I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power? Yet I'm perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal. I can say that this was an incapacity linked undoubtedly with the political situation in which we found ourselves. It is hard to see where, either on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed. On the Right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, and so on, that is, in juridical terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the state apparatus. The way power was exercised - concretely, and in detail - with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something no one attempted to ascertain; they contented themselves with denouncing it in a polemical and global fashion as it existed among the "other, " in the adversary camp. Where Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism; power in Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed. .Michel Foucault
About This Quote
In 1944, in a letter to his friend and biographer Jean-François Revel, the French historian and politician Raymond Aron wrote: "In my personal life, I have never had more trouble in formulating a concept of power than in the last few months of my life. My thinking has been turned upside down by this experience. I had thought that power was something that could be exercised only on a large scale - that is, on a national or international scale - and on the basis of institutions. But what took place in September was so different from anything I have experienced in my political life." [1] In an insight into the workings of the mind of a political animal who was at the epicenter of some of the most important events of his time, Raymond Aron's distinctive sense of irony is on display, as he realizes the limitations of his own understanding while pondering what might have been.
During World War II, when Aron was a founding member and then head of France's underground resistance movement, he devoted himself to breaking Nazi Germany's grip on France. In an interview with a Spanish television program in May 2000, Aron said he "did not know how to formulate" what happened during this period. He added: "I had ...
never done anything like it before." [2] Aron said he had entertained doubts about whether such an undertaking was realistic and whether Hitler's Germany would give up its war effort without a fight. "I asked myself: 'Was it possible to imagine that the Germans would surrender?' And then I realized that we did not even know if we were going to be able to carry it out." Aron said he doubted whether the government-in-exile could survive and perhaps even bring about resistance by France against Nazi Germany. "We did not really want [to lead] an army," he said.
[3] Aron also made clear that he believed his clandestine group had performed a service for France and for history by trying to sabotage Nazi Germany's war efforts and hinder its ability to win the war.[4] One key element in Aron's analysis was that power in its functioning can be exercised on different levels: national, international and individual. The crucial insight here is that there are no shortcuts in seeing how power functions and how its specific forms emerge within these different dimensions.[5] This broad approach allows us to recognize that power takes many forms at different levels. This framework also allows us
Source: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews And Other Writings, 19721977
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