The Anatomy of Power — John Kenneth Galbraith

The rule of three

In Law on Economy and Society, Max Weber writes that power is “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.” This ability to influence or impose on others is the standard conception. “But little more about power is so simple”, writes John Kenneth Galbraith. If we’re to understand the dynamics of politics, corporations, societies, and families, we have to delve further to see the sources and mechanisms in which power manifests.

Condign and compensatory power

In The Anatomy of Power, Galbraith says there are three prime instruments: condign, compensatory, and conditioned power. The first two should be familiar. Condign power is the threat of punishment, while compensatory power is the promise of reward. Every modern employee, for instance, submits to these instruments of enterprise. They receive payment for serving the entity’s economic purpose, and are promptly fired for disobedience or incompetence.

Much of society, you see, revolves around such agreements and transactions. Parents give allowances, teachers issue detentions, gangsters retaliate, police officers hand out fines, while nation states threaten nuclear escalation. Sometimes these promises and deterrence succeed. Sometimes they fail. And much of game theory, from ‘burning bridges’ to ‘tit-for-tat’, depend on this mutual sharing and shaping of risk and incentive.

Conditioned power

Unlike condign and compensatory power, conditioned power is less overt. Here, power is exercised through the shaping of beliefs. And while it is less discussed in the mainstream, we must not underestimate its role in societal function. After all, every long-lived system, from democracy to Christianity, is successful in part because its constituents adhere to the tenets of the system itself. Financial markets arise, for example, because investors and creditors share a conditioned belief in the promise of the future. They would not lend or invest if they believed otherwise. And such a market in turn would be powerless and immaterial.

Advertising is probably the most familiar example of “explicit conditioning”. From beer to firearms to degrees to cosmetics, corporations are forever seeking to convince us of their brand and necessity. Likewise, the wealthy politician that runs for office does not buy our votes today. Rather, he or she pays for our attention and beliefs via primetime television and social media.

Education and culture

More covert perhaps is the way in which education and culture conditions us. From schools to sports to the military, displays of patriotism, for example, are commonplace. Pledges, flags, memorials, and related observances help the country to communicate its history and preserve national interest. “Children in Communist countries”, Galbraith reminds, “hear relentlessly of the virtues of socialism… [while] children in the United States hear in a similar fashion of the virtues of free enterprise.”

For this reason, conditioning is probably the most chilling instrument of power. At its most extreme, we get organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram. “Once belief is won…, subordination to the will of others is thought to be the product of the individual’s own moral or social sense—his or her feeling as to what is right or good,” Galbraith writes. The members of such groups exhibit a fervent obligation and sense of duty for the cause and enterprise that conditions them so.

It goes without saying that condign, compensatory, and conditioned power are rarely found in isolation. Totalitarian regimes in particular are extreme concentrations of these three instruments. Dictators will punish and eliminate dissidents, reward and promote loyalists, and contort their schools, news media, courts, cultures, and other institutions to their interest and image.

Property and personality

Moreover, there are three sources of power that underpin these instruments, Galbraith notes. They are property, personality, and organization. The power of property, in its broadest sense, is self-evident. Every child who has won or lost in a game of Monopoly understands this intuitively. Indeed, the corporation buys submission just as the politician buys conditioning.

The power of personality is equally familiar. Often, at the birth of a technology startup, armed rebellion, or religious cult is a founder who attracts followers. He or she cultivates commitment and common beliefs through persuasion, charisma, and other exercises of ‘leadership’.

Moreover, as social animals, we obsess over ourselves and each other. Ego and vanity endows us with an incessant desire to inflate our self-image and self-importance. And so emerges what Galbraith calls a ‘sycophantic effect’. This is where people seek to associate themselves with desirable personalities—whether it be celebrities, sports teams, religious leaders, respected professions, and so on. This in turn reinforces the personality as sycophantic structures coalesce around them.

Organization and power

While personality makes for simpler and more engaging storytelling, its power in the modern world is often exaggerated. It also underplays the most important source of power that is organization. The war machine of ancient Rome, for example, was successful due not only to excellent command but to unparalleled discipline and organization for its time. Perhaps the same can be said about the Cold War or the Manhattan Project. Few will deny the role that political and economic organization played during those eras.

Of course, power is typically a chicken-and-egg problem. Early Christianity, for example, began with “the compelling personality of the Savior,” Galbraith recounts. Then “almost immediately an organization, the Apostles, came into being, and in time the Church as an organization.” The sources and instruments of power are almost always deeply intertwined.

Here, it is also important to see, Galbraith notes, all the structures and ‘histrionic effects’ that come with the rise in personality, property, and organization. The Christians, for example, built grand cathedrals, gave moving sermons, and practiced communion. (They exercised not only their economic might, but their spiritual condign and compensatory powers too—threatening the sinful with eternal damnation and the faithful with glorious salvation.)

Similar displays, of course, are practiced by our political and corporate leaders today. We have immense buildings for our enterprises, lavish banquets for the elites and their donors, and immodest halls for speeches, meetings, and public relations. What might an alien observer make, I wonder, of the photo-ops that our leaders love to shoot at every summit, forum, or conference? Much like the male peacock and his grandiose feathers, people are seemingly programmed to display their authority, importance, and power (perhaps in fear that we might forget).

Depths of submission

Putting our exhibitionisim aside, the zeal of any organization depends on “the extent and depth of the submission of its [members]”, notes Galbraith. Enter any large enterprise and you’re likely to find a correlation between company rank and fervor. As Galbraith observes, “no senior executive would presume to suggest that the cigarettes his company manufactures cause cancer, that its automobiles are unsafe, [or] that its pharmaceuticals are medically suspect.” In the modern world, “there are few people who so willingly and completely submit to the power of the organization with so little consciousness of the submission as the modern corporate executive.”

We should not, however, misconstrue this as commentary about the general rightness or wrongness of conditioning and organization. Here, it is simply a reminder about its prevalence. As Bertrand Russell writes in Power: A New Social Analysis, “opinion is omnipotent, and all other forms of power are derived from it.”

The age of organization

Another lens of history, Galbraith notes, pertains to humanity’s ongoing struggle to consolidate power and to wrest control from one another. During the Middle Ages, power coalesced amongst the kings, barons, generals, and priests. Then came the merchants and industrialists following the arrival of capitalism.

Perhaps the organizations of our times are not so different. A few corporations today control a large share of global business. From banking to computing, as Thomas Balogh writes in The Irrelevance of Conventional Economics, “microeconomics must now deal with a world of pervasive oligopoly.”

While this is true, power is also relatively diffused in the sense that people today, at least by historical standards, are more able to participate in democracy and enterprise. As Galbraith notes, “so long as the individual submits to the purposes of the corporation or the public bureaucracy… he [or she] retains some capacity to influence its exercise of power.”

Tension and seesaws

Indeed, from public corporations and trade unions to lobby-groups and lumbering states, we live today in an “age of organization”. But it is a type of teetering seesaw that tips easily into imbalance. The market economy, for instance, is in constant tension. Companies seek to consolidate their market power while competition moves to diffuse them. Network effects, scale economies, switching costs and other tipping points, however, may eventually lead to one-sided results.

The same is similarly true of our public institutions. What begins initially as a well-meaning system of mutualism may descend into extraction and parasitism. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain in How Democracies Die, political collapse can be an extended but inconspicuous affair. Unlike a visceral coup d’état, the breakdown of democratic norms and institutional forbearance can be a slow, hard-to-detect process. By the time we discover the malefactors who have hijacked our system, it might be too late. Even worse if they’ve conditioned the population to believe—via propaganda, fear-mongering, and misinformation—that what is happening is just, moral, natural and in the people’s best interest. The scars of the Second World War, of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, are lasting reminders of this danger.

Power and economics

The problem for society is that we’ve reached such an enormous scale without a deep understanding of the dynamics and structures of power—both good and bad. Galbraith agrees, writing “that economics divorced from consideration… of power is without meaning and certainly without relevance.”

The instruments of condign, compensatory and conditioned power, and the sources of personality, property, and organization, may help us to understand. But it is only a start. And this problem is especially fraught because we cannot detach ourselves from the conditioning of which we are a part. “The supreme expression [of power]”, Galbraith reminds, “is when the person does not know that he or she is being controlled.” Here, illusion and reality are one and the same.

But even if we wanted to, we could not extricate ourselves from the exercise and consequences of power. It appears to be interwoven into our social fabric and tendency for organization. However, while “power is socially essential”, it need not be “socially malign”, Galbraith adds—if only we are most watchful and effortful in its exercise.

Sources and further reading

Balogh, Thomas. (1982). The Irrelevance of Conventional Economics.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. (1983). The Anatomy of Power.
Levitsky, Steven., & Ziblatt, Daniel. (2018). How Democracies Die.
Russell, Bertrand. (1938). Power: A New Social Analysis.
Weber, Max. (1954). Law in Economy and Society.

The Anatomy of Power — John Kenneth Galbraith on Conditioning and Organization