Almost Right, But Not Really

My previous definition of power was right, but in many ways a little too narrow. I defined power as the ability to cause changes, and I focused on two sources of power: wealth and fame. It is true that both money and fame would allow us to become powerful, highly powerful, in the world today. However, having read the article by Michael Mann and applying his theory to ancient Mesopotamian societies, I realize that power, as the “ability to cause change”, is not limited to only money and fame. In my old definition, both money and fame would belong to the ideological power as defined by Mann because wealth and fame are both modern ideologies that people value so much in life. Even in ideological power, I only saw wealth and fame as two main sources, missing out the very big player in ideological power: religion.

Moreover, the money aspect of my old definition refers to economic power as well, but in this I did not quite fully define economic power. I said that power belongs to those who are rich. This is true in that economic power in the modern world is found in private companies and corporations, but governments and international organizations (which seem more political) actually have economic power too. Therefore, though I did correctly identify the source of power, my definition focuses more on how money could ideologically influence people, rather than as economic power.

There’s also political and military power that I failed to recognize in my first definition. On the simplest form, political power resides in the government, and it is quite obvious, today or in ancient time, that the government has a lot of power. For instance, kings in Mesopotamia (as the heads of state) could almost command anything they wanted: they could declare war, they had judicial power (Hammurabi’s rule in Babylon, for example), and they controlled the military. Military power, another source that I did not mention, is quite obviously important especially in the ancient Near East. Force was primarily the means to become powerful, through wars among the city-states, but this does not occur as regularly today although world wars could show this fact quite clearly as well.

Therefore, while my definition of power as the ability to cause changes was quite correct, I only identified ideology of wealth and fame to be the main source of power. Michael Mann has in some way liberated my view of how power exists in a society because I only identified power only from the rich and influential people found on magazines. In reality, however, various social institutions also had quite a lot of power because they could effectively cause changes in the world.