Sir Christopher Clark - 'Power' - QMUL Public History Unit - Full Talk

[Music] I'd like to you to welcome you to the second public history unit talk of this academic year entitled how with Christopher Clark before I start I'd also like to remind again to tweets to very another competition at QM underscore PA q with your thoughts hashtag PA to power for chance to win one of these man's fine books signed and before we started also like to thank singly omnipresent and dedicated team of the public history in it namely Joe Doran who's just snuck in here samo most as well and Patrick Higgins all the way at the back there to name a few who have been absolutely fantastic and putting these events on I'd also like to thank school of history for hosting this event tonight jr. Jackson as well unfortunally here and those of us who do history know how busy he is and if you're not here just to the art of wine reception then I'm going to tell you a bit about this man right here born in Sydney he was educated at Sydney Grammar School between 1972 and 1978 the University of Sydney after that were in the studied history between 1985 1987 he studied at the friar University Berlin the receipt of PhD at the University of Cambridge having been a member of Pembroke College from 1987 to 1991 professor of modern history right now at Cambridge and since 1990 has been a fellow of some captains college in 2003 he was appointed a university lecturer in modern European history and in 2006 a reader in modern European history this canvas university professorship in history followed in Oh 8 and in 2014 he succeeded Richard Evans as Reedus professor of history at Cambridge and in 2015 he was knighted in the Birthday Honours on the recommendation foreign secretary for services to anglo-german relations as for his work his first book was the study of the relationship between Christians and the Jewish minority in Prussia - yeah 17:28 in 1941 they published a study of cards will hunt 2nd 2004 the Longman's Pearson series profiles in power today since then he has published various articles and essays and related subjects in 2004 he co-edited wolf Kizer of the university of portsmouth an editor volume about the club become between Catholic and secular social forces the polarized so many European states in the year 1815 to 1819 professor Sir Christopher Cox research interests are centred on the history of 19th century Germany and continent of Europe his books include across iron Kingdom the rise and down pull of Prussia 1600 1947 a highly respectable book and one that received much critical acclaim including the Wolfson Prize to history another one of his books which is on tonight as you can see The sleepwalkers how you went to war in 1914 2012 which won the LA Times Book Prize in history in 2013 beating professor Julian Jackson school of history option from this one sopia I may have about him too much but without further ado I like to welcome our speaker for this evening wonderful Sir Christopher Clark thank you thank you very very much for those kind words of introduction is this working by the way good is which is the subject of my lecture this evening is at once the most ubiquitous the most ever-present and also the most elusive theme of historical writing and thinking questions of power lie at the center of most historical narratives whether avowedly so or not yet the concept is rarely interrogated or analyzed by the historians who use it or work with it there are studies that aim to clarify the differences between various types of power financial power persuasive power normative power military power coercive power it depends on which theorist you're looking at they divide the salami up into different numbers of slices but these sorts of studies tend to be written not by historians but by sociologists or political scientists and no consensus on definitions has ever been reached or at least not to my knowledge even in the field of political and diplomatic history where you would think power is really of the very at the very center of historians concern the term is mostly deployed as a transparent signifier whose meaning requires no further or separate elucidation by contrast with gender say or culture power has never provided the kind of focal point for a sub disciplinary foundation that might have licensed a concerted theoretical and comparative engagement with the problem of power across the full spectrum of historical practice so that we have gender studies and cultural studies but there is no such thing as power studies if you look up power studies on the internet you get something like this why is this so well the reason may lie partly in the nature of power itself it is as Thomas Bou saw a medieval historian or he's not a MIDI with his join as a historian of the Middle Ages has put it it is so conceptually vast and so inscrutably inflated that one instincts it instinctively seeks to pluralize the word rather than power power is not an identity that can be said doing here in groups or individuals rather it expresses a relational state of affairs powers thus neither a substantive entity nor an institution nor is it even a possession but rather it's an attribute of the relationships within which it's exercised and it was in recognition recognition of this feature of power that the most influential and I think also the profoundest post-war theorists on power Michel Foucault chose not to treat power under a separate rubric so there is no book by Foucault called you know The Adventures of power or power in all its varieties he chose instead to embed his reflections in an analysis of a specific institutional and disciplinary contexts and practices from this perhaps flows the difficulty of power as an object of synoptic historical thought or contemplation because the relationships within which it makes itself felt are as varied as the entire field of human experience as a purely relational concept it's often difficult to localize and this may help to explain the perennial debates that have fought across academic history over the extent of the power wielded by specific institutions or persons I'll be coming back to this in a few minutes but think of the debate over how much power someone like Hitler Hitler wielded within even within a system as concentrated as the as that of the Third Reich at the very least these debates about the amount of power located in a particular person or institution suggests a persistent uncertainty about how and where one should place power in complex systems and whether it's exercise depends more this is another perennial debate upon coercion the coercion of the governed by the governors or the consent of those over whom power is supposedly wielded the bundling of meanings within the idea of power is another problem power and influence they're often used interchangeably are of course not necessarily synonymous hence what the international relations theorist Robert Keohane call the cruel and ridiculous paradox of the influence of small allies he was thinking of the of the sort of disproportionate influence wielded over American foreign policy by a relatively small state like the State of Israel the boundaries between power and authority are also often blurred despite the fact that there's a long European tradition of theorizing the relationship between secular and priestly Authority in terms of the distinction between potestas or sort of raw power and octo itas or authority on the other hand making sense of power has thus often involved disentangling the various different kinds of asset that may be invoked to sustain it so in my lecture this evening I'm not going to try to chart chronologically the evolution of historical power studies because no such field exists I'm not going to categorize the various ways in which historians have deployed the term power because I doubt you'd still be conscious at the end of the hour if I did rather I want to look very briefly at some of the configurations in which the operations of power have attracted the attention of historians the powers and superpowers of the International System power and the plural power and personal Dominion the power of States the ultra concentration of power and the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century its place in pluralist democratic systems and its supposed diffusion in the era of what's sometimes called late capitalism but I'm also aware that power is not a reality external to the historical sources that documented it's not that power is out there and we have sources here that can help us to understand that thing out there the sources that historians use are themselves often artifacts of power many of the archives historians labor in are in fact and anybody who's worked in an archive will know exactly what I mean they are fossilized remnants of once powerful bureaucracies and archiving practices are often sort of fossilized versions of the record-keeping practices of what may be defunct or simply bureaucracies whose you know current business is conducted elsewhere and historians themselves are not immune the attractions and repulsions of power so bearing that in mind I want to close then with some brief thoughts on the subject of how the Opera of the operations of power work upon the writing of history okay so the rise and fall of States and the struggle for power among them is the oldest theme of historical narrative until well into the early modern era it was conventional to think of world history as a sequence of hegemonies starting with the Babylonians then moving on to the Persians often grouped together with the Medes the Greeks and then the Romans and so on and this way of structuring world history clung on in at least in the Western European tradition in part because it was believed to be sanctioned by Biblical prophecy and I'm referring here to an extraordinary episode in the Book of Daniel now I'm sure this won't be necessary here tonight but if I were giving this lecture to Cambridge undergraduates out at this point have to stop and explain to my audience that the Book of Daniel is part of another book called the Bible and that this extraordinary book and a composite text written over many centuries documents the the behavior and the doings of a person called God I don't have to do that tonight but in any case the Book of Daniel opens with a scene involving King Nebuchadnezzar and there's a sort of an eye of Onyx showing the king with his true name was being Nabu Kaduri osore a king of the neo-babylonian empire king nebuchadnezzar ii incidentally who reigned from 605 BC until 562 BC 43 years in all so this is a long reign especially by the standards of the ancient world today has mainly known both for building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and for besieging Jerusalem and destroying its temple so his career was you know a kind of weird mix of the Chelsea Flower Show and Operation Desert Storm the Book of Daniel recalls a morning in the second year of M Nebuchadnezzar's reign after the sacking of the city of Jerusalem there's an event which incidentally triggers or kicks off the so-called Babylonian captivity of the Judeans a great sort of myth that mythopoeic moment in the history of the people of Israel the children of Israel the King wakes up in the second year of his reign disturbed by a dream he can't find rest he summons his wise men it's there described in the Bible as the astrologers and the sorcerers and the Chaldeans now I'm meant to Wikipedia are meant to look up Chaldeans on Wikipedia and find out who they are forgotten they're always around I mean you've always got these astrologers the doctors the sorcerers the soothsayers and then the Chaldeans but never really knows why they're there but anyway they appear they all appear and they asked the King to describe the dream you know so you can imagine they turn up confident these are the holders of bureaucratic expertise they turn up of that day of that era they turn up and they say okay this is the kind of thing we can do right tell us about your dream and we'll interpret it for you but the King can't tell him about his dream he says I can't do that it's going to be much less easy than you think the thing is gone from me right now you've all had that feeling right that the thing is gone we don't know exactly what it is but it's just gone that's the the King it's a mournful acknowledgement he can't remember this dream it's gone from him they're going to have to tell him what his dream was at this point the mood in the room plummets and the wise men who are now not feeling very wise try as gently as they can to break the news that their transferable skills impressive as they are do not include reading the minds of sleeping kings and they say to him it's by the way that below at the picture below is a sort of a Babylonian email of the kind that wise men used to communicate with each other it's a rare thing they say that the King requires and there is none other that can show it before the king except the gods whose dwelling is not with flesh so they say not only can we not tell you this thing there's nobody on earth who can give you this information you're requiring beneath the Gorda the embroidered sorcerers gowns the perspiration is beginning to flow the wise men start nervously touching their beards it's a sort of babylonian thing and one can see why because a moment later the King says if ye will not make known an to me the dream with you can see his a scary-looking guy right there he is in stern if the if you will not make known unto me the dream with the interpretation thereof you shall be cut in pieces and your houses shall be made a dunghill the RG Bhadra continues but the thrust of the Kings position is already clear you guys are a waste of space what are you for why do I pay you and then comes the climax I ordered that tomorrow every wise man in my kingdom should be executed this is babylons Michael Gove moment this Empire has had enough of experts ok so the Kings the King's order the King's order for obvious reasons stirs consternation among those who are shocked to learn of it is a young Jewish captive in effect a prisoner of war by the name of Daniel a man of noble birth but he's very young he's probably of undergraduate age 1920 perhaps 18 the book records that Daniel speaks well to one of the palace guards now this is a feature done and he's he's he's eloquent he speaks well he's good at sort of you know winning people to his cause so he asks the guard he says what's up with the king I mean he says something like what aileth the king the the guard replied the garlics and translating loosely here from the Aramaic the guard explains he tells him about the dream the debacle with the wise men and so on so forth Daniel is undaunted he says can you get me some face time with the NEB the guard says ok but I warn you he's he's very upset Daniel goes to his friends he said dennis's that's what that's fine just get me to into his into his chamber tomorrow morning he then goes to his friends where he shares a sort of apartments three guys called Hananiah Mishael and Azariah guys he says that's pray to God for insight let's and these are the words of the King James Version let's desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret now interesting interesting enough he doesn't say let's pray to God to tell us what the dream was he says let's desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning the secret the next morning he goes to the king he explains the dream framing it not just as a nasty nocturnal experience but as a prophetic revelation o king he says their thoughts came into their mind upon their bed what should come to pass Hereafter and he that revealeth secrets maketh known to thee what shall come to pass so this is the language of prophecy and then comes the dream itself the King Daniel says had beheld in his dream a massive colossal figure this great image whose brightness was excellent stood before thee and the form thereof was terrible its head was of gold as brilliant as the Sun its breasts and arms were of silver its belly and thighs were of bronze its feet were of iron and in part of clay and what does it mean the King asked him great relief here for Daniel I mean at this point Daniel is presumably thinking thank God he's accepted this dream as the dream that he's had so he says thou o king up this heart of gold at his head of gold he says thou o King at this head of gold for wheresoever the children of men dwell the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given unto thine hand and hath made thee ruler over them all now you have to admit Daniel is handing this handling this situation brilliantly the king wants to know more and what about the silver breasts after the golden age of Nebuchadnezzar whose luster will never be out Shaun Daniel continues will come a lesser age of mere silver and then an even lesser age merely of bronze and then will come a really crap age of just iron and clay when men shall fight men and kings shall fight kings and in the days of these kings he says shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed so then history will be over the Kings reaction to all this is extraordinary here's an image from a sort of rather insipid gospel website the Kings reaction to all this is extraordinary then the King Nebuchadnezzar this is the most powerful man in the world incidentally then the King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and worshipped Daniel and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet odours unto Him now there are some further complications in this story Daniel's relationship with the King later unravels a bit there's a scary encounter with Lions which I'm not going to go into now Nebuchadnezzar's mood swings get worse there he is depicted by by Blake on a really bad day during a seven-year stint that he spent living with beasts in caves so things aren't you know it's not it's not all smooth sailing right but the the Book of Daniel records various further dreams and visions and Daniel gets into other hotspots but it's hard to overstate the importance of this opening scene for our theme this evening first it's a butyl beautiful and subtle fable on power the most powerful man in the world is powerless before his night terrors the holders of bureaucratic power the experts failed to come up with a solution and thus forfeit their power and indeed even their lives though it's important to note Daniel being a sort of kind-hearted youth the first act he does when he's been appointed Viceroy after Nebuchadnezzar goes down on his face before him the first thing he does is to declare that this order that the wise wise men across the kingdom will be executed is to be rescinded and indeed it is so the hold is a bureaucratic power forfeit their power and even potentially their lives and into this fraught constellation steps someone with no power at all a right las' alien a prisoner of war a captive from a destroyed City the jury is still out on whether God actually told Daniel the Kings dream or whether the young man didn't simply possess the human in sight remember he desired of God mercies as to this secret but it seems to me highly likely that what God gave him or what he possessed was insight enough human insight to understand the true nature of the Kings predicament what could a man as powerful as Nebuchadnezzar possibly fear other than his own mortality and how better to reconcile him with that terrible certainty than to establish his eternal primacy over the rest of human history the rest of human endeavor while at the same time imparting to the king something Daniel had himself learned as the son of a destroyed City a piece of wisdom namely that power is always temporary this book or rather this episode in the Book of Daniel laid the foundation for a way of thinking about the history of the world as the unfolding of a prophesied sequence of powers a sequence of empires of world hegemonies a vision that remained hugely influential well into the early period and still wields profound influence in the world of rapture websites and tele millenarian and here's a sample from a rapture website showing the the Colossus that the King saw in his dream starting at the Babylonian Empire then media Persia moving on to the Greeks and the Romans and then we have the end times they're just coming along quite soon so you start with babylon babylon ancient babylon there's the hang of the famous Hanging Gardens and there's a Babylonian bull then you have the Medes and the Persians you know the Persians well we know who the Persians are and they're still you know very much alive and kicking today we don't hear so much from the means I don't can't not very expert on what happened to them but anyway that's a rare photograph of some Romans and there is the Book of Daniel again from a rapture website I warn you you know you're welcome to go to these rapture wares at websites but I'd stay away from them if you have an allergy to nuts anyway Daniels prophecy imagined in other words world history before it had even happened as a sequence of powers a sequence of a gamma knees and the grip of this vision really only began to weaken when the Saxon political theorist Samuel poof endorphins are German scholars began to argue in the 17th century that the era of the Romans was over and it might seem odd that it took people until the 17th century to realize that the Roman Empire had finished but the reason people thought it hadn't was because they lived in something called the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and was widely believed or claimed that this Holy Roman Empire was in effect a continuation of the Roman times and in fact there are enthusiasts of these rapture sites who take the view that the the Roman Empire is still in place until at the moment because it's in place in the form of the EU so there are those who take them end of the anti-crisis room so there we have Samuel poof and off now for what poof and off put so poof and off denied that the Holy Roman Empire was in fact a continuation of the old Roman Empire he said you know it's just a logo right this makes it makes us sound good that we call ourselves Roman it's in fact got nothing to do with ancient Rome so he took a sensible pragmatic line on that and he was supported by numerous other scholars and this became the kind of Orthodox view for what what mattered for poof and off about history was not the diachronic sequence of Empires unfolding longitudinally as it were with the passing of time but rather the synchronic simultaneous relations between empires existing with us within the same envelope of time so there was what made what drove history was not some sort of prophesied sequence through time but rather the interaction between powers in the same time expressed in alliances conflicts Wars and of course one thing about these interactions was that they were not for ordained they were not prophesied and their outcome was unpredictable all conflicts have unpredictable outcomes and of course once you separated this story about what drove history from biblical prophecy then the history of powers could unfold under the rubric of disruption and change history could become a story of continued the continual iteration of new states of affairs brought about by conflict and this is a an idea of what history is that we in this room have all inherited and yet the habit of imagining history as a succession of Empires has been hard to shake in the so-called Age of Empires thus we've always been told in textbooks and so on the the the duds acceded to the Spanish and the Portuguese and the English and the French succeed into the Dutch and then the British beat the French so then it was the era of British Empire and the Pax Britannica may have looked like a sort of modern repetition of its Roman predecessor but even British hegemony which was on a scale at that point on unmatched by any previous Empire did not survive what Henry Luce called the American Century and of course today we have a situation of American hegemony with a sort of gap in military potency between America and its nearest rival which is greater than in any other point in human history and from this arises one of the central questions posed by US political scientists namely whether the United States whose relative lead in terms of military powers I've said is unprecedented will succeed in the medium and longer term in maintaining its leadership position if all these other hegemonies were temporary what about the American one and of course there's a lot of concern about that now and in this context has been a lot of interest in something called soft power a form of legitimacy generated by the dominant states association with the universalistic culture in other words instead of power based on tanks and missiles and so on power based on liberal or multilateral engagement with other states attractive values attractive cultural products Hollywood coca-cola you name it soft power is important the former US Secretary of State Joseph Nye has argued because it aims to bestow legitimacy upon the external projection of power and legitimacy is precisely what's often lacking when powerful states seek to apply force beyond their own borders projecting power in an environment where the locals don't want it or don't accept it has turned out and this is a lesson that many humans have had to learn to be an enterprise fraught with difficulty the historian Arthur Schlesinger recalled the greatest join of the Kennedy presidency and the great associate of Johnson great staffer at the White House recalled that at the height of the Vietnam War president lyndon b johnson and i quote found it viscerally inconceivable that what the economists Walt Rostow kept telling him was the greatest power in the world could not dispose of and this is of course Denis Johnson's words of a collection of nightriders and black pajamas so power in these contexts depends upon a paradoxical intertwining of coercion and consent no matter how many carrier groups you have and how many smart missiles and and even drones it's very hard to reject power without some measure of legitimacy and thereby consent not all power is governmental of course but the emergence and or decline of governments and later of state executives as the holders of a monopoly of legitimate violence that's the phrase the you know charismatic phrase of Max Weber has been one of the Central European stories about power it's a very dominant story in our discipline power can concentrate in government's in states and bureaucracies but it can also disperse again the French medievalist Georg do be described how the encompassing structures of the Carolingian Empire broke apart into ever more localized entities centered on the fortifications and military might of people called caste lands men who controlled castles soldiers and horses there you see that the Catalan fanciful modern representation one but you can see the difference in the type of power is he you have officials who have Latin titles you have written law and it was sort of resembling almost a constitution you have public ceremonies and so on here you just have this guy saying you looking at me mate like that sir oh no where you live it's that sort of situation and the argument being that as power broke up and got devolved down to these more localized power holders it's cut its character changed its exercised became less public more closely associated with the relationships of proprietorship it took on more aggressive and more exploitative more in-your-face forms but this period of fragmentation was followed according to some scholars at least by the rise in turn of new forms of government and here we have Lauren set these allegory of good government in Siena we need not concern ourselves with the details of these arguments or with the scholarly controversy over their veracity which is immense as you can imagine but more important from my point of view this evening is the underlying logic of the narrative power is in flux it disperses it becomes localized and in doing so it changes its character then it's refocus refocused on a higher plane and these changes help to explain why power is constantly obliged to legitimate itself anew the very expert expectation that power should have to legitimize itself implies as the job as the historian of Germany David Saban has observed that the idea that power should legitimate itself implies that it is in some sense always arbitrary come in I've only halfway through implies that in some sense always arbitrary that it's exercise requires justification or perhaps masking many medieval scholars would have agreed they took the view this was the norm of you in fact the dominant view among early medieval and high medieval moralists they would have they what they took the view that institutions of dominium of human power other humans were a thing of the devil rooted in the sinfulness the fallenness of man insisting on the godliness or virtue of the prince was one way around this problem they're not as especially good one but it's striking that the most influential early modern theorists of legitimacy namely Machiavelli in particular Thomas Hobbes reframed the problem of legitimacy deriving it not from the personal characteristics the personal traits godliness virtue of goodness of the Prince but from the functional utility of sovereignty as an agency as an institution as a guarantor of order and social peace I mean whether here's the Leviathan who I must say it seems to me is rather similar to the ghastly Colossus that poor old Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream or that Daniel persuaded him he'd seen in his dream but I mean whether or not this massive creature composed of millions of other human beings whether or not he's a nice person where he stands on animal welfare issues whether he pays his television license or not these are not questions are important what matters is does he keep the peace and and is he necessary to keep the peace even an ear is marked by the concentration of power and states uncertainty remains about how exactly power is distributed given that relations of power so often masked or have masked and do masked relations of interdependency we think of the late 17th and 18th centuries in particular in European history as an age of absolutism that's a term that has really not gone away yet the term absolutism remains controversial and faint in fact there's a book called the the myth of absolutism by Nick Nicholas Henshaw which argues that it is exactly that a myth that the that absolutism describes something it isn't actually there it's a piece of propaganda even under louis xiv one could argue the state was still very small Kings still needed the support and know-how a provincial elites not to mention their patronage networks if Peter the Great of Russia attacked and undermined the privileges of the old Russian nobility Catherine the Great his successor but not quite one reversed the polarities of the state building process handling power back to the nobilities moving it back free provincial izing it moving it back into the into the localities even after successive generations of Hohenzollern monarchs had eroded the eroded and worn away the foundation of provincial aristocratic power in the Prussian provinces the political life of the Kingdom of Prussia was still marked by what one German historian volcano Guevara has called a corporate latency a semi concealed or a semi hidden form of aristocratic provincial governance and the concentration of power through processes of state building absolutist or otherwise whether we want to use that term or not is not a uniquely European phenomenon in China one scholar has suggested the state structure endured through the centuries precisely because successive generations of rulers of emperors succeeded in forging an alliance with local power holders that was what made the imperial power so strong and so enduring but the relationship between the imperial center and the periphery changed markedly over time as local chieftains especially in the non-han chinese peripheral areas of the empire but in other areas too gradually accumulated more and more power to themselves sucking it away from the center but then along came the young gen emperor who came to the throne in 1723 resolved to do resolve to do away with these local chieftain seize his vision of the state as a centralized entity was offended by the imposition of native Chiefs between himself and some of the people he thought of himself as an unmediated ruler of all of his subjects he didn't want middlemen in Japan the Tokugawa Shogunate ruled two provincial potentates known as the daimyo who gradually acquired increasing independence and here again is this familiar dialectic the daimyo in the locale he's started up there's dr. Gellman Sakuni who was also he was the third son of jehoiada fusa and he was the second dime you of the meet or domain these the daimyo that the the the shotguns got weaker and weaker the die Muse got stronger and stronger in the end you had a kind of multitude of little Japan's with their own coinage their own customs their Amin their own taxes and and and customs and in other words a sort of complete breakdown as they sucked power out of the center of the Shogunate and accrued it to themselves and some scholars have argued paradoxically that it was precisely these growing limitations to show gonna rule that explained the longevity of the Tokugawa dynasty it hang on precisely because it was weak at the center and because power was franchised out in a way that from some perspectives was actually very efficient the state of course is not the only show in town there have been non-state environments one interesting one which has been a lot of interesting recently has been the American West a temporary non-state environment on the fringes of the sort of Imperial expanding or other expanding colonial state of modern America another is Mexico there's been very interesting work on how the power of the Mexican state throughout much of the history of that state Peters out once you raise the altitude if you go up into hills or mountains the state's power is scarcely felt so power and altitude exist in a direct ratio with each other why should the nineteenth-century ball of what's now central nigeria why should they have established a state nobody and never seen as he threatened them there was no pressure on them to create state like institutions so they didn't they had one of the most decentralized systems of human sort of community management known to history of course and this this phenomenon has often been connected with what's called the great unfinished drama of african statehood but there have been very sophisticated and centralized african states the Buganda followed a pattern very like the western european absolutist pattern it was situated of course and this is part of the reason why i began that took the course that it did it was situated in the extremely resource rich and very densely populated Great Lakes region of Africa but if ganda was powerful that was not necessarily highly centralized in Buganda to that the central court of the kabocha the authority of the kabocha there we see one of the last cabacas if the central court of the chaotic ibaka wielded power but only through local so-called saza chieftains and here as in early Tokugawa Japan the center was only powerful to the extent that it successfully co-opted the local holders of people and resources of power over people and resources and in Buganda as in Tokugawa Japan the military chiefs who had initially been installed in order to reinforce and project the power of the center ultimately mutated into political arrival and political rivals of the central authority who sucked power out of the center into the peripheries and that is one reason why the Buchanans state no longer exists today even the historical study of totalitarian systems as they're sometimes called Nazism Italian fascism and Stalinism is marked by what might seem an extraordinary degree given the what looks like an immense concentrated concentration of power that's what the word totalitarian means the total concentration of power within the state there's no power outside it supposedly but even these states the historical study of these states is marked by uncertainty or at least debate and contention over the degree of power concentrated in particular institutions and individuals was Hitler a weak dictator as one book has called him or was he master in his own house as another book has called him you have Robert collaterally writing on the Gestapo saying yes the Gestapo is a very fearful fearsome institution if they catch you you could be tortured you have no right civil rights have been completely suspended in the Third Reich that's a terrifying prospect to fall into their hands but he makes the point that in the very large industrial city of Essen the total number of Gestapo personnel was seven he makes the point that almost all Gestapo investigations were launched on the back of denunciations in other words that the Gestapo dependent as much on the public as the Metropolitan Police in London do on you know Crime Stoppers and other sources of information they couldn't simply launch investigations off their own bat they didn't have the resources to do it so even the Gestapo dependent upon the cans sent the willing consent and support of a large part of the population over which they supposedly wielded power Sara Davies as a social history social and cultural history of Stalinism makes a similar point Lyn viola has focused on peasant resistance to collectivization and it's an interesting feature of the history of the study of the Soviet Union that in the era when we didn't have access to archives that the history of the Soviet Union tended to stress the power of of the state but once the archives opened up new studies emerged which examined the social textures of Stalinism and interesting enough the power started to shift and it looked more and more as if for examples to can avoid workers the subject of a wonderful study by Robert Thurston could wield power themselves they could actually bargain with the regime and certainly bargain with their own local power holders including members of the local functionaries of the Communist Party the Italians of course invented the term totalitarian to Italian authorities more but did their state ever live up to the claims of the concept and that of course is a very doubtful claim as many histories have now made clear and if power is hard to locate and highly concentrated hyper centralized systems like the Third Reich of Stalinist or Stalinist Russia or fascist Italy it must be all the more so all the more difficult to locate in the hyper complex democratic pluralist societies of late capitalism and here I want to cite the only piece of advice that printed president lyndon b johnson ever gave to richard nixon nixon had just been elected he was the president-elect and he got a call from johnson and johnson said the following before you get to be president you think you can do anything you think you're the most powerful leader since god but when you get in that tall chairs you're gonna find out mr. president you can't count on people you'll find your hands tired and people cussing at you the office is kind of like the little country boy have found the hoochie-coochie show at the carnival he'd paid his dime and he got inside the tent and then he came out saying it ain't exactly as it was advertised i'm not even gonna say anything about what what a hoochie-coochie show is i think you can probably all guess but in any case in fact the history of the American presidency has been an education in the fluidity of power and we're going to see this again in the coming months and years when the British journalist businessman and essayist water budget I think that's how you pronounce his name Badgett it looks like Bhagu Bhagu or some except between its budget contemplated the the united states in 1866 shortly after the Civil War he produced an essay called presidential government in which he compared the presidency to the British monarchy he said basically there are monarchy they become a monarchy the president is their king but when Woodrow Wilson when Woodrow Wilson an admirer of Badgett turned to the same problem in the 1880s he called his s a congressional government America had passed through the era of Reconstruction and the legislature was now dominant indeed the president was no better placed to President Wilson argue there's no better place to shape legislation then and I quote any other influential person who might choose to send to Congress a letter of information and advice and yet when he revisited this is mr. Wilson himself when he revisited the same problem oops wrong here doing battles come to that the moment when he revisited the same problem ten years later in a further major study Wilson took a different line Americans he wrote now viewed the presidency as the unifying force in our complex system and this of course reflected the ascendancy of Teddy Roosevelt who had transformed the place of the president within that complex system and we find similar fluctuations in other presidential systems this is one as an example of what happened during the reign of Nicholas Sarkozy he seemed at first a very powerful figure comparable with Napoleon and then we see a few a few couple years later the Economist mocking him as The Incredible Shrinking president walking along behind you know his charismatic partner the Shantou is Carla Bruni and you can make the same kinds of point about the the role of the Bundys plays a dent in Germany and the bundeskanzler the Chancellor in Germany the German constitution as designed by the founders of the of the Bonus have a leakage of the new Germany that emerged after the Second World War had no idea that the Chancellor would come to play the dominant role that she today plays does anyone really know where power resides in the European Union Union I mean I've never met anybody who does when you start reading your way into the political science literature on this question you find that the scene is dominated by great ideological encampments they're like 17th century armies you have the Intergovernmental ist's they argue that control of the EU is exercised by the Member States either alone or in combination dispersed across them by contrast neo functionalists stressed the role of supranational institutions especially the European Commission and in more recent times the European Parliament though the relative weight of these two is of course itself constantly in flux institutionalist and networkers approach approaches emphasize the limited potential for the concentration of power in any one part of the EU power they argue can only be exercised when very large and composite coalitions involving actors of different kinds member states supranational institutions societal alliances or advocacy coalition's flow together in support of specific objectives then things can start to move power relations are thus played out in the context of what's often being called a multi-level game involving many different kinds of state and private actor and structured around informal Network like relationships in an extraordinary book called capitalism and schizophrenia a lyrical often perverse diagnosis of late capitalism published in 1972 and 1980 and consisting of these two volumes the anti Oedipus and a thousand plateaus the French post Marxist leftists yield aluze and felix guattari fixed their eyes on the United States and saw their a new kind of social order in which power did not flow from a single Center and was not anchored in the single core structure in place of our boil tropes you know metaphors involving trees root and branch for example in place of in fact as a chapter which begins with the words down with trees they said we want no more tree metaphors shut up about trees already in place of arboreal tropes that opposed Center and periphery roots and branch Deleuze and Guattari imagined what they called the thousand plateaus of capitalist society a world of these are their words multiplicities liens strata and segments era teas lines of flight and intensities they met half Erised them the postmodern social and political order as a riser sort of by it's a botanical term meaning a root system a rhizome a capillary network in which every point was connected to every other point an array in which power centers were and these are their words again diffuse yeah an array in which power centers were diffuse dispersed geared down miniaturized perpetually displaced now this is a really remarkable book these two books are a remarkable experience I used to think there are unreadable but then I realized that my mistake was to try and read them don't read these books bathe in their and emanations observe them through a curtain of gauze place them in a cool dry place for a few months diagnose them if you approach them in the expectation of encountering a sequence of falsifiable propositions that add up to an argument then the whole enterprise is bound to end in tears read it as poetry I mean this is a book whose chapter titles include and I quote 10,000 BC a geology of morals page 47 one of my favorite I mean there are hundreds but the page forty sevens one of my favorite contains a wonderful you should read it that we doesn't matter what do you read this stuff by the way page 47 page 47 contains a wonderful exhortation to the reader like and I am the I quote admire the tortoise well I mean I think it's what a fantastic piece of advice you know I think we do we do too little of this kind of thing when you write a paragraph on the same Pickers you know anyway you can't be reminded often enough of how admirable the tortoise is a paragraph on the same page opens with the guileless announcement a guileless announcement and I quote we are a little lost now well there again we can only agree and um and here are the author's on a sort of theory Top Trumps card it's fantastic thing you can see that what I like about this is the it says strength strong analytic Marxist foundations this is put together by some Californians if you tell Californian students special skills super postmodern terms are really cool and here they are again this is a very important picture because the one on the left in particular is it shows us something that's be very rarely been photographed namely a French intellectual actually thinking that's what it looks like now where the power is ever really is flatly distributed as geared down as delusion gutter he proposed in those two books is debatable certainly what must strike anyone who's worked with the kinds of sources historians use is the asymmetries of power that shaped them whether or not powers inscribed in stone or on paper I'm gonna do my best to make this last part really worth your while now whether it's inscribed in stone or on paper historical narrative as Michel de Vitoria always observed involves the uneven and encouraging the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production other words the means required to produce the things we call sources the things we have from the past or the things we have of the past themselves bear the imprimatur of power consider the contrast between two palaces this is the they're both called sanssouci this one is in me law in the north of Haiti not far from cap I see on the palace of the first Haitian King avi Christophe known as King only the first his was an extremely turbulent reign there we see a picture of him there and the one of the coins that he issued in 1820 which he appears in the you know reserve in the clothing of a Roman Emperor resembling Roman Emperor but his was a turbulent rain it didn't last very long he committed suicide in 1820 and 11 years or 11 days later his son and heir Jacques Victor oh he was bayonetted on the steps of that palace by Republican revolutionaries from Porto pass on the power in other words moved away from the palace of Sans Souci and me Oh away to the South and today the palace looks like this even though it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and here is the other sanssouci built in the 1740s by Frederick the Great of Prussia today it looks except for the style of course as if it were built last week and the reason for that is that power has always stayed with this building power never left this structure both the vemma and the communist regimes maintained it as a as a treasure of state heritage in to this day it remains exactly that okay well it's time for me to come to a close historians respond to the asymmetries of power in a range of ways some are attracted to the spectacle of power they're drawn to it the social locations in which it's exercised they write about cabinets anti chambers military headquarters ministries and boardrooms they admire the skillful use of power their almost erotic Lee drawn to it or so and so on feel sometimes when I reads their prose they baptize it in approving rhetoric others work against the gradient of power from the bottom up this was the aspiration of that social history of the 1960s and 70s which placed at the center those individuals and groups who had previously figured as the anonymous objects of policies devised by the power by the powerful sorry in some such narratives conceived in the paranoid mode its power that's then anonymized power becomes anonymous the textured portraits of leaders make way for faceless elites and ruling classes but some historians who focus on Subbotin actors find on the contrary that power pulls around the objects of contemplation the more they know of their protagonists the more power at least over their own destinies and immediate environments these protagonists seem to wield they find which strategy determination autonomy and resistance among peasant women Soviet steel workers forest dwellers slaves and prostitutes writing in this mode may come to seem a retrospective act of empowerment or perhaps it's just that narratives require protagonists who in turn demand a piece of agency and with it as all share of power the reasons for making such narrative choices which all historians of course make it's always implicit doubtless lie leaving aside the trends that push historical writing this way and that within the realm of what judith butler has called the psychic life of power we're accustomed to thinking of power is something out there that presses in on us from outside but what if we ourselves as but the suggests are actually initiated through what she calls a primary submission to power the power for example of our parents if butler suggests we understand power as a force in our own formation as subjects then power and i'm quoting her now is not simply what we oppose but what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are in the trial a haunting literary reflection on the nature of modern power franz kafka describes a man engaged on an ultimately futile quest to locate and address the power that will determine whether or not he has found guilty of a crime that he's unaware of having committed his efforts to secure information about his case as it's called hidden in my case have you heard anything about my case turn up nothing but hearsay and conjecture and when he finally locates the room where his judges supposedly convene he finds a chamber that is empty except for an elderly and judging from his contribution to the conversation possibly demented janitor with a broom in a beautiful essay on this book entitled Kafka varun literati alumina zeal Delors discerned in this bleak fable an analog of Kafka's own hopeless quest to come to terms with his domineering overbearing father because in his letter to his father brief and mine Fatih an incredibly powerful piece of writing Kafka's rage at the patriarch who overshadowed his youth is muted by the recognition that there was another father before this one a patriarch ever every bit is overbearing as that of the son who would later tower over young fronts the one who wielded power had first been obliged to submit to it if the line of flight from father to father - father has no end then perhaps there can be no terminal reckoning with power thank you [Applause] thank you again to Krista Park that wonderful speech we have a couple of microphones already floating around somewhere so you've talked about various powers and leaders throughout a range of time periods so you've talked about various powers and leaders and how they rule throughout a range of time periods which leader and/or nation do you think had the most impact on the world but only because I remember seeing your really fascinating documentary about Genghis Khan which said that there is more of Genghis Khan's DNA in the rest of humanity than of any other individual and this suggests that Genghis Khan wielded quite extraordinary power if you can measure power in sort of access to you know reproductive opportunity then Genghis Khan the scores probably higher than any other human being this is of course is not a form of power that I don't fit that was interested in for example but nevertheless I mean it depends on how you measure influence and power another immensely influential leader I suppose is Lenin because the the transformation of the Russian state that he with his of course with the help of many many others accomplished really was a you know wielded an impact that was global in scope but you know in the end the top Trump's the top trumps game of of impact is a difficult one to play because you know there's always someone else if you can come up with you know Charles the fifth would be another possibility of Martin Luther you don't have to be the leader of a state it could be the leader of religious movement you know whatever so I hope that's an almost adequate answer to your question um in terms of power which world power do you believe had the most responsibility for the outbreak of the first world war there you know I'm gonna really have to disappoint you here because I know people love to to play the blame game and to say that power is the one that did the did the did you know did this terrible thing and it's true that the literature the on the origins of the First World War when it asked the question why did this war Berkut break out the why question often turned out really contained a concealed who question who did this terrible thing and the answer of course that would become popular in this country and from the 1970s and 80s and 90s in fact right after you know quite recently was Germany and the the situation was you know helped by the fact that a very influential study by a German historian Fritz Fisher made exactly this case and said we're to blame we're the ones who started this war that's not my view my view is that the the Germans didn't plan this war they took the they were they were certainly very happy to risk a war and very happy to as they would have put it except a war if for example Russia mobilized they weren't going to go out of the winner they weren't gonna dodge that war they were going to counter mobilize and accept the war that was offered as they saw it but they were not the only power that behaved in this high-risk way we find the Russians also planning for imminent conflict we find voices in Paris saying you know we need a war and the sooner the better we need one that will start in the Balkans that will be convenient for us of course there are the Austrians who were perfectly happy to risk a European configuration in order to settle their affairs with Serbia so I think what you see when you look at the European 1914 is not a kind of peaceful suburban Park you know in which the Balkan states are sort of swinging on the swings and France and Russia are playing one of those chess games with stern pieces and you know Britain's falling asleep under a willow tree or something and into this park comes a sort of staring screaming psychopath called Germany in a waving I thought I don't think it's that kind of scene I think that Europe in 1914 was a very very dangerous continent occupied by powers all of which were prepared to risk a horrific war in pursuit of their own interests what's really missing in 1914 are the state's people the state they're all men in fact the statesman's who are willing to put peace above everything else hi I'm I I think the the discussion that most of us have been either involved in or just overhearing a lot quite recent of quite recently as the discussion of course around the power of Trump or the the power to be of Trump and I I just wonder what you think of the basic level of that discussion because I mean quite often it feels as though there's been a certain naivety to the way in which we're talking about power in relation to him and I wonder whether what you think about the way we are discussing power in relation to Trump and whether we need to have a better understanding of it in in the coming years and of course the the punic that one senses in a lot of the discussion of Trump is understandable given you know the the provocative quality of this personality and I do think it would be helpful for people to address the issue a bit more through a precise analysis of what exactly are the mechanisms that someone like Trump will be able to activate or not I mean a lot will depend on the kinds of ally alliance building is able to indulge in I mean in particular on the loyalty of the Republican Party or the the homogeneity the Republican Party and whether he's able to reunify the party around his own objectives because it was not then he may wind up being a you know very loud but ultimately lame-duck president but even if he has the support at the two houses there are many checks on his power especially in in domestic in the domestic setting he can set the tone he will doubtless do that in ways which may be quite damaging but he whether he can actually change things on the ground is another question where he will be able to make a difference is in areas that have to do with special powers areas that have to do with national security so although he's unlikely to be able to introduce a registry of Muslims that would affect you know citizenship status is right across the country that's very unlikely on the other hand he will be able to I think re activate the registry system that was used under the Bush presidency after 9/11 so those sorts of you know areas within the rather narrow domain of presidential prerogative in questions of national security he will doubtless be very active in those areas foreign policy is another question because actually the president has a lot of room for movement in foreign policy and it remains to be seen how he will behave in that setting but of course foreign policy is paradoxically though it seems to us to to be the ultimate field in which power is wielded actually foreign policy is a funny area because the president has no direct control over any of his partners the partners are all sovereign agents or agents of other sovereign powers so there's a paradox about foreign policy that you're you're locked in a kind of game where you actually in the end have very little in the way of direct sanction over any of the the other partners in the game the other players of the game so I think that you know a bit more in the way of a calm analysis of the constitutional instruments that he's likely to be trying to use would be helpful and understandable it is perhaps a little bit less panic at the end of your lecture you were talking you're talking about individual power but then earlier in your speech he was saying how the for example the Gestapo relied on public consent for their power so in your opinion what do you think the what can individual power do in relation to history well I think that's a question I think that what strikes me about it the power of individuals is that it's a sort of artifact of the way you do history I mean if you zoom in on particular particular individual like for example I don't know if anybody hears read that book the cheese and the worms about an Achon or that a lien Miller I think he's a Miller if I recall correctly who starts kind of inventing his own theology and then he starts talking to people about and this gets him into trouble and so on and in a marvelous book about this man because you know pieced together from the Inquisition records Kellogg Ginsberg you know reconstructed his life and presented him as a remarkably odd autonomous individual subject to sort of putting things to you know Bree Koehler someone who was putting together reality for himself despite the sanctions against it now in the end the the powers aren't they the Power Distribution between him and the Inquisition proved to be so asymmetrical that in the end he was burned at the stake which is not a good outcome obviously for this exchange but the point is that if you focus on individuals the more you know about them the more powerfully powerfully they come to seem so in a way the powerless appeared that the powerlessness of the powerless was in part the art and that the artifact of a kind of of a history that was focused very much on governments and sovereigns and so in part I suppose the answers your question would be that the that you cannot fully separate the question of where power lies from the question of where you look for it when you direct your attention in a particular direction power will tend to an autonomy will tend to pull around that object of contemplation I hope that's an answer of sorts to your question you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: QMUL School of History

Views: 13,152

Rating: 4.927711 out of 5

Keywords: qmul, History, PHU, Public History Unit, Sir Christopher Clark, Power, Lecture, Political History, Queen Mary University, London

Id: S7LPhIxof9c

Length: 64min 57sec (3897 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017