Morriss, Peter

Peter Morriss is one of the most important contemporary analytic theorists of power. His book, Power: A Philosophical Analysis, first published in 1987 and reprinted in 2002 with a substantial new introduction, has set the standard in careful analytic scrutiny of the concept of power. Morriss's approach differed from others in four main ways. The first was in paying more attention to how the word power is used in ordinary language. Second (and connected to the first), Morriss was asking why we have concepts of power: what jobs do we want such a concept to do? The third was to explore more extensively the relevant literature in analytic philosophy on how we can explicate such concepts. The fourth was to link all this with the more mathematical—and hitherto rather separate—literature on voting power. Thus Morriss's book was the first that attempted to produce an account of power that combined the insights of disciplines as diverse as analytic philosophy, social science, and mathematics.

This methodology led to a way of thinking of the concept of power different from that prevalent at the time. First, it led to focusing on power as the power of an actor to do something, rather than the power an actor had over another. Second, it interpreted power as a dispositional term: that is to say, that a power was something that could be exercised, rather than something that necessarily was exercised. Such dispositional terms had been extensively explored in analytic philosophy, particularly in philosophy of science; Morriss drew on these discussions, and developed them so as to create a coherent account of explicitly human powers.

His work has important negative and positive aspects. He has produced a critical analysis of many problems that exist in the literature on power. He has discussed the exercise fallacy—the fallacy of confusing the holding of power with its exercise. (And points out in his new preface that the crude way Foucault apparently commits this error in English-language versions of his work is based on poor translation.) He discusses the vehicle fallacy, which is to confuse the power of an agent with the resources available to a person to exercise his or her power. He expertly and nontechnically discusses many of the power indices and shows how inferences sometimes made from them are fallacious. These essentially negative attributes are important in their own right and justify a careful reading of his book, not least to ensure that readers do not commit these sorts of errors themselves. On the other hand, however, he gives a positive account of what power is. In doing so he covers a lot of ground and demonstrates how difficult it is to conceptualize power. He discusses the nature of counterfactual analysis and suggests that some versions of doing counterfactuals lead us astray. He briefly discusses the relationship between power and freedom, and importantly argues that the context in which we discuss power is important to our analysis of it.

Morriss defends two major ideas in his book. First, while power over and power to are both valid and important conceptions of power, it is power to that is fundamental. He makes clear in the text, and emphasizes in the 2002 preface, that at times what we are interested in when doing social research is power over. However, power over depends for its meaning upon the logically prior concept of power to. In mainstream analytic approaches to power, that view is now largely accepted. Second, Morriss defends the idea of an agent's power to do x in terms of the agent's ability to do x. This might seem straightforward, almost trivial; it might seem obvious that an agent's power to do something consists in his or her ability to do it. But, after all, analytic conceptual analysis will produce analyticity. What is important in analytic method is the subtlety of the analysis; here Morriss provides a key distinction between ability and [Page 428]ableness, and hence power-as-ability and power-as-ableness. He argues that when discussing power we need to put it into context. We need to understand the generic abilities of people—that is, claims about what people could do if certain conditions obtain. Whether those conditions do obtain at any given time is irrelevant to generic abilities. Ordinarily we think of people's powers as their ability when standard conditions obtain, and those standard conditions are understood by convention. Ablenesses are those things that someone could do when conditions actually obtain. Here what people can do when those conditions do not obtain is irrelevant. Ablenesses considered generically are taken to be when usual conditions obtain; it is an empirical matter about what are usual conditions. These are deep and subtle distinctions and require close scrutiny and study to fully comprehend.

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