A Concert of Empires

POWER by Adolf A. Berle. 603 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $10.

Adolf Berle's scrutiny of power began well before minority demands for Black Power, student power, etc., gave the subject its present topicality. A veteran intellectual, with special credentials in law and economics, he has been in and out of government service for more than a third of this violent century. As everything from ambassador to special consultant and Assistant Secretary of State, he watched how power was actually used in a variety of crises from the 1933 bank holiday to the Cuban missile showdown. Despite the old American distrust of all power, he believes that our current social ills are eliciting new assertions of power, and that its nature should therefore be better understood. His own attack on it is as systematic and undaunted as any book since Machiavelli's The Prince.

Unlike The Prince, Berle's is no how-to-do-it book for power wielders. It is an attempt to describe the sources and limits of power in four of its chief manifestations: economic, political, judicial and international. (Pure military power is scanted as mere brute "force.") Berle opens and closes with visits to Zeus, "god of power," who first used it to overthrow his father Cronus and control the Titans, those symbols of chaos --which Berle assumes is the one thing power can't abide. The plot thickens as Zeus gives birth to the world's first intellectual, Pallas Athena, who says of her father, "I never thought he had any brains," and then proceeds to fill that lack by showing him to what intelligent uses power can be put. Zeus also symbolically sires Apollo, the first creative artist, because "power has always sought the assistance of the arts" to answer the perennial question of how men should live. But power's prime function is to impose order on chaos.

Mythology thus provocatively serves as the source of the first of Berle's five rules of power: that order is always challenged by disorder. The second rule is that power is exercised only by individuals, not groups. Third and fourth: power always carries with it a "system of ideas," and always employs institutions to do its work. Lastly, says Berle, power always acts in a "field of responsibility" requiring a constant dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. An early example was Job's chat with God, which forced Omnipotence to acknowledge that reason has certain rights.

Test Against Experience. Berle tests his five laws mainly against American experience. The institutions through which power works, he observes, have a transient life of their own--like the French bureaucracy, which America's administrative system more and more resembles. Yet institutions are less significant, ultimately, than the system of agreed-upon ideas to which the power wielders must appeal. Growing doubt about the philosophical consensus behind American democracy, says Berle, is "the fundamental problem in America today."

According to Berle, the developing science of economics has helped to subordinate economic to political power and has pretty well tamed the gods of the formerly chaotic marketplace. This power shift has left loose ends. Labor's coercive power to strike, for example, is no longer directed against private management but against the public; it is not always used legitimately or even legally, as in the New York transit strike of 1966. An extended dialogue (e.g., about compulsory arbitration) is required to reach a clearer idea system about the limits on economic power.

Still more dialogue is needed, according to Berle, around another center of power, the Supreme Court. Berle calls the modern court "a revolutionary committee" that has reached "a power position senior to both the executive and legislative branches." He considers the Warren court's assumption of legislative responsibility both inevitable and desirable--in his terms, its school-desegregation and reapportionment decisions filled "fragments of chaos." He foresees, however, that the court's increasing use of the 14th Amendment, especially its "equal protection of the laws" doctrine, can be logically extended from schools and voting to such new areas as the granting of private credit and pension rights and even to a system of guaranteed income by judicial decree. Judicial power, Berle feels, has not been adequately "institutionalized." It is now subject to no appeal "other than agitation or, at worst, mobs in the streets." One of Berle's proposals for institutionalizing the court's self-appointed mandate is a council of advisers and a congressional committee to suggest laws ensuring constitutional rights. The object is to confront and deal with political questions "before, rather than after, the Supreme Court enters the arena."

Berle feels that the recurrent threat of chaos is most pressing in foreign affairs. Pure nationalism, as bequeathed to the modern world by Machiavelli, he sees as the dominant focus of international power still. But its influence is complicated by such things as Communist messianism (waning), and such illusions of order as can be generated by the United Nations. Berle believes power's next institutional forum, internationally, is not likely to be a single world empire but a concert of empires. All of which at least will have a good chance of avoiding nuclear war (the "least immediate" of Berle's fears). A good empire, by Berle's definition, is simply a superpower whose neighbors and client states can be free as long as they do not threaten the superpower's safety, as Cuba threatened America's in 1962. Empires are built on fear, not greed; and if their fears are minimized, Berle asserts, their economic influence will fade into the larger reality of an autonomous world market system.

Berle has no faith in automatic human evolution for the better. His chief bias is an old New Deal planner's intolerance of chaos--which may not prove as intolerable as he thinks. His analysis of power is a great deal more congenial to the American mind than Machiavelli's, which separated power from ethics. In outlining a basis for the post-modern world. Berle makes clear that power succeeds only with the help of philosophers, whose task is to cause man to agree on ideas of good and evil.

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