MIT Compass
MIT Compass
How has the exercise of power changed over time?
For a transcript of this episode, click here (https://sites.mit.edu/compass/files/2025/06/Power-podcast-transcript.pdf).
In this episode, we’ll get into exercises of power and how they have changed through the ages with MIT professors from sociology and history (classical Roman history, medieval northern Europe, and early modern Atlantic capitalism).
Featuring: Susan Silbey, Professor of Sociology (host); Will Broadhead, Professor of History; Anne McCants, Professor of History; and Malick Ghachem, Professor of History.
This podcast was created as part of the MIT Compass Initiative, "21.01: Love, Death, and Taxes.” For more information about Compass, check out compass.mit.edu.
This podcast was recorded at the MIT AV Studios and produced by Adina Karp.
Welcome to "MIT Compass:
Intro Speaker 1:Thinking and Talking about Being Human," a show about exploring fundamental questions:
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:What do we value and why?
Intro Speaker 3:What do we know and how do we know it?
Professor Alex Byrne:What do we owe to each other?
Intro Speaker 2:Hosted by MIT professors from across the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, each episode takes on the moral and ethical questions of the human experience.
Professor Susan Silbey:This week, we get into questions of power and how it has changed through the ages. I'm your host today, Susan Silbey. I'm in the Anthropology department, and with me is Professor Will Broadhead:
Professor Will Broadhead:Hi there. I'm Will Broadhead. I'm an associate professor in the History faculty. I work on the ancient Mediterranean world with a particular focus on Roman Italy and the political history of ancient Rome in the Republican period, which is basically the fifth to the first centuries BCE.
Professor Susan Silbey:Thanks Will. And here with us also is
Professor Anne McCants:Hello, and thank you, Susan. My name is Anne McCants. I'm an economic historian, and I cover a fairly long chronological range, but what I really want to think about today are the Middle Ages.
Professor Susan Silbey:Thank you, Anne. And finally, we have with us Professor Malick Ghachem:
Professor Malick Ghachem:Hello, Susan, thanks for having me. I'm a historian and a lawyer. I'm a specialist in the history of Haiti in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm also very interested in legal history and constitutional law, criminal justice, and I am also a practicing lawyer even today.
Professor Susan Silbey:Well, thank you, Malick, it's really a pleasure having all three of you with me today. So the topic we're going to focus on for our conversation is power, a word we use to describe how people get what they want. It can involve force. It could be simply the threat of force. It can be persuasion or reason. It could be manipulation, where we hide our intentions. It can be deference to a request or a command by a person with authority. Our sociological concept of power is the capacity of some persons to achieve intended and foreseen effects in a relationship with others. So let's use this carefully delineated definition as a tool for our discussion and for our research in general. Unlike some of the other episodes of this series of podcasts, let's not, however, discuss the definition itself. Instead, let's discuss changes over time, which the three of you are expert at, and see how perhaps the deployment/enactment of power has transformed over the ages. I would begin with a hypothesis which the three of you might agree or disagree with. From the beginning, power has been more often the ability of bigger and stronger persons to get what they want using physical force. Today, I would suggest that we see power, not so much as force, but wielded through persuasion and authority derived from expertise or organizational positions. I'm not sure, as historians, whether you would agree, or if you would have examples that illustrate this or challenge it. Can we start by just having each of you explain a little bit more about the time periods and places that you study? Maybe, Will, you could start us off. If you had to describe either a general pattern or an example, how would you say that powerful actors achieved and enacted power in the world you study?
Professor Will Broadhead:So my main focus is on the Republic of the ancient Romans, as I said, from the fifth to the first centuries BCE, and when you get down to the later part of that period, so the third, second, first centuries BCE, before it all falls apart, that Republic actually, in many ways, looked a lot like the current American Republican system. So there's a lot that we would recognize. One distinction I would make that's certainly relevant to the comparison between the ancient Roman Republic and the contemporary American Republic is that in order to participate in the system as a powerful person, one absolutely had to be male and one had to be wealthy, not just a little bit wealthy, but very wealthy. Roman society was organized explicitly according to property classes. To run for political office and to become part of the Roman Senate, one had to belong to a super class that was 10 times as wealthy as the wealthiest of the five main classes. So these are very wealthy men. Once they begin the process of engaging in that system, however, it will look a lot like what we're used to today. So they would have to convince two audiences to give them power and let them wield it, namely the Popular Assembly, which would elect them to magistracies or not, and then their peers amongst the political elite who could either facilitate or hinder their policy and military initiatives during their terms in office. One other thing I would add to that picture is that the top two magistracies that one could run for in ancient Rome were the in the Republican period, were the praetorship and the consulship, and both of those vested the successful candidate with what the Romans called Imperium, which literally means the ability to give commands. So these were the general commanders of the Roman army. That's the most obvious context in which their Imperium came to bear. But that Imperium was also active in civic contexts, and was symbolized by the well known fasces, which is the bundle of rods and axes made probably most famous by Mussolini's adoption of the fasces as the symbol of his fascist regime. But for the Romans, the rods and the axes symbolize the power of these magistrates to carry out punishments. So corporal punishment, whipping with the rods and capital punishment, decapitation with the axes. So according to your scheme, what we have with the ancient Roman Republic is a recognizable
Professor Susan Silbey:That's a lovely illustration of the example of legitimate authority within a well-developed constitutional organization and then this nice example of what I think you called coercive authority. variety of ways in which power can be exercised. Let's ask Anne how it went after Rome.
Professor Anne McCants:Well, one of the reasons I wanted to speak about the Middle Ages today is precisely because it has the name middle because it's widely considered by historians to be transitional in many senses. And so there's a European medieval ideal of looking back to Rome and thinking that forms and institutions and organizations and values should be classical, right? They should be informed by Roman precedent. But there's a big difference, and that is really religious, right? So there's another overlay, which is Christianity and really the universal church. Because we're talking about a period prior to the so called Protestant Reformation.And so there's an expectation that there is one Christendom. So power has to be negotiated between these two really radically different forms of legitimation, we we forget how radically different they are, because we associate all things medieval with with both, right, so thoroughly. So I think you know, when we get to thinking about examples, we can, we can talk about how that tension, which is so easy for us to overlook, actually plays out in practice. But it's not enough in the Middle Ages to just be a great general. You really need to have God's imprimatur as well, and so we can think about how one gets that. And wealth certainly helps. Being a property, a landed property owner certainly helps. But it's not sufficient.
Professor Susan Silbey:So does God's imprimatur come through God's organization on Earth, the Catholic Church?
Professor Anne McCants:I mean that is that is certainly the easiest way to do it. And I mean, if I was going to give a very specific example, I might think about someone like Charlemagne, the iconic medieval emperor. So we're thinking now about the late eighth century and the early ninth century. He is actually crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the Basilica of St Peter's in Rome on Christmas day in the year 800, right, by the Pope. And so one reading of that is that it's already a mess, right? He's a Roman emperor, even though he's a Frankish king. Well, I'm going to say thug and get myself in trouble by saying that, maybe, but we have a Frankish--
Professor Susan Silbey:Why would you call him a thug?"Thug," not simply because he had an enemy across the channel and in Germany, but because he just went after groups repeatedly? What--I mean what were the Romans doing that was different?
Professor Will Broadhead:They were doing almost exactly the same thing! There was a very strong incentive for all of these men, who were eventually elected to positions where they had Imperium, which gave them the ability to command armies. They held those positions for one year at a time. There was a very strong incentive to be militarily active and successful on an annual basis. Otherwise, what do you get from your magistracy? So--
Professor Anne McCants:Yeah, so I mean, I'm letting my own values show through here, right? I don't think it's really such a great thing to spend 30 summers consecutively, you know, sort of trying to brutally, if you will, Christianize another group of people. But let me go back to Rome on Christmas day in 800 because this, this event is typically understood certainly, you know, in the kind of school book, kind of textbook you know as sort of the moment at which the spiritual realm grants political power. And what's great about the contemporary sources is how problematic that is, right? Charlemagne's biographer Einhard actually tells us that he was upset that the Pope put a crown on his head because, like, this was not the way he wanted to hold political power. And I'll just say one other thing that I think is really illustrative of the tension here. Something else that happens in the year 800 is that envoys who had been sent to the east several years prior have come back to the Italian peninsula with large gifts. It turns out that one of these large gifts is an elephant. We know the name of the elephant, Abul-Abbas, and there's a there's a lot of complicated machinations to get this elephant even unloaded from the ship, right? Because you have to have a port that's big enough to take in a ship that can carry an elephant. The elephant is eventually transported across the Alps at the appropriate seasons of the year. And we know that Charlemagne campaigned to the north with his elephant, and we know that approximately 10 years later, the elephant dies on campaign. And I'll just point out, Susan, that in the royal Frankish annals, the number of words devoted to the Imperial coronation are dwarfed by a factor of four for the number of words that are given to Abul-Abbas. And so it makes one wonder, what was more important at the moment, a papal coronation, or the gift of an elephant, which I think maybe Will can confirm, has sort of Imperial symbolism.
Professor Will Broadhead:It certainly would have symbolism of power, in the sense that for the Romans, the elephant was most closely associated with the Carthaginians and caused them all kinds of problems for many, many years, until they finally figured out how to defeat the Carthaginian army with elephants. And so then it became a kind of token of their of their triumph.
Professor Susan Silbey:We know that, by the 15th century and the rise of the Protestant Reformation, that, as the sociologist Max Weber so brilliantly wrote, God's imprimatur was demonstrated individually in each life by one's economic success. The supposed evidence that you were a good person was that you could accumulate this tribute by yourself without an army. So we move across this 14/15/16 hundred years to another kind of power by accumulating wealth, not through collective armies that you lead, but by your own individual good works in the material culture.
Professor Malick Ghachem:Which gives rise to capitalism. I mean, that's how power in capitalism is deployed, through claims about what you deserve to have and through what you do have under, you know, under a capitalist system. And you know, as Anne knows, that historians who trace the rise of the market economy are looking at the period from, you know, 1400/1500 onwards in Europe, and then the rise of of the new world empires in the Atlantic world. To tell the story about the rise of capitalism, which you know, as you say, Susan, gives you a new way of making arguments about power and exercising power in a way that involves both force and persuasion, I would say. And I think I think law. I think that's true of law as well, actually, that law has always been a kind of hybrid of claims about or the use of force and also attempts to persuade people in the name of principle Anyway, well, we're starting to get into my my interest in the Revolutionary era. But I interrupted because
Professor Susan Silbey:No, that's--
Professor Malick Ghachem:I was on my the reference to the economy struck me as a moment to sort of begin to think about about modes of organizing economic power.
Professor Susan Silbey:So as we come into the more modern, not quite contemporary, which is your terrain, Malick, we see a transformation in some sense that is quite clear in the development of capitalism, which combines conquest and work and material goods also in the name of, at least in the conquests of the New World, God. And--
Professor Malick Ghachem:Right, yes, that true, that's absolutely true. I mean, so the church is very much part of that story as well. But at the same time, I mean, by the time of the middle to late 18th century, you know, with the rise of the of the revolutions in America, France, Haiti and elsewhere, the church also begins to be displaced by other claims about how to organize a society, in particular by Democratic claims right by claims that the state should be organized not in the name of the church or around Christian principles, but in the name of secular democratic principles ;ike citizenship and freedom and equality and all the rest. And you know, it's that's the period that I'm particularly interested in. And I study the Haitian Revolution, which, you know, is a particularly interesting example of how claims about law and moral authority did and did not work in a time period when, you know, economic forces were very much driving how European states colonized the rest of the world, beginning in the Atlantic world. So you know, and ultimately, I'm kind of interested in the relationship between claims based on morality, secular morality and democratic ideals on the one hand, and claims that are based in economic interest on the other. And they're the key word, maybe there, Susan, is"claims," actually, because, I mean, and this goes to your point about transformations and power is that these are, these are assertions of power in the form of claims, right? So they, they are moves that use language. And you know, that is what is interesting to me about law as a form of power, that it is a form of language, and about about morality, which, which, which takes the form of language and requires you to use and deploy language, right? So that's kind of a point of entry.
Professor Susan Silbey:As you as a legal scholar and lawyer know, and I, as a legal scholar, know that at its base, all law is a rule about when, where, how force can be used. Every law is about that retaining as the ultimate definition that law is simply the legitimate use of force by the state where there's a monopoly. It's something we made up, in some sense, over these years to confine this use of force to only certain designated actors, others not legitimate. So tell me about a particular kind of claim that intrigues you.
Professor Malick Ghachem:Well, I'm trying to think of a kind of claim that, in fact, does not involve, as a background norm, the ability to deploy force, which I agree with you, is sort of most of law. It's certainly criminal law, it's a lot. So let me give you an example that I think may challenge that proposition. Then we can explore kind of what's the role of power and economics and ideals. I mean, there is at the--at the beginning of the French Revolution, a document is enacted by what becomes the National Assembly, which is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. And this is one of the first declarations of rights, after the American Revolutionary declarations, and it has, in one of its first provisions, all men are born free and equal in rights. Now that is an example I think of law. The reason why I say it's law is because the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was supposed to be the first step along the way towards drafting a constitution for France after the fall of the monarchy, right, in 1789, so it is conceived as part of a constitution, therefore as law. And yet it is, it is an ideal. I mean, there's really no way at that time period to kind of deploy force to enforce the claim that all men are free and equal in rights, and the people who know this better than any others are slaves and free people of color in Saint Domingue. I mean, ultimately they do have a way of trying to enforce that claim, which is, you know, the Spartacus way of doing things; you rise up. But in terms of, sort of the French kind of imperial system and law, it's a claim about, you know, the way that the world should be, and the world was not, in fact, that way, depending on how you interpret the word man. So in my view, that's an appeal to morality, to ethics. It's a form of secularized Christianity, you could say the church is being destroyed during this period, but its influence is now kind of taking different forms, according to some historians. I mean, maybe this is what is distinctive about constitutional law versus other forms of law. We can talk about that, but in any case, so that that's an example. Now, how is it actually deployed? Well, there's a leading representative of the free people of color in France named Julian Raymond, who says, Well, you guys in France are basically hypocrites, because you say that people are free and equal in rights, but you have this colony in Saint Domingue, which is what Haiti was called before Haitian independence, where, in fact, you don't apply this provision of the French Declaration of the Rights of men. So what gives, and what he's trying to do is to shame France by invoking its own principles, right? And, you know, he knows at the time that he has no way of, sort of enforcing this in any kind of military sense. It's a moral appeal, and it's trying to appeal to the power of shaming and the power of, you know, of saying "you're a hypocrite, you're applying double standards," etc, right? And at the same time, he has a kind of backup argument, which is, in case that argument doesn't work, he says, you know, "we free people of color are the only barrier between you and the slaves, and therefore the possibility of a slave revolution, so if you don't enfranchise us, good luck with the rest of it." Right? I mean, many of the free people of color were themselves slave owners, so they had themselves an economic interest in owning slaves, so he's kind of in this intermediate space. So he's got an argument from economic interest as well, which is also an argument. It takes the form of language, but it has, you know, it has a threat of your physical safety is endangered if physical force behind it, right there. So, you know, these are all, I mean, I think ultimately hybrid claims. But what all of them share is how skillfully and how effectively in the context of of your time, can you deploy language, ideals, emerging constitutional norms to to encourage change in the society that you want to see. you don't act in a certain way, like nobody can really kind of unspool that thread and figure out--and I think that's kind of what, I mean, I think that's one of the distinctive characteristics of the Age of Revolution. And you know, what's interesting to me is I'm not sure we're able to separate these things today.
Professor Susan Silbey:I was going to say exactly the same
Professor Malick Ghachem:Except that I think that the power of thing! democratic ideals to shame people. It seems to me that I, as I look at the world that we live in today, it seems to me that power is fading a bit, or at least that's my worry that it's fading a bit, so...
Professor Anne McCants:So if I, if I could jump in with another wrinkle. So listening to Malik talk about, essentially, hypocrisy and the potential power of calling out hypocrisy to deal with situations where you don't have power. And I think, I think Will has already alluded to this as well, right? The the the family member who only knows about war from the history books, whereas I've actually lived it. But you know, it's, I'm thinking about a movement like the Franciscans, right, which sort of look at very wealthy traditional monasticism and say, "Wait a minute, Christian values are about poverty and supporting the downtrodden, and so we're going to go about barefoot, we're going to preach out in the open. We're going to renounce our possessions. We're not going to have gold and silver chalices in gorgeous buildings and silk robes" and so on and so forth. And the church hierarchy has to really think about, "do we suppress these guys, or do we embrace them?" And this is again, a case where we're so used to the Franciscans, and we even have a Pope Francis at the moment, we're so used to them being somehow iconically Catholic that it's hard for us to imagine that there was a moment in which it could have gone the other way, and they might have been declared anathema, to some extent like the early Protestants, who were hoping not to be in revolution, but instead to be in the reform business. And so I think these kinds of moments of contestation of the bases of your power, right? And there, ironically, there's some power in poverty too, because, you know, because it's embarrassing to have these guys going around barefoot and calling out the church, right for what it's become. So sorry to interrupt.
Professor Susan Silbey:No, I think that's right on target, and I think that sort of brings us to the contemporary moment, which has already been alluded to several times. Where are we at a time, could we say, looking across these 2500 years from which we began, and agree with Frenchman de Tocqueville saying that the course of history is the course toward democracy. Or, as you say, are we in a moment where this is, this ideal, this aspiration, which, by the way, we all know that this year, more human beings on the face of the earth--I don't recall the exact number--went to vote in elections in their countries. This year, the largest number ever of human beings. So that might suggest that democracy is not simply aspirational, but it's being implemented, if imperfectly, if slowly. So hard for us to judge where we are in history and in which direction it bends.
Professor Will Broadhead:Am I allowed to chime in and challenge that a little bit--
Professor Susan Silbey:Of course, of course.
Professor Will Broadhead:--by making the case for this phenomenon being cyclical----and not being a long linear
Professor Susan Silbey:Oh, okay. development. One starting observation I would make is that a lot of historical and contemporary what we would distinguish as dictatorships were elected dictatorships. So you could call them democratic, strong men. You know, Julius Caesar is effectively the same as, you know, name your favorite contemporary strong man. And so where are you going to draw the line between a democratic regime and one that has concentrated too much power in the hands of one person with the consent of the governed for it still to count as a as a democracy? So I think, you know, taking, taking the Roman example, as I said off the top, there are moments when studying the Roman Republic, where one really feels the parallels. I mean, there's some of the similarities are so striking that you think this is, we're just repeating ourselves, you know, mutatis mutandis and so on those grounds, I think I would make the case that these things are, in the long run, cyclical. I very much appreciate that, and probably agree. To wrap up our session, perhaps we can conclude, as many of these sessions have, with each one of you telling about an artwork, be it a book, a musical composition, a piece of visual art, that was your favorite, or perhaps influential to you in college, as you were becoming what you have become.
Professor Will Broadhead:So one of my favorite classes in college, because it didn't feel much like a class, was an art history class on Baroque art in 17th century Rome, and one painting that really stuck with me at the time, and that sort of won me over to the rewards that one gets from spending a long time looking very closely at a piece of art, was Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus, which is based on a great story from the gospel, where three days after the crucifixion of Jesus, two of his disciples are walking along the road to Emmaus, and a guy walks up to them, and they don't recognize him, so they start chatting with him, isn't it a shame that Jesus has been crucified, et cetera, et cetera. And then they sit down to dinner at a little tavern, and he reveals himself as the risen Jesus. And so the two disciples are sort of surprised and shocked, and Caravaggio captures this in a beautifully human, natural, humble way. And you feel like you're sitting there at the table with the three men, the way in which he captures the surprise of the two disciples as they sort of jump out of their chairs and spread their arms. It's sort of an act of painterly virtuosity. Also just amazing. It's sort of magical that he can capture that kind of explosive excitement at the revelation in that moment. Anyway, so that stuck with me for a long time and encouraged me to look very closely at that and other works of art from that point on.
Professor Susan Silbey:Anne?
Professor Anne McCants:Well, I'm gonna stick with the art theme, I think. As a child, I had grandparents who lived just outside of Washington, DC, and did not believe in fans or air conditioning or any of those lovely amenities, and so my strategy for hot summer visits was to flee downtown to the free museums as early in the day as possible and not return until the museums had thrown me out. And I spent a lot of time at the National Gallery, and that's where I discovered the very quiet, not dramatic, domesticated, if you will, painting of the Low Countries and and I think probably still to this day, one of my favorite paintings is of a sort of unidentified spot along a riverbank with a windmill by Ruisdael. And that is what actually inspired me to venture off, to not, not to study the either the landscape, the geography, or indeed, the painting of the of the Dutch Republic, but its economy. Not quite sure how that connection got made, but that has, it's a very different kind of painting than what Will has just described, but it pulled me in.
Professor Susan Silbey:Malick, your piece?
Professor Malick Ghachem:Well, I'm having a tough time deciding between two books. It's, that's sort of my, my lifetime quandary here. But I mean, when I was in college, I wrote a senior thesis about Montesquieu and a novel that he wrote called The Persian Letters, which is it was basically making fun of--and fun is the right word here--of Louis the 14th and French absolutism by telling the story of these two imaginary Persian travelers to France. And it's all about kind of hypocrisy and analogy and metaphors and double standards and all the rest. So that book was very influential, but but another book that I read around the same time, and which helped me with that project, and which I still think about today, is a much more contemporary novel by Salman Rushdie called Haroun and the Sea of Stories. So this is a book that he wrote, you know, after the Satanic Verses was was banned, there was a fatwa from the Iranian regime and and Salman Rushdie wrote this kind of parody of that whole situation for for young people, and he called the bookHaroun and the Sea of Stories. And one of the key figures is a storyteller. And basically his, his his theme is that telling stories is how we resist, how we exist, how we how we survive under authoritarian regimes and so on. But it's, it's just, it's a wonderful book about language and storytelling, and one that I recommend to students even today, because, I mean, I think, and even at a place like MIT, so much of the life that you will live is about how you tell stories, even in the world of technology or science, and how you how effectively you can use language, going back to our earlier discussion, like, I think that that's a big part of life and of how power is exercised even today. So great book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
Professor Susan Silbey:Well, thank you, Malick. So my art object related to power is the painting by Pablo Picasso called Guernica. It is a horrific painting in many ways. It is black, white, gray, no primary colors of Guernica in Spain, which was bombed by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War in the 30s. It was important to me, not at the time when I first encountered it as a would-be social scientist and sociologist of law and power, but it represented my freedom, because my family didn't allow me to leave Brooklyn and cross the bridges and on the subways to Manhattan, and when I was finally allowed as an adolescent to go into the big city, I went to the Museum of Modern Art. And in those days, it was so chock full of paintings, it was a much smaller building, and the paintings literally started from the floor and were stacked up on the walls, and there was no one wall, one painting or thing, and it was just chock full of paintings. But when you got to the room where Guernica was, it was such an enormous painting, and you couldn't really get any distance to get a whole view of it, that I spent a lot of time trying to decipher this painting. And it perhaps was the moment of transformation of this, you know, little naive to the would be scholar. And so that's my piece of art. And I thank you very much for joining this conversation about power.
Professor Will Broadhead:Thank you.
Professor Anne McCants:Thank you.
Professor Malick Ghachem:Thank you, Susan.
Intro Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to "MIT Compass: Thinking and Talking about Being Human."
Intro Speaker 1:We hope you'll check out other episodes at compass.mit.edu
Intro Speaker 3:This podcast was created as part of the MIT
Compass Initiative, "21.01:Love, Death, and Taxes."
Intro Speaker 1:This podcast was recorded at the MIT AV studios
Intro Speaker 2:And produced by Adina Karp.