open to the strong
possibility that at least in some respect, we are very far off the mark”

Foucault:
 “It seems to me that the notion of justice itself functions within a society of class as a
claim made by, and as a justification for, the class which is oppressed.”
o “And in a classless society, I’m not sure that we would still use this notion of
justice”
Chomsky
 “Well here I really disagree; I think that there is a sort of an absolute basis ultimately
residing in fundamental human qualities in terms of which our real notion of justice is
grounded”
o “I think that it is too hasty to characterize our system of justice as merely systems
of class oppression”
o “I don’t think that they are that. I think that they embody systems of class
oppression and they embody elements of other kinds of oppression”
o “But they also embody a kind of groping towards the true humanly valuable
concept of justice, decency, love, kindness and sympathy and so on, which I think
are real”

Foucault:
 “I will just say that I can’t help but think that the concepts of human nature, of kindness,
justice, of human essence and its realization, these are all notions and concepts that have
been created within our civilization, our system of knowledge and our form of philosophy
and as a result they form part of our class system”
o “One cannot, however regrettable it may be, put forward these concepts to
describe or justify a fight which should and shall in principle overthrow the very
fundamentals of society.”
o “This is an extrapolation for which I cannot find the historical justification”

6.5.1 Governmentality: The conduct of conduct  4th Dimension of power

 Discursive power operate through an individual
o Not just ‘over an individual’ like Lukes’ 3rd face of power: Power over
o Individual conducts their own conduct: Posited position of the 4th dimension of
power
 Governmentality
o How we think about governing others and ourselves in a wide variety of contexts
o In a limited sense: Different ways governing is thought about in the contemporary
world and which can, in large part, be traced to Western Europe from the 16th
century (This is what Foucault is interested in and what he studied in his
genealogies)
 Government becomes the conduct of conduct
o First conduct meaning: Steering, guiding or directing
o Second conduct meaning: Individual behaviour
o How do we steer, guide or direct individual behaviour
 From this definition, the concept of government is a broad one
o Avoids universal or radical positions relating to power
o Tries to acknowledge the multiple ways that power can operate
o Power in this sense is defined as the middle point between absolute liberty and
absolute domination  Power position that exists where we are not entirely free
but not entirely dominated either
 Power according to later Foucault
o Is made operable through the liberty of the individual
o Individual has the ability to make choices for themselves but nonetheless the
power of discourse still operates and still has an influence on the individual
o Government then becomes any more or less calculated and rational activity
undertaken by multiplicity of authorities and agencies employing a variety of
techniques or forms of knowledge that seeks to shape conduct by working through
our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs for definitive, but shifting, ends and
with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, affects and outcomes
  Far more diffused, more fragmented, more fluid  Not just state operating and
controlling  Now have a far more unstable concept and unpredictable
 People are aware that power is operating through them
o No variety/spectrum of awareness

6.6 Disciplinary power, biopower and queer theory

6.6.1 Disciplinary power

 Main techniques of disciplinary control
o Observation/surveillance
o Examination
o Measurement
o Normalisation
 Purpose of disciplinary control
o To render bodies docile, but useful
o Not by an all-seeing state
o Various disciplinary practices that develop more or less independently
 ‘Discipline and Punish’ by Foucault
o Panopticon: Prison designed by 18th century utilitarian, legal reformer and
political philosopher Jeremy Bentham
o Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for total surveillance and
inescapability of discipline
o The idea: Prisoners can’t see inside the watch tower but people in the watch tower
can see outside the watch tower; So you’re never quite sure if you’re being
monitored; Meant to act in a disciplinary kind of fashion
o Make the argument, based on this metaphor, that the functioning of power is
automatic; the effect of surveillance is permanent; the absolute nature of power
will make its actual use unnecessary (rendering bodies docile); and the individual
actually govern themselves
 o “Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building. It is the diagram of a
mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. Its functioning, abstracted from
many obstacles, resistance or friction must be represented as a pure architectural
and optical system. It is in fact a figure of political technology that may be and
must be detached from any specific views/use.
 Main questions asked
o What do you look at when you try to identify the operation of power?
o Where do you draw the line of the political?
o Foucault argued that you need to look beyond the role of the state in constituting
and implementing power; you need to look to other institutions
o Power can’t be reduced to a singular purpose either: Foucault demonstrates
through the Panopticon that all individuals are constituted by power and therefore
this disciplining is inherently political  Everyone is subject to this kind of
power operation, it is not something that just happens from the state or from
particular social structures that acts upon particular individuals, but it happens to
everyone
 Haugaard, 2012
o ‘…this form of power would appear normatively reprehensible. The social
subject, made to fit, into a system. The normalized and disciplined subject is
clearly a means to the end of the system. However, appearances can be deceptive’

Haugaard and power in the 4th dimension

 Haugaard argues that in the 4th dimension of power, actors are subjectified through
discipline, which has 2 aspects
o They can be virtual automatons through mindless discipline and rote learning,
which entails massive practical consciousness socialization
o They can be social subjects capable of occupying complex social roles that entail
discipline in the sense of self restraint
 The latter has the potential for being beneficial to actor B, thus normatively
commendable (Haugaard, 2012)
 o Not a zero-sum kind of game, power can be used productively and in a
normatively positive sense
o Through the conduct of conduct, through the governing of yourself through the
choices that you make, you can therefore occupy these important social roles

6.6.2 Biopolitics
 The administration of the processes of life of populations
 Concerned with matters of life and death, health and illness, both physical and mental and
the processes that sustain or limit the optical life of a population
o Power over life and death  Conditions and processes of life (‘conduct of
conduct’)
o Way of knowing individuals will help them potentially benefit themselves
o To help people understand themselves to improve themselves
o A way for people to govern themselves on the day to day
 Effects on individuals are ‘positive’ (power to) as well as ‘negative’ (power over)
o Necessary for people to live their particular lives
 Haugaard, 2012  He doesn’t talk about biopower directly
o ‘… the self-discipline of A facilitates a relationship in which A’s episodic power
over B entails the dispositional empowerment of B. Thus, the creation of subject
positions occupied by actors who have internalized constraint is key to the
creation of a form of modern power structure which is not zero-sum’
o This is where we can both improve the social conditions that we find ourselves in
and also the individual  The idea of power: Creating knowledge about
 individuals and the way they conduct their lives, we can in a non-zero-sum
fashion, improve the individual and the society, generally
o This can normatively be a positive thing

6.6.3 Queer Theory Examples

1. Judith Butler  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

 ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a
highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of
gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance
of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the
compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of
gender.’
o Saying that gender is this repetition of particular frames that are enabled
and enacted through discourse
o What we need to do to understand this process is deconstruct the
substantive appearance of gender and identify the particular acts, locate
the particular acts through these frames and look at the way it is policed
and produced
2. Halperin: ‘Forgetting Foucault’
 ‘Comparing medieval moral and legal codifications of sexual relations with 19th
century medical and forensic ones, Foucault contrasts various premodern styles
of sexual prohibition, which took the form of specifying rules of conduct, making
prescriptions and recommendations, and discriminating between the licit and the
illicit, with modern styles of sexual prohibition. These latter-day strategies took
the form of establishing norms of self-regulation not by legislating standards of
behaviour and punishing deviations from them but rather by constructing new
species of individuals, discovering and “implanting” perversions, and
thereby elaborating more subtle and insidious means of social control. The
ultimate purpose of the comparison is to support Foucault’s “historico-
 theoretical” demonstration that power is not only negative but also positive, not
only repressive but also productive’
 Idea from Foucault:
o Before the 19th century, categories/classification typically employed by
European cultures to articulate sexual difference did not distinguish
between the different kind of sexual actors but only among different kinds
of sexual acts
o In these kinds of pre-modern period then, it wasn’t that the specific acts
constituted a particular identity, but they simply were particular kinds of
sexual acts
o Behaviour did not represent a sign/marker of a person’s sexual identity, it
did not indicate/express some more generalised/holistic feature of that
person (Such as that person’s disposition or character)
o This kind of power is most clear in deviant sexual acts: Just because
someone committed sodomy, you can’t attach to them the identity of
homosexuality

Normative implications of Foucault

 The apparent development towards more liberal and humane exercises of power (reform
institutions, rehabilitation, etc) are only developments of more efficient techniques of
domination
o C.f Chomsky
 Later Foucault (governmentality) stresses the ability of disciplinary institutions to create
productive knowledge that individuals internalise, allowing for self-government
o Potentially normatively positive
o But also enormous potential for oppression and the need for interrogation of these
kind of processes
 There is only power
o ‘Defeat’ of a discourse only leads to a coagulation of new forms of discursive
power
 o Essentially, discourses around us (texts, languages, etc) are seen as power and the
operation of power
o Then we can only see them as re coagulating and forming new forms of discursive
power: New ways of understanding
o This could be better or worse, but we can’t escape power

6.6.4 Criticisms of post-structuralist theories of power

 From the third face of power
o Foucault doesn’t say anything new, it’s just Lukes in new clothes (c.f Haugaard)
o Foucault is simply describing socialisation  Not that different from the 3rd face
of power
 The project for change
o Says interesting things about power, but where to from here?
o Difficulty (lack of interest) in explaining sources and consequences of power 
Endless deconstruction but not putting forward solutions
o Difficulty of finding a place for effective strategies of resistance
o Effectively depoliticises the left (Marxism and Feminism)  Undermining the
projects of structuralist approaches
 Problems with theory and evidence
o Gnomic pronouncements and lack of stability in key concepts, particularly when
drawn from lectures and interviews
o Where does the apparently universal strategy of discipline in the modern era come
from? Why does it emerge?
o ‘State’ is not important, not a unified set of institutions but sometimes it appears
to achieve a massive coordinating role (eg. In wars, as Foucault admits). How is
the trick managed? Why only in crisis?

6.7 Tutorial discussion

1. Consider the modernist and post-structuralist positions of Chomsky and Foucault
The modernist approach of Chomsky includes
 There is a human nature that needs to realise itself without arbitrary limiting
effects
 Need to create a vision of a future just society
o To understand the nature of power, oppression, terror and destruction in
our own
o Philosophical task: Connect the concept of human nature (freedom,
dignity and creativity) and relate them to some notion of social structure in
which those properties could be realised
o To have direction that we know what impossible goals we are trying to
achieve if we are trying to achieve some of the possible goals
o Residing in fundamental human qualities is where the real notion of
justice is grounded
 There is a danger in not defining human nature
o Example: The society of Indochina will be torn to shreds by American
power
 Thinking that system of justice is merely a system of class oppression is too hasty
o They embody systems of class oppression, but also embody a group
towards the humanly valuable concept of justice, which he thinks are real

The post-structuralist approach of Foucault includes

 Power is in the hands of government
o Exerted through political institutions and other institutions that seems
independent from it, but are actually not
o Eg. University distribute knowledge  Maintain power in the hands of a
certain class to
 Risk of Chomsky’s idea:
o Risk defining human nature
o Human nature is difficult to conceive: They tried to realize that human
nature in the Soviet Union Marxism times
  Notion of justice itself functions within a society of class as a claim made by the
class which is oppressed
o Therefore the notion of justice is built off of discourse
o All notions of kindness, decency, love, and sympathy are all notions
created within the civilization and thus form part of the class system

a. What differences did you spot and what might this say about the nature of power?
 Difference
o Whether there is a human nature  F says no, C says yes it just
needs to realise itself
o Whether system of justice is real: Whether there even is a proper
definition of justice  F says no because system of justice is
created by discourse, C says yes and it resides in fundamental
human qualities
 Nature of power
o F: Discourse (?) I THINK
o C: Realising fundamental human nature (?) UNSURE

2. Discuss how post-structural approaches to power have shaped, or help us understand,

contemporary gender and sexual relations
a. Begin by setting out what post-structural power is: List some key tenets of this
power theory
 Power cannot be established without discourse
o Cannot exercise power except through the production of truth
o Exercised by means of surveillance
 Disciplines are the carriers of discourse
o A natural rule of normalization
o Discourse as an integral part of the workings of government
o Meaning of individual actions are not fixed
o They are created through specific politics
 o Discourse creates a certain way of knowing & common sense
 Must reject any a priori distribution of power and authority
o Cannot assume that just by their very nature they have power
o Foucault reject the idea of having a universal characteristic
because individuals are made into subjects
 Power pervaded society
o Relational analysis of power

b. Then use these key tenets and apply them to at least 1 contemporary example of
gender and/or sexual relations  How does post-structural form of power work
here?
 Judith Butler: ‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity’
o Gender is the repeated stylization of the body
o It is a set of repeated acts that congeal overtime to produce the
appearance of a natural sort of being
o Need to be aware of those forces that police and produce the social
appearance of gender
o Gender is enacted through discourse
 Halperin: ‘Forgetting Foucault’
o Foucault contrasts

3. Reflect upon post-structural forms of power

a. How convincing do you find this approach
b. Does it provide a satisfying means of political change?

7. Feminist Power

7.1 Readings: Continued Devaluation of Black Womanhood

Rape in slavery
 Tool of violence
 Institutionalized crime
o Part of white man’s subjugation
o For economic and psychological gain
 Black women’s sexual integrity was deliberately crushed
o In order that slavery might profitably endure

Conditioning
 Black women regarded as creatures of little worth/value by white feminists
o Rape of black women doesn’t attract same level of attention as compared to rape
of white women
 Reasoning:
o Seen as sexually permissive
o Available and eager for assaults
o Sexually depraved, immoral and loose
 Rape victims seen as:
o Having lost value and worth as a result of humiliation
o The same abolitionist public that condemned the rape of black women regarded
them as accomplices rather than victims
 Diary entries of Mary Boykin Chesnut
o She held enslaved black women responsible for their fate
o Anger not at white men
o Based on the myth that all black women were immoral and sexually loose
 Reality
o Majority of enslaved black women accepted the dominant culture’s sexual
morality and adapted it to their circumstances
o Black slave girls were taught that virginity is the ideal physical state
o But this does not alter the reality that no social order existed to protect them from
sexual exploitation
Post-slavery
 Freedom to choose a sexual partner
o Behave in whatever manner
o Engaging freely in sexual relations with black men
 Whites saw the sexual activity as further evidence to support their claim
o They ignore the fact that the great majority of black men and women attempted to
adapt the values and behaviour patterns deemed acceptable by Whites
 Black women struggled to change negative images of Black womanhood
o Try to emulate the conduct and mannerisms of white woman
o But white society resisted  Still accosted and subjected to obscene comments &
physical abuse
o Black women dressed tidy = Object of mudslinging by White men
o Always in constant reminder that they are not seen as worthy
 White journalists daily ridicule
o Perpetuated negative myths and stereotypes about Black people
o The Atlantic: Alleged unchastity of Negro women was attributed to their lack of
concern for sexual purity and their sexual immorality
o Convince White readers that they do not want to live as social equals with Black
people
o White public justify White male sexual assaults by arguing that Black women
invited sexual abuse by their lack of morals

Institutionalization through Myths

 Myth of the “bad” black woman
o All black women were eager for sexual exploits, voluntarily “loose” in their
morals
o They did not deserve consideration and respect granted to White women
o Every Black woman was a slut
 o To assault and exploit a Black woman sexually was not reprehensible and carried
with it none of the normal communal sanctions against such behaviour
 Racial hatred as a method of social control
o To maintain white supremacy in the new social order based on apartheid: Jim
Crow years
o Complex system of laws and social taboos enacted to maintain separation of races
o Laws forbidding inter-racial marriage, but did not prevent Blacks and Whites
from uniting
o Inter-racial marriage evoked fear and rage in white people
 Psychological warfare as laws were not sufficient
o Myth of the “bad”, sexually loose black woman  White men who treat Black
women with respect were persecuted and ostracized
o Myth of the black male rapist  Not in a reaction to any high incidence of inter-
racial rape
 Inter-racial marriages during slavery tolerated
o Because so few in number
o Represent no threat to the white supremacist regime
o After manumission, Supreme Court was asked to judge insane a white man who
desired to marry a female slave he had once owned  No longer socially
acceptable for a white man to have a black mistress
 Institutionalized devaluation
o Encourage all white men to regard Black female as whores or prostitutes
o Caused the formation of numerous houses of prostitution
o Myth that Black women possessed heightened sexuality encouraged white male
rapists

Disproportional changes in Myths

 Changes in public attitudes towards Black men

o Myth ceased to dominate by 70s
 o Explanation: Growing knowledge of the way in which this myth was used by
Whites in power to persecute and torture Black men
o Once the myth was no longer accepted, White women could freely engage in
relationships with Black men
o Taboo maintained because White men were interested in limiting the sexual
freedom of White women and ensuring their female “property” was not trespassed
by Black men
o Why marriages between White women and Black men are more readily accepted:
Patriarchal sexual politics  White women represent a powerless group so their
marriage to Black men is no great threat to existing White patriarchal rule
 No change in negative images of Black women
o If a large majority of that small group of White men who dominate decision-
making bodies in American society were to marry Black women, the foundation
of White rule would be threatened
o Continue to regard black women as unsuitable marriage partners
o Because White men always had “free”, unlimited access to bodies of Black
women, there is no need to legitimize these relationships by marriage
o Explanation: Perception of Black women as “beasts”, sexual savages who are
unfit for marriage
o Media representation of Black women: Excessive makeup, greasy type substance
on her lips to make them look thicker, wears a wig, dresses in garments to make
them look overweight (Gross distortion)
o Positive depictions of Black women in media: Longsuffering, religious, maternal
figure, self-sacrificing self-denial for those she lvoes

Media
 Remember My Name (Movie)
o Toughness of today’s “liberated” white woman
o Measure of her toughness is that she is able to beat and brutalize a black woman
who just happens to have a White boyfriend
  Whites who control media
o Exclude Black women
o To emphasize their undesirability as friends and sexual partners

Reinforcement of stereotypes in Black society

 The belief that all white men desire from Black woman is illicit sex prevents Black
women from seeking such unions
o Black females given the idea that all White men are eager to rape Black women
o The fact that this may no longer be the case has not caused Black people to
change their attitudes
o Black people are just as committed to racial solidarity as White people
 Black men maintain existing barriers
o Discouraging Black Female-White male marriages
o To eliminate sexual competition  Just as sexist
o Black people warn Black females to beware involvement with White men for fear
such relationships would lead to exploitation and degradation of black
womanhood
o Psychological weapon to limit and restrain the freedom of black females
 Socialized by parents
o To feel threatened or even terrorized by contact with White men
o Make Black females have difficulty relating to White male
o Have a phobic fear about White male sexuality
o Warned their daughters against the sexual overtures of White men but not that of
Black male exploiters because they are seen as possible marriage candidates
o Admonished daughter told not to submit to sexual assaults by White men, but not
encouraging them to reject similar approaches by Black men
o Racism allows them to conveniently ignore the reality of sexist oppression
 Reluctance of Black females
o White males who desire friendship or marriage with Black females are often
rebuffed or dismissed
 o Black women who date/marry White men find that they cannot endure the
harassment and persecution by Black and White people
 Views of Black men involved in inter-racial relationships
o Act contemptuously towards Black women who exercise the same freedom of
choice
o View White women as victims
o See White men as oppressors
o A Black woman involved with a White man is allying herself with a racist
oppressor
 Tactic used by Black men involved in inter-racial relationship
o Assert that they are exploiting White women like White men exploit Black
women
o Evoke a false sense of avenging themselves against racism to mask their sexism
o To help maintain patriarchal rule and to support the devaluation of black
womanhood

New focus to motherhood: Matriarch myths

 Women whose lives are firmly rooted in family
o Hardworking, self-sacrificing Black women
o Concerned with creating a loving, supportive environment for their families
 Black female slaves were capable of performance “manly” labour
o They were able to endure hardship, pain, privation
o But could also perform those so called “womanly” tasks: Housekeeping, cooking
and child rearing
o Their ability to cope with the “male” role threatened patriarchal myths about the
nature of woman’s inherent physiological difference and inferiority
o To explain the Black female’s ability to survive without the direct aid of a male,
White males argued the Black slave women were not “real” women but were
masculinized sub-human creatures
 o To prove their point, then often force Black women to labour at difficult jobs
while Black male slaves stood idle
 Racist scholars acted as if Black women fulfilling their role as mothers and economic
providers were performing a unique task that needed a new definition
o Although it was not uncommon for many poor and widowed women to perform
this dual role
 Designation of black women as matriarch
o A cruel misnomer because it ignores profound traumas the Black woman must
have experienced when she had to surrender her childbearing to alien and
predatory economic interests
o The term matriarch implies exercise of social and political power  In no way
resembles the realities of Black women or any women in American society
o They have no real effective power that allows females to control their own destiny
 Belief vs Reality
o B: Black female is the “man of the house”
o R: Black mothers go so far to delegate the responsibility of the “man” to male
children
o R: In single-parent houses, it is acceptable for a visiting male friend/lover to
assume a decision-making role]
 Feature of matriarchal society: Complete control women has over their bodies
o Lower class women have the least control over their bodies
o They have the fewest opportunities to exercise control over their reproductive
activities
 To discredit Black men and women
o Black women were told that they had to overstep the bonds of femininity because
they worked outside the home to provide economic support for their families
o In doing so, they had de-masculinized Black men
o Black men were told that they were weak, effeminate and castrated because
“their” women were labouring at menial jobs
 o They chose to see the independence, will power and initiative of black women as
an attack on the masculinity of Black men = Sexism  Deprived Black men of
their patriarchal status in the home
 Assumption that jobs of Black women were able to acquire elevated their status above
that of Black men
o In actuality, service jobs of Black women forced them into daily contact with
racist Whites who abused and humiliated them
o Whereas Black men were able to maintain a personal dignity that Black women
employed in service jobs were forced to surrender
o Lower class Black men comment on the fact that some jobs were not worth doing
because of the loss of one’s personal dignity
o Whereas Black women were made to feel that when survival was crucial, personal
dignity should be sacrificed
o Black women who thought herself “too good” to do domestic work was ridiculed
for being uppity
 Black men use the matriarchy myth as a psychological weapon to justify their demands
that Black women assume a more passive subservient role in the home
o White racist oppressors able to establish a bond of solidarity with Black men
based on mutual sexism
o White men preyed upon sexist feelings impressed upon the Black male psyche
from birth to socialize Black men so that they regard Black women as the enemies
of masculinity
 Black women accepting the Matriarchy theory
o Because it seemed that they were finally receiving acknowledgement of their
contribution to the Black family
o Because the term had more positive implications than other labels used to
characterize black womanhood
o Allows Black women to regard themselves as privileged
 o In reality, this indicates how effectively colonizers are able to distort the reality
of the colonized so that they embrace concepts that actually do them more harm
than good
o Similar tactic to: Black slaves who accepted their master’s picture of freedom
because they were afraid to break the bonds of slavery
o Once Black women are deluded into thinking they have the power they don’t
really possess, the possibility that they might organize collectively to fight against
sexist-racist oppression is reduced

White vs Black Women

 White women entering workforce
o Criticized and persecuted in the beginning
o But after initial attacks ceased, there was little protest
o No discussion of them becoming masculinized as a result of performing tasks
traditionally done by men
o Seen as a positive step, a move towards gaining independence
 Black women entering workforce
o Encouraged to feel that they are taking jobs from Black men
o De-masculinizing Black men

Other negatives images based on stereotypes

 Aunt Jemimas
o Passive, longsuffering and submissive
o Typical house servant was an aged mammy who is loyal to a White family and
have few if any attachments of her own
o The Ideal Black nanny: Asexual, fat, impression of not being clean, wearer of a
greasy dirty head rag, shoes too tight to make her feet look larger and to further
confirm the bestial cow-like quality
o Reason for this ideal: White women were not pleased with young Black women
working in their homes for fear that liaisons between them and their husbands
  Sapphires
o Evil, treacherous, bitchy, stubborn and hateful
o Image of the female as inherently evil
o From the Christian mythology that depicted woman as the source of sin and evil
o White women could use the image of the evil sinful Black woman to emphasize
their won innocence and purity
o Sapphire’s shrewish personality create sympathy in viewers for the Black male
o Identity projected to any Black woman who overtly expressed bitterness, anger
and rage
o Many Black women feel fear of being regarded as shrewish Sapphires, so they
repress these feelings
o Or they embrace them as a façade because she realizes that if she was vulnerable,
she would be exploited
 Amazons
o They saw her ability to endure hardships no “lady” was supposedly capable of
enduring as a sign that she possessed an animalistic sub-human strength
o Based on myths and fantasy
o Amazons were interested in building societies in which the male figure would be
present in only small numbers
o Somewhat true because the institution of slavery forced Black women to
surrender any prior dependence on the male figure and forced them to struggle for
their own survival
o In reality, most Black women (post-slavery) resented the fact that they were not
being supported economically by men

7.2 Reading: Amy Allen ‘Rethinking Power’

7.3 Introduction of the Feminist Challenge to the State

Positionality as a research
  Different positionality in terms of social structures
o Gender, race or class
o We bring positionality to our analysis
 ‘A feminist research ethic is a commitment to inquiry about how we inquire. It requires
developing your ability to be attentive to:
o The power of knowledge, and more profoundly, of epistemology
o Boundaries, marginalization, silences, and intersections
o Relationships and power differentials
o Your own socio-political location (or situatedness)’20
 ‘A feminist research ethic can be used to improve our scholarship, regardless of whether
it is feminist or not’21

Amy Allen (2016)

 ‘Although any general definition of feminism would no doubt be controversial, it seems
undeniable that much work in feminist theory is devoted to the tasks of critiquing
women’s subordination, analysing the intersections between sexism and other forms
of subordination such as racism, hetero-sexism, and class oppression, and envisioning
the possibilities for both individual and collective resistance to such subordination’
o Domination, power-over, kind of approach: Critiquing women subordination and
the intersections with other subordination  Agency vs Structure spectrum again
 Women are essentially dominated, and this intersects with other forms of
domination which reproduces and reinforces domination
o Nuanced approach: Think about how power can be operational from an agency
perspective  Power to do things & Power through collectivity (power-with)
 No single approach to feminist approach
o But Amy Allen’s definition is a good start

Challenging the state

 Power theorist more radical and explicitly challenging the power of the state
20
Ackerly and True, 20
21
Ackerly and True, 19
 o Feminism
o Marxism
o Anarchism, resistance and hidden transcripts
o Power in movements
o Revolution
 Until now, most power theories are attempting to explain the operation of power within
the kind of, mostly legal democratic context
o With the exception of the elite theory
o But includes the community power debate, the 3 faces of power, Max Weber,
domination, cultural approaches, post-structuralist approaches  Don’t explain
the power of the state, they could but they haven’t had that kind of focus

7.3.1 Feminism’s Challenge to the State

 Dryzeck and Dunleavy (2009)
o “Politics has generally been dominated by men, practices according to patterns of
male behaviour, and structured by male interests. For all their differences,
pluralism, elite theory, Marxism and market liberalism had little or nothing to say
about the gendered nature of politics, and how it affects the way that the state
works. Feminists argue that as a result they all missed one of the key foundational
facts of politics, in the liberal democratic state no less than elsewhere.”
o “The feminist theory of the state involves explication and criticism of male
domination, together with prescriptions about how it might be remedied.
Beyond this common core, feminism is a diverse body of thought whose
adherents differ on some matters of theory and practice. It is also an evolving
social movement as well as an academic outlook. Some feminists have sought to
link their ideas to liberalism, pluralism, elite theory (at least in its later form
involving critique of elite dominance) and Marxism… Other more radical
feminists keep their distance from all of these classic positions in the theory of
the state, treating the state as bound up with patriarchy, hierarchal rule by
men, in its very essence”
 MacKinnon (1989) Towards a Feminist Theory of the State
o MacKinnon’s point is a structural point (structure end of the structure-agency
problem)  Says that the state is inherently gendered
o “The question for feminism is: what is this state, from women’s point of view?
The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way
men sees and treats women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively
constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender – through its
legitimating norms, forms, relation to society, and substantive policies. The state’s
formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of design”  This
is sort of saying that this the incorrect position, inherently unjust

7.3.2 Feminism’s challenge to the state: Pateman and the sexual contract
 The social contract: Locke
o Individuals relinquish some of the liberties they have in exchange for security,
property rights and civil rights. Contracting individuals take on obligations:
citizenship, law, taxes, military service, etc
o Think about it in a liberal perspective to impose legitimacy
 The sexual contract: Pateman
o She criticises the notion of social contract: Says that this is all well and good
about the idea of the individual contracting with the state in an individual kind of
fashion to consent to this relationship and come to an agreement and aid
legitimacy
o But it is inherently a gendered relationship  Locke’s theory requires an
additional patriarchal contract  Women and children contract with men for
protection and in return give consent to be governed by a man
o Relationship then exist with the man, not with the state  Women is not existing
in a legitimately consensual relationship in this common context
o “Feminist reinterpretation shows that, rather, the original contract is two-
dimensional. One dimension is the social contract that justified government of
citizens by the state. The second dimension is the sexual contract that justified the
 government of women by men and thus the patriarchal structure of the modern
state” (Pateman, 2015)
 These kinds of approaches start from a radical position
o Rejecting the very foundation of the state

7.4 Understand Allen and Feminist approached of power-over, power-to and power-with
 Context of Amy Allen’s work
o Feminist usually analyse power in 1 of 2 ways: Men have power over women
(power domination  MacKinnon and Pateman  Assign the domination to the
state) and the way in which women has the power to act (empowerment)
o Division in feminist thought is hotly contested in 2nd and 3rd wave of Feminism
o Power domination over emphasize the way women are victimised 
Empowerment theorist ought to examine the power that women has do have,
grounded from the capacities that are peculiar to women (that have been
denigrated and devalued by misogynist cultures  Ability to care, nurture and to
mother)
o Empowerment theorists glorify practices like mothering, or traits like caring and
nurturing that traditionally are mechanisms of women oppression
 Main point
o The heat of the debate is less important than the partial
o Theorisation that occurs within this debate
o Each perspective is one-sided and ignores the other approach
 “Empowerment theorists tend to neglect the ways that men dominate women and
domination theorists, by contrast, tend to neglect the form of power that women do have.
Neither one-sides of feminist conceptions of power can do justice to the complex ways
that women can be both dominated and empowered and, in the context of one and the
same practice, institution or norm”
o Power is more nuanced than this
o Need to pay attention to this nuance
 “I will define power simply as the ability or capacity of an actor or set of actors to act.
This rather broad definition… easily includes all 3 of the sense of power that I have
delineated”
o Power-over: The ability or capacity to act in such a way as to constrain the
choices available to another actor or set of actors (related to domination theories)
 Not necessarily attached to domination of a structure or the nation of the state
or radical conceptions
o Power to: Individual ability or capacity to act so as to attain some end (agency
end of the spectrum)
o Power with: Collective ability or capacity to act together so as to attain some
common or shared end

7.4.1 Unpacking Power-Over

 Allen (1998)
o “I define ‘power-over’ as the ability of an actor or set of actors to constrain the
choices available to another actor or set of actors in a nontrivial way”
 MacKinnon (1987)
o “Gender here is a matter of dominance, not difference. Feminists have noticed
that women and men are equally different but not equally powerful… Another
way to say that is, there would be no such thing as what we know as the sex
difference… were it not for male dominance”
o “those who think that one choose heterosexuality under conditions that make it
compulsory should either explain why it is not compulsory or explain why the
word choice can be meaningful here. And I would like you to address a question
that I think few here would apply to the workplace, to work, or to workers:
whether a good fuck is any compensation for getting fucked. And why everyone
knows what that means”

7.4.2 Unpacking Power-To

 Allen (1998)
 o “I define ‘power to’ as the ability of an individual actor to attain an end or series
of ends”
 Despite power-over of neoliberalism (Newman, 2013)
o “… neo-liberal projects were themselves transformed—in part—through their
encounters with feminist and other activist claims. Employers came to bear the
‘costs’ of equality governance, parental leave and more complex patterns of work
demanded by women’s entry as full worker citizens. Welfare states, while looking
to curb benefits paid to ‘dependent’ women, had to invest in development,
empowerment and training and to launch a multiplicity of ‘social’ programs in
order to enable women both to contribute to the economy and to manage care
work. It is not the case, then, that women were included in policy and
economy in ways that left the social order unchanged (Brodie 2008):
neoliberalism had itself to adapt and flex to take account of feminist projects”
o Makes the view of neo-liberalism that it is essentially a steamroller coming into
society in the 70s and 80s period  Rolling over everything that previously
existed and now we exist in this neo-liberal world and logic that we can’t escape
o She recognised the power over through neo-liberalism to constrain, but she also
wanted to talk about feminist power-to
 Tutorial task:
o In what ways has the Australian state had to ‘flex’ to accommodate a feminist
agenda in 2021
o In 2021, the Australian state has been extremely patriarchal and misogynist 
How have they, nonetheless, had to flex and accommodate a feminist agenda

7.4.3 Unpacking Power-With

 Allen (1998)
o “Power-with is the sense that informs Hannah Arendt’s definition of power ‘as the
human ability not just to act but to act in concert’ (1969, 44). Understood in this
way, power is a collective ability based on. The receptivity and reciprocity that
characterize relations among members of the collectivity. These aspects of power-
 with can be summed up in the following definition: the ability of a collectivity to
act together for the attainment of a common or shared end or series of ends”

7.5 Nuancing and Critiquing Feminist Approaches to Power

7.5.1 Nuancing feminist power theory: Bell Hooks and Intersections

 Intersections of power rejected the totalising picture of gender domination; focus on
cultural power
o Power-over and Power-to
o Bell Hooks: “Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better
acknowledge and ground differences among us and negotiate the means by which
these differences will find expressions in constructing group politics”
 Bell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (1981): Sexual/racial hierarchy of white males/black
males/white female, black females
o Looks at gender, race and class
o Sexual and racial hierarchies that exist in American society
o “White men could justify their de-humanization and sexual exploitation of black
women by arguing the possess inherent evil demonic qualities. Black men could
claim they could not get along with black women because they were so evil. And
white women could use the image of the evil sinful woman to emphasize their
own innocence and purity”
o Black women are at the bottom: Dominated and constructing these kinds of
hierarchies by everyone  Produce a system of domination of Black women,
especially
 Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins (1991): Intersectionality
o “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as
some critics charge, but rather the opposite-that it frequently conflates or ignore
intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of
difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence
 that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their
identities, such as race and class”
o Power is expressed in a flat, horizontal sort of way  Where someone finds
themselves in these kinds of identities can produce different forms of domination

7.5.2 Nuancing feminist power: Complexity, Dynamism and Newman

 Janet Newman: A fine-grained empirical analysis of specific ‘spaces’ of power
o Talk about the way that neo-liberalism and the neo-liberalist state had to flex to
accommodate feminist activism
o It hasn’t been overthrown or thoroughly challenged, but nevertheless it had to flex
o She discusses specific spaces of power in her article
 Main points from her argument
1. Temporality
 Think about temporality, and the progress of time
 The power of neoliberalism has not simply been rolled out unchallenged
and unscathed by feminist power-to and power-with
 If we look at this overtime, we can see how the state had to flex, to
accommodate because of this
2. Political action
 Lobbying, campaigning and involved in social movements to change
 Not enough to celebrate feminist agency in theory
 Need to investigate conditions that lead to, enable and sustain that
agency and action
 Activism to challenge the state
3. Gendered labour:
 There isn’t a general pattern in gendered labour
 Instead, “specific conjunctural alignments in which changing conditions
of work (paid and unpaid, concerned with production and reproduction)
bring about particular gendered possibilities of agency”
  Neo-liberalism encourage women to enter the workplace hasn’t
produced a kind of general pattern of gendered domination but it
produce gender possibilities of power-to or power-with (possibilities of
agency)

7.5.3 Feminist theory in combination with other power approaches

 Liberal (pluralist feminist approaches)
o Neutral (pluralist state): Dahl’s work, groups that seek to affect the state and the
state respond to their efforts, essentially the state acts as a weathervane that
responds to power of groups that seek to act upon it  Women has the ability to
form groups and the state will respond
o Power-to and power as a resource  Something feminist actors can use to
achieve particular ends
o Can work within the state to mainstream women’s issues
o Hence the interest in the impact of ‘critical mass’ in legislatures; women’s
agencies within the bureaucratic arm of the state (‘femocrats’)  Women
involved in feminist activists that were involved in education, bureaucracy and
literally entered the state to influence it
 Marxist feminist and ‘dual systems’ approaches
o Marx ignored the link between class exploitation and gender subordination
o Overlook women’s labour in the home and the exploitation of this labour in
capitalist modes of production
o ‘Dual systems theory says that women’s oppression arises from 2 distinct and
relatively autonomous systems. The system of male domination, most often called
‘patriarchy’, produced the specific gender oppression of women; the system of the
mode of production and class relations produces the class oppression and work
alienation of most women’ (Young, 1990)
 Post-structuralist approaches
o Disciplinary approaches that emphasise the way discourses surveille and
discipline gender
 o Biopower/4th face approaches that emphasise the way power works through
individuals to produce the category of gender
o Gendered individuals become agents in their own governance
o Potentially non-0-sum and normatively +ve, but literature tends towards
normatively -ve analysis  This is a process of discipline and domination

7.5.4 Criticisms of feminist theories of power

 Sheer variety of approaches defies easy categorisation of critique:
o Determinism and reductivism: Radical approaches have fallen from favour as
theorists and empirical investigation has recognised the many resources/forms of
power and oppression  Not many are conducting any kind of numbers like they
were before  Can’t describe to the state this kind of gendered oppression
because the state does other kinds of oppression and domination as well 
Newman identify the way that the state responses
o Power-over, power-to and power-with fails to engage with the productive effects
of discourse (poststructuralism)  Odd admission of Allen because in the late 90s
period (when Allen wrote her paper), poststructuralism was a hot topic  Doesn’t
talk about power through effects and produce individuals in a gendered kind of
fashion
 Compare this to the collapse of grand narratives and theory instigated by
poststructuralism
o Poststructuralism has undermined the coherence of feminist theory
o Especially the dominance kind of approach
o Contribute to the difficulties feminist activism faces with praxis because on what
basis are we acting, campaigning and trying to challenge?
o If we are not trying to achieve a revolution, what are we trying to do instead? This
question is being left open
o This is also a problem with Marxism and class (not only feminism)
 But see Allen and Newman on their nuance take on critiques, the collapse of feminist
activism
7.6 Tutorial Discussion
To begin, collectively devise some rules for conducting this tutorial that are derived from your
knowledge of gender and power.
 Giving equal weight to everyone’s ideas
o Don’t talk over people  Make sure everyone has a turn
 Establishing your positionality before you express your ideas on gender and power
 Bell Hooks power structure
o White male  Black male  White woman  Black woman

Ways the Australian state had to ‘flex’ to accommodate a feminist agenda in 2021

8. Marxist Theory
 Marxism background
o 19th century theorists: Limitations of 19th century theorising (Structuralist
approach, almost deterministic, reductive)
o Not the most nuanced theory but is enormously sophisticated
 Positioning our power theorists
o Marx sought to interpret most of history and all of contemporary politics and
economics through the lens of class struggle
o A complex and nuanced thinker (his thought evolved with time) – Huge body of
work that we will only scratch the surface of, through the prism of power
o When Marx died, he was stateless and largely friendless (he liked to feud)
o But his work influenced the state governments of roughly 1/3 of the world’s
population during the 20th Century
 Introducing Marxist theory: What is it?
o ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’
o ‘When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all
production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole
 nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly
so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If
the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of
circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes
itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of
production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the
conditions for these existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and
will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class’ (Marx and Engels,
Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848)
 Role of state
o State is there to block socialist revolution by proletariat

8.1 Marxist challenge to the State

 Marx was influenced by the philosophy of Hegel
o But Marx = Material (economic forces) basis
o C.f Hegel = Idealist (ideas) basis
 Marx & Hegel similarities
o Utopian moment of humanism  Perfect moment
o Gradualist model of progress  Incrementalism/Gradations of Progression over
time  Instead they believed that advances could only evolve from a fundamental
clash between 2 opposing social forces
 Hegel’s dialectic under capitalism
8.1.1 Theories of power as a guide to political action
 Karl Marx, ‘Concerning Feuerbach’, thesis 11 (1845)
o ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to
change it’
 A guide to political action
o Overthrowing this capitalist state and instituting a new form of socialist power
o This is the radical aspect of Marxist theory  Doesn’t accept the state

8.1.2 Is class domination more fundamental than other dimensions or sources?

 Pluralist theory (Dahl)
o There are many different power resources
o There are a variety of resources that power can draw upon: Money, organisations,
access
o So class domination is not more fundamental than other dimensions or sources
 Elite theory (Mills)
o By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles
which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least
national consequences
o Mills identify power as belonging to a number of different spheres: This creates
an elite but not necessarily one based on economic class
o So class domination is not more fundamental than other dimensions or sources
 Weberian
o Class, status and party (organisation) are equally important
o Talks about various forms of legitimate domination
o So class domination is not more fundamental than other dimensions or sources
 Marxist
o All history is the history of class struggles and classes are the product of modes of
product and exchange
o So class domination is the more fundamental than other dimensions or sources
 o (Jessop, 2012): ‘Its distinctive interest in class domination is not limited to
economic class domination in the labour process (although this is important) nor
even to the economic bases of class domination in the wider economy (such as
control over the allocation of capital to alternative productive activities). For
Marxists see class powers as dispersed throughout society and therefore also
investigate political and ideological class domination’

8.2 Marxist approaches to power:

1. Economic domination
 Economic domination is historically contingent
 Economic domination occurs because of the conditions of capitalism, whereby
one class has control of the means of production and can live off the productivity
of another class
o Class emerge at a certain stage of development where there exist a social
surplus of production which makes it possible for 1 class to benefit by the
exploitation of another
o Conflict between classes begins here in this moment where development
has progressed to allow the possibility of a surplus production
o Fundamental antagonism models
 This relationship is inherently exploitative and interests between classes
fundamentally conflict
o Because classes fundamentally have different kind of power resources
 But: Dialectic
o Which lead to synthesis and new mode of socialist production
o Socialist utopian ideal

2. State domination
 Colin Hay (Marxist conception of the State)
a. State as an instrument of the ruling class
  (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto) ‘The Executive of
the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’
 Staffed with personnel who are closely connected with and
controlled by the capitalist class (politicians and powerholders
in the state and controlled by capitalists)
b. State as an ideal collective capitalist
 Functionalist: The state performs key and necessary functions
that ensure the operation of the capitalist economy
 Eg. Maintaining order, enforcing private contracts, defending the
state’s territorial borders
 State perform these kinds of functions to keep the capitalist
system humming along  In this conception, doesn’t matter
who is managing the state because the state is compelled to
implement the same kind of public policies
c. State as a factor of cohesion with social formation
 The state acts as an arbiter between classes to ensure stability
and perpetuation of capitalism
 It can accommodate for the varying forms of the state:
Authoritarian to liberal democratic
 Gives the state of state power far more choice over their strategy:
Allows for capitalist state to adopt rather radically different
approaches from others

3. Ideological domination
 Consider the following forms of ideological domination that I am about to
introduce. Do you find one, some, or all of their accounts of ideological
domination persuasive?
o Consider why or why not via the contemporary example of Jobkeeper
payments to unemployed Australians during COVID-19
o Take some notes for tutorial
  Marx: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’
o Western capitalist context: Socialist revolution is more successful in
context other than the West
o Western Marxism concerned with ideological domination to explain why
socialist revolution has not occurred in the West especially under the
conditions of liberal democracy
Gramsci:
 ‘In Russia, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous;
in the West,… when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was …
revealed’
 Ideology:
o Refined Marxist conception of Ideology
o Ideology was more than a crude and deterministic outcome of economic
relations under capitalism
o Instead, ideology was a particular to a given kind of circumstance
 Hegemony:
o States has always been variable combinations of force and hegemony
o Force involves the use of a coercive apparatus to bring the mass of people
into conformity and compliance with the requirements of specific modes
of capitalist production
o In contract, hegemony involves the successful mobilization and
reproduction of the active consent of dominated groups by the ruling class
through the exercise of these kind of ideological forms of power
o Creates a hegemonic kind of ideology that is mobilised
 Organic Intellectuals:
o How hegemony is achieved
o (Broad understanding) Organic intellectuals are the organizers of culture:
Scholars, artists, cultural leaders
o Also functionaries who exercise technical or directive capacities in
society: Administrators, Bureaucrats, Politicians
 o They arose in conjunction with their society’s particular economic
structure, and this led them to be aligned with the interest of capital and
they become the deputy of class domination
o They produce, disperse and enforce hegemony (perpetuate hegemony)
 Dynamic:
o More dynamic that Marxist’s reductive ideas
o Particular to a given circumstance and necessitates a particular response
to that circumstance

Althusser
 ‘… there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’
o Give no agency to individuals
 Ideology
o Artificial or illusory relationship between individuals and the real
conditions of their existence (like Marxist theory)
o But does not claim that there is a real material existence in a perverted
ideological representation of that existence
 Ideological as well as repressive state apparatuses
o Instead, he argued that our existence where we find ourselves in is a
consequence of social practices and under these social practices,
individuals are literally created in the image of the society in which they
live
o Repressive state apparatuses function by violence: Government army,
police, court, prisons
o But also says that the ideological domination occurs by these ideological
state apparatuses
o He analyses religion, family, culture and the ideological function of the
legal and political system that we finds ourselves in
 Interpellation
 o Individuals’ recognition of themselves as answering to an identity
ascribed to them by the ideological state apparatus (religion, education,
family, culture)
o Materially speaking, their recognition, assertion of activity into the
practices that are called upon by these ideological state apparatuses,
individuals recognise their position in the capitalist society and recognise
the way that it has been ascribed to them and incorporate that into
themselves
 Highly structuralist and deterministic
o Our actions are literally caused by our position we find ourselves in the
structure of society
o But also, we answer and internalise this position through interpellation
(little room for change)

BUT: Once capitalism is established, ideology is not very important for maintaining class
power
 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 28
o “The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of
the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is
of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things,
the labourer can be left to the “natural laws or production”, i.e. to his
dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in
perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves”
 Essentially, workers find themselves in these forms of economic domination and
perpetuate these forms of class domination
o Because we need to work in these types of conditions in order to be able to
survive
o So you don’t really need this ideological domination because it overrides
the need for forms of ideological domination  Tension in Marxist
ideology
  Important: Form of economic class domination, state class domination or
ideological class domination
o This is one of the tensions that exists within Marxist thought because there
isn’t a satisfactory answer to that and Marxist theorist has taken these
ideas and pursued them in a number of different kinds of directions
o There has been interesting theorisation around that but no coherent and
satisfying explanation of capitalism and the operation of power within
capitalism

8.3 Criticisms to Marxist approach to power:

1. Marginalisation of other forms of domination
 Eg. Gender, race, interstate, structural domination
 Doesn’t provide account for those types of domination = Very reductionist 
Only provide an account of class domination
 Privileging and centring class domination
 Usually lead to odd theorisations of these other types of domination  Because
theorists have to develop 2 kinds of strands of theory to synthesize and
incorporate a Marxist and Feminist account
2. Relatedly, by reducing power to economic, state and ideological forms, it risks missing
other sources of power
 Althusser: Contemporary Foucault  He echoes Foucauldian thought: Forms of
discourse and how discourse produce individuals; But he doesn’t interact with
these kind of thoughts  Because competition exist within French intellectual
circles at the time
 C.f Post-structuralism
3. Exaggerates the structural coherence of class domination
 Emphasize the power of 2 groupings to polls, capitalists, the proletariat and the
cohesion that exists within those that produce synthesis of social revolution 
Somewhat exaggerated: Do we even see these kinds of coherence
 How accurate is it in the contemporary context?
 4. Utopian/futurologist themes that have failed to be borne out by history
 Synthesis is dialectic has failed to come about in most of the world
 Led to the marginalisation/sidelining of Marxist accounts/theory/forms of power
5. Politically/morally unpalatable for many due to explicit calls of revolutionary violence
and after the human rights abuses of communist states
 There are problematic for many people: Legitimate concerns
6. Generally: Reductive, Deterministic, Contradictions in Intentions (Especially empirically
speaking)

8.4 Tutorial Discussion

Then, in some small groups, unpack economic, state and ideological forms of class domination.
What forms of power do these accounts deal with credibly and which forms of power do they
miss? Feel free to mobilise examples that you are familiar with and power theories we have
examined previously this semester.

Differences: Economic, state and ideological forms of class domination

 Economic class domination:
o Produce enough so that they can give more to the higher class
 State class domination:
o State is a form of oppression to stop workers from rising up
o GameStop example: They went straight to the government when it was failing
o Southeast Asia COVID vaccines go to the rich first
 Ideological class domination:
o How ideas spread from the elite and make everyone think that the system is in
their interest, don’t need to use force but use ideas to keep people thinking that the
systems are in their interest
o In terms of the SEA COVID vaccines, why do people accept this and not fight
back against the unfair vaccinations? Due to ideological class domination maybe?
That makes us accept the fact that we have no say without money
Contemporary relevance or irrelevance of Marxist accounts of power
 Relevant from Economic standpoint
 Agree the post-structuralist theory poking holes in Marxism
o Very chopped down
o Now it’s not just one state/one actor
o Marxism doesn’t account for the competing interests within the state
 Different forms of Marxism
o As Marx didn’t really stipulate certain things in his ideology
o Eg. The Socialist Revolution: How will this come to be?
o Marx’s theory is very national based  Not international
 Angela Davis: How it is applied now
 It neglects the gendered aspect of power
o Eg. Gendered labour, gendered management
o Blind to racial, gender inequalities
 Book: The Left Hemisphere by Razmig Keucheyan
o Broad overview of Marxism today

9. Anarchism, Resistance and Hidden Transcripts

 Explicitly rejects the power of the state
o Rejects hierarchal forms of power
 Normative dimension
o Interesting empirical things
 Focus
o Work of James C Scott
o 19th-20th century origins of Anarchism
o Developments of Anarchism
 Purpose of this week
o Anarchist forms of power
 o How they complicate versions of power as domination, power-over and structure
vs agency
o Understand and reflect upon the challenge that James C Scott’s work in particular
poses to any form of structuralism or power-over
 Tutorial task
o Make a meme for Week 9 Tutorial and email it to tutor BEFORE tutorial

9.1 Origins of Anarchist Forms of Power

 Anarchism is deeply sceptical of legitimation, authority and political power
o Usually grounded in moral claims about the importance of individual liberty
o Offer a positive theory of human flourishing an emancipation  Quite similar to
Marxist theory and Feminist theory
 Anarchism envisages a power emanating especially from the state
o And also envisages a way of escaping, challenging or overthrowing that power
 Emancipatory goal
o Based on ideals of non-coercive and collective consensus building
o Think about: How might we go about collectivism, organising
 It is utopian, collectivist and revolutionary
o Mikhail Bakunin: Revolutionary power theorist
o Utopian: Imagine these kinds of futures where we can be free from dominating
kinds of powers
o Revolutionary roots to Marxist theory and some forms of radical Feminist theory

9.1.1 Positioning our power theorists

 19th century Anarchist thought
o These kinds of theorists were living at the same time as Karl Marx and
Engle and other kinds of Socialists
o They are interacting with Marxist thinkers and Karl Marx in particular
o Individuals were fighting  Have different visions and theories
 Split in 1872
 o From International Workers of the World (collectivist organisation)
responding to the emergence of 19th century Capitalism and class
exploitation in the European context
o In the first Internationale, there was a split in 1872 that occurred
between Socialist thinkers and Anarchists
o This is where Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx were interacting:
Thinkers from different camps pushing different views  Interacting
and fighting: Don’t see eye to eye
o This is where Socialist and Anarchists split off to form their own
political and theoretical trajectory
 Mikhail Bakunin Statism and Anarchy (1873)
o Revolutionary power theorist  He writes the year after the split
o “We have already expressed several times our profound aversion to the
theory of Lassalle and Marx, which recommends to the workers, if not
as their ultimate ideal, then at least as their immediate and principal
objective, the creation of a people’s state. As they explain it, this will
be nothing other than “the proletariat raised to the level of the ruling
class”
o “…If there is a state, then necessarily there is domination and
consequently slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is
inconceivable – that is why we are enemies of the state”
 Position:
o Rejection of the state whether Socialist or not
o Emphasis on collective organising and consensus decision-making

James C Scott, CIA-Recruit, farmer and scholar of anarchism

 Most well-known for his scholarship on anarchism
o Rise to prominence is 70s, 80s, 90s and a bit of 2000
 Live in farm
o Very interested in agricultural aspects
 Scott did reports for the CIA agency
 Not just a scholar of anarchism but an anarchist himself

9.1.2 Anarchist approaches to Power

1. Kinna (2011)
 “When they [Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin] talked about power,
19th-century writers usually had one of 2 things in mind: the
repressive machinery of the state or the liberating potential of
collective actions. These 2 aspects of power were typically
counterposed such that collective action were believed to hold the key
to the destruction of the state’s capacity to repress”
o This is the 19th century version of Anarchism: Sees power as
force
o Power as force: Repressive state power and non-hierarchical
forms of power (volent and/or collective) resistance and
revolution
o They weren’t averse to using force or violence
2. Woodcock (1968)
 “In 1963, it was evident, things had changed. The new anarchists…
had forgotten Spain and had no use for the old romanticism… They
were militant pacifists”
o 19th century radicalism and revolutionary aspect of Anarchism
o After world war 2: Power isn’t power as force, but
reformed/revolutionized
o Power is pacifist collective action: Forms of repressive state
power remains, but non-hierarchical forms of (pacifist and/or
collective) resistance and revolution (?)
 Evolution of Anarchist thought
o From 19th century to mid-20th century
 o From radical/violent theorizing (use of state force is illegitimate and
isn’t afraid of using similar means to overthrow it) to more pacifist and
peaceful version (rejects this kind of violence and loses its radicalism in
terms of its revolutionary aims)

9.2 Public and Private Transcripts and Forms of Everyday Resistance

 James C. Scott
o Not doctrinaire anarchism of the 19th Century of 1960s counterculture
o Scott pessimistic about overthrowing power of state (or capitalism) + State power
has grown (‘high modernism’)
o ‘[High-modernist ideology] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say
muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical
process, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs,
the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design
of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It
originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in
science and industry’ (Scott Seeing Like a State, p.4)

9.2.1 Anarchist approaches to power: An ‘anarchist squint’ – Power as viewed from below

 The state has projects predicated on measurement, uniformity, predictability, and

planning: legibility and simplification
o What Scott is describing in Seeing Like a State: Way that the state makes things
legible (there’s a particular process to that)
 These confront local practices based on specific knowledge and experiences
o Particular practices exist in tension and confrontation with the state projects of
legibility and simplification
 o He used metaphorical example of Maps: How Maps seek to make a specific
territory knowable so we can do things like tax and do that in a uniform, equitable
kind of manner
o This confront local realities, local practices, local experiences and local ways of
knowing
o There is a relationship that exists there, one that’s incredibly permeate with the
power dimension (unequal power relations) between the power of the states and
the local community (huge power imbalance)
o But nonetheless there is a power confrontation: Dynamics of domination and
resistance
o That is the interesting thing about Scott: The DYNAMICS of domination AND
RESISTANCE
 Dynamics of domination and resistance
o Yes we need to focus on these patterns of domination, but we need to think about
them as a dynamic process.
o Can’t just think about structuralism, can’t just think about hegemony but need to
look at the way these practices of domination interact with actual individuals:
o People who experience these forms of domination, need to pay attention to what
these people do in response, need to examine these forms of resistance

9.2.2 The State seeks to expand legibility to aid its purposes:

Early cities contained tiny minority of world’s population

 Almost all people live beyond reach of centres under locally developed practices (but
power here too)
o Power relationship existed in these local practices: Local aristocracies, the church,
etc
o But nonetheless, they were separate/beyond the reach of the kind of centre: From
the power of the state
o State was fairly thin and uneven in terms of its spread
  For many centuries, technical, military and administrative limits to expansion of legibility
curb ambitions of state, even at local level
o Real practical problems with expanding the scope of the state: Difficult to do,
difficult to know what was happening
o Because it was difficult to know what was happening, it was difficult to extend
the ambitions of the state
 Modern states overcome these limitations and therefore expand legibility and projects
o This is where Scott becomes pessimistic to resist the state: 19th Century ideal of
overthrowing the state is somewhat utopian
 Other works
o Georges-Eugène Haussmann and C19 redevelopment of Paris: Laid the military
security of the state  Revolutionary foment and agitation present  French
state concerned with redeveloping Paris to ensure the military security of the state
 The redesign city was, above all, made safe against popular insurrections 
The geography of insurrections, however, was not evenly distributed across Paris:
Resistance was concentrated in densely packed working class areas which had
complex, illegible street plans (tightly packed, narrow laneways, no organic
development across centuries)  In 1860, the state annexed these inner suburbs
which contained ¼ million people and was explicitly redesigned to gain mastery
over these kind of wild belt that has escaped police control  The military
control over the spaces which hasn’t been mapped properly was integral to the
French state’s plan  Series of new avenues were designed to facilitate
movement between barracks and the outskirts of the city  To make forms of
resistance legible, they redesigned the city in order to create these kinds of
processes
o The Australian lack of the public square (European style): Deliberately designed
out of Australian colonial cities to control the public space
o Also see Scott Seeing Like a State pp. 59-63

Making social phenomena legible

  Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 220

9.2.3 Open and ‘everyday’ resistance: Public and Private transcripts

 Public transcripts:
o Is used as a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between
subordinates and those who dominate
o The public transcript, where it is not positively misleading, is unlikely to tell the
whole story about power relations
o Because frequently, in the interest of both parties, to tacitly conspire in
misrepresentation

Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 90

  An empirical point about public transcripts
o ‘Unless one can penetrate the official transcript of both subordinates and elites, a
reading of the social evidence will almost always represent a confirmation of the
status quo in hegemonic terms. Just as subordinates are not much deceived by
their own performance there is, of course, no more reason for social scientists and
historians to take that performance as, necessarily, one given in good faith’
o This is the idea of the hidden transcript: “If subordinate discourse in the presence
of domination is a public transcript, I shall use the term hidden transcript to
characterise discourse that takes place off stage, beyond direct observation by
powerholders”
 Nicholas’ Summary
o If we don’t pay attention to these hidden/private transcripts, then we cannot know
the way that power is truly operating
o He mobilizes this critique of hegemony: Idea of false consciousness and
hegemony  If we only pay attention to these kinds of public, dominant
transcripts (the transcripts of the power holders), then yes, we are going to see
hegemony and false consciousness  It is only through the examination of these
hidden, private transcripts that we will be able to actually see whether or not
hegemony is actually in operation, whether or not people do have false
consciousness, whether or not people are actually controlled in this 3rd face of
power, Gramscian, kind of way

Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 26

 Describing American society during slavery, in particular
 Hidden transcript
o “Discourse that takes place off stage, beyond direct observation of powerholders”
 Discursive acts that reflect power relations under the conditions of slavery
o If slaves are talking to overseers who are harsh/indulgent/white: We are likely to
see public transcripts  Where the dominated are saying the things that would be
 expected in these circumstances (See hegemony, if that is what you are looking
for)
o When see interactions of slaves with other free blacks, slaves of same master,
close friends/family: Likely to see truer representation of power relations  Truer
description of how these dominated people understood the power relationships
that they existed in
o This is an important empirical point: If you can’t access these private transcripts,
can you actually say that a discourse/power operation is actually hegemonic

9.2.4 Dynamics of Domination and Resistance

Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 198

 ‘Not so long ago in the West, however, and even today, for many of the least privileged
minorities and marginalized poor, open political action will hardly capture the bulk of
political action. Nor will an exclusive attention to declared resistance helps us understand
the process by which new political forces and demands germinated before the burst on
the scene. How, for example, could be understand the open break represented by the civil
rights movement or the black power movement in the 1960s without understanding the
offstage discourse among black students, clergymen, and their parishioner?’
9.3 Anarchist approaches with some Comparisons to other Approaches
 Legitimate domination, charismatic domination, legal rational domination and traditional
domination

9.3.1 Thinking about Scott’s analysis c.f. Weberian terms…

We can see this dynamic of domination and resistance as contending forms of legitimate
domination
 State power aligns with attempts to impose legal rational authority/legitimate domination
 o Seeing Like a State: Making population/territory legible  Imposing legal
rational authority/legitimate domination
 Local practices are not power-free but rest on localised traditional authority (which may
disadvantage particular groups)
 Resistance may be individual/spontaneous but may include charismatic authority figures
o Bandit leaders, underground preachers, etc

Power theories not as separate as one might think

 Scott very critical of hegemonic/false consciousness kind of approaches

9.3.2 Thinking about Scott’s analysis c.f. other state challenging theory…

There are structures of power, but the dynamic of domination and resistance is not particularly
associated with economic or gender relations
 Primarily class analysis
o With some attention to race [particularly on the context of American slavery] but
little on gender
o See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 22
 Implicitly more Weberian approach
o Similar to how Weber wasn’t particularly interested in economic or gender
approaches
o Use more general sense of domination
o But Scott does have some justification for it
 Scott says: These ways of looking at things, perhaps these forms of class/gender
domination don’t exhibit the same kind of tendencies as public/hidden transcripts
o “The literature on gender-based domination and on working class culture and
ideology has proved insightful in many points. They share enough similarities to
the cases I relied most heavily on to be suggestive. At the same time, the
differences limit the analogies that can be drawn. In the case of women, relations
of subordination have typically been both more personal, intimate. Joint
 procreation, and family life event had meant that imagining an entirely separate
existence for a subordinate group requires a more radical step than it has for serfs
or slaves. Analogies become more strained in contemporary settings where choice
of marriage partner is possible where women have civil and political rights”
o “For the contemporary working class in the West who can take or leave a
particular job, though they must typically work and who also have some ability to
gain citizenship rights, many of the same difficulties arise.”
o “Both cases illustrate how essential the existence of some choice is in raising the
possibility of hegemonic incorporation. In the case of gender highlights the
importance of specifying exactly how separate spheres actually are.”

9.3.3 Thinking about Scott’s analysis in Foucauldian terms…

Similarities
 Emphases on surveillance, legibility, power of knowledge and the micro-politics of
power
o Coming from different directions (different originations) but examining similar
points

Differences
 Scott
o State is more unified and intentional actor with visions, schemes and projects (less
created by power, more agency)
o Pays more attention to resistance: His critique of scholars who examine elite texts
to understand power relations applies to Foucault
o Foucault is in his genealogy, examining these kinds of hegemonic discourses 
What he is doing, what his analysis is
 Foucault
o See power as much more discursive, operated through discourses, permeating
throughout society
 9.3.4 Criticisms of Anarchist theories of power
1. Utopian
 The state has become further entrenched since the 19th century
o Further enhancing its authority and oversight
 Imagine breaking free from the state through collectivism and consensus
decision-making
o Scott’s work displays the abandonment of this utopian ideal
o Because this is very difficult to imagine in the kind of context
2. Whither resistance?
 Much like criticism of poststructuralism, what does a more limited form
of political action defined in terms of resistance offer those interested in
radical social change?
 Appeals of radical theory: Is its radicalism  Overthrowing power
structures and imagining something different
o So what does Scott’s work offer then in context where we are not
going to run through the state, what kinds of template for
political action does he offer?
o Similar to poststructuralist critique
3. Empirical
 How can hidden transcripts be accessed, especially historically?
o Many records have disappeared, if they were ever collected
o Can we actually demonstrate this? The answer might be no
 In contemporary times:
o Can gather hidden transcripts: Talk to these people and access
these materials

9.4 Reading: False Consciousness or Laying it on Thick, James C Scott

 Social facts
 o Powerful have a vital interest in keeping up the appearances appropriate to their
form of domination
o Subordinates help sustain those appearances or at least, not openly contradict
them

The Interpretation of Quiescence (pp. 70-76)

 How to interpret conforming behaviour by the less powerful when there is no apparent
use of coercion?
o Community power literature: Low levels of political participation despite market
inequalities and a relatively open political system
o Neo-Marxist: Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
 Why does a subordinate class seem to accept or at least consent to an economic system
that is manifestly against its interests when it is not obliged to by the direct application of
coercion or fear of its application?
o Assumptions: Subordinate group is relatively quiescent, they are relatively
disadvantaged and it is not directly coerced
o All, except the community power debate, explains this by reference to hegemony
 False consciousness
o Thick: Dominant ideology persuade subordinate groups to believe actively in the
values that explain and justify their own subordination (Consent)
o Thin: Dominant ideology achieves compliance by convincing subordinate groups
that the social order in which they live is natural and inevitable (Resignation)
 Hegemony
o Thick: Emphasize the operation of what has been called “ideological state
apparatuses” (schools, church, media) which exercise a near monopoly over the
symbolic means of production  Secures active consent of subordinate groups to
the social arrangements that reproduce their subordination
o Thin: Define for subordinate groups what is and is not realistic and to drive
certain aspirations and grievance into the realm of impossible  Convince that
 nothing can possibly be done to improve their situation and that it will always
remain

Critique of Hegemony and False Consciousness (pp. 77-82)

 Understanding how the process of domination generates the social evidence that confirms
notions of hegemony
o Problem: Implicit assumption that the ideological incorporation of subordinate
groups will diminish conflict
o Subordinate class at the base of revolutionary movements typically seek goals that
are well-within their understanding of the ruling ideology
 Problem with hegemonic thesis
o Difficult to explain how social change could ever originate from below
o If elites control the material basis of production, allow them to extract practical
conformity and also control the means of symbolic production, thereby ensuring
that their power and control are legitimized, one has achieved an equilibrium that
should only be able to be disturbed by an external shock
o In other words, everything fits too neatly
 Social phenomenon: The reverse of hegemony and false consciousness
o How is it that subordinate groups such as these have so often believed and acted
as if their situations were not inevitable when a more judicious historical reading
would have concluded that it was?
o We require an understanding of a misreading by subordinate groups that seems to
exaggerate their own power, the possibilities for emancipation, and to
underestimate the power arrayed against them
o If elite-dominated public transcript naturalize domination, some countervailing
influences manages to denaturalize domination (which is why there are
revolutions)
 Thin theory of naturalization
o Claims nothing beyond the acceptance of inevitability
  Cannot assume that there is an absence of actual knowledge of alternative social
arrangements
o No matter the naturalization of the hated present, people can always imagine
o Serfs and slaves may have difficulty imagining other arrangement, BUT they can
imagine the total reversal of the existing distribution (A world turned upside
down)  Collective hidden transcripts from the fantasy life of subordinate groups
are not merely abstract exercises but they are embedded in ritual practices 
These imaginations provide the ideological basis of many revolts
o Popular imagination to negate the existing social order: Imagine the absence of
the distinctions they find so onerous
o Utopian thoughts such as this has been cast in disguised or allegorical forms in
part because its open declaration would be considered revolutionary
 Historically, based on evidence, there is no fat or thin theory of hegemony
o Obstacles of resistance are not attributable to the inability of subordinate groups
to imagine a counterfactual social order
o Because they do imagine the reversal and negation of their domination
o AND they do act on these values in desperation and on the rare occasions when
the circumstances allowed
o Subordinate groups are not paralysed by an elite-fostered discourse intended to
convince them that efforts to change are hopeless

Paper-Thin Theory of Hegemony (pp. 82 –85)

 Ideological hegemony of involuntary subordination can occur if:
o There exists a strong probability that a good many subordinates will eventually
come to occupy positions of power: Encourages patience and emulation +
Promises revenge (but must be on someone other than the original target of
resentment)
o Close observation: Total abolition of any social realm of relative discursive
freedom  Hidden transcript generated amongst subordinates eliminated
  Conditions so stringent that they are not applicable to any large-scale forms of
domination
 Serfs and slaves had little prospect of upward mobility
o But they had a life apart in the slave quarters, village, household, etc
o It’s neither possible nor desirable to destroy entirely the autonomous life of
subordinate groups that is the indispensable basis for a hidden transcript

The Social Production of Hegemonic Appearances (pp. 85-

 Host of factors that might explain why a form of domination persists despite an elite’s
failure to incorporate ideologically the least advantaged
o Subordinate groups are geographically and culturally divided
o Daily struggles for subsistence and surveillance it entails
o They have become cynical from past failures
 Reasons why ideological incorporation should find such resonance
o Official transcript provides convincing evidence of willing, enthusiastic
complicity
o Avoid any explicit display of insubordination
o Small acts of resistance: To avoid any open confrontation with the structures of
authority being resisted
o Disguised resistance: Control over land  Squatting to a defiant land invasion;
Matter of taxes  Evade rather than a tax riot
o Only when dramatic measures failed, when subsistence was threatened, then they
will act in collective defiance
o It is for this reason that the official transcript of relations between the dominant
and subordinate is filled with subservience, euphemisms, and uncontested claims
to power
 Official transcript naturalized because
o Elites exert their influence to produce
o It ordinarily serves the immediate interests of subordinates to avoid discrediting
their appearances
  Subordinate groups also sanitize official transcript to cover their tracks
o Even if subordinate groups do put in an appearance, their behaviours are mediated
by the interpretation of dominant elites
o If subordinate groups resist in minor situations: Eg. Steal from owners, masters
will know little about it
 Example: Malay paddy farmers and tax (pp.88-89)
o They resented paying the official Islamic tithe
o Quietly and massively, they dismantled the tithe system: Only 15% of what is
formally due was actually paid
o For complex political reasons, neither the religious authorities nor the ruling party
wishes to call public attention to this effective defiance
o Because if they did, it would expose the tenuousness of government authority in
the countryside and might risk encouraging other acts of insubordination

Interrogation of Power, or, the Use Value of Hegemony

 Example: Norwegian prisons (p. 94)
o Strategic understanding that they will have to continue to deal with prison
authorities
o Inmate struggles: Attempts to domesticate power to render it predictable and
manipulate
o Prisoners press constantly for the specification of procedures, criteria, and
guidelines that will govern the granting of privileges
o Impossible to know from the official transcript to what degree the argument of the
prisoners is strategic in the sense of being a conscious manipulation of the
prevailing norms
 Example: Person appealing to his superiors in a capitalist firm for a raise
o So long as he anticipates remaining within the structure of authority, his case will
necessarily be addressed to the institutional interests of his superiors
o True reason for wanting raise: Buy new car, support gambling habit, etc
o None of these reasons will have a place in the official transcript
 o Official transcript: His loyalty and effective contribution to the institutional
success of the firm in the past and what he can contribute in the future
 Cannot judge candor based on official transcript alone
o Power of domination elicits a continuous stream of performances of deference,
respect, reverence, admiration, esteem, and even adoration
o This is in the public transcript to further convince ruling elites that they claims are
validated by the social evidence they see before their eyes
o Example: Protesting  Will large observe the “rules” even if their objective is to
undermine them

No notes on ‘Naïve Monarchism: “Long Live X”’ subchapter

Minding the Public Discourse

 For any form of domination, one may:
o Specify the claims to legitimacy it makes
o Discursive affirmations it stages for the public transcript
o The aspects of power relations that it will seek to hide
o The acts and gestures that will undermine its legitimacy
o Critiques that are possible within its frame of reference
o Ideas and actions that will represent a repudiation or profanation of the form of
domination in its entirety
 Analysis of domination
o Specifying the ways in which the structure of claims to power influences the
public transcript it requires
o Examine how such a public transcript may be undermined or repudiated
o Specify precisely what a subversive act in this context would look like
 Whenever public transcript is breach
o Breaches will disrupt or desacralize the ceremonial reverence
o Acts of insubordination represent a small insurgency within public transcripts
9.5 Readings: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Jim Scott

The Unwritten History of Resistance

 Circumstances which favour large-scale peasant uprisings are rare
o Revolts that develop are crushed unceremoniously
o But even a failed revolt will have achieved something
 Historiography of class struggle is distorted in a state-centric direction
o A small and futile rebellion claims an attention all out of proportion to its impact
o While acts of flight, sabotage, theft have far greater impacts and are rarely noticed
o Small rebellions have a symbolic importance for its violence and its revolutionary
aims
 Everyday forms of resistance
o Ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: Foot-dragging, dissimulation,
false-compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage
o Requires little to no co-ordination or planning
o Often represent a form of individual self-help
o Typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority
o Unlikely to do more than marginally affect the various forms of exploitation
which peasants confront
 Example 1: Desertion and evasion of conscription
o It has limited the imperial aspirations of monarch in South-East Asian
o [Link]’s account of draft resistance in Post-Revolutionary France: There were
increasingly frequent reports of conscripts retuning home and living there
unmolested. Better still, many had never left it in the first place (James Scott, p. 7)
 Example 2: Flight and evasion of taxes
o Has curbed the ambition of Third World states
o Unpopular government schemes/programmes nibbled to extinction by passive
resistance of the peasantry
 Everyday resistance vs Direct confrontations
 o Peasant squatters on plantation vs Public invasion of property
o Gradual military desertion vs Open mutiny aiming at eliminating/replacing
officers
o Pilfering of public/private grain stores vs Open attack on markets/granaries
aiming at the redistribution of food supply
 Reasons Officials of the state also do not wish to publicise insubordination
o It would admit their policy is unpopular
o It would expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside
 Submission and stupidity by the subordinated is a pose, a necessary tactic

Examples
1. Attempts by women transplanting groups to boycott landowners who had first hired
combine-harvesters to replace hand labour
 Background
o Changing human labour with capital labour
o Husbands and wives usually work together
o Husband gets replaced, wives who reap the land boycott the employers
 Reasons for quiet resistance
o Nature of the changes confront by the poor
o Nature of their community while another concerns the effects of
repression
 Everyday resistance
o Batteries removed from machines and thrown into irrigation ditches
o Vital parts (eg. Distributors and air filters) were smashed
o Sand and mud were put into the gas tanks
 Methods of boycott: “Letting it be known”
o Let it be known that they were not pleased and that they would be
reluctant to transplant the fields of those who employed capital labour
o Let it be known that if the machine broke down, employers could not
count on his old workers to bail him out
 o Retaliation: Employers let it be known that they were arranging for
outside labourers to transplant their crops
 After retaliation by employers, boycott collapsed
2. Anonymous thefts of harvested paddy which appeared to be increasing in frequency
 Amount of paddy stolen over a single season was alarming to the employers and
they believed that it was growing

What counts as resistance

 Peasant resistance
o Any act(s) by member(s) of the class that is (are) intended either to mitigate or
to deny claims (e.g. rents, taxes, deference) made on that class by
superordinate classes (e.g. landlords, the state, owners of machinery,
moneylenders) or to advance its own claims (e.g. work, land, charity, respect)
vis-à-vis these superordinate classes
 Factors
o No requirement that resistance take the form of collective action
o Intention built into the definition
o Symbolic or ideological resistance (e.g. gossip, slander, rejecting imposed
categories)
 Some do not believe peasant resistance to be real resistance, but as ‘token activities’ (p.
23-24)
o ‘Real’ resistance = (a) organised, systematic and co-operative, (b) principles
or selfless, (c) has revolutionary consequences, (d) embodies ideas or
intentions that negate the basis of domination itself
o ‘Token activities’ = (a) Unorganised, unsystematic and individual, (b)
opportunistic and ‘self-indulgent’, (c) have no revolutionary consequences, (d)
imply an accommodation with the system of domination
 Example: Military desertion
o Military desertion was responsible for the collapse of the main institution of
repression of the Tsarist state
 o It also contributed directly to the revolutionary process in the countryside
o It is clear that the military desertion was a self-indulgent act
 To ignore the self-interested element is to ignore most lower-class politics
o The goal is not to overthrow or transform a system of domination but to
survive
o They are ‘working the system to their minimum disadvantage’
o Their intention is survival and persistence
 Confining search for peasant resistance to formally organised activity would be in vain
o Because in Third World countries, such organisations are either absent or are
the creations of officials and rural elites

9.6 Tutorial Discussions

 Anarchism in practice
o Myanmar when all the drama was happening: Local community
o US 2020 with BLM and political turmoil of elections
o Indigenous forms of anarchy: Localised anarchists’ beliefs and feelings that exist
and pervade
 Giving power back to the people and showing that the people can look after themselves
o Different from violent depictions of anarchism
 Internet huge form of anarchism
o Humour or trolling
 The way the international system is run is some form of anarchy
o Because no on control the actual states: It’s a free for all

Hidden transcripts
 Give a lot more agency to the people than Foucault
o Not everyone want to have power over the state
 He believes more so than Foucault that people can do what they want to do
o Foucault thinks in a new state they are going to do things the way it has been done
before
  By looking at the evidence of present revolution, there are many times people claim that
slaves had false consciousness
o But that is all horse shit because they were doing minor resistance (stealing, etc)
o So it is not known by the people
 Scott: Finds all hidden forms of resistance
o In theory, false consciousness could exist, but it is less likely due to the evidence
o There may be an appearance of false consciousness but that’s just what people are
trying to show
o Or they know the system sucks, but they just can’t openly resist

Then, in small groups, discuss on how anarchist approaches to power have shaped, or help us
understand, the nature of urban design, control and resistance, using at least two of the readings
(one must be Scott 'False Consciousness or Laying it on Thick?' and one other of your choice).
You can discuss these issues in any context, but I have given you some links in the lecture slides
and some suggestions below to start you off.

You are required here to engage with the case study and apply the power theory to it. Think
about urban design, control and everyday resistance. I'm asking you stretch yourselves a little
here, so to get you thinking, you might like to explore public housing estates; the lack of public
squares in Australian cities; urban 'renewal' and gentrification; CCTV surveillance. There are
obvious issues of state control in all of these examples, but what might be some 'hidden
transcripts' and 'forms of everyday resistance'?
 What would anarchist power say about these urban designs
 Transcript:
o Some sort of record
 Discourse:
o Broader, written in transcript
o Discourse not recorded = Hidden transcript
 CCTV Surveillance: Panopticon
o People internalize surveillance: They don’t resist
 o Not really resistance online and social media because if they post on social media
then they are not really afraid of surveillance
 Lack of public squares
o People can’t meet up and generate their thoughts
o Geographical separation between subordinate groups
o In Asia and Europe there are a lot of public squares where there are a lot of public
squares
o In Australia, they deliberately planned cities without public squares so that they
don’t revolt
o Resistance: Online, social media
 Henry
o Projects both market and the state
o Where other theories is only one or the other
o Critique: Loses sight of power relations  Recognise the state as having all the
power but also thinks that you can move beyond the state
 People’s possibility to resist it
 Gentrification
o Renewing a place and make it urbanized
o People get kicked out
 Forms of everyday resistance
o Tax evading if you don’t agree with the state taxes (from reading)
o Clothing and art

10. Power in Movements

 Another challenging the state type of power movement
o Interdependent power challenge and complicate domination power-over
and structural forms of power
10.1 Interdependent power, social movements and political participation

Introducing some starting concepts: Movement and ‘interdependent power’

 Last week: James C. Scott ‘arts of resistance’, ‘hidden transcripts’, etc
 Can see that these dominated people do recognise the power relationships that exist
o Don’t necessarily have forms of hegemony
o Especially kinds of strong forms of hegemony that sometimes appear in Marxist
theory: False consciousness
 Power to and power with (feminist theory idea)
 This week
o More open forms of protest
o Related to Scott’s thesis regarding public and hidden transcripts
o Diversity of approaches: Aim to sample that diversity, not putting forward a
‘correct’ view n
 Power of and in social movements (Charles Tilly; Armstrong and Bernstein)
o Collective action through exercising ‘independent power’ (Frances Fox Piven)
o Old and new ‘repertoires of contention’ (Charles Tilly)
o Power in networks and the digital age (Castells)
 More to power than just power over
o There is power in movements and power of movements

10.1.1 ‘Interdependent power’

 Piven: ‘Power from below’ assumes power is systematically unequally distributed (there
is an ‘above’ of dominant classes, the state and/or other elite groups
o Most individuals lack significant power resources
o ‘Interdependent power’ critical for successful public/open challenges against the
minority with significant power resources (Frances Fox Piven)
o May be periods without open collective contention (James C Scott) but open
collective contention does occur and can have effects (e.g. Charles Tilly)
 “I propose that there is another kind of power based, not on resources or things, but
rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue
of group life” (Frances Fox Piven)
o Simplified: In these relationships that exist (unequal power relationship), between
actors that control significant power resources and those that don’t, there still
exists a power from below by virtue of the relationship that exist between those 2
groupings
o This is rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are
enmeshed: People who hold power are reliant on the people who are dominated,
they can’t exist without them, their power resources are entangled with the
relations that they have with the dominated
o It is in this kind of moment that Fox Piven is saying, we have an interdependency
of power and in this interdependency, we can, as dominated actors, exercise
power (because of interdependence between dominated and dominator)
 “While conflict theorists emphasize that capitalist have power over workers because they
control investment and the opportunities for employment that investments generate, and
that they can call out the goons, the troops, the press or the courts, our focus on
interdependent power, on the other hand, lets us see that workers also have potential
power over capitalists because they staff the assembly lines on which production
depends” (Frances Fox Piven)
o Simplified: Capitalists hold power resources, they control investment, they
control the opportunities for investment and if things hit the fan, they can mobilise
other kinds of power resources (the state, courts, press)
o But she’s saying that this focus on interdependent power allows us to see that
workers also have potential power (needs to be realised) over capitalists and they
have this power because capitalists need workers to staff the assembly line
 “In the same vein, landlords have power over tenants because they own the fields that
tenants till, but tenants also have power over landlords because without their labour, the
fields are idle. State elites can invoke the authority of the law and the force of the troops,
but they also depend on voting publics. Husbands and wives, priests and their
parishioners, masters and slaves, they all face this dynamic. Both sides of this relation
 have potential for exercising interdependent power and, at least in principle, the ability to
exert power over others by withdrawing or threatening to withdraw for social
cooperation”
o This is the basis of interdependent power: Power of social movements
o This is the power of individuals when they act in concert: Power in movements
(Amy Allen’s terms: Power with)

10.1.2 Positioning our power theorists: Social movements

 Examples
o Post-material movements of civil rights, sexual, gender, environmentalism, peace
movements
o Protests/organisations of exercise of interdependent power developing in 19th
century
 Social movements
o ‘Loose coalitions of groups, organisations and individuals that use a range of
participatory strategies to change specific public policies and broad social values
and structures around a particular dimension…’ (Smith, Vromen and Cook, 2012)
o ‘Social movements are defined as networks of informal interactions between a
plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations, engaged in political or
cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collective identities’ (Mario Diani, 1992)
Nuance
 Not individual organisations: ‘social movement organisations’ (SMOs)  Organisations
within one or more social movements
 Networks mostly not face-to-face:
o Most of the movements have been largely not face-to-face
o Emerge in modern period of contention (social movements of labour)
o Digital social movements: Largely enacted online
 ‘Left’ or ‘right’; ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’
 o Much of new social movement literature focus on ‘progressive’, ‘leftist’
movements
o But in the last 5-10 years there have been right wing populism, emergence of the
alt right, conservative right-wing reactionary movements as well

Contemporary political participation: Decline or transformation?

 Trend relatively clear

 Can see that newer forms of participation over time: Contacting officials via email
increased significantly since the mid-2000s
 There has been a significant decline in contacting officials in person/writing: Less
face-to-face, more digital
 Working together with others have been relatively stable
 Protesters remain relatively stable
 Signing of written petition has decreased since 1987
 Signing an online petition has increased since 2004
 10.1.3 Introducing starting concepts: Social movements

 Decline in solidaristic member-based activity (political and non-political)

o Example of labour: Power of labour in the 20th century up until the 1970s, in the
Australian context, there was mass union membership after WW2 (this is the
height of solidaristic activity
o People join political organisations like unions and community groups
o Eg. Sports-based groups: Also conduct political events in upgrading soccer fields
 Shift to new forms of ‘individualised collective’ participation
o See Vromen 2017: Citizens are acting/participating individually but connected to
a wider collective value
o If you go into the supermarket and purchase free-range chicken/cage-free eggs,
you are participating in a form of ‘individualised collective’ participation 
Connected to a broader animal rights/welfare project
o Don’t pay up to be a member of an organisation
 Project rather than member or duty based
o Online activism: Kicked off in the last 15 years or so
o Hybridised form: Element of joining up and organisation but more hybridised in
terms of online (can go in and out of it as you please)
o Individual activity
o ‘Everyday makers’ (Henrik Bang) and permanent protest (e.g. political
consumption)

Tutorial task
 Consider the idea of interdependent power
 What ‘power from below’ might you possess and how (if at all) have you exercised it
 Thank about this broadly – what new forms of ‘individualised collective’ participation, in
real life or online, have you participated in?
 List as many activities as you have participated in , even if only ‘very small’ or
‘insignificant’ and bring the list to class
 o If you’ve liked something on Facebook
o Or shared something on social media

10.2 ‘Repertoires of contention’ over time

 Repertoires of contention
o Comprises of what people know they can do when they want to oppose a public
decision, they consider unjust or threatening
o Tilly (1986, p. 2): Includes the “whole set of means [a group] has for making
claims of different types of different individuals”
 Tilly’s main thesis
o There is a repertoire of contention
o Points to the ways of demonstrating opposition, presenting demands

10.2.1 Ways of demonstrating opposition, presenting demands

 Socially constructed
 Limited by
o What protestors know
o What others expect
 Range from ‘official’ to ‘oppositional’
 Repertoires change ‘glacially’
o What do change, older forms often persist
o See: Tilly
 Existing repertoires constrain collective action
o Different from the image we might have on contention/mindless grounds
o Instead, they act within know limits and innovate in the margins of existing forms
o They may miss many opportunities available to them in principle
 “Although it may seem otherwise, even government officials and industrial managers of
our own time generally behave as though they prefer demonstrations and strikes to utterly
unconventional form of collective action”
 o Quote from Tilly
o This is the idea of repertoires as a contention  Shows how different forms of
interdependent power have evolved and is being contested across time
o Points to the social construction of this and how it constrains political action 
So have we actually changed now? With digital action

A chronological view of social movement power and action

 Three stages
o Old regime to 1850
o National 1850-1990s
o Transnational/multi-institutional/network 1990s- present
 Changes in scope and autonomy of actions over 3 periods
o Forms of state
o Forms of capitalism
o Technology
o Political identity
 Old regime
o Parochial issues
o There were particular techniques
o Patronized action: Really aims at particular parochial individuals
 National
o Cosmopolitan issues: Less local issues, more diverse
o Modular techniques: Can pick them up and put them into another context
o Autonomous action: Individuals can act in an autonomous kind of fashion
 Transnational/multi-institutional/network
o Aimed at the state and culture
o Global issues: Rather than cosmopolitan, national issues
o Simultaneous techniques: Eg. Climate strikes
 o Autonomous actions and networks of actors: Not just individuals but can see a
network of actors that has been mobilized across time and space within these
digital means

10.2.2 From the old regime to the national (Tilly)

 The old
o ‘Broadly speaking, the repertoire of the 17th to 19th centuries held to a parochial
scope: It addressed local actors or the local representatives of national actors. It
also relied heavily on the patronage-appealing to immediately available power
holders to convey grievances or settle disputes, temporary acting in the place of
unworthy or inactive power holders only to abandon power once the action was
done. For all their labelling as “riots” and “disorders”, seizures of grain, invasions
of fields, machine-breaking and similar actions had a common logic and an
internal order’
  Older forms of action
o Seizures of grain
o Rough Music: Making a commotion
 Some still continue today in forms of contention
 The national
o ‘The repertoire that crystallized in the 19th century and prevails today is, in
general, more national in scope: Although available for local issues and enemies,
it lends itself easily to coordination among many localities. As compared with the
older repertoire, its actions are relatively autonomous: instead of staying in the
shadow of existing power holders and adapting routines sanctioned by those
power holders, users of the new repertoire tend to initiate their own statements of
grievances and demands. Strikes, demonstrations, electoral rallies, and similar
actions build, in general, on much more deliberately constructed organization than
used to be the case. The social movement, as we know it, came into being with
the new repertoire.
  Some of the examples in the shift of power in contestation
o These are sights of action moving from local to national scale
 We change the repertoire as a consequence, to be able to deal with that
change
o The change in politics and power relations that are associated
with that
o Change in power relations, technology, capitalism

10.2.3 Transnational/multi-institutional/network power?

 Transnational
o ‘Globalization, neoliberal or not, means just this: Increased specialization and
integration in complex and far-reaching systems of cooperation and
interdependence, with the potential that popular power will also become more
far-reaching and available to more people. The evidence suggests that popular
power’s potential has expanded far beyond the specific institutional locations
that informed our ideas about democratic power and labor power’ (Piven)
o Got this kind of globalized, transnational potential for social movements
 o As power has spread/trans-nationalized/globalized in the last 30 years, we have
seen the potential for a transnational form of action and contestation
o Example: Climate strikes  Actions that are occurring regarding a particular
political issue being climate change and those actions being coordinated
simultaneously, in locations all across the world in a simultaneous kind of fashion
 While climate change is a global issue, we can also act upon it globally 
Climate change represents particular kinds of problems and power relations and
systems of domination + If you use Piven’s idea of interdependence, it also
represents an expanding potential for forms/locations/contestations
 Multi-institutional
o ‘A multi-institutional politics approach moves beyond understanding power as
vested primarily in the state. Society is viewed as composed of multiple and
contradictory institutions with each institution viewed as mutually constituted by
classificatory systems and practices that concretize these systems. Movements
may target a diverse array of institutions (both state and nonstate), and seek both
material and symbolic change’ (Armstrong and Bernstein)
o Critical perspectives of 19th century forms of power: Marxism  When associate
dominating sources of power with a particular kind of dimension, that being the
dominating power of capital
o In a more nuanced, contemporary context, we can think of power as being located
in multiple institutions  It is dynamic, it varies
o We may seek to act upon this particular dimension in a particular institution to
deal with the fact that we are dealing with this kind of variance and dynamism
 Network
o ‘Each type of society has a specific form of exercising power and counterpower.
It should not surprise us that in the network society, social power is primarily
exercised by and through networks. The question is though, which kind of
networks? And how do they operate in the making of power? To approach these
questions, I must first differentiate between 4 distinct forms of power: (a)
networking power; (b) network power; (c) networked power; and (d) network-
making power’ (Castells)
 o He talks about a network society  Idea that power is mobilized through these
networks in a contemporary context: If society in a contemporary context is
network, so is power

10.2.4 Criticisms
1. Literature has tended to place lesser emphasis upon movement politics and
power from the political right (though changing in last 5 years or so)
 If we see social movement literature, it changes in the last 5 years or
so but the literature up until that time was kind of predominantly
writing about progressive, new left social movements
 Social movements emerging from events of the 1960s and 70s: That’s
fine but it's not the only form of power that has been mobilized
 Don’t see reactionary right wing social movements: Authoritarian
populism: This was a neglected feature before the past 5 years
2. Proliferation of meso-level empirical analyses and this has led to a difficulty
of identifying generalizable operations of power
 See Caiani and della Porta 2018 for an overview of approach vis a vis
the radical right
 What can we say about power, the way that power operates
generalizable-y, comparing social movements: This is lacking from the
literature
3. Empirical: Related to generalizability problem  Mechanisms identified, but
what threshold of movement power has led to change?
 What constitutes change? Definition issues
 What is the threshold: What is the level that we flip things over and
see this social change?

Conclusion
 The purpose of this week is to introduce you to interdependent power and the way this
idea continues to complicate versions of power as domination, power-over and structure
vs agency
  We discuss show issues related to social movements and political participation
 Unlike many of our other ‘challenging the state’ theorists, power of and in movements is
quite optimistic regarding change
o We can actually change things
o If we look at the power of social movements since the 60s and 70s, we can see
how much they’ve changed public policy and social attitudes: There are real and
tangible changes
 Collective action has changed and evolved with time, and new repertoires of action have
emerged
 The literature is rich, inter-disciplinary and empirical
o Has led to good, contemporary social science in a meso-level

10.3 Reading: Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys, or Social Movements

Looking Backward to See Forward (pp. 461-463)

 Lazarsfeld, 1982
o ‘If for a given period we not only know the standard of living, but also the
distribution of ratings on happiness and personal adjustment, the dynamics of
social change will be much better understood’ (94)
o ‘The analysis of public opinion might become a predictive science, a science of
sentiments’ (95)
 Task of this essay
o To prove the spot in historical evidence marked by interests, complaints,
demands, and aspirations and see how weak it is
 Present world
o The idea of a defined aggregate set of preferences at a national level (public
opinion) makes sense
o We consider the opinion survey a complement to voting, petitioning or protesting
 In the past
o Most people did not vote, petition or take positions on national affairs
 o Yet they did act together on their interests to broadcast their demands

What Changed and Why? (pp. 463-

 Existing repertoire constrains collective action
o People tend to act within known limits
o To innovate at the margins of existing reform  End up missing available
opportunities
o Reason for constraint: Advantages of familiarity and investment from external
parties
o ‘Even government officials and industrial managers of our own time generally
behave as though they preferred demonstrations and strikes to utterly
unconventional forms of collective action’
 This essay focuses on discontinuous and public forms of collective actions
o Because the opposite is harder to document
o Whereas public and discontinuous collective actions make a statement and leave
behind more documentation
o Authorities generally monitor and seek to control public and discontinuous public
actions  Because of their implicit claims on the existing structure of power

Old repertoire
 Characteristics
o Common appearance of participants as members or representatives of constituted
corporate groups rather than of special interests
o Tendency to appeal power patrons for redress of wrongs
o Extensive use of authorized public celebrations to present grievances
o Repeated adoption of symbolism to state grievances
o Converge on the residence of wrongdoers (not on seats and symbols of public
power)
 Examples
o Seizures of grain (food riot)
 o Collective invasions of forbidden fields
o Destruction of barriers
o Attacks on machines
o Rough Music
o Expulsion of tax officials
o Tendentious holiday parades
 As explained in lecture:
o Parochial scope: Address local actors or local representatives of national actors
o Rely heavily on patronage: Appealing to immediately available power holders to
convey grievances
o They had a common logic and an internal order

New repertoire
 Characteristics
o Autonomous means of action rarely employed by authorities
o Frequent appearance of associations
o Direct challenges to rivals rather than appeals to patrons
o Deliberate organisation of assemblies for articulation of claim
o Display of slogans of common membership
o Preference for action in public places
 Examples
o Strikes
o Demonstrations
o Electoral rallies
o Planned insurrections
o Social movements
 As explain in lecture
o More national in scope: Also available for local issues and enemies +
Coordination among many localities
 o Relatively autonomous: Initiate their own statements of grievances
o More deliberately constructed organisations

Social movement
 A series of challenges to established authorities in the name of an unrepresented
constituency
 Does not have the official standing of an electoral campaign
o But occupies a recognised place in contemporary means of collectivity

Example: Turnouts vs Firm-by-firm Strike

 Turnouts
o Workers in a given craft who had grievance against employer went from shop to
shop within the locality, calling out workers to join them in a march
o Circuit ends with a meeting at the edge of town
o Voted delegation makes a certain set of demands and declares a work stoppage to
the employer until they reach an agreement
o Local scope + Pressure on nearby patrons
 Firm-by-firm Strike
o Covers a whole town/industry/country
o Main action generally occurs within and just outside a single workplace
o Strikes allow workers to state their grievances
o Involves less dependence on existing power holders
 Why prevailing repertoire of popular collective action underwent the change
o Because the interests and organisations of ordinary people shifted away from
local affairs and powerful patrons to national affairs and major concentrations of
power
o Because the old repertoires became ineffective, irrelevant and obsolete
o Because of the shifts of power and capital

Old-Regime Ritual and Revenge:

  Great celebrations
o Customarily include processions, tableaux, fireworks and illuminations
o Offer occasions to express shared satisfaction/dissatisfaction
o Provide models for other occasions: Eg. Popular cause in London forcing
householders to light up their window as a sign of solidarity
 Public punishment
o Hangings gave spectators multiple opportunities
o Display opposition/support for the punishing authorities/victims
o Either stone the prisoner or rescue the prisoner

Surveys and Strikes

 Before 1800
o Amateur demographers, assiduous tax collectors, and curious royal officials
create surveys to assess the state of their world
 Mid-century censuses
o Almanacs, statisque, or directory and the emergence of populist inquiry
o This neatly paralleled the development of social movement
o It is nicely tuned to the concern of the powerful to know the nature of the ‘beast
that now roared below’
o Authorities shaped a regular apparatus for collecting information from
individuals: Tallying strikes and policing them
 Strikes vs Demonstrations
o Strikes: Aimed especially at the boss; Demonstrations: Carry a message to
authorities and the general public
o Since tolerance from authorities and credit from shopkeepers often contributed to
a strike’s success, it’s show of strength is ‘no mere flourish’

10.4 Reading: Can Power from Below Change the World, Frances Fox Piven (2007)

History of successful protests & movements

 1. Power of Mobs
 During the revolutionary period
 Because state was weakened by
o Conflict between colonial elites
o Distance that separated colonies
2. Fanatical abolitionists
 Boldness and single-mindedness in pursuing goal of immediate emancipation
 It shattered to sectional compromises that had made national union possible in
1789
3. Mass strikes of the Labour movement (1930s)
 These strikes won the basic framework of an industrial relation system
 Brought many working people into the middle class
o Gave respect and self-respect to the now unionized workers
4. Black freedom movement
 Confronting the system of Southern apartheid
5. Antipoverty protests (1960s)
 Forced an expansion of American social programs
6. Vietnam antiwar movement
7. Women’s movement
8. Gay liberation movement

Their goals
 Never simply won
o Demands modulated and honed to mesh with ongoing institutional arrangements
and the powerful’s interests
 Once protests subside, the limited achievements whittle back
o Nevertheless, the reforms left a mark
o Eg. Electoral representative system persists but chattel slavery not restored
 Movements usually disruptive, disorderly and violent
o Use slogans, banners and other actions to give the movement some voice
An Expanded Theory of Power
 Power now seen as something that rests on personal skills, technical expertise, money or
the control of opportunities to make money, prestige or access to prestige, numbers of
people, or the capacity to mobilise numbers of people
o Randall Collins (1975): “Look for the material things that affect interaction: the
physical places, the modes of communication, the supply of weapons, devices for
staging one’s public impression, tools and goods”
o Mills (1956): “The ‘truly powerful’ are those ‘who occupy the command posts’ of
major institutions, since such institutions are the bases for great concentrations of
resources
 Zero-sum assumption, Power as domination
o Power as the ability of an actor to sway the actions of another actor(s)
o What one actor achieves is at the expense of another
 Power is also concentrated at the top:
o Wealth, prestige and the instrument of physical coercion are all reliable bases for
dominating others
o People with higher social rank inevitably have more power and people with lower
social rank have less

“Interdependent” power
 The sociological basis of disruptive force
 Another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the
social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life
o Social life = Cooperative life
o People who make contributions to these systems of cooperation have potential
power over others who depend on them
 Power not concerned at the top but is potentially widespread
 o See that workers also have potential power over capitalists because they staff the
assembly lines on which production depends  Labour power also has an
institutionalized expression in the formation of unions and a panoply of labour
rights incorporated into law and regulation
o Tenants have power over landlords because without their labour the field are idle
o State elites depend on their voting publics  Vote means that people have power,
some power, because political elites depend on them
o Both sides of all these relations have the potential for exercising interdependent
power, and at least in principle, the ability to exert power over others by
withdrawing or threatening to withdraw from social cooperation
 Institution:
o They help to shape the identities and purposes of people
o They socialize people to conform with institutional rules on which daily life
depends
o Institutional life socializes people to conformity, while at the same time,
institutions yield the participants in social and cooperative activities the power to
act on diverse and conflicting purposes, even in defiance of the rules
 This form of power increases with globalization
o Centralization and specialization: Far-reaching systems of cooperation and
interdependence
o With the potential that popular power will also become more far-reaching and
more available to more people

The problem
 People must recognise that they have some power, that elites also depend on the masses
 Globalization does not mean that popular power has dissipated
 Rules are also instruments of power
o Some rules may reflect a kind of compromise, simultaneously limiting and
legitimating the exercise of interdependent power from below
 o Rules become intertwined with deep interpretations of social life that justify
conformity, despite the power disadvantage that results
o The clash with tradition provides people with alternatives
 Recognizing the fact of interdependence
o Economic and political interdependencies + Cultural constructions
o Monetary contributions by husband is given more weight than the domestic
services by wives
o Mobilizing interdependent power is dependent on how people understand the
social relations in which they are enmeshed
 See ways of enduring the suspension of the cooperative relationship on which they
depend
o To withstand any reprisals they may incur
o Less evident in mobs, riots, where the action is short
o But in worker strikes, they need to feed their families and pay rent
o Even rioters risk precipitating the exit of their partners in cooperative
relationships

Conclusion
 Interdependent power has a dark side
o The hungry and diseased mobs are not enlightenment thinkers
 The process of reform will be complicated, and the outcomes shaped not only be
interdependent power, but also by the complex institutional structures we inherit, cultural
memory, and the concentrated power resources of aggrandizing elites

10.5 Tutorial Discussion

 Interdependent power
o Power not only held by elites
o Capitalism is a system to mitigate against interdependent power
 What ‘power from below’ might you possess and how (if at all) have you exercised it
 o If 1 person doesn’t attend class, there’s no problem but if all the students didn’t
join then professor might be fired  Professor & University depend on students
(who have relatively little power)
o Black Lives Matter calling for change
o Collective not in a grouping of people but in terms of purchasing power: If no one
buys from one brand, it is collective action (Boycott: Eg. Woolworths still reliant
on consumers)
o Technology: Strong online presence  Signing petition
 Why can’t we easily exercise that power
o Government easily quash power from below
o People don’t realise they have interdependent power because it can come off so
minor
o Elites tend to have concentrated power (organised and small group) whereas
social movements are more diffused and spread out, less in contact
 Thank about this broadly – what new forms of ‘individualised collective’ participation, in
real life or online, have you participated in?
 List as many activities as you have participated in , even if only ‘very small’ or
‘insignificant’ and bring the list to class
o Shared Instagram post to my friends about the clarification of the Israel and
Palestinian conflict  Human rights movement
o Buy plant-based food (sometimes)  Animal rights movement
o Don’t use plastic bags in supermarkets  Environment movement

Once you have considered the breadth of participation and power, form into some small groups
and consider how these may be evident in contemporary social movements. Choose one or two
movements to examine.
 Soccer Super League
o Meant for capitalism
o Pressure from fans to quit leagues
o Boycotting games, not paying for subscriptions
  Sponsorships from rich people
 Black Lives Matter
o Joe Biden used result of BLM movement to attack on Trump’s racist policies
o Biden mainly won because of Trump’s terrible dealing of BLM and COVID 
Using a movement to enhance political movement
o In US, president is a representative from elites  Spokesperson for the elites
o Trump used a Make America Great movement to get elected as well
o What role did the BLM movement played in getting Biden elected? Was it
effective? Has BLM reached its goals
 Labour movements
o Employers depend on labour so if a lot of people don’t come to work, they might
give them what they want
 Movement against government bill
 Movement
o Individual and group form a network to change cultural value
o Election: People do form a network and choose the politicians they prefer so
politicians can make policies and change old values  Elections is some kind of
movement
o Electoral social movement: Seek change through elections

How do we measure the success of a social movement?

 Legal conviction of the police in BLM
o Used as precedent
 How it’s grown overtime (BLM)
o Recent BLM protest in USA = Largest ever held
 Rights for women: Widespread = Success of social movement
o How it greatly impact other countries
o Achieving women votes
 Can quantify goals for social movements
o Conviction of particular police officer
  How to quantify that success?
o Australian marriage equality now the law: Did it come from social movement or
an underlying social shift
o BLM in US have a lot of changes: Defunding of police institutions
o BLM in Australia configured a little differently: Hasn’t entered the political
sphere enough  Difficult to talk about success in Australia because it requires
shift in White Colonial systems  In Australia, people don’t understand their
own context, don’t learn about movements and history of Australia, Aboriginal
dispossession, etc  Mostly learn about convict/settler in Australian history
o Comes from underlying systemic change that is pushed by the social movements
o Social movements can’t work on their own  Need a move in the community to
support the movement

11. Revolution

11.1 Problem of studying Revolutions and Power

 Defining revolutions (as opposed to coups d’etats, civil wars, rebellions, riots, resistance,
etc)
 Conflicts may be over 3 things:
1. Content of decisions/actions
2. Who make decisions or has power to act
3. What fundamental rules govern decisions and actions: Nature of the State
 Only conflict over 3 = Revolution (Theda Skocpol)
o Which is why it’s difficult
 Problems of studying revolutions
o Revolutions (as defined) and revolutionary uprisings are rare events
o Few ‘successful’ cases; many (potential) variables
o Lack of attention to non-events and negative cases
 Because hard to identify hidden revolution transcripts
 o People not upfront about their intentions to conduct revolutions
o Hidden transcripts difficult to access

11.1.1 Classical explanations for revolution

1. Whig history (leading to liberal triumph – USA, France)

a. Approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from a dark, awful
past to a glorious present
2. Material conditions  Mass discontent  Revolution (‘spasmodic’ view)
a. If material conditions get poor enough, it will lead to mass discontent and
revolution
b. Roughly represent the occurrence of revolution
c. Difficult to specify the threshold of when things get awful & what about times
when it is awful but no follow up revolution
d. This explanation can describe cases but doesn’t provide an account of power
relations that produce a revolutionary context
3. Marxist theory: Revolution is an inevitable consequence of class relations, transition from
1 phase of human history to another

11.1.2 Problem of studying revolutions

 Revolutions happen in unexpected places (each one is sui generis)

o Prompt up when people aren’t expecting them
o Collapse of Soviet Union: People didn’t see this coming
o Difficult to identify what is causal about revolutions
 They do not happen under the most desperate conditions as spasmodic view would
predict
o Can see far more totalitarian contexts where there is no revolution
o No notion of threshold of how awful things need to be
o Inconsistent
  Nor do they happen in industrial capitalist societies most ripe for transition to socialism
as Marxists initially predicted, instead in semi-feudal peasant societies (Russia, China)
o Whole West Marxism which explains ideational/ideological domination
 Explanations explored in the lecture fall into structure and agency positions

11.2 Structural accounts of Revolution

11.2.1 Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions

 Structural account
o Individual purpose/intention does not cause revolution
 Largely an account of how old regimes break down:
o State-centric focused
o Focused on modernisation
 When dominant classes impede reforms that would strengthen the central state,
state becomes vulnerable to (especially) international crises
o E.g. War, economic competition
 These crises cause state to lose control of monopoly of violence, leaving dominant
classes unprotected
o Older forms of power relations to newer modern forms

Case studies: France, Russia and China

 Where landed elites blocked economic modernisation
 Structure of peasantry also critical
o Feudalistic power relations
o Smallholders more prone to solidarity and revolt than landless serfs
o (Contra Marx)
 Argument: Other power theories fail to capture something important about revolutions
o These theories focus on purposive actions and how those actions bring about
revolutions
 o But in doing so, these theories failed to perceive the structural forces that create a
revolutionary situation
 To fill this gap, Skocpol views revolutions from a Structural account
o Elites blocking modernisations
o Certain structures need to be present in societies
o Special circumstances present: Smallholders that will see societal solidarity and
potential revolution

11.2.2 Critiques of Skocpol’s argument

1. Not enough role for agency and individual decisions

a. Skocpol denies she removed agency, but rather heavily emphasised the structural
constraints on it (see: Wickham-Crowley)
b. What is the role of individual agencies? Are we just all pawns? Need someone to
activate the revolutionary context
2. No role for ideology
a. Skocpol has acknowledged this as a valid criticism
3. Historians argue her case studies were too coarse
a. Problem of patterned social science v detailed case knowledge

11.3 Rational choice accounts of Revolution

“All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottring
authority or the misery and sufferings of the people. They should begin with a psychological
chapter, one that shows how a harassed man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This
unusual process, sometimes accomplished in an instance like a shock or lustration, demands
illuminating. Man gets rid of fear and feels free. Without that there would be no revolution”
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs (1982, p.111)
 What is the agency part that causes things to kick of
Rational choice approaches have traditionally been good at explaining the rarity of revolutions
 Collective action problem:
o My action is not going to make a difference
o There will either be too few people, leading to risk without reward
o Or a sufficient number, leading to reward without necessity of risk = Free ride
o Cahnge that I will be criticial person is extremely small  Collective cation
problem: If people are incentivised not to act either through the risk of
punishment or through the fact that they can simply free ride
 Does not explain the cases where people do put their lives on the line, even against
seemingly impossible odds
o Rational choice does not do a good job with non-instrumental decision-making

11.3.1 Timur Kuran (1991)

 The social fact to be explained is unpredictability of revolutions
o Context is the wave of democratic revolutions across Eastern Europe in late
1980s: “Poland, 10 years; Hungary, 10 months; East Germany, 10 weeks;
Czechoslovakia, 10 days; Romania, 10 hours”
 Everyone has a threshold for action where need for integrity and self-expression
outweighs the need to conform – much lower for some than others
o Personal threshold depends on how many other people you see refusing to
conform – creates safety in numbers  Is contextual
o Very slight changes in distribution of thresholds can bring about massive
changes as “cascade” occurs

12.2 Tutorial Discussion

Explore whether the distribution of world power is reflective of balancing or bargaining power.
You can discuss this in relation to any IR issue or context.
o Balancing power: South China Sea island  Identify what state is a threat and build an
alliance against the state  Eg. Cold War
o Band-wagoning: Australia’s relationship with US and China  Tension between US and
China while Australia tried to stay in the middle (Free riding)
o Chose COVID as the issue to stop band wagoning
o Putnam’s domestic politics: Scot Morrison’s statement was good politics at home but
damaged international relations
o A lot of what happens in the state, become international (globalization changes the
picture a lot)
o MNCs have foothold to many countries = Realist will say domestic influence and say it’s
not as important as states (that’s where realism as a theory struggles)  Realist would
say Facebook & Google is American interests because American companies
o TNCs have bigger economy than some small states: Walmart is bigger than 7 states
economy
o When Nigerian/American President negotiates a deal, they have to keep those companies
happy
o Patent waiver: Some countries holding the waiver  Balancing power
o Prioritizing domestic politics over International politics but there’s some benefits in
exporting because of global health safety (bargaining power: Vaccines)
o John Cena apology to China for saying Taiwan is a country  But didn’t say sorry for
what (Strong economic interdependence between US and China)
o Tension between US and China government  But companies in US and China would
rather have free trade  Australia also has to balance against the threat of US and
China’s breaking relationship