Power

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

The volume contains a number of arguments. However, four themes have a central role in the overall work. The first theme given treatment in the analysis is that the lust for power is a part of human nature. Second, the work emphasises that there are different forms of social power, and that these forms are substantially interrelated. Third, Power insists that “organisations are usually connected with certain kinds of individuals”. Finally, the work ends by arguing that “arbitrary rulership can and should be subdued”.

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