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

1. Introduction

One of the most striking and troubling aspects of the current social landscape has been the deranging impact of social media on social relationships. The massive growth of online communications technologies is disrupting established patterns of social interaction and authority through the control of information (Gurri 2018), and having a profound psychological impact on users (Haidt 2022). Rogers Brubaker (2020) has recently called this ‘digital hyperconnectivity’ and is particularly concerned with its impacts on the construction of the self. It also has profound implications for interpersonal interaction. Modes of interaction through frequent, brief, symbol and emotion laden electronic communications simulate the arena of intimate relations, in which the pressures of interpersonal judgment are natural and inevitable. And yet this happens among vast populations of users for whom there is no real interpersonal community of propinquity, friendship or kinship.

This pattern of using mass means of communication to manipulate emotions was already well established with such things as the modern art of advertising (Gurney 2017). However, experienced viewers can manage a degree of critical distance and ironic understanding of such communications. But with the explosion of online, rapid, multi-direction communications, encompassing both genuine intimates and (often hostile) strangers at once, the capacity of this rather anonymous mode of communication to penetrate into the realm of interpersonal emotional judgment becomes worrying and even pathological. Abstract ideologies of remote provenance can easily appear in the guise of intimate moral and emotional communal pressure. Research by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues (Twenge et al. 2020, 2022) has shown that while ‘screen time’ in general may not be associated with negative psychological effects, if one isolates social media activity from things such as television watching and video games, a clear association between social media use and declining mental health appears. This is particularly the case among girls, for whom the interactions are less about recreational performance (more true of boys) and more about engaging in an arena of intense social judgment.

This essay argues that this phenomenon, still unfolding before us, needs to be understood as more than just the impact of a new technology. It is an example of a fundamental tension in modern society, manifest in many ways, between social relations that operate at vast social scales, and those that operate at much smaller and more intimate scales, between the impersonal and the interpersonal. The preceding is only an illustrative example to set the scene. My purpose is to outline a conceptual model for thinking about this relationship. I work from two basic premises, which I lay out in the next two sections. First, that modern society preserves within it, basic aspects of early small-scale society, particularly in regard to how humans interact with one another at a more direct interpersonal level, which end up embedded within much larger, more bureaucratic and impersonal networks and chains of causal social relations. We need to see the direction of historical social change not so much as a shift from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ society, but rather as an embedding of more primal modes of social interaction within emergent and vastly extended forms of interaction. Second, and more central to this essay, this has implications for how we theorise power. I claim that there is an understandable bias in our conceptualisations of social power, toward treating it either as manifested in key domains of institutionalisation (politics, economy, culture, etc.), or as generic modes of social interaction (force, persuasion, manipulation, etc.). These perspectives have analytic value and utility, but I claim that they leave the idea of the individual human person, as the enduring focal point to which various kinds of power relations must attach, underdeveloped. We need to take into account how our various susceptibilities to power coalesce in actual persons. Toward that end I begin to develop a model for thinking about how persons become susceptible to power along four key dimensions: material (‘the body’), emotional (‘the heart’), cognitive (‘the mind’) and moral (‘the soul’). My aim is to help us think more precisely about how larger patterns of power come to bear on actual, complex individuals, and more interpersonal social settings, to help build a bridge between more macrosociological and historical comparative scales, and more microsociological and ethnographic scales of investigation.

2. ‘The great shift’

The emergence of the modern social sciences is bound up with the experience of a great historical shift in western/European society, between patterns shaped primarily by face-to-face interpersonal relationships, and kinship, to one in which people are linked more by impersonal institutional relationships (markets, bureaucracies, etc.). The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies traced the shift from custom-bound local rural communities, or ‘Gemeinschaft’, to more urban patterns of free association he called ‘Gesellschaft’ (Tönnies 2001). With a more enduring impact on sociology, and social science more generally, Emile Durkheim stressed a transformation in the division of labour, from the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of small scale, relatively undifferentiated society in which people are bound together by the immediate social pressures of their peers to conform, to one of the ‘organic solidarity’ of modern society, held together by the impersonal functional interdependence of a much more complex and variegated division of labour (1964). In the middle of the twentieth century, this idea became encoded in Talcott Parsons’ structural-functionalist sociology and his concept of ‘pattern variables’ (Parsons et al. 1953, Layder 2006, pp. 23–25):

Table

Small Scale Community	Large Scale Society
Relationships ascribed by birth (e.g. clans, kingship)	Relationships defined by achievement (e.g. professions, presidents)
Individuals relate to each other through multiple roles (e.g. at once sibling and co-worker)	Relationships more narrowly specified (e.g. doctor-patient)
Norms of interaction particular to certain social categories (e.g. lord and commoner)	Interaction norms prescribed by universal rules (e.g. equality, human dignity, etc.)
Emotional attachments among social actors (e.g. family, friends)	Emotional detachment among social actors (e.g. clients, strangers)
Value orientation to the good of one’s community	Value orientation to one’s self-interest

Even the intellectual renegade Michel Foucault had a version of this idea in charting a shift from a premodern world in which power is understood as concentrated in monarchical ‘centres’ that display their power through punitive action on the body, to a modern one in which power is encoded in the knowledge claims of new sciences that act on selves by shaping subjectivity (Foucault 2000.

Much of this story is about a fundamental shift in how social order is underpinned. Before the modern age, power is distributed primarily through kinship networks, often monopolised by aristocratic and dynastic strata (Haldén 2020, Wooldridge 2021, pp. 35–46), and legitimated, and sometimes challenged, in a religious dimension in which supernatural beings (God, gods, angels, devils, spirits and sprites) are relevant social actors and sources of power. In the modern age, aristocracies decline and supernatural beings recede, and social relations are increasingly negotiated and managed by ever more elaborated law (Hearn 2023, pp. 77–108). The English jurist Henry Maine (1986) grasped this aspect when he described this shift as one from ‘status’, in which one’s position was defined by where one sat in a hierarchy of personalistic kinship-based relationships, to one of ‘contract’, where the impersonal structures of modern law allowed people to interact more as unencumbered individuals.

There have of course been many criticisms of this paradigm of a ‘great shift’. Bruno Latour famously claimed ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour 1993), by which he meant that the idea of modernity is crucially defined by an unsustainable distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ (or ‘culture’), which was absent in premodern society. Moreover, he thinks we mislead ourselves when we separate a domain of society made of human will and action, from a natural world of causation. For him, as a programmatic point, distinctions between an autonomous domain of human society and a wider causal world should be dissolved. Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000) argued that this idea of a great unidirectional shift in which diverse traditional societies converge on a single broad type of modernity needs to be replaced by a vision of multiple modernities, in which the pattern of institutional change in modern societies across the globe is understood as much more diverse than the paradigm suggests. The tendency to draw a sharp division between these two ideal types of society has also been criticised by Steven Grosby (2011). His objection is that it exaggerates the differences, obscuring the continuities, particularly in regard to how the affinities of kinship become associated with territories of natal origin, generating a sense of ‘vitality’ that is an important part of what defines and holds together modern nations. Grosby has long challenged the idea that nations are a peculiarly modern development, arguing that this principle of vitality connects nations, ancient and modern (Grosby 1995, 2005). I find the challenges of forming modern nations with common identities, moralities and laws, under conditions of mass communication and popular sovereignty, more distinguishing than Grosby does, but I share reservations about overdrawing the boundaries between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. But as will become apparent, I anchor the historical continuities more in personhood itself, and perennial issues in human power relationships.

Regardless of these criticisms, it is difficult to deny the sheer expansion, across humanity, in the social scale of social relations, brought on by the expansion of empires, markets, bureaucracies, legal systems, in short, by five hundred years of globalisation (Osterhammel and Petersson 2005). Early on in the eighteenth century there was already a sense that a scalar problem causing tensions for social relations was at hand. We can understand Adam Smith’s two great works as attempts to grapple with the implications of this distinction. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1982), he emphasised how interpersonal judgments of proper conduct, of ‘approbation’ and ‘disapprobation’, guided by the capacity for sympathy, formed the fabric of human moral life. And he reflected on the limited reach of this process in governing vast networks of social relations (Smith 1982, pp. 212–234). In The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1981) he advocated the capacity of law governed market relations to allow people to interact as relatively anonymous self-interested individuals, who nonetheless must take into account the interests of others, to pursue their own interests. Market institutions, he hoped, could pick up in the more impersonal sphere of evolving capitalism, where the more personalised moral judgments of daily social life could not reach. Benjamin Constant (1988, orig. 1819) argued that the leaders of the French Revolution had failed to take this shift into account when they tried to apply the conception of ‘liberty’ found in ancient Rome and Greece to modern society. These early polities fought for the freedom of a collective, the citizens of the republic, who were tightly bound together by kinship, civic religion and ritual, and face-to-face opinion formation (the forum, the agora). What modern citizens wanted according to Constant was not this intense mutual commitment, but rather a state that would protect their basic interests and rights, and then leave them alone to do as they please. Alexis de Tocqueville (2000) saw this shift as involving the decline of aristocracy and its replacement by democracy. Aristocracy involved ‘great men’ at the top of long chains and networks of personalistic obligations, which provided the skeletal infrastructure of social power. Democracy by contrast, emerging after the American and French Revolutions, turned people into a sea of relative equals, associating in civil society, but inclined to let their social horizons shrink to their immediate worlds of friends and family (what he called ‘individualism’). He worried that such citizens, in search of equality and privacy, would deliver their great collective power into the hands of an overweening state, unlike the aristocrats of old who jealously guarded their private domains of social power.

The rest of this argument follows in the same spirit as Smith, Constant and Tocqueville interested in this scalar problem. However much kinship and religion may endure as institutions, and different societies and civilisations may evolve along distinctive, non-convergent paths, there is an underlying question of how the relatively constant element of the individual person, located in immediate webs of social relationships that are the initial locus of social power, continues, through the vast expansion of social scales.¹

3. Implications for theorising power

Our theoretical language of power tends to reflect this opposition between the larger and more encompassing, and the smaller and more immediate. Attempts to formulate general frameworks for thinking about power tend to fall into what we might call ‘institutionalist’ versus ‘interactionist’ types. This of course isn’t an absolute distinction, but rather one of emphasis. Different kinds of conceptualisations are suitable to different kinds of questions, and scales of research, and all serve useful purposes. My point is not to criticise these, but instead to argue that another framework is needed to think about how power ultimately attaches to persons in their immediate social surroundings.

By institutionalist I simply mean those who build their frameworks around major institutionalised dimensions of social life, typically economic, political and ideological processes. Michael Mann’s (1986) IEMP model that treats long-term history as a matter of the interactions of organisational networks clustering around four key domains of activity – ideological, economic, military and political – is a prime example. Gianfranco Poggi’s (2001) idea of political, economic and ideological/normative ‘forms of power’ similarly attaches power to major institutional domains, populated by key organisations: governments, companies, churches, political parties and so on. Ernest Gellner’s (1991) division of power into ‘the plough’ (production), ‘the sword’ (coercion) and ‘the book’ (cognition) is again another formulation of the tripartite economics/politics/ideology analytic framework that pervades most attempts to grapple with power at the macro-sociological and long-term historical level.

Of course, these various macro-forms of power ‘interact’, but by interactionist I mean the more conventional sociological sense of power-infused modes of social interaction that we ascribe to actors, rather than the institutional domains within which power evolves and consolidates. Prime example here would be Dennis Wrong’s (2002) typology of power as falling into four main types: force, manipulation, persuasion and authority, building his approach around the Weberian question of why people comply, what makes power legitimate, or not. Similarly, John Scott (2001) analyses domination and resistance to it (which he calls ‘counteraction’) in terms of characteristic modes of interaction: coercion, inducement, expertise, command, protest, pressure. Wrong and Scott are of course not ignorant of the large-scale patterns of power found in institutionalist approaches, but a focus on how people and groups engage with one another in struggles over power generates a different set of interactionist analytic concepts.

As I’ve said, my interest is in how power relationships become anchored in persons. Developing a concern prominent in Foucault, two theorists of power have paid particular attention to the issue of ‘subjectification’, how subjectivities are formed that get people to internalise certain norms of behaviour. Steven Lukes’ (Lukes 2005) idea of the ‘third dimension’ of power argues that power is not simply a matter of prevailing in a public power contest, or controlling what does or doesn’t get contested, but rather rests especially on the shaping and distorting of subjective interests, such that they serve the dominant. It is the ‘securing of consent to domination of willing subjects’ (Lukes 2005, p. 109). But ‘willing’ is not to say ‘wise’ or ‘well-informed’. This argument claims that interests themselves can become deformed, causing people to want what they ought not to want, and to accept power relations they ought to reject. False consciousness is a real possibility.

Mark Haugaard (2020) has, in effect, elaborated Lukes’ third dimension into two: one that involves the tacit knowledge that informs power interactions and one that involves social subjects internalising and thereby affirming their social power relations as norms. The latter, Haugaard’s ‘fourth dimension’, is premised on a basic human need for ontological security, which generates stabilising routines and habits of self-discipline and restraint. People strive to know how to be in the (social) world and to behave accordingly. This can lead to social competition to excel at self-mastery, as in Norbert Elias’s medieval elites acquiring civilising manners, leading to modern expectations of the self-disciplined individual. But when the basic interactional conditions for securing one’s ontological security are cut off, as in solitary confinement, the fourth dimension can become a locus of extreme vulnerability. Whereas Lukes’ third dimension is concerned with ‘consent to domination’, Haugaard’s fourth dimension is normatively neutral. It can be the basis of either empowerment, knowing how to be in the world and realise the self, or of social control, as this very need makes us tractable to the wills of others. Be that as it may, it is a domain of the implicit and habitual, of unconscious compliance, knowing what to do without thinking.

It is notable, however, that the terms ‘self/selves’ and ‘persons’ do not figure in the indexes of Lukes’ and Haugaard’s books. This is a sign that they are interested in something different from me. Although they are interested in human psychology to a degree, the interest is almost entirely in how persons become subject to wider society, through subjectification, and mainly in regard to how this operates against people’s interests, or at least beneath their consciousness. This is an important perspective, for both empirical and moral reasons. However, my interest is in how individual persons, by their nature, reach out to others to form power relationships. My concerns are closer to those of Derek Layder, who proposes a social analysis that is ‘layered’ outward from the person as an agent and locus of power, embedded within contexts of social interaction and structure (Layder 2006, pp. 271–301). Layder argues that power is intrinsic to the formation of the self, for both good and ill, and we err when we treat it primarily as an external force that acts on persons (Layder 2004, pp. 104–14).

Recently translated into English, Heinrich Popitz’s Phenomenon of Power (Popitz 2017) could be said to ground his analysis of power in an idea of the person; however, he places a distinct emphasis on our susceptibility to physical and psychic injury, seeing this, rather bleakly, as the very ground of power. Because we are subject to the fear of harm, and psychologically need recognition, we are manipulable by others, who use these fundamentals to gain power over us. I too see persons as intrinsically susceptible to power, but not in this strictly negative sense, as weakness and vulnerability. ‘Susceptibility’ can mean both ‘vulnerable’ and ‘receptive’, and I use it in that ambivalent sense, the sense in which we sometimes talk of social order arising out of our susceptibility to the influence of others, and ensuing mutual adjustment. This is akin to what the Enlightenment Scots such as Adam Smith (1982, pp. 9–23) and David Hume (1978, pp. 316–324) meant by ‘sympathy’. That term implied our susceptibility to the feelings of others, caught up in a web of sentiment, in search of approval, and avoiding the disapproval of our fellow human beings. But my aim is to provide a more multidimensional analysis of the person, with susceptibilities that are significantly differentiated as material, emotional, cognitive and moral. I am interested in how all these dimensions of susceptibility are anchored together in individual persons. Ultimately, power is not distinguishable from, or at least it is intrinsic to, society itself. That which makes us susceptible to its ‘good’ aspects, also makes us susceptible to the ‘bad’. There is value in conceiving of persons in these terms, and not as in need of ultimate liberation from society itself, experienced primarily as ‘subjectification’. In a sense, I am coming back to the basic problem of social order (Hechter and Horne 2003, Wrong 1994). Social order requires some sort of submission to the influence of wider society. We are, whether we like it or not, evolutionarily designed for that. In conventional Weberian terms, this would be called ‘domination’, in his value-neutral sense of stabilised patterns of power relationships (Weber 1978, p. 53, Lukes 2005, pp. 111–12, Hearn2008). But it is difficult to override the common-sense use of domination to mean unwanted and negative social control. In his recent translation of the opening chapters of Weber’s Economy and Society, Keith Tribe translates the key word in German, Herrschaft, as ‘rulership’, and this goes some way towards correcting the normative skew of ‘domination’ in English (Weber 2019, pp. 471–473). However, this emphasises, as Weber meant to, obedience to commands, whereas I am interested in a more diffuse process of submission to the given social order, that does not always clearly show this command-obedience relationship. I will define my focus as on our ‘susceptibility to power relationships in the formation of necessary social order’, leaving normative evaluative judgment outside of this definition. Where I use the word ‘domination’, it should be understood in this broader sense, even if the specific context is one where we would conventionally evaluate it negatively.

4. A conceptual model

There are debates about whether it makes sense to posit, as I do, a general, transhistorical idea of the ‘individual’, or whether this is itself a culturally and historically specific idea, that cannot be applied to people long ago (Carrithers et al. 1985). While we need to attend to how culture and social structure shape individuality, I think there is good reason to regard the human species as having a particularly highly developed transhistorical sense of the individual, whatever its varied contexts.

There is no doubt that modern, highly differentiated society presents many more ways and lines along which people can individuate, distinguishing themselves from others. This idea was central to Durkheim’s division of labour (Durkheim 1964). The corresponding thesis was that the person immersed in small-scale communities is weakly distinguishable from a set of positions and roles prescribed by social structures (Poggi 2000, pp. 33–36). This view becomes very pronounced in the work of Louis Dumont (1986) who cast the individual as a peculiar product of western/modern thought. But this approach confuses ‘individualism’, an egoistic philosophy or worldview, with the individual, and confuses a holistic analysis of social structure, with society itself (see Cohen 1994, pp. 14–15). On the contrary, a broad consultation with ethnographic and historical cases, western and ‘non-western’, simply reveals the rich diversity of social contexts that individuals must adapt themselves to (Cohen 1994, passim). Modern and western concepts of the individual do have a particular history shaped by Christianity and the development of European law (Siedentop 2015), but the culturally shaped concept is not the thing itself. To trace the origins of human individuality I would go much deeper to the species level. The work of Tomasello (1999, 2016) and colleagues has shown that humans are distinguished from their closest primate relatives (chimps and bonobos) by their unique ability to develop ‘joint attention’ with others, to focus on common tasks in ways that presume the presence of another mind, regarding the same activity from a different angle, and possessing a distinct perspective. This is a spur to the development of communication and language, which further provides evidence of the other minds with which one interacts and strategises. It also provides the primary conditions for the formation of a shared moral universe, in which people conceive of the group, bound together by the mutual regulation of each other’s actions, as individuals. Again, this is not to gainsay the fact that the scope of variation in social roles and activities is limited in small scale, technologically simple societies. But it would seem that ‘the individual’ forms with emerging human society itself, not at some later stage. I am concerned with how persons occupy and must negotiate shifting positions within patterns of power relationships in their society – how individuals negotiate their inevitable embedding within power relations. Whatever the long-term changes in encompassing structures, this is a perennial aspect of human existence. Human personhood encodes an elementary design for situating people within group power relationships, for making us susceptible to others.

Before proceeding I would make two clarifying points. First, that I am not simply proposing a ‘microsociological’ approach that focuses on interpersonal interaction. I am more specifically concerned with the constitution of the person itself, as being so constituted that it has specific, and relatively stable modes in which power relations attach to it. Second, however, this is not about ‘identity’ or ‘identification’, which I would define as the process by which unique understandings of the self become attached to social categories that exist in the realm of public knowledge and ideology (Hearn 2012, pp. 190–208). It will have implications for that process, but my concern here is with how the person, as a universal and transhistorical type, undergirds the possibilities of power. I analyse four recognisable but distinct ways that individual persons inevitably became engaged in social power relations, in terms of the material, emotional, cognitive and moral aspects of their beings. I do not rely on any psychological theory of personality, or claim that these four aspects correspond to specific structures in the mind. To what degree they correspond to mental structures and/or general principles of social interaction is an open question. I simply claim that the broad observation of individual social behaviour across many and diverse social settings, including the small and large social scales emphasised here, tends to confirm the stability and generalisability of this quadripartite approach. It is a conceptual hypothesis that must earn its keep through its analytic utility and transposability.

Somewhat metaphorically, I refer to these four parts of the person as the ‘body’ (material), the ‘heart’ (emotional), the ‘mind’ (cognitive) and the ‘soul’ (moral). These of course interpenetrate in actual persons, but our common sense knowledge that they can come into conflict with one another gives us a prima facie reason to make the analytic distinction. I quickly elaborate them here, before looking at each one more closely: (1) The ‘body’ is susceptible to material harm, through injury or threat of injury, either directly through pain and bodily damage or indirectly through material deprivation. Bodies, as seats of appetite and desire, are also susceptible to inducements, and as the ground of basic needs, they are objects of care. (2) The ‘heart’, in the sense of the emotional being, is highly susceptible to the judgments of others, to their approval and disapproval. People have a fundamental psychological need to love and be loved, so these also can be instruments of control, but this need is also what binds us together as social beings. (3) The ‘mind’ negotiates the world through knowledge and belief, and becomes dependent on these and their accuracy in guiding action. It relies on ‘maps of reality’, and those who draw up those maps will exert control over people’s actions, over what people believe is true about the world. (4) The ‘soul’, used figuratively here, has a close relationship to the ‘heart’ but designates something different. By ‘soul’ I mean that part of our being that amplifies our immediate emotional susceptibility to the judgment of others into rule-based understandings of how people in general ought to behave towards one another: into ethics and morality. These tend toward codification in the forms of religion and law. When augmented to the level of a belief in an ultimate realm of moral judgment, people can be controlled by their desire to be on the right side of such judgments, although enforcement measures can also land more directly on bodies (punishments) and hearts (shaming). Bodies, hearts, minds and souls each have their characteristic susceptibilities to deprivations and satisfactions. But I remind the reader that the view of ‘domination’ taken here is not to assimilate it to oppression and exploitation. Some patterns of social control are necessary and beneficial to persons, and wider society, providing social stability, and enabling collective action.

Each of these modes of control can operate at both small-scale interpersonal and large-scale impersonal levels, and I will elaborate each in regard to this scalar contrast. We should remember that this idea of scale forms a continuum, and we do not neatly pass from one level to another. Moreover, all modern society ultimately has its origins in small-scale societies, where all relationships were interpersonal, and our four modes of susceptibility interpenetrated in daily life, and were in some respects relatively undifferentiated. The ‘great shift’ to modernity described above can be partly understood as the differentiation of these modes, as they acquire relatively independent institutional, organisational and ideological supports, and distinct personnel that specialise in exercising these forms of control (we might quip: ‘police, pals, professors, and priests’). But although each becomes subject to pressures from large-scale and impersonal institutions, they don’t dislodge from the realm of the interpersonal with the same alacrity. The ’heart’ and to a degree the ‘soul’ have a certain ‘stickiness’ to the level of the interpersonal, a natural sensitivity to the immediate judgments of others. Again, the interpersonal is not replaced by the impersonal over the course of history, it lives on embedded within those much larger structures. While in some ways distorted and deranged by the relationship, the interpersonal is still an important part of how our susceptibility to social control works, however extended and institutionalised it becomes. I now consider each in turn, how each one gets altered by growth in social scale, and some of the ways in which they interact.

4.1. The body (material)

At the interpersonal level, people can be controlled by the threat or use of force and violence, acting on sheer self-preservation. This favours the physically powerful over the physically weaker, a difference that frequently corresponds to sex, and adulthood versus childhood. Correspondingly, sex and age are the primal dimensions along which power first gets differentiated in small-scale societies (Fried 1967). And bodies can be acted on through control of essential resources, such as water, food, shelter and so on. We can be coerced through threats without actually imposing direct physical harm.

This capacity for bodily threat and harm has been raised to a ‘high art’ up to the present. Max Weber famously defined the modern state as the organisation that enjoys a legitimate monopoly of the use of force (Weber 1978, p. 56). However, that monopoly is never fully realised. In households, domination through physical violence and intimidation can be shielded from public view. Criminal enterprises frequently use violence or its threat to police their members, demonstrate their power and prosecute their aims. As for the state, police and militaries are endowed with publicly sanctioned capacities to harm bodies. Among the reasons for this in law enforcement are the need to control such criminal harm in the household and elsewhere, but these powers of bodily domination extend to strategies of crowd control, and ultimately incarceration (Foucault 1979). If police and law enforcement direct bodily domination within the boundaries of the state-society, armed forces normally direct it outward, geopolitically, employing cutting edge weapons technologies, and potentially delivering lethal violence on a massive scale (Malešević 2017). However, the line between police and military can become blurred, with the latter sometimes deployed on the domestic front.

We also easily forget that bodies are also controlled by being ministered to. Those who help and treat our bodies and possess specialist knowledge of how to do so, from tribal shamanic curers to modern medical practitioners and healthcare systems, also wield power. This is power that operates on the same susceptibility to pain and mortality, and fear of it, that those delivering bodily violence are acting on. But this kind of bodily control is usually invited, offering to alleviate pain and suffering. However, we should remember that just as the threat of war can empower the state and its military, generalised fear in regard to public health, for instance in the context of a pandemic, also invites an increase in the domination of populations by healthcare institutions, professionals and specialists (cf. Furedi 2019). Sociologists sometimes have a preference to seek the springs of social order in norms and values, but we do well to remember that across societies and history, harm and the fear of harm are a basic ingredient in social order (Shlapentokh 2006).

4.2. The heart (emotional)

The Enlightenment Scots (Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith) trained their attention especially on our emotional susceptibility to the judgment of others, seeing this as the ultimate root of morality, rather than more abstract rational argument (Frazer 2010). From infancy, we learn to depend on the affection of others, and the avoidance of their anger, for our sense of wellbeing and good standing among our most intimate relations. Because of this we are all relatively easily emotionally controlled. This is a very effective and physically unviolent way of achieving the mutual regulation of behaviour, and a basic part of our primate natures. However, action on our emotions can become coercive, and praise and blame distributed inequitably and instrumentally, especially when relatively spontaneous emotional interaction slides into calculated manipulation (Layder 2004, pp. 59–65). Emotional relations are not necessarily a refuge from harmful domination.

At larger impersonal scales, this mechanism weakens as a tool of domination. It is easier for individuals to disregard the critical emotional judgments of strangers as the irrelevant views of outsiders and enemies. To some degree, the susceptibility of the heart stays circumscribed within more face-to-face interactions. Nonetheless, as our opening example of social media suggests, we have ‘heart strings’ that can be played upon. Historically the arts have been mediums for bringing larger scale ideologies and values to bear experientially upon emotions. Thus, religious institutions such as the medieval Catholic Church, sponsored by elites, have been primary patrons of the arts, seeking to use these to fuse sentiment to religious experience. In more recent times, authoritarian states also use the arts to try to channel human passions toward ideological causes. Whether it is corporations playing on our sentiments and desire for status through sophisticated advertising, or politicians and activists hailing us to connect our persons and self-assessments to ideological critiques of the social order (anti-immigration, climate change, antiracism, humanitarian aid), symbols can enhance our emotional susceptibility to quite socially distant sources of messages. These ideological messages offering understandings of reality, and moral agendas, have strong components of ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ discussed below. The point is that these can operate partly by working directly on our emotional natures.

A further issue is salient here. This is the correspondence between the immediate emotional environment people find themselves in, and the content of the messages they receive. Where one shares common sense values with those close to one’s life about some issue, for instance the rightness of equality between the sexes, then more distant ideological messages supporting this will likely be more emotionally salient and compelling, then if one’s intimate circle rejects this principle. Messages from further afield, directed towards hearts, can land on both fertile and stony soil.

4.3. The mind (cognitive)

Each of us carries around mental maps of our world and how to negotiate it. Much of this knowledge is very personal and local – the state of repair of our house, the best place to get a quick lunch and so on. These bodies of knowledge form out of practical experience. But they blend with other more comprehensive and less directly experiential bodies of knowledge – how electricity works, the causes of health risks, or the implications of different political systems. And these larger bodies of knowledge often have very immediate personal implications. We accept them when they apply and work in practice. But our acceptance of them involves a linking of personal experience and practical everyday knowledge to these larger bodies of knowledge, and a certain faith in the authority that delivers them to us, rather than our own direct experience. Knowledge based on experience shades into belief based on authority. Those who shape these larger bodies of knowledge, and succeed in getting them recognised as ‘true’, can have significant influence on people’s behaviour. Knowledge is power. Not just the ability to shape people’s beliefs (Foucault 1980), but the concrete mastery of nature and natural processes that firm knowledge confers (Bacon 2000), gives the possessor more power over their environment. The catch is, some of this more abstract propositional knowledge is the best approximation of truth we have, and worth being guided by, and some of it isn’t. Some of it misrepresents reality, serves particular interests and facilitates domination of some over others. This is a constant liability of knowledge itself. Control of the mind is about seeing that particular truth claims prevail, and better yet, go unchallenged. The best protection against this is to have social and institutional norms that all truth claims are in principle challengeable (Rauch 2021).

In small-scale societies, people receive all their knowledge, from practical matters to cosmology, from those in their immediate surroundings. The reliability of truth claims arises out of the personal authority relationships in which they are embedded, and knowledge is often received as the common sense of the social group that is one’s world. As societies grow in scale and extent, more elaborate institutions develop for knowledge production, such as churches, universities and science. Efforts are made to synthesise expanding knowledge about the natural world with philosophical knowledge about the ultimate order of things, often understood as having a divine or supernatural basis. In modern, complex and more impersonal societies, this synthesis has tended to come apart, with science and religion going separate ways, and recognising separate spheres of authority, over ‘minds’ and ‘souls’. But regardless of this rupture, people frequently have a need for more comprehensive bodies of knowledge that tie together their various bodies of immediate and practical knowledge. And so they are permanently susceptible to manipulation and domination through their acceptance of truth claims, presented in a way that synthesises knowledge, bridging the divide between cognitive and moral orders. Those who produce and control authoritative knowledge are more distant and abstract, but the basic need for what they offer doesn’t go away.

In the realm of cognition, the capacity to dominate ideas about the ultimate order of things (philosophy, theology, cosmology) tends to fall on intellectuals who manage to occupy key institutional spaces for the production of knowledge (Shils 1958, Collins 2000, Poggi 2001, pp. 97–122). Meanwhile, as the division of labour increases, so do niches of specialised expertise in regard to various practices and bodies of knowledge. Those who control institutions of science, education at all levels, and public media, thus are able to dominate the general disposition of knowledge and belief in the wider society. In more liberal forms of modern society, an ongoing contestation among ideas helps destabilise cognitive monopolies, but such societies also generate separate markets for knowledge provisioned through separate channels, leading to siloed beliefs and multiple domains of cognitive domination (Haidt 2022).

4.4. The soul (moral)

In early small-scale societies, the messages we receive about how we ought to behave, and how our fellows feel about us, are very closely connected. Emotion and morality interweave. However, moral sanctions tend to acquire supernatural reinforcement. Obligations to one’s community and kin become obligations to dead ancestors. Misfortune is often interpreted as an expression of anger of the ancestors around aspects of communal conduct, or as the indirect effect of the ill will of others in the living community through means of magic and witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard 1937, Horton 1964). Emotions, blessings and blame, are the currencies used by supernatural beings in the reinforcement of the normative order. More abstract representations of the overarching moral order in myths, symbols and rituals are also present, but the relationships to supernatural beings and forces are more personalistic, interacting with actual interpersonal relations. Those who mediate these beliefs and their reproduction in the community, elders and religious experts (shamans, curers, etc.), thereby exercise a certain control, and can manipulate moral messages and symbols. But they also find themselves caught up in dynamics of group psychology beyond their control.

Again, with growth in scale, ministering to the soul has diverged from the more general production and reproduction of cognition about the world. In Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, ‘natural philosophy’ sought a rational synthesis of knowledge about the objective world and about the divine (Hunter 2020). But from the Enlightenment on, ‘science’ increasingly established its distinct authority over the natural world, and the production of moral authority became a matter of religion, philosophy and law. Expert guidance in how we ‘ought’ to behave became a more specialist practice, though hardly a monopoly of experts, given the roots of morality in everyday emotions, in which we are all ‘experts’. But to the extent that morality takes more abstract and codified forms in religion, law and ideology, and substantial populations subscribe to these, those who lead this process have powers to control or at least channel the actions of those populations. While claims to moral authority are in some sense institutionally ensconced in certain roles and thereby monopolised (again, law and religion), anyone can make a bid to critique, indict and reform society, or some part of it. The capacity to detect and channel moral outrage does not require the same kind of cognitive expertise as building an airplane or theorising society. The domination of souls through moral authority is something of a wild card that can end up in many different hands. In contrast to the realm of cognition, where authority more easily divides and specialises, and reforms tend to follow methodical rules of falsification (Popper 1945), in the realm of morality the pattern within authoritative institutions is more often one of fissure and rebellion, as dissenting prophets seek to displace or break with ‘corrupt’ authorities. Nonetheless, as virtue ethics would have it (Hursthouse 2001), some reject the idea of morality descending from on high in the form of codified prescriptions, preferring to see it as learned through practice and interpersonal exemplification, as phronesis rather than doxa. This approach to ethics may provide some immunity from moral domination.

4.5. Putting it back together

Let me elaborate the preceding by overviewing connections between the four parts I have discussed. The interactions of cognition and morality are particularly complex. The expansive impulses of the ‘mind’ and the ‘soul’ cause them to blend into unified bodies of knowledge with both empirical/descriptive and moral/normative content, in what we often call ideologies, worldviews, or cultures. However, a hallmark of modernity is the coming apart of these two kinds of claims, of a rupture between ‘scientific’ and ‘moral’ knowledge. Ernest Gellner argued that the rise of modernity involved a kind of reversal (Gellner 1991, pp. 70–90). In foraging bands and tribes, referential knowledge about the objective world was relatively practice specific (how to make tools, locate food, etc.), developing piecemeal and unintegrated. In contrast, the survival pressures for communal solidarity were strong enough that all knowledge tended to be wrapped in symbolically laden moral accounts of social and cosmic order. However, over the course of social evolution referential knowledge about the external world is increasingly integrated into a single system, eventually by means of modern science, and meanwhile as society extends and divides, shared moral universes made of symbols and values separate. Thus, the unity of descriptive and normative orders is permanently broken, and normative orders themselves multiply and diverge. Major global historical changes in how domination and authority are now constructed and operate hinge on this shift, as localised communities unified by moral orders are divided and embedded within a global rational order of empirical knowledge (Meyer 2010).

Taking stock, while these four modes of control have different potential scopes, and operate on different parts of the human person, they combine in all sorts of ways, and almost always interpenetrate to some degree, a point similar to Mann’s assertion of the ‘promiscuity’ among his four sources of social power (Mann 1986, pp. 17–18). Ultimately, motivations, that is, orientation towards particular kinds of social action, are mobilised in the interpersonal arena where our ‘bodies’ and ‘hearts’ are directly subject to the actions, emotions and assessments of those relatively close to us. The realms of the ‘mind’ and the ‘soul’ however, of more codified forms of cognition and morality, are affirmed more by their practical purchase on a wider world. They provide some control over that world, and a basis for communication with, and conduct towards, relative strangers. Nonetheless, these two diverge in another respect. Cognition seeks a unified knowledge about the world that applies from the most abstract to the most practical and immediate circumstances. It is relatively unmoved by our feelings about it. Morality is different, spanning across interpersonal and impersonal scales. While moral ideas may develop in elaborate abstract systems, their practical application is still in the realm of emotion infused personal relations. There is a tension between morality as ideological conviction, versus as interpersonal responsibility.

One of the places where the relationship between persons and power has been most developed is in Max Weber’s famous and contested conception of ‘charisma’, so I move to a close by examining that concept in the light of this discussion. We can debate whether Weber’s concept was adequate, and whether we should define it differently, but my contention is that Weber’s formulation of the concept encodes aspects of the problem I have been analysing – how power relations are anchored in individual persons. It is evident in Weber’s writings that he regarded charisma as, at the core, a relationship between a leader with a powerful personality and a group of followers, however that relationship may have been elaborated and generalised (Weber 1978, pp. 241–245, Breuilly 2011, pp. 494–495).

Weber’s concept of charismatic authority was dual from the start, because charisma is conceived in the first instance in relationship to its own routinisation, and as a response to routinised society (Bendix 1960, pp. 326–329, Greenfeld 1985, Adair-Toteff 2005). On one hand, it refers to the ‘extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed’ (Weber 1958, p. 295) and how such persons are thereby enabled to hold sway over an immediate group of followers. It is fundamentally interpersonal, and in its purest form antisystemic, transcending all established norms and values. On the other hand, the problem of sustaining this mode of authority after the charismatic leader is gone poses the problem of the ‘routinisation’ of charisma, of the infusion of the charismatic aura into more enduring institutions, such as lines of kinship and heredity (e.g. dynasties) or bureaucratic offices (e.g. the papacy). Here, the authority generated may encompass personal relationships but is itself impersonal and attached to institutions. Edward Shils elaborated this second sense of charisma extensively, arguing that this diffuse charismatic principle, akin to the idea of the ‘sacred’ in Durkheim (1965), is present throughout modern societies, bolstering traditional and legal-rational modes of authority, as an attitude of respect for the sanctity of the national community and its complex of authority relationships (see the collected essays in Shils 1982, pp. 93–175).

While it is tempting to map these two aspects of charisma onto premodern ‘community’ and modern ‘society’, respectively, in fact the idea for Weber seemed to already articulate the tension between personal and impersonal modes of authority. Weber’s characteristic examples of charismatic leaders – the prophet, the revolutionary – are generally already located in larger social systems against which they are reacting and rebelling. It is striking that anthropological studies of small scale, relatively egalitarian societies, have shown little need for the concept of charisma. Communal leadership is often task-specific, and while force of personality plays a role, the supernatural dimension of leadership based on indwelling spirit is largely missing (see Sahlins 1963, Service 1966, Fried 1967). The primary context for Weber’s conceptualisation is the ancient world of expanding empires, religions and civilisations, washing over various ethnic groupings, on up to modern societies, not the relatively separate communities of early bands and tribes. Tellingly, the place where charisma does play a larger role in the anthropological literature is in accounts of what A. F. C. Wallace called ‘revitalisation movements’ (Wallace 1956), in which communal leaders with supernatural gifts are called forth to address societal crises brought on by the pressures of colonialism and culture contact (e.Worsley 1957, Cochrane 1970).

Returning to bodies, hearts, minds and souls, the charismatic, as conceived by Weber, acts especially on the last three. We think first of the paradigmatic ‘prophet’ and forget that Weber also identified ‘war heroes’ as exemplars of charisma (Weber 1978, pp. 241–245), and the latter might make us think of actions targeting the body. But the warrior’s charismatic leadership of followers was a matter of demonstrating extraordinary courage, bravery and skill in battle and plunder, not of physical coercion towards followers, however much that might be inflicted on enemies. Weber clearly saw the more pacific forms of charisma as involving intense emotional commitments between leaders and followers, as well as often supernaturally inspired visions of a changed social order, and strong moral imperatives about how members of the group ought to conduct themselves. Weber’s charismatic leader simultaneously addresses hearts, minds and souls through their powerful interpersonal presence. And while the emotional bonds may weaken with routinisation, the social memory of those bonds is cultivated, and infuses the more enduring cognitive maps of reality, and imperative codes of conduct, that a routinising institution finds it easier to sustain. Whatever charismatic aura gets attached to the Christian church, in all its variety, the idea of the believer’s personal relationship to God through Christ, is the ground of that charisma.

So, the idea of charismatic authority for Weber is not one of a premodern mode of power, but rather of how interpersonal power constantly re-enters the reticulating networks of impersonal power that large scale institutionalised and bureaucratising societies build up, in both the ancient and modern worlds. In later writings, it becomes clear that for Weber the most salient context for this process was in maintaining structural space in parliamentary systems for ideologically innovating political leaders to enter the process, by leading parties that could in turn disrupt calcified political bureaucracy (Palonen 1999, Pfaff 2002, Weber 2005, pp. 255–271). Weber took Nietzsche’s nihilism seriously as a problem to be confronted and saw charismatic authority not simply as a trace from our premodern past, but as an ongoing corrective, in which personhood and interpersonal relations reassert themselves at the core of power processes.

As we know, today the term ‘charisma’ is routinely applied to the qualities of celebrities and other public figures who project personas via mass media that simulate a certain immediacy of presence, and that various publics find attractive (Mills 1956, pp. 71–93, Kurzman et al. 2007, Ferris 2007). And as with our opening case, developments of social media have made this often a two-way communicative relationship that was not possible until recently, although the communications (e.g. ‘tweets’) from the celebrity to their followers are actually impersonal mass communications. I have argued that this is not what Weber meant by ‘charisma’. It is rather a simulacra of that relationship, in which our deeply rooted susceptibility to interpersonal emotional and moral appeals gets captured by the technology of mass communications, and often manipulated by those doing the capturing. But it works because we are predisposed to receive messages in this personalistic form, even though it is something of an illusion.

5. Conclusion

Prior to writing this essay I had been familiarising myself with the stoic ideas of Epictetus (2008) and Cicero (1971), and there is a stoic dimension to the present argument. The Stoics taught that we need to develop a realistic sense of our own powers, and what is and isn’t within our control. They believed that much unhappiness derives from worrying about things beyond one’s control and failing to attend to the development of one’s power over oneself. While not wanting to invoke the implicit ‘political quietism’ that this often suggested, nonetheless, this attention to how matters of power converge on the individual self is important. A part of our understanding of power needs to be self-understanding. Our language of power is often very alienated, treating power as something that begins outside of us and impacts us, something that we get caught up in. I think we need to do more to own it. I review our four aspects and their connections one more time.

The human body is susceptible to all kinds of physical threats and inducements, but it is also a material through which people express and perform power relations. Through intoxicants, we seek power over our own happiness and pain, through bodily alterations we express rebellion, eating disorders and self-harm express desperate needs to recover control over the self. Emotional states are projected onto, ideological convictions are performed through, and moral evaluations are attached to, the body. It becomes not just the object, but the medium of struggles with power, and our expression of our sense of those struggles.

Susceptibility to the evaluative emotions of others makes us human and is in many ways the seat of our sociality. But emotions can be coercive, and susceptibility can be vulnerability. We sometimes turn to more detached, cognitivist perspectives on ourselves and our relations, precisely to override this vulnerability, and reground our perspectives. And while morality may have its roots in our emotional natures, our commitments to certain understandings of moral order may again provide an alternative self-assessment that questions the more immediate emotional judgments we are subject to. This distancing has to do with how the ‘soul’ alters the raw messages of the ‘heart’, with the more universalising cognitions of the ‘mind’. As a result, one’s sense of what one ‘ought’ to do often conflicts with what one feels emotionally pressured to do. There can be a power contest between ‘heart’ and ‘soul’.

As just suggested, the mind, human cognition, has the strength of being able to generate more context-free perspectives that can achieve some detachment from more direct emotional and moral pressures. On the one hand, the expansionist, universalising tendencies of cognition makes our personal knowledge about ourselves and our surroundings susceptible to, and inclined to articulate with, larger knowledge systems that convey their own interests and prejudices. It is not a simple route to objective perspective. On the other hand, it does provide a means and strategy, within the individual, for pulling back from the control that emotional-cum-moral suasion can have over our behaviour. We can cast a cold eye over ourselves and our circumstances, and to some degree correct for our other susceptibilities.

In this essay, I have tried to convey a sense of the ‘soul’, our moral natures, as involving a peculiar synthesis of ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, animated by the primal process of direct, mutual emotional evaluation, but tempered by the cognitive impulse to find consistency and underlying principles. Precisely because emotion and cognition become integrated into a system of sorts, morality becomes a particularly powerful way of controlling thought and behaviour, but also of providing the resolve to stand against such efforts at control. Where societies are unable to generate an effective moral order, a unified message to ‘souls’, moral conflict tends to break down into an unintegrated field of emotional appeals and intellectual arguments. This is the chronic tendency of modern society.

I want to convey a sense that these four ‘parts’ are not neatly balanced and integrated, but rather often in tension and disproportion with one another. But they become manifest, and fatefully tied together, in individual living human bodies, which are the ultimate ground of all power relations. However, much power may be generated and reproduced through core institutions, take particular forms in social interaction, or be analysable into levels of awareness, social power ultimately begins and ends with individual human beings, who are internally differentiated in their susceptibilities to power. The purpose of this essay is to explore how to conceptualise that process.

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.

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

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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).

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.