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Must Radicals be Marxists? Lukes on Power, Contestability and Alienation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

G. W. Smith
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Extract

According to Steven Lukes ‘A exercises power over B when A affects A in a manner contrary to B's interests’. Although he is not willing to contend that this general concept of power is altogether beyond reasonable dispute Lukes argues that it is the specific conceptions of power to which this more general concept gives rise when we fill in what is to count as B's interests that pose the fundamental problem for social and political science. For, although the conceptions are, to some degree, assessable in terms of their descriptive accuracy and explanatory scope, they are also ‘ineradicably evaluative’ and ‘essentially contested’. Three important ‘normatively specific conceptions of interests’, implying three corresponding conceptions of power, particularly concern him:

(1) the liberal conception, which relates men's interests to what they actually want or prefer, to their policy preferences as manifested by their political participation; (2) the reformist conception, which, deploring that not all men's wants are given equal weight within the political system, also relates their interests to what they actually want and prefer, but allows that this may be revealed in the form of deflected, submerged, or concealed wants and preferences; and (3) the radical conception, which maintains that men's wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests and, in such cases, relates the latter to what men would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1981 , pp. 405 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 Lukes, Stephen, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Relativism: Cognitive and Moral’, Essays in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 172.Google Scholar

2 Lukes, , Power, pp. 26 and 23Google Scholar; and ‘Relativism’, pp. 172–3.Google Scholar

3 ‘Relativism’, p. 172 (italics original)Google Scholar. Cf. Power, pp. 34–5Google Scholar, where Lukes goes on ‘the one-dimensional view of power presupposes a liberal conception of interests, the two-dimensional view a reformist conception, and the three-dimensional view a radical conception’.

4 See, for example, Bloch, M. et al. ‘Power in Social Theory: a Non-Relative View’ in Brown, S. C., ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1979), pp. 243–60Google Scholar; Morriss, P., ‘The Essentially Uncontestable Concepts of Power’ in Freeman, M. and Robertson, D., eds., The Frontiers of Political Theory (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1980), pp. 199–232Google Scholar; Gray, John, ‘On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts’, Political Theory, V (1977), 331–48Google Scholar, and ‘On Liberty, Liberalism and Essential Contestability’, British Journal of Political Science, VIII (1978), 385–402Google Scholar; Young, R. A., ‘Steven Lukes' Radical View of Power’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, XI (1978), 639–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macdonald, K. I., ‘Is “Power” Essentially Contested?’, British Journal of Political Science, VI (1976), 380–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lukes, 's reply, VI (1977), 418–19Google Scholar; Bradshaw, A., ‘A Critique of Steven Lukes' “Power: a Radical View”’, Sociology, X (1976), 121–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lukes, 's reply, 129–32.Google Scholar

5 The topic is ‘Contest Two’ as Lukes calls it, in his reply to Bloch, et al. ‘On the Relativity of Power’Google Scholar, in Brown, , ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, pp. 261–74.Google Scholar

6 Most obviously, perhaps, in connection with Lukes's claim that the ‘point… of locating power is to fix responsibility for consequences held to flow from the action, or inaction, of certain specifiable agents’, Power, p. 56Google Scholar. But this is a logically secondary issue in that we can question (as critics have) whether this condition is in fact fundamental to power identifications, given Lukes's definition of the concept.

7 Lukes, Steven, ‘Alienation and Anomie’, in Laslett, P. and Runciman, W. G., eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 3rd Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 134–56.Google Scholar

8 ‘Relativism’, p. 172.Google Scholar

8 ‘The mere fact of moral diversity does not of itself entail that fundamental moral conflicts are not rationally resolvable: one of the contending moral principles or judgements may, after all, be “correct” or “valid”, and others “incorrect” or “mistaken”’. See ‘Relativism’, p. 164.Google Scholar

10 ‘Relativism’, p. 165.Google Scholar

11 For example, Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. xxxixGoogle Scholar; Feinberg, J., Social Philosophy (Englewood-Cliffs, N.J.: McGraw-Hill, 1973), Chap. 1, sect, 1Google Scholar; Raphael, D. D., Problems of Political Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 115–22Google Scholar; Connolly, W. E., The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1974), pp. 147–8Google Scholar, and Appearance and Reality in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 184.Google Scholar

12 This is not to contradict Lukes's claim that ‘identification of cases of power… is always theory-relative in a deep and complex way’ (‘On the Relativity of Power’, p. 263Google Scholar). Indeed we shall see some of these complexities as we proceed. It is just that any theory of power must be able to compass certain very central power phenomena – one of them being the power a master has over a slave.

13 ‘On the Relativity of Power’, pp. 262, 269.Google Scholar

14 Power, pp. 26, 42.Google Scholar

15 See, for example, his reply to Macdonald, , p. 419.Google Scholar

16 ‘On the Relativity of Power’, p. 269.Google Scholar

17 ‘On the Relativity of Power’, pp. 269–70.Google Scholar

18 For a more detailed discussion of the various kinds of counterfactuals which might be involved in cases of this kind see my ‘Slavery, Contentment, and Social Freedom’, Philosophical Quarterly, XXVII (1977), 236–48.Google Scholar

19 Power, pp. 33 and 42.Google Scholar

20 The notion of ‘autonomy’ here is drawn from Benn, S. I. and Weinstein, W., ‘Being Free to Act, and Being a Free Man’, Mind, LXXX (1971). 194–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lukes, , Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), Chap. 8Google Scholar. Lukes has been badly misunderstood in this regard. Young says, ‘the radical rule is that in a state of autonomy interests and preferences will coincide. Unless this is assumed, Lukes' substitutions of interests for actions under conditions of relative autonomy makes no sense whatever… However, there is no compelling reason to believe that men unconstrained by power should necessarily act in accordance with their interests… To hold this is to maintain, in effect, that only power causes men to act against their interests’ (‘Steven Lukes' Radical View of Power’, pp. 642 and 647 (italics original)Google Scholar). Men may act autonomously against their interests: what they cannot do is to have interests which cannot be resolved into their autonomous preferences.

21 See Lukes's illuminating discussion of ‘Power and Structure’, in his Essays in Social Theory, Chap. 1.

22 Thus we sustain a distinction between a definition and a theory of human nature, by refusing to identify human interests as those which only the rationally incompetent reject or the volitionally defective fail to pursue when given the opportunity.

23 Lukes does not employ the vocabulary of ‘essential contestability’ in this earlier piece, but the ‘qualified’ relativist message is basically the same.

24 He makes an explicit connection between the two in ‘On the Relativity of Power’, p. 262.Google Scholar

25 Lukes admits to the charge that his notion of radical power is ‘in a sense Marxist’ in that it involves a notion of ‘real interests’ (‘Reply to Bradshaw’, pp. 129–30).Google Scholar

26 ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 146.Google Scholar

27 ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 147.Google Scholar

28 ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 147Google Scholar. That is, the kind of inductive test J. S. Mill applies (or purports to apply) in Chap. 2 of Utilitarianism, where the ranking of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures is arbitrated by (competent) individuals who experience both kinds and announce their preferences.

29 ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 148.Google Scholar

30 ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 148.Google Scholar

31 Lukes's endorsement of W. E. Connolly's definition of ‘real interests’ (Power, p. 34Google Scholar) suggests he would agree. Connolly: ‘Policy x is more in A's interests than policy y, if A, were he to experience the resalts of both x and y, would choose x as the result he would rather have for himself’ (italics original).

32 ‘Alienation and Anemie’, p. 148.Google Scholar

33 ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 147.Google Scholar

34 ‘Relativism’, p. 161.Google Scholar

35 As the ‘contradictions’ of capitalism increase the proletariat develops class-consciousness on the one hand, and proto-communist social practices on the other. Autonomy and the social experiences upon which to make autonomous judgements develop pari passu. See, for example, Lukes's comments on Marx's views about trade unions and the moral improvement of workers, in ‘Alienation and Anomie’, p. 146.Google Scholar

36 See, for example, ‘Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction’, Easton, L. D. and Guddat, K., eds., The Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 262–4.Google Scholar

37 The idea that the proletariat can have no particular interest to protect and must therefore be free from disabling class bias because, being without property, they can have nothing to protect in a property system, is sheer sophistry. For they may well have a sectional interest in destroying the property system which causes their deprivation. The plausibility of the idea rests on the gratuitous assumption that only property-ownership can cause false-consciousness.