Concepts of Power
Mack, Raymond W.
Concepts of Power The Power Structure: Political Process in American Society, by Arnold M. Rose. Oxford University Press. 506 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by Raymond W. Mack Lack of power, I think,...
...Rose summarizes and evaluates what social scientists know about the influence of economic elites on government, and he weighs the role of the military and other elites...
...He then turns his attention to the masses and to the issue of alienation in a mass society...
...Many sociologists and political scientists take a much more pluralistic view of the distribution of power than Mills and Hunter...
...Here he analyzes the position of voluntary associations in the distribution of power in the United States...
...Critical to an understanding of American society, then, is a comprehension of both the meaning of and the answer to the questions: who holds political power, and how do the holders exercise their power...
...Concepts of Power The Power Structure: Political Process in American Society, by Arnold M. Rose...
...The debate has hinged in part—but only in part—on a question of focus: some people's perceptions of other people's power versus other people's use or abuse of power...
...This hypothesis would explain a lot of data, from Oscar Lewis' La Vida to last summer's urban riots —especially if one views them as class riots rather than as race riots...
...After describing the methodological, theoretical, and substantive issues in research on the structure of community power, he assesses the data on perceptions of power and influence...
...But each reader can decide for himself what to do with his own biases, for Rose is a responsible social scientist who shares the data on which he bases his conclusions and the process by which his reasoning gets him there...
...If you need another reason to buy the book, it carries as a fringe benefit a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz, a little gem of an essay on theories of power, containing such shrewd insights as this: ". . . distinction between the perception and the execution of power is precisely what distinguishes plural-ists from elitists, the latter being far more concerned with its exercise and the former far more concerned with its perception than is healthy for either...
...Reviewed by Raymond W. Mack Lack of power, I think, corrupts...
...Arnold M. Rose has made a brilliant attempt to sort out the conflicting claims and to weigh the evidence for and against each...
...He worked with Gunnar Myrdal on An American Dilemma, is the author or editor of more than a half dozen respected books, and has been active in the Democratic Farmer-Labor party and has served as a representative in the Minnesota legislature...
...The Power Structure is a work of enormous scope and careful scholarly focus...
...I find Rose unreasonably hard on Hunter and, in places, something of a populist romantic in his interpretation of data on the uses of power...
...Absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely...
...His standing among his colleagues is suggested by his being President of the American Sociological Association (a position of minimal authority but considerable prestige, translatable, of course, into some power...
...C. Wright Mills' concept of the power elite and Floyd Hunter's description of community power structure have influenced the perceptions of a whole generation of academics, social critics, and political actors from Hollywood to Washington...
...Rose brings splendid qualifications to the task...
...This thesis is simply the flip side of the record that says office makes the man, or responsibility develops leadership...
...A fascinating part of the book is the set of case studies on how the power structure operates: political influence in Texas, how John F. Kennedy won the Presidential nomination in 1960, and a social history of the passage of Medicare...
Vol. 31 • December 1967 • No. 12
