Power Part 2
The social construction
While I don’t have the space here to develop a comprehensive normative theory of power and crime, I can give an indication.
As I observed earlier, any political theorist invariably draws upon an internalized practical consciousness, derived from the collective consciousness. The theorist considers this ‘common sense’ foundational in the weak sense that it is impossible for them to reason without it.
For me, now speaking as a political theorist, this foundational part is the loosely Kantian moral position that persons are an end in themselves and therefore of equal moral worth (Allen et al. Citation2021, pp. 517–18, Korsgaard Citation1996). In terms of the development of the European collective consciousness, this has roots in the Greek and Roman distinction between a citizen and a slave: a citizen exists for their own ends, while the slave exists for the purpose of the ends of others.
However, contrary to the Classical worldview, in the modern-democratic-order-of-things all persons are citizens and slavery is inherently morally wrong (Pettit Citation2012, Haugaard and Pettit Citation2017).
These assumptions make it morally wrong; therefore, normatively undesirable, or criminal, for a social actor to be used to an end, either by more powerful individuals and/or by the collective.
As I don’t have the space to develop a fully-fledged theory, I will simply discuss legitimacy and crime relative to power. Pragmatically, power structures are tools. Social subjects are tool users, and among those tools are the social structures of political power. These structures enable both power-to (the power to do something) and power-over (the power of A to get B to do something that B would not otherwise do) (see Dahl Citation1957, Allen Citation1999, Haugaard Citation2020, pp. 18–36).
Power structures are normatively desirable to the extent to which they serve the purposes of all social subjects, all of whom are of equal moral worth. It is important to understand that power-over is not necessarily dominating.
As any parent or educator will know, the parent–child or educator–student relationships involve a lot of power-over, which can be dominating, but part of being a successful parent or educator is learning precisely how to exercise power-over in a manner that is facilitating (power-to) to the less powerful responder.
The same applies to complex organizations and politics, while power-over is often dominating, it is not necessarily so. Normatively, legitimate power-over should serve the interests of both the more powerful, commanding power-over, and the less powerful, obeying.
To make sense of this, we must distinguish between episodic power (which refers to the momentary exercise of power) and dispositional power (which refers to the long-term power resources of social actors). Normatively, it is legitimate to exercise power-over episodically, if the less powerful gain dispositional power resources from obedience.
Typical of such dispositional empowerment would be the tragedy of the commons. Essentially, the more powerful are given authority by the less powerful to enable the group to overcome a collective actor problem. When the less powerful are commanded episodically not to overgraze the commons, and punished for doing so, that power-over is in their interests relative to dispositional power-to to have a shared common. Yet, episodically, each actor is tempted by their short-term interests, which are at the expense of the collective interests.
Conceptualization
In this conceptualization, there is, of course, a sliding scale from what is deemed deviant, thus metaphorically or socially criminal, to those actions that become criminal in law. With respect to homosexuality, for instance, it was criminal both socially and legally in the 19th C, but slowly became non-criminal in most Western democracies through the 20th C.
However, it still retained the stigma of social crime until the latter part of the 20th C. In 21st C, this has changed, through the legalization of such institutions as gay marriage.
Currently, during the Covid-19 epidemic, states have responded to the pandemic with a whole set of norms and restraints, which would be inconceivable without legitimization through appeals to science.
Consistent with scientific justification, the criminals who violate this new order-of-things are characterized as ‘ignorant’ and prone to ‘conspiracy theory’ (for instance Bartlett Citation2021). Anisen (Citation2022) argues that Covid restrictions are part of a wider trend whereby liberal capitalism is being transformed into a kind of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff Citation2019).
However, while it is correct from a sociological perspective that state responses to the pandemic do represent a significant increase in power-over, legitimized by science, it is an open question whether the use of science is reifying (as the pandemic is real) or whether the restrictions are normatively justified (as there is a shared power-to objective – combating an epidemic and keeping the hospitals working), which brings us to the next section.
