CHAPTER ELEVEN

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From Modern to Postmodern Power

The past has no voice: it exists as habits, institutions, artifacts, and texts. To make any of these articulate requires the voice of a present interpreter. If that interpreter denies that he has a voice, ignoring the cognitive and other interests of his own time and place and pretending that his construction of the past constitutes its “objective” reality, he buries the past in the tomb of time and severs any real connection it might have with the living present.

—Richard Waswo1

I. CELEBRATING THE DEATH OF THE PAST

Not long ago Western societies celebrated the beginning of their third millennium not as a mere calendar change but as marking a turn into a “new age” that promised to surpass the achievements of the past. In the “advanced societies” of the West the occasion afforded the opportunity to affix a certain collective identity, to say who we are, and declare who is included in “we.”

Collective identity is not only built of positive assertions but made possible by selective memory loss, a rearrangement of remembrance and forgetting that forms the collective memory. For a new identity to take hold, an existing understanding has to be repressed, redefined, or overcome. A society might wish to forget a certain part of its past because of its painful associations: a military defeat, a brutal act of suppression, a shameful policy of exploitation. Conversely, it may wish to remember some noble action: a “glorious revolution,” a heroic sacrifice for the common good, a decisive victory. Remembrance is not always associated with celebration. It may arouse mixed emotions, as in the observance of Martin Luther King Day: celebration for his contribution to civil rights and African American political consciousness, shame for his murder and for the continuing hold of racism.

The third millennial celebrations were of the unambiguous kind and perhaps closer in spirit to the eschatological hopes of early Christians. The media’s soothsayers divined that a divide or break had occurred. The past was “over,” completed, disposable, not so much forgotten as obsolete. Some societies might be “left behind,” while among the favored societies in the West and (it was implied) among those of its groups or classes that had adapted, the future of the present promised to be superior to the future realized by the past. Its unique promise was a present in which the future is continuously being realized.

The death of the past might also be a bad pun. The new age should have been anxious to leave behind the events of a very bloody century—two world wars, a holocaust, Hiroshima, an abundance of cruel dictatorships with an appetite for torture and mass imprisonment, and the killing fields of Southeast Asia and postcolonial Africa. It is perhaps impossible to know how to mourn the loss of millions of human lives, but one can reflect upon the modes of power that put within reach the massive destruction and deformation of values accompanying the slaughters of the twentieth century. Or, to state the point differently, it is a commonplace among many who have written about the Holocaust that the mind feels helpless in seeking the terms to understand and convey the horrors of a recent past. Yet the mind apparently had little difficulty in finding the terms for constructing the powers that could produce the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

A society whose technology-oriented culture teaches the importance of embracing the new and “getting past” loss must cultivate the art of forgetting. What, then, is the ars oblivium, the modern’s methodology for forgetting and thereby posing the possibility of a society of perpetual afterwards?

Here, as in so many lessons about power, Hobbes is modernity’s instructor.2 History, Hobbes declared, is a mere “register of fact,” useful in making prudential decisions, but too bound to a particular context to be of service in the quest for “nothing … but general, eternal, and immutable truth.”³ Along with the politic virtue of prudence, the past is subordinate to the needs of abstract theorizing. When theorizing abstracts from the human world, it annihilates some portion of it and loses the innocence of mathematics. Loss then ceases to pose the possibility of a power-vacuum, as when aristocrats, kulaks, and unbelievers are eliminated. A selective emptying becomes one of power’s preconditions.

In contrast, for the pre-Hobbesian ages the ontology of power was formulated as a contrast between reality and appearance, between that which endures and that which passes away, between permanent and ephemeral power. Power was believed to be the crucial attribute of reality, of that which secures or protects the structure of things; the ultimate that by assuring perpetuity holds impermanence at bay. Pre-Hobbesian man courted power by finding appropriate ways for transients to commune with the enduring. “Listening not to me,” Heraclitus advised, “but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one.”⁴ Hence the importance of ceremonials and rituals of power. Subjects entreat kings; kings confess to priests; and priests beseech the gods. The early philosophers ritualized inquiry, inserting themselves in place of the priests and the logos of reason for the gods.

The aim of communicating with reality is to become receptive to its power without diminishing it. For theorists of a postmodern era, however, the contrast between appearance and reality no longer holds. Appearance is all that there is—which might seem to spell the death of reality. In late modernity the sovereignty of appearance is dependent upon incessant and insistent changes that undermine confidence in the existence of a reality principle. In the rituals of postmodern power the true sovereign is disappearance. It has assumed the role of reality, of that power which abides and presides over the world of (dis)appearances.

What is the nature of that power which manufactures disappearances? One clue was the dissonant note that threatened to mar the celebratory mood of the new millennium. Its coming was preceded by feverish attempts to prevent “glitches” (due to the calendar change to 2000) from disrupting the intricate electronic networks on which businesses, financial markets, transportation systems, government agencies, and especially military forces depend. The computer—the emblem of postmodern achievement of instant communication worldwide, the carrier of the new logos of “virtual reality” and of a certainty lacking in the old-style logos, which had represented reality as regularity, as “laws of nature”—now threatened to undo a world increasingly, sometimes totally, beholden to it. What is the meaning of that uniquely contemporary threat to the power-structure of the new age? what are the foundations of afterwards such that less than two years later the New World of the new millennium and its greatest representative, the American Superpower, suddenly experienced acute vulnerability even though no state remotely rivaled its power?

II. THE BACONIAN VISION OF POWER

Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.100

…And so those twin objects, human Knowledge and human power do really meet in one …

—Francis Bacon5

In earlier times the practice of naming and proclaiming a certain identity for the present and its past was one in which philosophers and political theorists played a prominent, if not disinterested, part. Over the centuries theorists promoted themselves by asserting the general superiority of their era over past eras and, by implication, their achievements over those of past thinkers. Although Aristotle may have been among the first philosophers to have established a genealogy of philosophical predecessors that, coincidentally, indicated how he had surpassed them, he also acknowledged past achievements, thereby suggesting both innovations and continuities. Nor did he take his accomplishments to mean that overall his era was superior to preceding ones.6 Sixteenth-century writers, however, used the genre in a more sweeping and dismissive way. In the process of bestowing the identity of a “renaissance” on the present, they also created a certain past, the “Dark Ages.” They compared the creative and wide-ranging character of literature, the arts, and philosophy in their own age, and its celebration of individuality, with what they viewed as the repetitive, authority-dominated ways of mediaeval scholastics, whose cramped ideal consisted in piling commentaries upon commentaries. Yet while Renaissance writers defined one past in negative terms, they were insufficiently secure in their post-Christianity to venture into the future without hedging their bets by clinging to an inspirational past. So they constituted and appealed to their past, making a cult of classical antiquity: “Saint Socrates,” intoned Erasmus, “pray for us.”⁷

Francis Bacon was the unrivaled practitioner in the arts of self-promotion and a master-tactician in the use of intellectual artifacts to promote a new collective identity and justify the discontinuity between one era and another. And all in the cause of a new vision of power. He dismissed the utility of retaining some usable past, arguing that the rejection of past philosophies and scientific methods was a necessary preliminary to laying an entirely new “foundation” for society.⁸ Where Aristotle had treated his predecessors as forerunners and judged them by their contribution to pure knowledge, Bacon introduced a different standard by which to condemn ancient philosophy in general and Aristotle’s in particular, not as wrong but as impotent. For Bacon the ancient philosophers had produced formulations incapable of yielding any practical results. In the new age “the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.”⁹

This declaration signified a radical turn in the Western understanding of power and its sources. In previous centuries ordinary power was a scarce good limited to mundane objects (food, shelter, construction, weapons) produced primarily by physical labor. In contrast, political power was represented as transcendent, “mighty,” or “awful,” its authority divinely sanctified. Imperial rule, military force, and warfare were its supreme expressions; organization and leadership were its means. Bacon’s vision was bolder still: he conceived how power might be invented and generated virtually at will, thus promising an end to the shortage of power, especially in its mundane uses. His primary concern was not to expand the state’s political power directly but to emphasize its directive role in promoting systematically a more fundamental source of power, the human mind.

III. CULTIVATING MIND AND METHOD

Ingenuity is one thing and method (ars) is another.

—Thomas Hobbes10

The reshaping of mind to make it complicit in the quest for power entailed a change as thoroughgoing as any experience of religious conversion. Mind had not only to be instructed in the curriculum of the new “natural philosophy” but, first of all, cleansed. “After I [Bacon] have purged and swept and levelled the floor of the mind,”¹¹ the mind was to be disciplined by the “the severe and rigid search after truth.”¹²

To a striking degree Bacon borrowed Machiavelli’s framework, formulating the conditions of power, identifying their sources, and devising a statecraft aimed at exploitation and control. This time the objects were not princes or republics but nature, the modes not singular actions but organization, the means not arms but a method of inquiry. The project called not only for a different conception of scientific methods of investigation but for the creation of a new subject, a political theory of science. Bacon extricated science from the setting of aristocratic dabblers with their “cabinets” of oddities, and of ingenious artisans who were unable to offer a clear explanation for their inventions; then he placed it in the context of national power and “policy.”

Tacitly another ruler and another system of power were being expelled. The “God of nature” whose domain was assumed to be unchallengeable by mortals would ere long become “Nature’s God.” Rather than approaching nature as a field of observation or a cause for humility, the new politics would view it as a combination experimental laboratory and object of erotic assault:

… nature not only free and at large (when she is left to her own course and does her work her own way) … but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.¹³

By adhering to the right method, man could discover nature’s “laws,” that is, the “powers” governing an “order” expressed as regularities. Conceptually nature was transformed from a theologico-political ordo (Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin) to a political-scientific order.¹⁴ Science could then use that knowledge to produce human power in the form of inventions. These, in turn, could be directed towards the material improvement of the human condition itself (“the relief of man’s estate”).

“Upon a given body to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures,” Bacon declared, “is the work and aim of human Power.”¹⁵ By that formulation, with its accompanying motto that “knowledge is power,” Bacon may be said to have sketched the idea of modern power and the basis for modern society in the organization of knowledge and its conversion into practical inventions for the extraction of power from, and over, the material world. His vision encompassed not only the systematic pursuit of theoretical knowledge and its practical applications under the aegis of the state but the reformation of social attitudes to provide an ethos or culture supportive of a conception of power as essentially boundless in its reach and benefits.

Culture is not, however, solely a matter of practices but involves beliefs. It is often said that power is “based” on or “supported” by belief. An equally appropriate metaphor might be that power is parasitic off beliefs. Often the beliefs seem to be in tension with the values actually practiced or represented by the powers. Mediaeval conceptions of power, whether papal or royal, fed off unworldly beliefs about the sacred. Late modern conceptions, which typically were slanted towards rule by elites, battened on the idea of the “sovereign people.” Eventually the parasitic powers exhaust their “host” and seek a fresh source to exploit.

But what of the theoretical mind that is drawn to a vision of power as both constitutive of a new world and, at the same time, destructive of some part of the things, beings, and relationships in a world being remade? and what of assigning to reality the ephemeral status of appearance while endowing (dis)appearance with the status of reality? Again Hobbes is our guide, and doubly so. His science-oriented theory of power complements a political theory that conceived of a society wherein absolute political power, “the greatest of humane Powers,” was generated by the opposite principle of free consent, “compounded of the Powers of most men …”16 In a revealing passage devoted to “power cognitive” Hobbes expands Bacon’s conception of a mind preparing to investigate power:

For the understanding of what I mean by the power cognitive, we must remember and acknowledge that there be in our minds continually certain images or conceptions of the things without us, insomuch that if a man could be alive, and all the rest of the world annihilated, he should nevertheless retain the image thereof … every man by his own experience knowing that the absence of destruction or destruction of things once imagined, doth not cause the absence or destruction of the imagination itself.¹⁷

Power cognitive and world annihilation: the juxtaposition of those two images of power reveals a combination of primitive urges and their modern sublimating form. In that combination elements of past and future probe and test each other as they search for the right catalytic mix. The name of the discourse is “reverie,” a word whose older meanings are far removed from its later dream-like associations. For the fourteenth century a reverie was “wild delight, violent or riotous action.” For the seventeenth century, the century of Locke’s “master builders” of modern science and mathematics, reverie was “abstracted musing.” A century later Hume remarked, “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” The violent actions that would potentially encompass the annihilation of the world would be made possible by abstracted musings (E = mc²) that transmute into power, obliterating cities, while thought remains intact and retains the quality of innocence, pure thought, mathematics, the child-like Einstein.

In Chapter VIII, I called attention to the role of his formulation “… figuring the world to be annihilated” as the imaginary act and methodological first step from the actual revolutionary disorder of the civil wars to an order constructed by abstracted musings. Hobbes first would have the world disappear temporarily while leaving behind only man: “… after the destruction of all other things, I suppose men still remaining …” But what Hobbes imagined as left behind is not man as such but his distilled essence, mind whose essence is power, “power cognitive,” power able to preserve the world as idea, though, in fact, the world may have been destroyed.

IV. MODERN POWER REALIZED

Francis Bacon … is the great forerunner of the spirit of modern life.

—John Dewey¹⁸

Bacon’s vision was fulfilled in the spectacular developments that advancing knowledge and technological innovation made possible. Beginning in the seventeenth century Western societies steadily transformed the material conditions of human existence, raising to new levels the economic lot of their populations, improving culture, education, and life expectancy; and, while inventing the concept of a “premodern” society, negated its actuality by assembly lines and mass production. Bigness, as represented in Hobbes’s titles Leviathan and Behemoth, foreshadowed modern power’s fondness for the huge and massive. In their heaviness, immobility, and fixed location, the factories of industrialized economies mirrored an economy whose power-ideal was the tangible writ large: a giant factory producing iron and steel.

In the process industrialized societies established their unsurpassed power as the identifying mark of modernity. By the end of the second millennium humankind had launched the exploration of worlds beyond its own; scientists had begun to produce life itself and to promise an era when as a matter of course it would be possible to “customize” the specific traits of vegetables and babies.

The theory and practice of modern power might be said to have reached its climactic moment at Hiroshima when, as it were, a Hume preferred the destruction of the world to scratching his itching finger and a Hobbes saw a world annihilated but mind left triumphant. Hiroshima confirmed beyond dispute that the achievements of modern power required the destruction of established practices, institutions, ways of life, and values.

More than two centuries before Hiroshima writers had begun to catalogue the social and human costs resulting from the systematic application of science and technology to the production of life’s necessities and wants. Populations were dislocated, communities and neighborhoods destroyed, local cultures undermined in order to prepare conditions congenial to modern industry. Deracination meant not only dislocation but deculturation. Not, as Schumpeter would have it, “creative destruction,” but destructive creation.

V. MODERN POWER AND ITS CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS

[After the Revolution, Jefferson warned, the people] will be forgotten, … and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and they will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.19

The social movements that transformed the political character of society were the precondition of modern power and modernity itself. Sometimes they brought constitutional forms, representative institutions, rulers accountable to democratic electorates, and guarantees of individual liberties. Other times they brought dictatorship, the suppression of political liberties, ideological and religious fanaticism, the active persecution of selected elements of society, and, at best, only a modest improvement in the economic condition of the lower strata of populations.

Political power, in its democratic impulses, was merely one of the revolutions that contributed to the phenomenon of modern power.²⁰ The others are the scientific revolution dating from the seventeenth century and the market-industrial revolution that began in the eighteenth. Unlike the political revolutions, which enlarged the number of participants, these revolutions generated elite cultures, ideologies, and modes of discourse and action that proved exclusionary of the demos or relegated the latter to positions of low reward and status. The new domain of economy theorized by Adam Smith and the classical and neo-classical economists recognized that power relationships flourished in the economy, e.g., between owners and workers, yet it emerged as a domain that, unlike religion during the Reformation or politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was never seriously exposed to democratization. There was no economic equivalent to Luther’s priesthood of all believers, Rousseau’s general will, or Paine’s popular sovereignty—even though many practitioners of the science of economics acknowledged labor to be the principal source of economic value and even referred to “labor power.” Whatever corporate solidarity “the sovereign people” might aspire to was shattered, perhaps irrevocably, by the division of labor. The political economy of modern power taught workers to be subjects of power rather than citizens.

The earliest theorists of the scientific revolution, such as Bacon and Hobbes, made it clear that scientific knowledge was beyond the capabilities of the “vulgar.” Despite calls made during the French Revolution for a “democratic science” and the principle that “new knowledge must be held in common, as are the other riches of the state,” the response was a theory of selective public education.21 Condorcet’s plan was representative. He proposed systems of selection that would classify applicants according to intellectual promise. Thus a hierarchy of the intellect could be created and a new version of aristocracy institutionalized.²² Condorcet’s plan was opposed by artisan groups, and, although it was not passed in its original form, it was an intimation of how the demos might be further depoliticized, this time by means of a meritocratic system of education that skimmed off its potential leaders and prepared them to be useful functionaries.

The scientific, economic, and political revolutions contributed distinct and vital elements to the structure of modern power. Eventually they became complicitous in it. The process by which these revolutions were integrated could not have occurred without the guidance and coordination provided by administrative bureaucracies. These helped to define and enforce the reach of modernity. The theoretical significance of bureaucracy was clearly set out in Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). According to Tocqueville’s thesis the “political revolution” of 1789 had been preceded by an earlier administrative revolution carried out under the auspices of a monarchy unaware that it was subverting its own foundations. The radical innovation in governance by which the state established bureaucracy as the mode of exercising its authority “had already caused one of the greatest upheavals that have ever taken place in the history of a great nation” and had “an incommensurable influence” upon the political revolution of 1789, causing it to assume an unprecedented form. First the state-sponsored revolution destroyed the ancient infrastructure of local authorities and replaced it with a permanent system of centralized control. It was, in effect, an early effort at political modernization that, in attempting to introduce the science of rational policy, destroyed the participatory institutions of municipal and provincial life. Centralization, far from being dismantled by the revolutionaries of the 1790s, was incorporated; and although later revolutions might “decapitate” the head of administration, “the body” “survived intact and active.”²³

The emergence of bureaucracy had an enormous impact upon the politics of modern political societies and the prospects of democratization. It introduced permanent, virtually self-perpetuating power structures designed to be independent of regimes and political parties, to be the embodiment of specialized expertise, “outside” politics. As the locus of “policy” and its formulation and implementation, administration signified one more momentous development in the separation of the citizenry from power. That development was registered in the emergence of a new political vocabulary that was striking in its contrast with the usages being invoked to characterize demotic action. Where the people were depicted as “turbulent” and “tumultuous,” as irregular, modern government was portrayed by its champions as “regular,” “efficient,” and “orderly.” In that vein The Federalist promised that the new central government would “move on uniform principles of policy” and pursue a “steady system of national policy.”24

It might seem to be straining usage to describe these various developments—scientific, technological, political, bureaucratic, and economic—as revolutions. However, all of them display effects comparable to those that are commonly associated with political revolutions. The other forms may not immediately appear as violent, yet in their own ways they overturn former habits, relationships, and convictions, and, above all, undermine established ways of life. Like political revolutions they mark a turning away from the past. The relative power of these various revolutions can be measured by a peculiarity of political revolutions. Unlike the other forms, which seem to have found the secret of self-perpetuation, modern political revolutions, whether democratic or communist, seem to lose their dynamic once they succeed.

VI. CONTAINING POWER

What is a power, but the ability or faculty to do a thing? What is the ability to do a thing but the power of employing the means to its execution?

—Alexander Hamilton²⁵

In its simplest formula, power is the ability to effect a purpose, to gain an end. The complications enter when we ask about the nature and author(s) of those ends, the means and resources to be used in realizing them, the enlisting of other powers, and the consequences likely to follow, especially the losses. The greater the unity among the powers available, the greater the temptation to mobilize them for grandiose purposes; the greater the resources called upon to achieve them, the more elaborate the organizational means, the more demanding the preconditions, and the more complex the consequences—and the losses. Obvious political questions are, how is a unity or alliance among powers achieved and how are the uses of power decided, by whom, and for what purposes—cui bono, who profits by it? who loses?

Efforts to control concentrations of great power are as old as recorded Western history. The Old Testament provides an early example involving King Solomon and his ambitious undertaking of building a temple dedicated to Yahweh, the all-powerful god of Israel. The project can be viewed as an attempt to “house” power, to contain it within a structure, and thereby solidify the identification of Yahweh, the greatest power in the world, with Israel and its king. This seems what Solomon initially had in mind: “I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever” (1 Kings 8:13). But apparently Solomon then renounces that ambition, suggesting instead that omnipotence could not be contained:

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded? (1 Kings 8:27)

As an architectural form, a temple is an enclosure of a particular shape and structure that sacralizes what occurs inside. Within the temple prayer and ritual are customary means of communing or allying with, rather than containing, the power being worshipped. Yahweh’s power was too great to be bound within a human structure, but that does not obviate the political character of the temple as a site of power-rituals whereby a community positions itself towards its universe of power—in the case of Israel, the power of its king and the ultimate power of its god.

The story of Solomon’s temple is apposite to much of Western political thought and practice. The containment of power has been a continuing theme, right down to the “iron curtain” and “containment policy” of the Western powers aimed at preventing the spread of Soviet communism after World War II.

In the history of postbiblical Western theorizing the typical solution to the problem of containing power was to establish a constitutional “framework.” The most famous and influential theorist of constitutions was, by any measure, Aristotle. In the Aristotelian view, a constitution designated the individual or group that exercised supreme authority over a political society; it identified the location of power—the power that the laws of the constitution authorized to the ruler or rulers or to various bodies (e.g., courts). But what was the source of the power authorized by the constitution? Aristotle insisted that for constitutional rule to be stable and effective, constitutional power had to adapt to and select from the extra-constitutional distribution of power in society, which meant some would be favored and others excluded. Thus an aristocratic constitution would recognize the dominant status of the aristocracy (e.g., significant wealth, noble birth, and military prowess); a middle-class constitution, such as the “polity,” would signify the presence of a large class of owners of medium-sized property, while a democratic constitution recognized the power of equality or numbers. Most revolutions were attributed to a mismatch between constitutional authority and actual social power. An excluded group controlling significant power will agitate to have its type of social power recognized in the constitution; if thwarted, it will seek to overthrow the constitution and create an appropriate form for consolidating its rule. Aristotelian constitutional theory might be defined as the attempt to encourage political stability and moderation, not by denying class rule, but by ameliorating or restraining class power by the rule of law and by “mixing” the basic elements so as to promote inclusiveness, lessen resentments, and moderate the exercise of power.

Generally speaking, mediaeval constitutional thought followed the same line. It often echoed the prevailing practice of representing classes or estates—nobility, clergy, and “commons” (roughly, a gentry plus elements of a middle class)—and emphasizing the role of statutes and customs, as well as privileges, in limiting power.26

“Constitutionalism” is a modern creation. Its theoretical debts are to Harrington, the English Levellers, Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Federalist. Its practical debts are to the revolution of the 1640s and the rebellion of 1688 in England, and to the American revolution of 1776 and the Federalist counter-movement of 1787.

The attempt of modern constitutionalism to domesticate power might be summarized in terms of “R’s:” restraints upon power, recognition or authorization of sufficient power to govern effectively, and regularization or non-arbitrariness in the actual exercise of power. The first is typically embodied in constitutional provisions (or, in the case of Britain, privileged conventions) limiting the purposes for which power may be used and specifying certain areas from which power is restrained (e.g., a constitutional bill of rights) or exercised under more stringent limitations. The second identifies what persons or bodies are legally authorized to exercise certain enumerated powers (e.g., the chief executive’s authority to propose legislation or to veto laws passed by the legislature). The third, regularization, indicates the specific forms to be observed if power is to translate into binding laws, decisions, or actions (e.g., legislative process; due process of law in criminal, civil, or administrative proceedings). The three “R’s” might be expanded by a fourth, the rituals that transmute power into authority, such as elections and coronations.

For the most part modern constitutions, especially of the post–World War II variety, were notable for avoiding overt reference to social or class power. Instead they have prided themselves on being inclusive of virtually all elements in society and denying any special prerogatives to wealth or status. At the same time, however, modern constitutionalism is the inheritor of a fifth “R,” the regulatory authority that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monarchies had first exercised to control trade, manufacture, agriculture, currency, and inventions. Regulatory authority takes the form of “policy” and of implementing rules issued by bureaucrats. It was both an early recognition of “economy” as the crucial element in national power (mercantilism) and the identification of it with the production of goods to meet the needs and stimulate the wants of the population while supplying the means for “the common defense.”

While the political theories of early modernity were exploring the rights and obligations of the citizenry, a complementary but different discourse emerged whose focal point was the general “population” and its power-potential. A mid-eighteenth-century writer formulated the new focus and indicated how modern power would fashion the demos to fit economy rather than citizenship:

Another thing which contributes to the powers of a state is the industry and talents of the different members who compose it. It follows then that to maintain, augment, and serve public happiness, one should oblige subjects to acquire the talents and kinds of knowledge necessary for the different employments to which they may be destined, and maintain among them the order and discipline which tend to the general good of society.27

In the process the political economy of modern power was created and became the object of public policies whose purpose was to promote economic growth, establish a framework of laws to promote predictability (e.g., enforce contracts), curb excesses, educate the population in necessary skills, and, sporadically, minister to casualties.²⁸ By the last quarter of the twentieth century it had become evident that the system of power represented in political economy had become not only essential to the workings of constitutionalism but its rival and, if not its master, at least its prompter.