Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life.  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)

Excerpt:

Tocqueville singled out “powerlessness” as the striking characteristic of the politics of the times. Yet those times might also be described as notable for the abundance and variety of powers rather than their scarcity and for actors overwhelmed by powers rather than lacking them. In this and the next chapter I want to develop the paradox of power and propose it as the political and theoretical context for interpreting Tocqueville.

 

From ancient to early modern times the theoretical problem presented by power lay in its finite amount and consequent social disorder as nations, families, singular actors, groups, and classes struggled for control of a scarce good and by its means the enforcement of their conception of good order. The symbol of the politics of scarcity was the idea and institutions of privilege by which authority was bestowed on and power restricted to a relative few who were singled out on the basis of birth, an entitlement from a high authority, or great wealth. As late as the eighteenth century Rousseau began his reconstruction of the logic of society by positing a human condition afflicted by powerlessness: men find that “the power of resistance” offered by nature was greater than “the forces” that each individual could bring to preserve himself. Rousseau’s solution of a social contract, whereby each incorporates himself into a community, admittedly did not create power. Instead “by aggregation a sum of forces … [would be] brought into play” by “the single motive force” of men “acting in concert.” For “men cannot generate new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones.”

 

Beginning in the sixteenth century with Machiavelli, the hallmark of modern political theorists was a preoccupation with power or, more precisely, with the exercise of political power and with the conditions for maintaining and extending it. By the next century power talk ceased to be the monopoly of political theorists. Power became a concern shared with other theoretical forms, most notably in the natural sciences, and in the eighteenth century with political economy. By then the preoccupation of theorists had shifted from the acquisition of power to its production. The growth of modern science, the organization of it around technological applications, the phenomenal expansion of economic production, the development of ever more destructive weaponry, and the growing penetration by Western nations of the non-Western world all meant that powers of unprecedented magnitudes were reshaping the world, uprooting traditional social and political forms, and reconstituting nature.

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