1.Michel Foucault distinguishes between Sovereign Power and Disciplinary Power.
(a)What are the essential elements of each type of power?
(b) How would Foucault interpret Weber’s distinction between Catholicism and Calvinism?
(c) How would Foucault assess Durkheim’s distinction between Mechanical Solidarity and Organic Solidarity?
Michel Foucault’s philosophy is directly related to the concepts of power and security within a society. As such, Foucault frequently discusses the ways in which individuals should be punished for crimes against their society, and the parties that should be responsible for said punishment. The two chief types of power Foucault defines are Sovereign Power and Disciplinary Power: in the former, the ruler of a society (the sovereign) levies a kind of public bodily harm or punishment upon the offended, which acts as a momentary but innately dramatic act that sends a potent message to the sovereign’s public (Foucault 48). The latter, meanwhile, is a slower, less satisfying kind of punishment, in which the prisoner is subjected to an organized effort to change their souls and actions through rehabilitation and correction (Foucault 153). In modern contexts, this might be understood as the dilemma between execution (Sovereign Power) and imprisonment/rehabilitation (Disciplinary Power).
Foucault’s work extends many of Weber’s concepts regarding the evolution of Calvinism as a means to address certain issues with Catholicism. In many ways, the shift Weber notes from the spiritual fulfillment found in Catholicism to the shift towards attaining prosperity as a means to express goodness in Calvinism to Foucault’s progression from sovereign to disciplinary powers. Viewing Weber’s description of the switch to a more capitalistic view of Christianity through the rise of Capitalism, Foucault would note that this removes sovereign power in favor of a more disciplinary power that the anarchic free market would provide. Instead of God providing individual punishments to be seen as a public spectacle, people are subtly pushed and prodded into virtuous (i.e. capitalistic) behavior by the regulatory forces of Calvinism and their motivation to achieve eternal salvation through capitalism (Weber 119). As wealth and prosperity is viewed as a sign that one has been ‘chosen’ in this manner, this becomes an equally visible, but less punitive and violent, means of maintaining societal order; people are disciplined into behaving like a society’s most prosperous individuals to achieve the same material and spiritual status (Weber 120).
Comparing Foucault’s Sovereign and Disciplinary Powers to Durkheim’s ideas of Mechanical and Organic Solidarity, the two sets of powers line up fairly cleanly. For instance, both Sovereign Power and Mechanical Solidarity heavily involve the organized, public and violent distribution of punishment against an individual – the goal of which is to ensure that the rest of the public sees this display and understands how to act and think toward each other in society. In this respect, the criminal being punished deviates from mechanical solidarity, and the sovereign must punish them to bring them back in line (Durkheim 31). Conversely, disciplinary actions are closely related with the loss of individualism – the need to rehabilitate offenders to make them more like others – that can also be associated with Durkheim’s concept of organic solidarity (Durkheim 69). As Foucault would see it, Durkheim’s attempts to achieve organic solidarity would have to be accomplished through disciplinary systems like the Panopticon, in which people naturally behaved themselves and obeyed the rule of law because they knew/felt they were being watched.
2.Of bureaucracy Weber writes: “Such a machine makes ‘revolution,’ in the sense of the forceful creation of entirely new formations of authority, technically more and more impossible” (p.230).
(a) What are the elements of this bureaucracy and what is its relation to democracy?
(b) How would Lenin criticize Weber?
(c) In turn, how would Weber respond to Lenin?
Weber’s perspective on bureaucracy and democracy outlines specific elements to bureaucracy that makes the very nature of true revolution and freedom impossible within society. First and foremost, bureaucracy is a system that can never be destroyed, as it is “the means of carrying ‘community action’ over into rationally ordered ‘societal action’” (Weber 228). Weber has several major principles that comprise bureaucracy: they have hierarchical structure, are managed by a set of rules and organized by specialty functions, deliberately impersonal and focused on employment through technical qualifications (Weber 229). These clear lines of authority and fixed areas of activity provide the means by which a society can operate based on clear competency rather than favoritism. For Weber, these principles are most helpfully and beneficially employed within a democratic system, which itself carries the bureaucratic ideal of placing the best person in the position where they would do the most good. A perfect democracy for Weber involves these skilled individuals engaging in their duties without passion or emotion, which lends them objectivity and thereby eliminates favoritism. Democracy, for Weber, is a system where everyone is treated equally regardless of their status, and operates upon a rational basis.
In response to Lenin’s criticisms of Weber’s perspective, Weber would conversely view Communism as less a means to ensure freedom for the people and more a new, different way to impose new kinds of restrictions and bureaucracy upon the citizens of a society. Given the indestructible nature of bureaucracy once it has been established, a change of government would simply adjust those bureaucratic roles instead of eliminating them and their corresponding class oppression. Rather than having a radical democracy within a society, Communist revolutions would simply result in outright authoritarianism, in which bureaucrats would create their own levels of dictatorship in ways that differ from the old methods of subjugation without lessening the subjugation as a whole. After all, Weber argues that bureaucracy is “a power instrument of the first order – for the one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus” (Weber 228). While he agrees that capitalism is an oppressive, life-draining force on societies, Weber is not able to find an appropriate escape from them, simply seeing democratic bureaucracy as the best possible configuration for the principles of bureaucracy that he feels will always be there.
Comparing Weber and Lenin’s perspectives on bureaucracy, both appear to have similar perspectives on its effect on capitalism, but differing solutions for that same problem. According to Weber, the solution is to simply maximize the bureaucratic ideal, placing skilled people in positions of power that they can operate with the least about of subjective passion. Lenin, however, believes that this kind of thinking is needlessly pessimistic, and is naïve in its confidence that people in bureaucratic positions will do the right thing. Lenin would greatly prefer for the capitalistic state to be overthrown with violent revolution. Weber, meanwhile, believes that Communism is just as problematic and oppressive as capitalism, if not more so, as Communism can easily take the form of authoritarianism and despotism. To that end, the two theorists run the spectrum between Lenin’s optimistic overthrowing of bureaucracy and Weber’s selection of the best of limited options.
3.Read the statement below from the Chancellor and Executive Vice Chancellor, concerning recent cases of sexual harassment. With the help of supplementary sources from The Daily Cal also referred to below, how might this statement be evaluated by the following theorists:
(a) Durkheim. (Here you might consider the abnormal forms of DL but especially the forced division of labor.)
(b) Weber. (Here you might consider Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy and it relation to its clients)
(c) Foucault. (Here you might consider the elements of disciplinary power.)
The letter from UC Berkeley’s Chancellor about the new policies they will put in place in order to curb instances of sexual harassment opens up the possibility for a number of philosophical evaluations about its effectiveness and ethics. Durkheim, for instance, would view the increased level of sanctions against people who violate the sexual harassment policies as a means of forced division of labor, in which people are un-spontaneously forced into positions they may not be able to handle (Durkheim 312). Overall, the most generous reading of this letter and the proposed changes is to bring forth a more aggressive and impassioned plan of action against rape and sexual assault on UC Berkeley’s campus, which necessitates a dramatic change within the social culture currently present.
However, these measures come as a form of moral policing, which can be innately difficult to accomplish for those who lack the natural ability to fit within this new culture. From the perspective of Durkheim’s forced division of labor, there will inevitably be conflict on a number of levels, as administrators and staff are forced into the position of acting as counselors and anti-sexual assault advocates. As they do not have the experience or training for this, they will invariably come under fire for mistakes they will make in their efforts, as evidenced by media complaints that the administrators are not doing enough to curb sexual assaults on campus through these PR efforts (Karasek and Warner, 2014). This misalignment between the social functions and natural ability of UC Berkeley faculty and staff contributes to a problematic and misplaced effort to address these issues.
When viewed through the perspective of Weber and his thoughts on bureaucracy, the letter’s policies demonstrate bureaucracy’s tendency for depersonalization and impersonality, creating a systemic, unemotional solution to a very human, emotionally-involved problem. In treating the issue of sexual assault from a systematic point of view, framing the solutions through policy reform and “system-wide peer review,” the problem is addressed through a dispassionate and bureaucratic perspective (Dirks and Steele). As the Chancellor’s letter notes, the proposal “will ensure that remedies and penalties are applied firmly and consistently,” which fits with the highly efficient nature of bureaucracy (Dirks and Steele). In many ways, Weber would applaud this calculated and systemic approach to bureaucratic work, as it demonstrates many of the principles he celebrates in bureaucracy as the most effective means of organizing large-scale change and outcomes.
Given Weber’s understanding of bureaucracy, he would likely view the social justice groups and women’s rights activists as the ‘clients’ to which this new bureaucracy is catering, allocating resources and changing the application of rules to better suit their particular needs and demands. In some ways, this could contribute to the eventual creation of Weber’s ‘iron cage,’ in which people joylessly go about their duties in the process of combating sexual assault through these systematic peer review processes proposed by UC Berkeley administrators (Weber 123). Weber views this as an innately efficient (and possibly inevitable thing), but is also wary of its all-encompassing nature in the end.
Of all these theorists, it is possibly Michel Foucault who has the most positive appraisal of these anti-sexual assault measures. These changes constitute a kind of disciplinary power, in which a greater social and evaluative trend toward rejecting rape and sexual assault as a community becomes the norm – people outside of that norm are punished tacitly by the society and rehabilitated to think differently. The discreet nature of these measures specifically avoids juridico-political nature of sovereign power, in which perpetrators of sexual assault would be publicly shamed and punished (Foucault 48). The implicit goal of these anti-harassment measures is to instead bring about a steady rehabilitation of UC Berkeley’s culture, in which members of the society are made to feel sufficient guilt about the effects and consequences of sexual assault that they would change their behaviors. Rape culture would no longer be normalized, and students/faculty would work to act in accordance with their position within the division of labor.
In many ways, this comprehensive culture change coincides with Foucault’s Panopticon, as people would suddenly regulate their behavior in order to ensure they were not violating the campus’ sexual harassment laws, inducing “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 201). Anticipating observation and possible punishment, people would constantly self-examine their behavior to ensure they did not break these rules.
Works Cited
Dirks, Nicholas B. and Claude Steele. Letter to UC Berkeley Campus Community. March 14,
2016.
Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. 1893.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House,
1975.
Karasek, Sofie, and Meghan Warner. “Sexual Assault will not be solved by public relations.”
The Daily Californian. October 13, 2014. <http://www.dailycal.org/2014/10/10/sexual-assault-will-solved-public-relations/>.
Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge, 2009.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 1992.
