Body, heart, mind and soul: power and personhood in an impersonal world

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines a conceptual model for thinking about how human susceptibility to power relations is anchored in basic aspects of the person, emphasising combined material, emotional, cognitive, and moral dimensions of personhood. It argues that these are primal, transhistorical aspects of personhood and society, but that the historical movement from small-scale societies of primarily interpersonal interaction to large-scale societies based on impersonal mediated relationships (markets, bureaucracies, etc.) profoundly alters how power relationships attach to persons. Small-scale interpersonal power relations remain embedded within large-scale impersonal power relations, the former constraining the latter, and the latter distorting the former.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• personhood
• social scale
• domination
• charisma
• stoicism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for JoPP, and Steven Grosby, for their helpful critical comments, and Anthony P. Cohen for his long-standing inspiration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Evolutionary psychology has made much in recent years of the persistence of the human past in the present (Barkow et al. 1992, Buss 1999, Pinker 2002). I acknowledge that, while stressing that perspective’s differences to the framework I am outlining here. Such research has been concerned to show that many aspects of how modern humans today perceive, process, and make sense of their environments can be attributed to mental adaptations laid down in the distant pre-neolithic past. A key point is that these adaptations of our ‘stone age minds’ are sometimes misaligned with our current environments but laid down too deeply to easily dispense with. This is reflected in various cognitive biases, heuristic mechanisms for making time-sensitive decisions when there is either too much or too little information, especially when crucial possibilities regarding mating or self-preservation are involved. I too am anchoring my argument not just in premodern ‘traditional’ society, but the original small-scale societies of our relatively egalitarian foraging and village horticulturalist ancestors. However, unlike the present argument, there is a tendency in this literature reduce the mind to its more cognitive functions, and to see all humans as ‘problem solvers’, focussing on these generic traits of the human mind, with less concern for how different aspects of persons combine in the individual. That said, there is a subfield of ‘coalitional psychology’ (Cikara 2021), related more to social identity theory in social psychology and often concerned with political behaviour, that looks for the adaptive patterns behind social group formation, in ways that are less cognitively reductionist. The complexities of this literature are beyond the limits of this essay. I raise it to acknowledge another approach, very different from the one taken here, which nonetheless is also concerned with how basic, unchanging aspects of minds and persons, interact with the ever-changing complexity of social relationships.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Hearn

Jonathan Hearn is Professor of Political and Historical Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and President of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. His published writings explore themes of social power, nationalism and identity, Scotland and its Enlightenment, liberal and civil society, and competition. His most recent book is The Domestication of Competition (2023, Cambridge University Press).