Power
Power, Authority
Coercion begets resistance and, in the longer term, is potentially revolutionary. For this reason, it is in the interests of the powerful to preference the use authority, rather than coercion.
Authority is a resource that is based upon subjective perceptions of legitimacy. The less powerful complies because he or she believes that the powerful has a right to command or, what Weber terms, a belief in legitimacy (Weber Citation1978, p. 213). The exercise of power using authority does not beget resistance. Quite the contrary, the more authority is used the more stable social order becomes.
I would argue that what Arendt famously described as power, which she claimed is the opposite of violence (Arendt Citation1970: 50–56), is power that is based upon authority, as a resource.
Authority is essentially performative. As argued by Austin (Citation1975, pp. 22–3), a person who issues a command performs a given position of authority, and those who are commanded are the audience, who either respond appropriately, deeming the command ‘felicitous’, or they may deem the command ‘infelicitous’, in which case they undermine the legitimacy of authority.
When the less powerful obey the command, they reproduce, or confirm-structure,1 the social structures of the powerful actor’s authority. If an unarmed police officer directs cars right or left, and the car drivers drive as commanded, those drivers confirm the felicity of the police officer’s authority and thus reproduce it.
In contrast, when a highway robber threatens someone with a gun, commanding, ‘your money or I shoot’, that compliance does not confirm-structure the authority of a highway robber. Authority is based upon a belief in the legitimacy and right of those in authority to command as they do and when the command is obeyed that belief is reinforced (see Haugaard Citation2018).
This belief may be well founded, in the interests of the less powerful but it may equally be contrary to their interests. As argued by Gramsci (Citation1973), hegemony would be an instance where a specific class identifies with the interests of another dominant class, through socialization into the practical knowledge of the latter class, and therefore the less powerful class views the interests of that dominant class as legitimate for society.
From a sociological perspective, authority is entirely oriented towards the legitimacy beliefs of the compliant social subject. If a social actor complies because of a belief in the legitimacy of the command or commander: that is authority. It may well be the case that the observing sociologist does not share these beliefs, maybe even regards them as deeply illegitimate normatively.
Furthermore, as we shall see, legitimacy is not the same as mere acceptance. Often social actors confirm-structure social practices that they consider illegitimate out of an acquiescence born out of practical knowledge of structural constraints
The kleptocratic rulers
The kleptocratic rulers create a kleptocratic order-of-things, which those who resist have violated. For instance, at this moment, the democratically elected leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, is being tried as a ‘criminal’ (BBC Citation2021).
The military rulers do not present a front-stage performance of persons who overthrew democracy, thus are themselves criminal relative to the democratic order-of-things. Rather, San Suu Kyi is the ‘criminal’ who violated the norms of a social order that they have socially constructed. In such a situation, the ideology that gives legitimacy to the signifier ‘criminal’, with reference to San Suu Kyi, is (or may be) shared by the powerful but will not be so by the less powerful (or foreign commentators – BBC Citation2021).
Similarly, the autocratic leader of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has called in the help of Russian troops, to suppress protestors, who he termed ‘bandits’ and ‘terrorists’ (Walker and Bisenov Citation2021).
The social function of the dominant discourse is for the home consumption by the elite, as self-justification. As in all situations of coercive power, many of the less powerful may present a front-stage performance of endorsing that ideology, but this is acquiescence, which is weaker than sociological legitimacy
Legitimacy in the sociological language game is defined as such relative to the beliefs of the less powerful. Power that is legitimate relative to the beliefs of the less powerful is not necessarily legitimate within the normative language game.
The third dimension of power concerns the processes whereby social actors’ epistemic beliefs render dominating (normatively) power relations legitimate. It is one of the great sociological conundrums of the study of power that the dominated often perceive their own domination as legitimate. This was the conundrum that Gramsci dealt with using the concept of hegemony and was the target of Lukes (Citation1974) account of the third dimension of power.
The third dimension of power concerns how unequal power relations are legitimized on the epistemic level, which works in several ways. Most of social actors’ knowledge of social life is carried a knowledge of social life.
Social actors take for granted the natural-order-of things, which often renders compliance to the power-over of the powerful a virtually automatic response. As social order is often interpreted as a moral order (the way things are is the way things should be) criminal acts appear as the violations of the natural-order-of-things.
Structural Tools
Briefly, democracy is essentially a set of structural tools for managing power-over conflicts in such a way that everyone is treated as an end in themselves. As we saw, in the kleptocratic order-of-things power-over is zero-sum, the winner’s gain is entirely at the loser’s expense. In democracy, power is positive sum, which creates the condition of possibility that everyone gains something from the democratic contest.
The winner in an election exercise episodic power-over the loser. However, this is legitimate as long as that power-over does not undermine the dispositional power-to resources of the loser, which enables them to contest the next democratic election.
So, for instance, it is legitimate for the winner to exercise power-over by implementing a given health or environmental policy, but it would be illegitimate (criminal) for the winners to implement a policy that curtails free speech as that would undermine the opposition’s dispositional power.
The democratic system essentially empowers (power-to) social actors in such a manner that they can manage inevitable social conflicts (power-over) in a manner that respects the equal moral worth of all citizens.
The democratic process is a channelling of social conflicts into a structured set of power-over conflicts, with a clear set of rules of the game, or order-of-things, that preserves the power-to dispositions of all players so that, even when they lose, they can still play again (for more detail, see Haugaard Citation2020, pp. 186–217).
So, relative to this framework, the following would be, currently politically pertinent, crimes against the democratic order-of-things: not recognising defeat when adverse electoral results are in; creating a partisan judiciary; making voting more difficult for a specific sector of the population; removing freedom of speech or assembly; controlling who can present themselves for election; characterising certain viewpoints as ‘unpatriotic’ or instigated by ‘foreign agents’, therefore illegitimate and ‘criminal’
Contemporary society
In contemporary society certain sex crimes are considered a violation of the sacred and the punishment of such criminals attracts a lot of media attention. These are instances where the coercion of the criminal creates a functional feedback loop to legitimacy.
As I have argued elsewhere (Haugaard Citation2020, pp. 114–17), Nietzsche’s famous ‘death of God’ hypothesis is really a sociological claim to the effect that as interpretative beings, human subjects have replaced God with scientific Truth (with a capital T). Both God and Truth claims are modes of reification.
Rather, than embracing the freedom to realize that truth (with a small t) is a social construction, which should be used a conceptual tool to enable social actors (power-to), Truth is seen as transcendental and universal, which are qualities that are used to reify structures of domination.
As a tool of reification, Truth appears external to social relations, as a claim to something universal, which transcends social construction. So, if social policy is justified relative to Truth there is a suggestion that this is not some conventional, socially constructed, social policy.
Rather, the policy appears to transcend convention and appeals to pure Reason (with a capital R). So, disagreement with such policies, and attendant Truth claims, become socially constructed as inherently irrational. Consequently, there is a perceived association between crime and irrationality.
In this context, it should be noted that not all uses of truth are reifying in this manner. When truth is recognized in the form of a fallible hypothesis, open to refutation by the force of better argument or evidence, that is a non-reifying use of truth (with a small t) (for more detail see Haugaard Citation2020, pp. 114–21).
However, in everyday life most social actors tend to view truth as transcendental and infallible (Truth), which is a misperception that is useful for the purposes of reification.
As presented by Foucault (Citation1979), much of the modern discipline presupposes these kinds of Truth claims. The advent of the social sciences, including criminology and psychology, entails the creation of a ‘normal’ social subject, as a Truth claim, relative to whom actual living social subjects are measured. Through this reifying use of Truth, in the early 19th C., there emerged a whole series of minor crimes, likened to irregularity of behaviour, such as crimes of time (lateness), inattention, impoliteness, and sexual indecency (Foucault Citation1979, p. 178).
Deviance became a crime relative to what appeared as a universal social order that was scientifically grounded in the language of Truth. The transcendental Truth claim disempowers any resisting social subject by characterizing them as essentially irrational.
Power and crime: a scale
Power exists on a scale from pure coercion to pure authority. On this scale, we will explore the relationship between power and crime, where: 1) power is illegitimate, both sociologically and normatively, 2) power is legitimate sociologically but not normatively, and 3) power is legitimate normatively.
About this scale, it is important to understand that position 2, where there is sociological legitimacy combined with normative illegitimacy, is not necessarily less dominating than position 1. In a way, the ultimate in successful domination is to get the less powerful to believe their domination is legitimate – maybe even as emancipation or freedom.
The scale is constructed relative to stability, from coercion, where conflict is highly visible, to a mid-position where there is acceptance but there is a latent conflict of interests,3 to the position where legitimacy is highly stable because it is normatively defensible.
State’s Power
When the source of power is largely coercion, punishment of the crimes is often fierce and cruel, as the criminal is socially constructed as making war on those with greater power. An exemplar would be the execution of Damiens in 1757 for regicide, which was a public enactment of war between the sovereign and the body of Damiens (Foucault Citation1979, pp. 3–7; 48).
The social construction of the crime as an act of war against the powerful means that crime is understood as potentially revolutionary. Therefore, it is of huge symbolic importance for the sovereign to demonstrate absolute victory by the annihilation of the criminal.
The excess of violence serves to demonstrate the impossibility of changing the kleptocratic order-of-things. However, ironically, the excess of punishment of criminals is symptomatic of the weakness of this type of rule because all acts of violence and coercion continually create potential resistance and revolutionaries. Thus, this is a highly unstable form of power-over, which constantly begets resistance, often in the form of crime.
As recently observed by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, ‘Some cite … unabashed oppression as evidence of rising autocratic power, but in fact it often represents the opposite – an act of desperation by dictatorial leaders who know they have lost any prospect of popular support.’ (Roth Citation2022).
In purely coercive power relationships, punishment does not serve to reinforce legitimacy relative to practical knowledge. However, the excess of punishment of crime has a social ontological aspect, which reinforces social order.
Extreme violence combined with surveillance can be used to create fundamental ontological insecurity in the social subject with the consequence that they can become incapable of agency and therefore unable to resist through crime.
As Solomon Northup observes in his account of slavery, the objective of slaver violence is to break the spirit of slaves, so they will not have the agency, or will, to revolt (Northup Citation2012, pp. 170–3). Furthermore, extreme violence in response to crime creates a kind of ‘social death’ (Patterson Citation1982) of the social subject, which renders them unable to have the kinds of social ties necessary for a successful revolution.
Power “to” & Power “on”
By virtue of being a criminal, the social actor is a social deviant, thus isolated. If the natural-order-of-things is widely shared, in a relatively homogenous or non-pluralist society, crime is perceived (by the majority, although not by any deviant minority group) as a cognitive failure that results in moral failure.
In most societies, social praxis that accords with the socially constructed rules-of-the-game confers high social capital, which in turn confers status authority. As I have argued elsewhere (Haugaard Citation2020, pp. 156–160), based upon Bourdieu (Citation1989) and Elias (Citation1995), the formation of the modern state was also associated with a class competition over cultural capital.
In the early modern period, the aristocracy tried to distance themselves from the rising bourgeoisie by developing cultural capital, in the form of distinction in manners, dress and general self-restraint. The bourgeoisie copied the aristocracy, developing their cultural capital. Slowly, the pursuit of distinction through the acquisition of cultural capital moved down the social hierarchy.
Overall, the ability to structure the norms of cultural capital created a mode of social advancement, additional to the merely economic. Conversely, failure to use, or flawed reproduction of, the shared norms to structure social practices, manifest by non-conformist behaviour, confers low cultural capital.
As crime is a failure to structure correctly, criminal behaviour is often associated with low cultural capital, even stigma – typical instances would Romani, Traveller and immigrant populations of Europe.
Reification is another process of three-dimensional power legitimation of social order. Essentially, social structures are made stable by obscuring their social contractedness. If social structures are understood to be made, by implication they can be unmade, as observed by Foucault (Citation1988, p. 36) about social critique. Conversely, when it is deliberately obscured that social structures are made, then it is not self-evident that structures can be unmade.
To stabilize normative illegitimate social structures, to make them sociologically legitimate, it is in the interests of the more powerful to reify social structures, rendering the social contractedness of social structures invisible
In traditional societies, the sacred is used to reify social structures. The socially constructed social order is presented as created by a deity, who is a transcendental being. Any violation of the social order becomes a criminal act that offends against the will of God. In a theocratic reified society, offences against the divine-order-of-things are a subset of blasphemy.
Those who punish criminals who transgress consider themselves to be doing God’s work, thus there is virtue to be gained from punishment. This fact makes the punishment of the criminal not only popular with the powerful but often attracts the powerless into public punishment of the offender, which is highly functional to social stability, as it mobilizes the less powerful into ritual acts of reinforcement of the order-of-things. Recently, mob blasphemy killings in Pakistan (Balloch and Ellis-Petersen Citation2021) would be close to this ideal type.
Even in modern societies that are not so explicitly theocratic (where blasphemy has disappeared as a crime), new forms of the sacred are socially constructed that confer legitimacy (Alexander Citation2011, Haugaard Citation2020, pp. 102–4). Often the trial and punishment of those who transgress these sacred norms attracts much popular attention, which serves as a force of social integration.
Bureaucracies
Acting on their immediate interests is a violation of the social order-of-things that is in their dispositional longer-term interests. As the order-of-things is in the interests of the less powerful, it is normatively acceptable to term violation of such a normative order a ‘crime’. Criminal acts try to gain episodic advantage while still benefiting from the dispositional power created by the rest who are compliant.
Organizations, including state bureaucracies, are created not only for overcoming tragedy of the common situations but also as tools to enable social actors to pool their power resources; to enable them to accomplish power-to tasks that they could not otherwise when acting singly. In other words, organizations are shared sources of dispositional power.
Again, episodically, such organizations entail power-over. Those with authority in an organization exercise power-over the members. This is normatively legitimate as long as the power-over is used for the shared dispositional power purposes that the organization was set up for.
With reference to the previous example of the pandemic, if the state controls citizens for the purposes of overcoming a shared threat, in the form of Covid-19, that constitutes entirely legitimate power-over. If so, resistance can be termed ‘criminal’, normatively. However, if, for instance, the ban on public gatherings is not really for the purposes of preventing Covid-19, rather to prevent democratic participation, preventing a political opposition from mobilizing, as in Hong Kong,
Myanmar and some East European countries (Sesco Citation2021), then the power-over is illegitimate normatively, and acts of resistance are criminal only within sociological language game.
These are, of course, ideal types and on a scale. In real life, in states with high levels of democracy and therefore openness to dissent, the lockdown comes closest to an exercise of power-over for the power-to purposes of managing a pandemic. Conversely, in societies where power is largely coercive, and dissent prohibited,
Covid-19 lockdowns are largely a convenient way of silencing of opposition in a manner that appears normatively legitimate (thus conferring sociological legitimacy) but is normatively reprehensible
. In between these extremes, lockdowns have elements of both. In real life, normative legitimacy is not binary: it is on a scale. Actual societies are more or less normatively legitimate, rarely entirely legitimate or illegitimate
The same applies to democracy: political systems are democratic, thus on a scale (Hyland Citation1995). In ascertaining the purpose of power-over a partial, although not complete, guide is the type of resistance that a specific exercise of power-over elicits, as observed by Foucault, resistance can be used as a ‘chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used’ (Foucault Citation1982, p. 780)
