On Barry Hindess's Discourses of Power

Author(s): Mitchell Dean

Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 36, No. 1, Theory, Politics, Power: Essays
in Honour of Barry Hindess (February 2011), pp. 4-9
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
36(1) 4-9

On Barry Hindess's Discourses of © The Author(s) 2011

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DOI: 10.1177/0304375411401831

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Mitchell Dean1

Abstract

Given the limitations of a short commentary, this article is restricted to an attempt to summariz
argument of a relatively small book, Discourses of Power. This book is adorned by a beautiful pictu
Citizen Kane, no doubt chosen by its author, and characterized by an argument of daz
coherence, which not only sums up and dispenses with most of the fundamental ideas
power in the canon of Western political theory but also provides a balanced appraisal
radical alternative. Here, I attempt to resist the thesis that it is impossible to disagree
anything in this book. I ask whether, in addition to the view of power as capacity and powe
right addressed in the book, Hindess should have considered the influential view of pow
appropriation.

Keywords
power, legitimacy, moral autonomy, political community, appropriation

We should note the title of Barry Hindess's book, Discourses of Power} This alerts us to its
which is not "power" itself but authoritative discussions of power. Furthermore, while it d
guishes two recurrent senses of the word "power" in the discourses it addresses (i.e., power
capacity and power as right), it is only one of these which is the central focus of the book. In
end, the book is principally concerned with power as right, that is, the kind of power exer
by the sovereign or by government and which claims or is granted legitimacy.
This sounds straightforward enough. There are, however, two points that the reader of this
should grasp at the outset. The first is that focusing on power as right, or as legitimate po
grounded in the consent of those over whom it is exercised, illuminates certain analyses of po
as capacity, including ones which explicitly reject the view of power as right as, for instance,
found in Steven Lukes's Power: a Radical View? The second point can be made with respect t
subtitle, "From Hobbes to Foucault." If the book does not seek to answer the question of "w
power?" it also does not attempt to provide a history of discourses of power. The text makes
ences to classical political philosophy. Yet, it does not locate canonical thinkers in order to defin
origins of an intellectual trajectory but rather to examine recurrent themes concerning power.

1 School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Newcastle University, NSW, Australia

Corresponding Author:
Mitchell Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Newcastle University, NSW 2308, Australia
E-mail: mitchelldean.dean@gmail.com

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Dean

can be illuminated by texts sufficiently distant from contemporary affairs. Thus, while the book con
tains careful discussions of political and moral philosophy, particularly that of Thomas Hobbes and John
Locke, it also discusses more recent political science (Robert Dahl and the community power debates)
and a substantial host of theorists associated with sociology and social theory from Max Weber and Tal
cott Parsons to Lukes and critical theory represented by Marcuse and Habermas. A chapter is devoted to
Michel Foucault and it is he who is viewed as providing something of an alternative to the standard
themes and analyses.
I was going to use the metaphor of the surgeon's scalpel to describe the way the text cuts one way
and the next dissecting different positions with precision. Even the somewhat privileged interlocu
tor, Michel Foucault, emerges with a couple of minor incisions, as we shall see. Perhaps, however,
that metaphor is too harsh and too visceral for such a refined thought as this. Paying heed to Hin
dess's own intellectual formation, the book's formulations manifest a kind of mathematical preci
sion linking political philosophy and the social sciences.
The book takes its reader, from whom it demands some degree of investment, into domains not
easily recognizable in terms of conventional discussions of power: those of morality and the person,
notions of civil society and community. It forces its reader to follow challenging links—between, for
instance, Locke's Law of Opinion and Reputation and Lukes's "third dimension of power"—in a
way which makes these links seem obvious. The book, then, is a model of clarity and precision.
It is a book of considerable erudition, of brilliant exacting manoeuvres and criticism, and of pow
erful, concise, and convincing arguments. Yet, there is a quality about the book which could be,
at least in some part, irritating to the reader. Let us call it its modesty. It assumes a reader capable
of grasping its implications, and thus of filling in the spaces or gaps it leaves.
I think there are two such spaces. The first relates to the core argument of the book, and the sec
ond to what the book constitutes as outside itself. Let me attempt to summarize the core argument
and I shall then return to its outside toward the end.
First consider power as capacity. Little can be said of this basic notion found in Hobbes other than
it refers to attributes that have nothing much in common except their usefulness in pursing some end
or another. Thus, a concept of power as capacity doesn't really help us investigate the kinds of capa
cities Hobbes names such as those of extraordinary strength, eloquence, or riches.3 Somewhat more
can be said about the way this idea of power as capacity soon becomes a conception of power as the
capacity to realize one's will at the expense of the will of others. Power and its effects are presented
here as counterfactuals: it makes people do what they otherwise would not have done, or it prevents
them from doing and even from thinking what they otherwise would have done or thought.
If power is a quantitative capacity, then to work out which party to an action prevails is to work
out who has greater power. To discover the latter, the American political scientist, Robert Dahl, pro
posed we study the outcomes of key decisions in situations of conflict. According to Hindess,4 the
main problem with such a view, even if it allows for capacities having the same scope (e.g., different
parties with different quantities of military strength), is that it does not allow for the unpredictable
course of conflict and for the deployment of tactics and strategy in that conflict (such as in the course
of the Vietnam war). The problem then is that such an approach, while promising predictability, can
not offer prediction due to the indeterminacy of conflict.
Further, these analyses based on a quantitative conception of power are dogged by their some
times tacit concern with the other main conception, the location of sovereign power and its legiti
macy. Thus, while Dahl and C. Wright Mills disagree about the location of power in the mid
twentieth century United States, they both argue in their different ways that it is nothing like the
image of a republic in which the people and its consent are the source and legitimacy of the govern
ment, which is found in its Constitution and its earlier Declaration of Independence.5
Underlying our key conceptions of power, then, is a particular normative vision based on a notion
of political community made up of morally autonomous individuals who are able to give or withhold

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 Alternatíves: Global, Local, Political 36( I)

consent to the exercise of power over them. When these individuals give consent to the exercise
of power over them, they make it legitimate. Such a normative fiction stands behind conceptions
of sovereign or political power, or of notions of government. In this conception, persons or agencies
of the government have the capacity to issue laws and commands which they expect to be obeyed
because the morally autonomous members of the political community have freely agreed to the right
of such persons and agencies to exercise that capacity. Notice here that government is regarded as
the government, as a centralized locus of political power, the principal activity of which is the issu
ing of laws and commands which are binding on its subjects.
Locke, of course, is the putative great exemplar of this normative model. Hindess suggests that
"a broadly Lockean view of political power, and corresponding style of political critique, have
played, and continue to play, a major role in Western political thought."6 On the one hand, Locke
establishes a language of government based not only on consent but on two kinds of contract, one
establishing a commonwealth (or what we would more likely call a "society"), and the other, taking
the character of a trust, between the commonwealth and its government. By so doing, Locke is able
to break open Hobbes's account of sovereign power and establish that the dissolution of government
is not the dissolution of society. On the other hand, this view of government founded on the consent
of morally autonomous persons within a "polished" or civil society, is able to be contrasted with
illegitimate government, founded on usurpation or on the tyrannical exercise of power. Of course,
one might add, there are conditions where usurpation, conquest, and appropriation can be justified,
even in the Law of Nature, a point to which I shall return.
Turning to Lukes, Hindess finds something similar to Locke's assumptions about the nature of
individuals and political community when Lukes asks: "is not the supreme exercise of power to get
another or others to have the desires you want them to have—that is, to secure their compliance by
controlling their thoughts and desires?"7 While it might be thought that this insidious form of
power in some respects follows another Lockean concern for the government of behavior to habi
tuate individuals, particularly children, to rational and moral conduct, Hindess suggests there is
an element in Lukes's formulation not present in Locke: "it requires the idea of a power whose
effects are produced in ways that cannot readily be traced to the deliberate actions of an identifiable
individual and group."8 In this respect, Lukes would appear to identify a kind of pathological civil
society. Locke would view civil society as self-regulating through the Law of Opinion and Reputa
tion which is the source of the continued consent or otherwise to the government. Lukes, in contrast,
would view Opinion and Reputation not as an expression of public morality but as serving the inter
ests of the strongest groups in civil society. It is clear, then, that Lukes owes more to the Marxist
view of civil society as a domain of irreconcilable interests and social subordination, and to Antonio
Gramsci's notions of hegemony. Hindess concludes that Lukes, Marxism, and critical theory, all base
their analyses of power on the contrast between socially conditioned individuals and the ideal of an
image of the autonomous individual against which these individuals can be measured, and the claim that
the realization of such a model is possible in a Utopian civil society, that is, one not structured by the
illegitimate effects of power.9
I have already mentioned the spaces that this book leaves for its reader and now want to note two
such spaces. The first is that the reader might ask: what is wrong with the conventional understand
ing of power, first as a quantitative capacity exercised over others and second as a sovereign or polit
ical power grounded in the consent of a community of rational and moral individuals? This question
could be based on two obvious responses to Hindess. First, that everyone knows that this idea of
political community is a fiction, as he himself notes, but it is a useful fiction which we use, in lib
eral-democratic societies, to make governmental or sovereign power safe and to prevent us from
sliding into something resembling Locke's tyranny. Second, as for power as quantitative capacity,
we can recognize its limitations but it enables critical analysis based on our commonsense intuitions
and observations about social structure and its social and economic inequalities.

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Dean

Taking up the latter point, I think the answer is that the quantitative view of power has none of the
analytical and predictive capacities it claims. While it claims to be able to predict the outcome of
conflict, it simply cannot do so as noted previously. To the extent that it does, it rests on a teleology.
Quantities of power are inferred from outcomes such as who wins, who makes key decisions, who
gets richer, and so on, but it is these outcomes which are the very means by which we infer the exis
tence of that power. In that sense, the idea of power as possessed, in certain and different measure, by
individuals, groups, and institutions is, quite simply, incoherent. It belongs to political rhetoric rather
than social and political analysis.
Turning to the idea of power as right, it is problematic because it attaches "a particular normative
significance," as Hindess puts it, to the government and its laws and to those agents and agencies
that make and enforce binding decisions.10 Taking this in a rather different direction to Hindess, one
aspect of this normative significance is the assumption that the government ought to be the source of
the plenitude of political power in society. The problem with this is that, while it might acknowledge
the particular conditions under which this arrangement came about, it assumes that once established
such an arrangement is immutable. One outcome, and this is not a point which Hindess makes, is that
it so normalizes this type of political order, that it does not allow us to entertain the possibility of
alternative constitutional arrangements, such as, for example, the idea, found in English pluralism
and in associationalism, that bodies outside the government (like churches, trade unions, or sporting
bodies) may have independent sources of legitimacy which cannot be penetrated by governmental or
party political action.11 This latter criticism, of course, remains within the bounds of the normative
political philosophy that Hindess criticizes.
More fundamentally, the taken-for-grantedness of a centralized source of legitimate power is
empirically disabling because it first assumes that the powers of the government are more important
than those of other agencies, and, secondly, that government operates, or should operate, primarily
through consent. By contrast, Foucault would seem to offer an alternative to the conventional themes
on power in that he gives no privilege to state agencies in the government of society and population
and he views the government of the state and by the state as only one dimension of the government
of individuals, families, communities, societies, souls, and so forth.12 Secondly, government, con
ceived as the "conduct of conduct," can seek to operate upon and through various schemata of indi
viduals and collectives for very different reasons. In Discourses of Power, Hindess thus endorses a
broadly Foucauldian alternative which focuses on the rationalities and techniques of rule. It must be
said that the empirical fecundity of this approach during the years since the book was published
bears witness to the extent that it has been and remains something of an alternative.
Hindess makes a couple of criticisms of Foucault that, viewed from this distance, are certainly not
mortal. He finds a lapse in a late formulation in which Foucault, distinguishing between the open,
reversible relations of power and the more fixed, hierarchical states of domination, seems to offer a
kind of general normative program to minimize such states of domination.13 The second criticism
concerns Foucault's well-known injunction to cut off the King's head in political theory. Hindess
argues that it is not only the notion of sovereignty that needs to be displaced but the very idea of
political community he has shown to be wanting throughout the book.14 The first point makes Hin
dess a more consistent Foucauldian than Foucault; the second clarifies the aim of the attack which
nonetheless shares the same targets—concepts of "state" and "legitimacy," the opposition between
power and freedom, and the attribution of power to a source.
The second line of critique of Foucault by Hindess leads to the second space for the reader that is
found in the final sentence of the book: "In effect, this means finding a way to think about politics in
the absence of its defining, constitutive fiction: something far easier to suggest than it will be to
effect."15 If, as I would suggest, Hindess's criticisms of Foucault are not devastating, then the latter
has already offered partial indications which begin to fill this space, which I do not need to repeat
here. But I would like to add something else.

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 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36( I)

That is, whether, in this book, Hindess hasn't exaggerated the extent to which this view of power
as based on the consent of morally autonomous and rational individuals within a political commu
nity is at the heart of the most significant Western conceptions of power and views of constitutional
or sovereign government. Recent historians of political thought have, for example, placed the ques
tion of the American Indians and the colonization of America at the center of Locke's concerns in his
famous second treatise. Richard Tuck, for example, draws the implication from Locke "that govern
ment follows the ownership of land: only if land has been brought into cultivation and thereby appro
priated, can a government claim jurisdiction over it."16 Carl Schmitt in 1950, relying on the same
section (s. 121) of Locke's second treatise, made a similar point that "according to Locke, the
essence of political power, first and foremost, is jurisdiction over the land."17
I make these two references not to pose the question of the interpretation of Locke but to ask
whether there is an influential Western (to use Hindess's adjective) view of power as appropriation.
Some examples would be the thinking about the conquest of the New World from Vitoria to Locke,
liberal conceptions of colonial rule such as those of J. S. Mill, Marx's account of the dispossession of
the peasantry, and his dream of "the expropriation of the expropriators," and the theories of imperi
alism of Joseph Chamberlain and Lenin. Such a view of power as appropriation has excited the
aspirations of both left and right—sometimes with disastrous consequences—in the twentieth
century.
In the government of the international domain, to take a related example, there is today much
reliance upon the image of a political community made-up of moral actors—often called a "global
civil society."18 Yet, any historical account of international political and legal order would have to
be an account of the appropriation of land and expropriation of people through war, conquest, colo
nization, and economic subjugation, and the associated establishment of jurisdiction and legal title
over land.19 For this way of thinking about power, appropriation is a condition of precisely those
Lockean notions of a political community and rights; ideas of justice and legitimacy, as much as
territory and security, presuppose it.
This, of course, is not news to Hindess. In large parts of his work, he has addressed the related
issues of empire, international government, colonial appropriation, and the government of subject
populations.20 Yet, if we restrict ourselves to this small book, there remains this question about
whether this significant, and highly consequential view of power, might also have been considered.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. Hindess, Barry, Discourses of Power: from Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
2. Lukes, Steven, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974).
3. Hindess, n. 1, 23-4.
4. Hindess, n. 1, 31-3.
5. Hindess, n. 1, 64-6.
6. Hindess, n. 1, 48.
7. Lukes, n. 2, 23.
8. Hindess, n. 1, 81.
9. Hindess, n. 1, 95.
10. Hindess, n. 1, 145.

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Dean

11. Hirst, Paul Q., "Introduction," in The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge, 1989).
12. See, for example, Foucault, M., "On the Government of the Living," in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth:
Essential Works, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: New Press, 1997), 81.
13. Hindess, n. 1, 155.
14. Hindess, n. 1, 158.
15. Hindess, n. 1.
16. Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order From Grotius
to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 176.
17. Locke, John, Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Schmitt,
Carl, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950/1974) (New
York, NY: Telos Press, 2003), 47.
18. For example, Kaldor, Mary, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). See for a
fuller discussion, Dean, Mitchell, "International Govemmentality," in Dean, Governmentality: Power and
Rule in Modern Society, 2nd ed (London: Sage, 2010), 228-49.
19. On this view of international law, see Schmitt, n. 17,ch. 1, "Law as a Unity of Order and Orientation," 42
9, and ch. 5, "Land-Appropriation as a Constitutive Process of International Law," 80-3.
20. For instance, Hindess, Barry, '"Divide and Rule': The International Character of Modern Citizenship,"
European Journal of Social Theory 1, 57-70, "The Liberal Government of Unfreedom," Alternatives:
Local, Global, Political 26 (2001): 93-111, and Helliwell, Christine, and Barry Hindess, "The 'Empire
of Uniformity' and the Government of Subject Peoples," Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research
6 (2002): 139-52.

Bio

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Sociology, University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author most
recently of Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2nd edn (SAGE, 2010), and
Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (Open University
Press, 2007).

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