Max Weber on Structures of Power

"All political structures use force, but they differ in the manner in which and the extent to which they use or threaten to use it against other political organisations." This is the opening sentence of an essay first published in 1921 but written between 1910 and 1914. He is careful to distinguish the differences in the ways different states make use of their structures of power, as he goes on "Not all political structures are equally 'expansive'. They do not all strive for an outward expansion of their power". He speaks of the jealousy of neighbouring states, of the vulnerability of those in possession of colonies to that jealousy, and of the way that proximity and shape might expose some states to invasion from their neighbours. In the opening paragraph he sketches the usual way a structure might acquire domination over another: "by incorporating [others] or making them dependent."

All this can be read in the collection by HH Gerth and C Wright Mills that I have borrowed from my local Lambeth Library, and which I note (not without interest) was first published in 1948.

He goes on to sketch two broad attitudes that political structures tend to have towards those outside their immediate control. They can be more 'isolationist' or they can be more 'expansive', and of course they can change their mind about this along the way. 'On the basis of this power the members may pretend to a special 'prestige' and their pretensions may influence the external conduct of the structure.. Experience teaches us that claims to prestige have always played into the origins of war... Feudal lords, like modern officers or bureaucrats, are the natural and primary exponents of this desire for power-oriented prestige... power for the political community means power for themselves as well as prestige based upon this power."

"For the bureaucrat and the officer, an expansion of power, however, means more office positions, more sinecures, and better opportunities for promotion (even in a lost war)."

After a short excursion into some moments in history describing states favouring isolationist policies (including Roman, Britian, and Spartan) he returns to the question of fear. "The Spartan aristocrats, so far as they were able, quite deliberately limited their political expansion for the sake of isolation. They restricted themselves to the smashing of all other political strucures than endangered their power and prestige. They favoured the particularism of city states. Usually, in such cases, and in many similar ones, the ruling groups of notables (the Roman nobility of office, the English and other liberal notables, the Spartan overlords) harbor more or less distinct fears lest an Imperator, that is, a charismatic war lord, emerge. A tendency towards centralisation of power goes very readily with a chronically conquering 'imperialism' and the war lord might gain the ascendancy at the expense of the power of the ruling notables."

Weber concludes this opening section by returning to the question of money: "Like the Romans, the British, after a short time, were forced out of their policy of self-restraint and pressed into political expansion. This occured, in part, through capitalist interests in expansion."

In order to try to understand the nature of the hpc it is necessary to understand the context which brought it into existence. I've gone back to Weber as a kind of touch stone. I particularly like the way that he sets off without forgetting that human beings are subject to fear, jealousy, aggressivity, and greed. He doesn't emphasise this unduly, he doesn't do it like Ian Kennedy, and he doesn't pretend it isn't part of the scene. It is the sensibility of a novelist in the service of a sort of science, not the raging of a beautiful soul against the sins of the others.