Barry, Brian (1936–2009)

Brian Barry is one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years and in 2001 was made the seventh recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize in political science. In addition to his work on justice, rational choice theory, and multiculturalism, Barry wrote several essays on political power—a number of which have been reprinted in Democracy, Power and Justice: Essays in Political Theory (1989).

Barry's first contribution to the study of power was a methodological one. In the 1970s, he was one of the first political scientists to apply to the study of political power some of the analytical tools used by economists to study markets and exchange. In “Power: An Economic Analysis” (1975), he poses a series of questions about the nature of power and the relationship between having and exercising power. He says that it is his intention to “dissolve the puzzlement that such questions reflect” not through the “orthodox” linguistic approach of grappling with the nuances of meaning but through the construction of a “model designed to give insight into the processes involved.” This model, which makes use of such concepts as ordinal and cardinal utility and equilibrium, is presented for the reader through a series of 15 [Page 65]diagrams. Looked at today, the essay appears unexceptional because a number of rational choice theorists apply the methods of economics to the study of power. Barry was, however, one of the first to appreciate both the possibilities and limitations of this economic approach.

Barry's other principal contribution revolves around the distinction between power and luck. People are successful to the extent that they get the outcomes that correspond to their preferences. People are lucky to the extent that they are successful without having to do anything. The difference between people's success and their luck is their decisiveness (luck + decisiveness = success). When it is expressed in this way, decisiveness appears to be a property of individuals. Yet, Barry is also clear that there may be situations in which a group collectively brings about an outcome though no one person is decisive. If a bloc of voters always agree with each other and together constitute substantially more than a majority, then as long as each of them votes, no one member of the bloc will make any difference to the overall result even though each member of the group will always be successful.

What of political power? Power is related to but is not the same as decisiveness. The difference between the two is that although decisiveness is a probability, power is a capacity. An actor's power is his or her ability to overcome resistance—not the actor's probability of encountering and overcoming resistance. To see what is at stake here, consider the position of an omnipotent dictator. We would want to say that the dictator is powerful. But imagine a situation in which the dictator happens to live in a society in which everyone else already wants what it is that the dictator also happens to want. In such a situation, the dictator would be very lucky but completely indecisive because his or her luck would be entirely responsible for the dictator's success. If we were to equate power with decisiveness, we would then be forced to conclude that the dictator is powerless. What is missing here is the relevant counterfactual. The dictator is powerful because, even if every other person in the society had the opposite set of preferences, the dictator could still bring about the outcome he or she wanted. The important lesson to be drawn is that power is an “inherently counterfactual notion.”

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