Exploring an Obsession

...An unnamed interviewee observes, "People with real power tend to be very accessible, gentle people...

...Her book, however, sets itself the novelistic task of providing us better insight into the experience of exercising and giving up power...

...author, "Making Public Policy" Power is a source of endless fascination...

...Nonetheless, one of the interesting findings of a decade-old study by Sidney Verba and Gary Orren suggests the pervasiveness of what they termed "power denial": When they asked members of the media, labor, business, etc...

...and women, who, generally speaking, have many reasons for wanting to go home, really do live two interspersed lives...

...The author also notes that one important reason why John Tower had trouble finding support last year when his nomination for Secretary of Defense ran into problems was that "he was not liked in the Senate because he had abused his power when he was there...

...The maximally competitive market is supposed to eliminate it by giving consumers free choice of products, and workers their pick of employers—an approach that seriously underestimates its prevalence...

...Being courted, after all, is the process by which specialness is always expressed, from a king to a beloved...

...The fascination with power has spawned a number of different approaches to writing about it...

...Someone else devotes energy to satisfying your needs...

...Thus, she announces, "This is a book about power—not what people do with it, but what it does to people: what it is like to get it and use it, and what happens when it is lost...

...This implies that feelings of relative powerlessness are part of the human condition...

...Xandra Kayden's Surviving Power represents a curious hybrid in this varied literature...

...Traditional economic theory, by contrast, has for the most part ignored power...

...There exists, in addition, good psychological evidence that we frequently overinterpret the actions of others toward us, ascribing more intentionality to them than they actually possess...

...Their writing consequently bears roughly the same relationship to our understanding of politics that pornography does to our grasp of romantic love...

...Surviving Power never really succeeds in conveying a visceral feel for what it is like either to hold or to lose power...

...As for our obsession with the power of the rich and famous, I am inclined to believe there is less here than meets the eye...

...The bastards don't last unless they have a very independent base," former Attorney General Elliot Richardson is quoted as saying...

...A political scientist by training, she is quite familiar with the academic work on the subject...

...Furthermore, the very word conjures up private jets, fancy parties and sprawling estates—it holds an allure for us that is inextricably bound up with our bewitchment by wealth and fame...

...This method shamelessly overrepresents residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...If others hang on to your every word, it is hard not to take yourself seriously, not to begin to think there is a reason...

...Her source material consists of interviews with dozens of present and former powerholders, chosen not (as an academic work would normally demand) by criteria designed to evolve general results, but rather by the accidents of acquaintance...

...No one can survive in Washington who isn't nice...

...are marked by civility...

...Journalists and biographers, meanwhile, often view the political domain largely or even exclusively in terms of struggles for power, but just as often ignore the questions over which people are fighting in the first place...

...Furthermore, where the political novel usually portrays Washington as a world of rough manners, gross language and long knives, Kayden asserts that in fact the upper reaches of power in the U.S...

...Political scientists have produced a countless number of scholarly studies defining the phenomenon, discussingits appearance in our institutions, and arguing about whether or not its distribution in the U.S...

...she notes that the constraints on it are typically "something the empowered are far more conscious of than the powerless...

...But the author does not believe power is, so to speak, all-powerful...

...Like the novelist, she is acutely aware of power's notorious "high...

...is fair...

...Finally, the typical Washington (or Wall Street) novel has a special ambition: to impart the psychology peculiar to powerwielding...

...The reasons for this seem fairly obvious...

...Still, I think that—to an extent far greater than the popular imagination allows —the real ability to influence events springs from more mundane sources: job expertise, bureaucratic authority, rhetorical skill, or the strength of one's ideas...

...On the other hand, her thoughtful account has the considerable virtue of ringing truer than those that novelists typically give us...

...Most people have at one point or another been on its receiving end, and have reacted against it emotionally...

...The author herself points out that the exercise of power fits our culture's image of masculinity, and threatens its conception of feminity...

...Yet both of those explanations are, I suspect, at least somewhat misconceived...

...Shecould have said the same about ex-Speaker of the House Jim Wright...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard...

...Kayden includes an interesting chapter on women and power...

...This, too, can create a false sense of victimization...

...Former British Cabinet Minister Shirley Williams, commenting on the difference between men and women in high places, says: "I look at corporate culture as one in which it is men who almost don't want to go home...

...Certainly, people are frequently subjected to the whip of power, sometimes in a raw or brutal way...

...Granted, individual instances abound of these people recklessly elbowing obstacles out of their path...

...to rank the influence of such elite groups in society, each respondent invariably ranked his own group considerably lo wer than did the other survey participants...

...Although a sensitive observer, Kayden is no novelist...

...Kayden's delineation, though, is more subtle than that offered in most works of fiction...