Many people seem to believe that America is ruled from behind the scenes by a conspiratorial elite with secret desires, i.e., by a small secretive group that wants to change the government system or put the country under the control of a world government. In the past, the conspirators were usually said to be secret Communist sympathizers who were intent upon bringing the United States under a common world government with the Soviet Union, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 undercut that theory. So most conspiratorial theorists changed their focus to the United Nations as the likely controlling force in a "new world order," an idea which is undermined by the powerlessness of the United Nations and the unwillingness of even moderates with the American power structure to give it anything but a limited role.

For a smaller group of conspiratorial thinkers, a secret group of operatives located within the CIA was responsible for many terrible tragedies and assassinations since the 1960s, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Problems with a conspiratorial view

There are several problems with a conspiratorial view that don't fit with what we know about power structures. First, it assumes that a small handful of wealthy and highly educated people somehow develop an extreme psychological desire for power that leads them to do things that don't fit with the roles they seem to have. For example, that rich capitalists are no longer out to make a profit, but to create a one-world government. Or that elected officials are trying to get the constitution suspended so they can assume dictatorial powers. These kinds of claims go back many decades now, and it is always said that it is really going to happen this time, but it never does. Since these claims have proved wrong dozens of times by now, it makes more sense to assume that leaders act for their usual reasons, such as profit-seeking motives and institutionalized roles as elected officials. Of course they want to make as much money as they can, and be elected by huge margins every time, and that can lead them to do many unsavory things, but nothing in the ballpark of creating a one-world government or suspending the constitution.

Second, the conspiratorial view assumes that the behind-the-scenes leaders are extremely clever and knowledgeable, whereas social science and historical research shows that leaders often make shortsighted or mistaken decisions due to the limits placed on their thinking by their social backgrounds and institutional roles. When these limits are exposed through stupid mistakes, such as the failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs during the Kennedy Administration, then conspiratorial theorists assert that the leaders failed on purpose to fool ordinary people.

Third, the conspiratorial view places power in the hands of only a few dozen or so people, often guided by one strong leader, whereas sociologists who study power say that there is a leadership group of many thousands for a set of wealth-owning families that numbers several million. Furthermore, the sociological view shows that the groups or classes below the highest levels buy into the system in various ways and support it. For example, highly trained professionals in medicine, law, and academia have considerable control over their own lives, make a good living, and usually enjoy their work, so they go along with the system even though they do not have much political power.

Fourth, the conspiratorial view often assumes that clever experts ("pointy-headed intellectuals") with bizarre and grandiose ideas have manipulated the thinking of their hapless bosses. But studies of policy-making suggest that experts work within the context of the values and goals set out by the leaders, and that they are ignored or replaced if they step outside the consensus (which is signaled by saying they have become overly abstract, idealistic, or even, frankly, "pinko").

Finally, the conspiratorial view assumes that illegal plans to change the government or assassinate people can be kept secret for long periods of time, but all evidence shows that secret groups or plans in the United States are uncovered by civil liberties groups, infiltrated by reporters or government officials, and written about in the press. Even secrets about wars and CIA operations -- Vietnam, the Contras, the rationales for Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- are soon exposed for everyone to see. As for assassinations and assassination attempts in the United States, from McKinley to Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Robert F. Kennedy to Reagan, they have been the acts of individuals with no connections to any power groups.

Because all their underlying assumptions are discredited by historical events and media exposures, no conspiracy theory is credible on any issue. If there is corporate domination, it is through leaders in visible positions within the corporate community, the policy planning network, and the government. If there is class domination, it is through the same mundane processes that social scientists have shown to be operating for other levels of the socioeconomic system.

More on illegal government actions

Even though there are no conspiracies, it is also true that government officials sometimes take illegal actions or try to deceive the public. During the 1960s, for example, government leaders claimed that the Vietnam War was easily winnable, even though they knew otherwise. In the 1980s the Reagan Administration defied a Congressional ban on support for anti-government rebels in Nicaragua (the "Contras") through a complicated scheme that raised money for the rebels from foreign countries. The plan included an illegal delivery of armaments to Iran in exchange for money and hostages. But deceptions and illegal actions are usually uncovered, if not immediately, then in historical records.

In the case of the Vietnam War deception, the unauthorized release in 1971 of government documents called The Pentagon Papers (which revealed the true state of affairs) caused the government great embarrassment and turned more people against the war. It also triggered the creation of a secret White House operation to plug leaks (the "Plumbers"), which led in turn to an illegal entry into Democratic Party headquarters during the 1972 elections, an attempted cover-up of high-level approval of the operation, and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in the face of impeachment charges. As for the Reagan Administration's illegal activities, they were unraveled in widely viewed Congressional hearings that led to a six-month imprisonment for the president's National Security Adviser for his part in an unsuccessful cover-up, along with convictions or guilty pleas for several others for obstruction of justice or lying to Congress. The Secretary of Defense was indicted for his part in the cover-up, but spared a trial when he was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve, 1992.

It is also true that the CIA has been involved in espionage, sabotage, and the illegal overthrow of foreign governments, and that the FBI spied on and attempted to disrupt Marxist third parties, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Ku Klux Klan. But careful studies show that all these actions were authorized by top government officials, which is the critical point here. There was no "secret team" or "shadow government" committing illegal acts or ordering government officials to deceive the public and disrupt social movements. Such a distinction is crucial in differentiating all sociological theories of power from a conspiratorial one.

Claims about the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

The group said by many conspiratorial thinkers to be at the center of the alleged conspiracy in the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations, is in fact a mere policy discussion forum. It has nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group. All the CFR does is sponsor discussion groups, debates and speakers. As far as being secretive, it issues annual reports and allows access to its historical archives. Historical studies of the CFR show that it has a very different role in the overall power structure than what is claimed by conspiratorial theorists.

More information

For my responses to an interviewer on the issue of conspiracy, see http://www.publiceye.org/antisemitism/nw_domhoff.html.

For more about conspiracism, including links to other resources, please visit the Conspiracy section of PublicEye.org, especially Chip Berlet's excellent article entitled "Conspiracism as a Flawed Worldview".

This document's URL: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/theory/conspiracy.html

The aim of this essay is provide a big-picture canvas of the wider meanings of the Left-Right dimension in human thinking, a dimension that precedes and transcends mere politics, but may well explain some of the puzzles about the political Left and Right. I begin by discussing general findings on the cross-cultural differences in the thinking and attitudes of Leftists and Rightists on many different aspects of life. Then I describe how this dimension has manifested itself in language, and how it became part of politics during the French Revolution. Then I show how the left-right dimension manifests itself in personality, and that political preferences do relate to this dimension.

After showing the considerable difference between the political Left and Right in personality and social attitudes, I suggest that they nonetheless share certain essential similarities that are relatively rare in the general population, especially a high degree of moral fervor and moral anger, even while they differ completely on what they are fervent and angry about. My next step is to suggest that this shared moral fervor leads political Leftists and Rightists to have similar condescending attitudes towards their more moderate left-oriented or right-oriented compatriots, those who are merely "liberal" or only moderately "conservative."

The left-right dimension in general thinking

In the 1960s, a psychologist interested in philosophy and ideology, Silvan Tomkins, wrote an essay in which he argued there is a Left-Right dimension in every area of waking thought, from beliefs about mathematics to beliefs about child-rearing practices. Based on his research, Tomkins (1964) concluded that those on the Right end of this continuum first and foremost tended to be rule-oriented. They see rules as external to themselves, and even to people in general. Rules are part of the universe, or ordained by God. In addition, Rightists are often uncomfortable about emotions and tend to deny their feelings. They therefore want emotions under control. They also favor hierarchy, at least in part because they want to keep impulses under control through rules. The best people, those who follow rules and control emotions, should be in charge. Rightists become angry with rule breaking, not with oppressive authority.

Rightists tend to be very individually oriented. They tend not to see groups and social classes. They think that success is a matter of individual effort, overlooking the social support that they and everyone else has had in order to advance in life. This individualistic orientation, along with their respect for hierarchy, makes them into natural supporters of the current power structure, whatever their socioeconomic standing.

On the other hand, according to Tomkins, Leftists are oriented toward human needs and pleasures, not rules, and think that rules are created by people. They are attracted to new experiences and positive feelings. They are for equality and do not like hierarchy; they are egalitarians who are willing to change the rules if they think that is necessary. In addition, they tend to focus on groups and social networks. This group-oriented stance, along with their emphasis on equality, makes them natural allies of the underdogs, whether this means low-income people or people excluded from the dominant society on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religious preference.

It is this underlying dimension of human thinking and experience that has been rediscovered by cognitive linguist George Lakoff (1996) in his work on "moral politics," in which he comes to similar conclusions about Right and Left thinking based on a metaphoric analysis of what Leftists and Rightists say and write.

Tomkins developed a questionnaire to test his ideas on American participants, mostly college students. The questionnaire asked people to endorse one or both of a series of paired statements, such as "Numbers were invented" or "Numbers were discovered." As Tomkins expected, he found that people differed in consistent ways on which statements they endorsed, supporting his hypothesis that there were Right and Left ways of looking at the world over and beyond how people felt about any specific issue. For example, when confronting the statements about numbers being either invented or discovered, Left-oriented thinkers (and keep in mind that we are not yet talking about politics, but a general way of thinking) replied that they were invented by we humans, whereas Right-oriented thinkers tended to say they were discovered, i.e., that they exist external to people. (The issue here is not which is "really" the correct answer, if there is one, but simply what people say off the top of their heads.)

Similarly, Right-oriented thinkers were for strict child rearing in order to tame the unruly emotions in children ("spare the rod and spoil the child"), while Leftist-oriented thinkers saw children as little flowers to be nurtured and supported, that is, allowed to grow more or less "naturally." More generally, when asked whether people are basically "evil" or "good" in terms of human nature, Right-oriented thinkers tended to say "evil" and Left-oriented thinkers tended to say "good." In fact, people's preference on this question about basic human nature best predicts how they will answer many other questions in a "Right" or a "Left" way. So we can say that beliefs about human nature are an anchor point of the general Left-Right dimension.

To show that there is a Left and Right to every question and even every academic discipline, Tomkins noted in his essay that the field of psychology is on the Left side, with engineering and the natural sciences on the Right, and the humanities to the Left of psychology. However, even within a field like psychology, there are Right and Left sides to every issue, with the "hard-nosed" experimentalists and "quantifiers," who study specific narrow psychological processes, on the Right, and the more field-oriented and clinical researchers, who use "qualitative" methods, on the Left.

In closing this section, let me stress that we are talking here about pure types at the ends of a continuum. Everyone believes in controlling impulses at one time or another, not just Right-oriented thinkers, and just about everyone likes to explore and take risks in some situations, not just Left-oriented thinkers. Thus, most people are somewhere in the middle in their overall thinking, and they are sometimes complex blends of the two orientations. Moreover, Tomkins claims that some of the most famous and creative people in Western history, such as the philosopher Kant and the composer Beethoven, are those who are able to synthesize aspects of the Left and Right, thereby appealing to both sides of the continuum. The point for now, though, is that there is a general Left-Right dimension that transcends any particular issue.

Why do we talk about politics in terms of Right and Left?

Why do we speak of the hierarchically oriented stand-patters as "Rightists" and the egalitarian, we-can-do-better, let's-change-things people as "Leftists?" According to the Oxford English Dictionary and conventional wisdom, it's because the conservatives happened to sit on the king's right when they marched into the French National Assembly that was convened in 1789 in the face of the upheavals facing the king and his court. Since the conservatives were on the right, it followed that the upstart bourgeoisie, radical intellectuals, and other insurgents had to sit on the left (see Laponce, 1981, Chapter 3, who analyzed French newspaper accounts from the 1790s to explain how the use of right and left spread across that country and into the rest of the world).

According to this account, the use of Left and the Right to characterize political views is just an historical accident. A precedent was set through what was much like a flip of a coin, and then it became a custom, and was invested with all kinds of meaning, and things rolled on from there, a small example perhaps of the "path-dependent" nature of history.

But Tomkins and other scholars claim it may not be that simple. As they note, Right and Left have been invested with deep meanings throughout Western history, and indeed, in every other culture we know about as well. The Right is always good and straight and true and up, and the Left tends to be the opposite. For example, the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, have a very complex cosmology that ties many basic dimensions of life to the left and the right, as do many other peoples (e.g., Hertz, 1960; Needham, 1973). In the Bible, the elect sit on the right hand of God.

These associated meanings of Left and Right are also seen in word etymologies, which reveal the "meaning complexes" that embed specific terms (Thass-Tienemann, 1955, 1967). In many Romance languages, for example, the left is related to strange stuff and lesser aspects of life. For example, sinistra, the Latin word for left, is also the root for our word "sinister." Droche, the old word for left in French, also means awkward, and gauche, the current French word for left, has negative connotations. In Norwegian, the word for right, hoyer, literally means "higher."

Or take a look at English. People are "out in left field," not right field, when they have a far-out opinion. We give people "left-handed compliments." So the question may be: why did the nobility sit on the king's right in the first place?

Perhaps the left-right, bad-good dichotomy had its origins in the basic dualisms that exist in human thought everywhere, as implied by Tomkins's work. That's a big claim, but it gains support in work by psychologist Charles Osgood and his colleagues (1975) from the 1950s to 1970s. Osgood basically asked people all over the world to make snap judgments on just about anything you can think of -- whether it was colors like "red" and "blue," or concepts like "left" and "right," or specific people like presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy -- using a series of polar opposites, such as soft/hard, up/down, hot/cold, and fast/slow. So, for example, if you were asked to rate a "turtle," you might strongly think it was more "hard" than "soft" and more "slow" than "fast." You also might rate a turtle as somewhat more "down" than "up" because they are close to the ground. You might be hard pressed to decide if a turtle is "hot" or "cold," so you might pick the middle point on the seven-point scale, meaning that it does not strike you as either "hot" or "cold."

On the other hand, if you were asked to rate a "giraffe," you might say it was more "soft" than "hard" because of its smooth skin and colorful fur, and more "fast" than "slow" because it can run plenty fast when it has to. You probably would rate it as more "up" than "down" because of its long neck, and you might say it is more "hot" than "cold" because you figure it is a warm-blooded animal living on the hot plains of Africa.

Osgood called his list of polar adjectives "the semantic differential." Based on very large samples of people from all over the world, and using very rigorous statistical analyses, Osgood established that there are three basic dimensions when people impute meaning. These dimensions hold all over the world and for whatever we rate, whether turtles or giraffes or presidents or cooking pots or colors or pictures. The importance of each of the three dimensions varies from concept to concept, but there are main factors that inform any intuitive judgment we make:

First, there is the evaluative dimension. Do I like it or not like it, which is soon translated in our thinking into a "good-bad" dimension. The evaluative dimensions includes polar opposites such as good/bad, pretty/ugly, and friendly/unfriendly

Second, there is the activity dimension. Basically, is it active or passive, fast or slow?

Third, there is the potency dimension. Is it strong or weak?

If the Left-Right dimension explained by Tomkins also has any relationship to our thinking about politics, then there should be differences on the semantic differential. So I tested this possibility by giving the semantic differential to college freshman and sophomores who did not know the purpose of the study. Eighty rated only the concept "Right," 78 rated the concept "Left." Then I studied children from the first grade through high school in Napa, California, thanks to an insider connection that got me entrée into dozens of classrooms in a single day, back in the mid-1960s (Domhoff, 1969). The two sheets of paper put before the students looked like what appears below, with either the word Left or Right at the top of the page, followed by instructions to judge where they would place Left and Right on each of the pairs of polar adjectives that we used (e.g., good/bad, male/female, unclean/clean). They had seven blanks they could mark to express the degree to which their idea of Left or Right fit with one or the other side of the continuum, which means they could mark the middle choice ("4") if the word at the top did not remind them of either side.

There was one added twist to this study. I used a set of polar adjectives that were related to "left" and "right" by the Maori of New Zealand to see if we had similar conceptions to what they have. The scale appears below.

	"right"
light	- - - - - - -	dark
curved	- - - - - - -	straight
high	- - - - - - -	low
female	- - - - - - -	male
sacred	- - - - - - -	profane
heterosexual	- - - - - - -	homosexual
mysterious	- - - - - - -	commonplace
unclean	- - - - - - -	clean
correct	- - - - - - -	incorrect
bad	- - - - - - -	good
beautiful	- - - - - - -	ugly
limp	- - - - - - -	erect
strong	- - - - - - -	weak

Sure enough, just like the Maori, the older children and college students tended to say that the Left was bad, dark, profane, female, unclean, curved, limp, homosexual, weak, mysterious, low, ugly, and incorrect, while the right was judged as just the opposite -- good, light, sacred, male, clean, straight, erect, heterosexual, strong, commonplace, high, beautiful, and correct. This suggests there is a pan-human meaning to the Left and the Right.

If we look more closely at how we think about leftness, it is not always simply "bad," as in "not good." It is more like the Left is bad in the sense of "tempting." That is, the Left involves impulses that are not a good idea because they upset people and get you in trouble, which is in keeping with Tomkins's claim that expressing or controlling emotions is a key factor in the Left-Right dimension. But it is not just that the Right is good and the Left is "baaad," as in the admiring comment, "he's a baaad cat." The Right is also "up" and the Left is "down," as also seen in the rating of the Right as "high" and the Left as "low." That is, the hierarchical dimension that Tomkins talks about is built into the Left-Right dimension, too, through the basic equation of "good" and "up" and "bad" and "down" in our mental universe. How are you feeling today? "I'm really up, today, thanks." Or, "sorry to say, but I am feeling down today." When we are elated we are "high as a kite," on "cloud nine," or "walking on air." When we are feeling discouraged or depressed, we are "down" or "low," or "in the dumps."

So, Right and Left really do stand for something in our minds. They stand for proper, right-minded thinking versus playful/sinful/heretical thinking, and hierarchy versus equality, just as Tomkins suggests. To support God, the king, the president, the bosses, or the department chairperson is to be on the Right. To question or rebel against them is to be on the Left.

But does what I have outlined in this and previous sections relate to the actual people who are political Rightists and Leftists in countries like the United States? I now turn to the evidence that it does, starting with a study that a colleague and I did of political Leftists and Rightists using the Tomkins questionnaire.

The Left and Right in politics

Tomkins also claimed that the Left-Right dimension appears in politics, and I am now going to present evidence that such is the case.

But before I do that, I need to make sure we are all on the same page when it comes to talking about different political orientations in the United States. First, most people in the United States usually think of the Left-Right dimension as the "liberal-conservative" dimension, and rightly so, because it means the same thing at a theoretical level. However, a terminology problem arises because those who are "left of center" divide into two basic types, as do those "right of center." On the Left side, just to the left of the center," we find the "liberals," whereas those to the left of liberals are called "Leftists." In the past, the Leftists usually defined themselves as either "socialists," "communists," or "anarchists." Today they are more likely to self-identify as "progressives" or "anti-capitalists," although there are also those who lean in an anarchistic direction who call themselves "libertarian socialists" to emphasize their respect for individual rights and their wariness of a large government. Meanwhile, just to make things a little more complicated, the term "progressive" has also been adopted by some moderate liberals who don't want to be associated with "The L-Word." On the Right side, just to the right of the center, there are "moderate conservatives" and on their right we find the "ultra-conservatives," with the varying types of ultra-conservatives self-identifying as "New Rightists," "Christian Rightists," and "Neo-conservatives." There's also a very small and unusual group on the right, the "Libertarians," who dislike government but are -- in theory -- in favor of freedom to smoke dope, be gay, etc. They are in some ways a mirror image of anarchists, and they are civil libertarians, but anarchists and libertarians also differ totally in that the anarchists are internationalists and dislike markets, whereas libertarians are more nationalistic and love markets over and beyond just about anything else. In any event, it is the New Rightists, Christian Rightists, Neo-conservatives, and Libertarians that I am calling political Rightists in this essay. All of this can be confusing, so below is a chart that tries to provide an overview.

Points Along The Left-Right Dimension in American Politics

	Extreme Left	Moderate Left	Moderate Right	Extreme Right
Generic name	Leftists	Liberals	Conservatives	Rightists
Types	Anti-capitalists Anarchists Socialists			Religious Right New Right Neo-Conservatives
Political party	Socialist Green Marxist-Leninist	Democratic	Republican	Republican Libertarian

It's also important to make clear that the political substance of what is "Left" and what is "Right" can vary from time to time and place to place due to the different histories of different countries. This point is especially critical for understanding the differences between the European Right and the American Right. The European Right mythologizes a past of strong states, complete with kings and their courts, and a hierarchical church. It can see itself submerged in the state, and could therefore move, just 70-80 years ago, to the extreme of fascism.

The American Right, on the other hand, due to the history of the United States, has a myth of a highly individualistic past, with a minimum amount of government. That is, the American Right is based on the tenets of 19th century, Big-L "Liberalism," the philosophy that codifies and justifies a small-government, a "free" market, and anti-union policies and practices. It claims that people are rational self-maximizers. The people who become the wealthiest are assumed to be the smartest and the fittest. The American right therefore shares an elitist orientation with other Rightists, but it doesn't glorify the government.

Meanwhile, the small-L liberals in America, that is, those left of center within the Democratic Party, who want to end racism and sexism and exploitation of ordinary workers, came to the conclusion many decades ago that federal-level government programs were the only way to achieve their goals. The federal government would have to end segregation, women would have to have the right to vote, and workers would have to have the right to unionize to counter the power of big corporations. This need for action at the national level was especially obvious in the case of freedom for African-Americans because the state governments in the racist, segregationist South were clearly not going to change one iota without federal pressures (see Starr, 2007, for a full discussion of how the small-L liberals gradually evolved from the big-L liberals and therefore differ from the present conservatives and Rightists, who stick to the original big-L positions).

However, the American Rightists, given their strong desire to keep things as they are, and their respect for hierarchy, including the hierarchical relationship between whites and blacks and men and women as well as capitalists and workers, saw the new small-L liberalism as a form of "collectivism." Contrary to Rightist rhetoric, however, small-L liberalism is a relatively slight modification of old-style liberalism and an expansion of democracy to include more than the owners of income-producing properties. In other words, and this is crucial, most Americans are either 19-century liberals or 20-century liberals in an ideological sense. Contrary to the Rightists, there are few or no socialists or communists. And contrary to the Leftists, the American Rightists are not "fascists." Put another way, the conservatives and liberals use extremist rhetoric when talking about each other. However, because most Americans are one or another variant of Big-L liberalism, that is, they are neither communists/socialists nor fascists, they are usually able to compromise their differences without violence. On the other hand, the fact that the two sides can come to demonize each other so completely is a testament to the more fanatical aspects of the human mind.

Now we are ready for studies that try to relate styles of thinking and personality to political preferences. Such studies have a long history that dates back to the late 1930s in the United States, but I want to start with a study from the 1960s that used the Tomkins Left-Right questionnaire and then turn to the other studies. It's a study I did with my colleague Henry Minton at California State University at Los Angeles in the autumn of 1964, just before the presidential election between liberal Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson and ultra-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. We were able to give the Tomkins questionnaire and several personality tests -- to be discussed in a second -- to five groups:

1. Members of the W.E.B. DuBois Club, the youth group of the American Communist Party at the time.
2. Members of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group of the main Trotskyist party in the United States.
3. Members of the Young Democrats, a group which contained all shades of Democratic opinion, but with a decided liberal tinge.
4. Members of the Young Republicans, almost exclusively pro-Goldwater ultra-conservatives.
5. Members of a class in introductory psychology. Since psychology was a required liberal arts course at Cal State LA at the time, this sample is very likely representative of the college population, which is relevant because all of the Young Democrats and Young Republicans were students at Cal State LA, as were a small number of the Communists and Trotskyists.

In addition to the Tomkins questionnaire, we collected basic demographic information on the participants that isn't essential here because everyone back then was standard-issue young white college students, along with something that is important for my current purposes, a self-rating on a 7-point liberalism-conservatism dimension. We also gave the Internationalism-Nationalism Scale, which is known to correlate with conservatism.

It's also important to note that we did not use the two or three Tomkins statements that relate at all to politics -- the ones about the nature of government and the best way to deal with criminals. In other words, we made the Tomkins questionnaire apolitical in that it focuses on statements about human nature, numbers, child rearing, and a few other non-political issues.

Here's what we found. First, on the liberalism-conservatism self-rating scale, all but one of the Communists and Trotskyists gave themselves the strongest possible liberalism rating, a "1," with one person giving himself a "2." All of the Young Democrats gave themselves a "2," "3," or "4," which clearly differentiates them from the Leftists. And all but two of the Young Republicans gave themselves the most extreme conservative ratings, a "6" or a "7;" the remaining two rated themselves as "3" and "5." So the self-ratings completely differentiate the various groups, with the exception of the Young Republican who gave himself a "3," who turned out to have been raised in a liberal family.

The second analysis consisted of a correlational matrix that included the liberal-conservative self-rating, along with the international/chauvanistic nationalism scale, the Tomkins questionnaire, and the Jackson-Minton Adjective Checklist. This analysis first of all showed that the participants' subjective self-ratings correlated very highly, r= .78, with the internationalism-nationalism scale, with the conservatives on the highly nationalistic, super-patriotic side, a finding that has been reported in virtually every study that has been done of Leftists and Rightists in the past 60 years. That means we are on solid ground when we turn to the Tomkins results.

The Total Left Scores, that is, the total number of Left-oriented statements that the person endorsed, correlated .46 with liberal self rating and .35 with internationalism, which is a solid result in the world of personality studies, and the Total Right Scores correlated .51 with the self rating and .65 with nationalism, which is an even more impressive result.

Although those are good correlations by the standards of personality studies, it's a fair question to ask why they aren't even higher. One important reason is that some of the self-identified Leftists and Young Republicans had not yet found their "natural" home on the Left-Right continuum. That is, we know from the biographies and autobiographies of many political figures that they start out at one place and end up at another. In particular, there are many dramatic examples of young Leftists who move to the Right. Most of the famous Neo-Conservatives of recent decades started out as Socialists or Trotskyists in the 1950s and 1960s, for example. There is also a little movement from the Right to the center, and even to mild liberalism, where Hillary Clinton would be a good case in point. Based on her upbringing, she was for Goldwater in 1964, but by the time she had finished college and law school she was a liberal. (More generally, there is a modest correlation between parental and offspring politics as people are growing up, but other factors enter into political orientation after age 18 or 19 -- including what the new generational as a whole is experiencing -- e.g., "the Sixties," "the Eighties.") So young adults often differ from their parents in political orientation, and siblings often differ from each other, too, for that matter. There's also social class and peer-group influences and situational factors like where you work.

There is one very interesting study of liberals and conservatives that is consistent with the Tomkins dimension. It is a by-product of a follow-up study of University of Minnesota students who had taken a battery of vocational interest tests in the late 1930's in an attempt to predict their future career interests. When they were studied via questionnaires and interviews 25 years later, they provided new information on their interests and attitudes, including their political orientation. So, as one small part of the data analysis, the participants were divided into liberals and conservatives (Rossmann & Campbell, 1965). And they differed in their interests, hobbies, and occupations in ways we would expect from the Tomkins dimension. More generally, there is a wealth of data showing that Rightists are much like Tomkins would expect, but much less information on Leftists.

The differences on values, interests, and occupations between political Leftists and Rightists must not be the whole story, however, because there is much evidence of extremely authoritarian Leftist political parties in the United States. In particular, there are various Marxist-Leninist parties that say they practice "democratic centralism," meaning that everyone has an equal chance to speak and participate, but they then agree to follow what the majority decides. What invariably happens in these groups is that they come to be run by an inner circle, the "central committee," which is in turn usually dominated by one strong leader. Some of the accounts of these groups are harrowing; there is evidence of self-righteous manipulation of the members and a willingness to use violence (Ellis, 1998; Lalich, 2004).

Similarities between those on the political Right and Left

Although the Right and Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences.

First, they share the same high degree of moral outrage and anger. This strong moral outrage makes them into absolutists. They become True Believers in their cause, with no doubts whatsoever. They see everyone else as sell-outs and trimmers. This includes many people who share their sympathies, but not their fanaticism. This disdain for less fanatical friends who share their general beliefs also reveals to us what the tamer versions of Rightists and Leftists, that is, conservatives and liberals, have in common: they are more pragmatic, tentative, and experimental in their beliefs. As might be expected, then, and as everyday observation makes apparent, there is often tension between moderate conservatives and Rightists on the Right side of the divide and between liberals and Leftists on the other side.

On the Right, the tension is due to the fact that the moderate conservatives are willing to accept the current situation on most issues, whereas Rightists are not. Rightists in the Republican Party often contemptuously call moderate conservatives "RINOs," which means "Republican in Name Only," and therefore fair game for attack because they are weak-kneed compromisers and backsliders. For example, most American conservatives do not want to go back to black-white segregation or to the subjugation of women, even though most conservatives of the 1950s and 1960s opposed the extension of equality, fairness, and opportunity to women and African-Americans (including famous libertarians like William F. Buckley). Present-day conservatives have accepted those changes; they figure that's the way things are, but things should change no further (and people like Buckley came to accept the changes and even regret some of their past views).

However, those on the far Right have not accepted most of these changes. They talk about the 1950s as a golden era, even though there were far fewer ultra-conservatives than there are now, and even though it was a time of racial segregation and almost complete male dominance. The thought that there have been changes in the tried and true ways completely upsets them. Indeed, they claim that the problems of today are due to the changes since the 1950s. There has been "moral degeneration," something that Rightists have been saying throughout Western history. They have once again created a self-serving myth about the past.

Similarly, there is tension between liberals and Leftists over many issues. Liberals want small gradual improvements, but political Leftists want major changes right now. When various types of Leftists have to define what they share in common, they are sure of one thing -- they are not mere liberals. Put another way, Leftists often define themselves as "not-liberals."

The moral outrage of True Believers of the Right and Left leads them to share a second similarity: they see everything as rushing to a huge crisis. They share the feeling that things have become intolerable and can't go on any longer. This sense of crisis is defined as growing immorality and degeneracy on the Right and as intolerable inequality, corruption, and injustice on the Left. However, at the same time, both Right and Left have hope because they believe that things are going to come out all right, that is, the way they want them to.

These feelings of impending doom followed by a new dawn lead the political Right and Left to share the same underlying theory of how history unfolds and how it will end. For both extremes, it is a story of an original paradise that is lost due to one or another mistake or sin, followed by a growing crisis that leads to an apocalypse, which then leads to a regaining of paradise. That is, both Right and Left begin with the idea that human beings once lived in positive, non-conflictual social groups that were, sadly, disturbed by one factor or another, which has led to the current crisis that is soon to reach an apocalyptic climax. This huge climax -- this Armageddon, this revolution, this upheaval -- will be followed by a new positive state of being. It will incorporate some positive aspects of what developed after the primordial human society was left behind.

Where Right and Left differ is in the substance of the matter. Reflecting the differences along the Right-Left dimension, what varies is the nature of the original human social setting, the cause of the problems that developed, and the nature of the resolution. This is best seen by looking at Christianity, which is the underlying theory of many on the far Right, and Marxism, which is the underlying theory of many on the far Left.

	Christianity	Marxism
Original state	Garden of Eden	Primitive Communism
Problem	Sin	Division of labor, private ownership
Crisis	Moral degeneracy	Alienation/exploitation
Conflict	Good vs. Evil	Class conflict
Resolution	Christ's return	Revolution
Result	Heaven on Earth	Socialism/Communism

Although the two theories of history have very similar structures, their substance is completely different. The Rightist theory is far more individualistic and psychological. The Leftist theory is almost completely group or class oriented, and hence sociological. These differences far overshadow the similarities and drive the two extremes even further apart.

Third, the two extremes share the same story about how the current society is structured. However, they draw very different conclusions about who the good guys and the bad guys are in this shared scenario. The common story line goes like this:

The country is sustained by good and hard-working average people in the middle like us, but we have little or no power. For the Right, these "good people" are the middle class of small business owners, farmers, and white-collar workers. For the Left, they are the workers, that is, the people who work with their hands in factories and fields. Although important and hard-working, we good people are exploited and dominated by the few at the top. For the Right, that means the bureaucrats, internationalist financiers, pointy-headed intellectuals, and effete liberals. For the Left, that means the capitalists. Moreover, we good people have to contend with the ne'er-do-wells, those who don't contribute to the overall good of the society like we do. For the Right, that means the alleged welfare bums and allegedly shiftless people of color. For the Leftists, it means the lumpenproletariat.

Since this state of affairs is not fair to the good and hard-working majority, we have a right to be angry, and we should organize to create social change that brings about a new social order. For the Right, that means a return to an idyllic world of small business, small government, male dominance, and white Christian rule. For the Left, it means a transition to economic, gender, and racial equality (see Berlet & Lyons, 2000, for a statement of these ideas).

But these similarities in moral fervor and in the narrative structure of the Left and Right's views of history do not seem to fully explain how Leftists often end up in very rigid parties and perhaps eventually willing to call for revolutionary violence or engage in physical attacks on property and/or persons. A larger theory is therefore needed. The starting point for that theory can be found in group dynamics and organizational theory. That is, based on work in social psychology and sociology, it is possible to explain how extreme political groups on the Right and the Left can share many similarities even though the substance of their concerns is very different. Part of that theory can be found in the document on the four-network theory of power on this site, but there is much more to be said. Richard Ellis (The Dark Side of the Left) and Janja Lalich (Bounded Choice) provide two starting points on how Leftist groups become hierarchical and sometimes violent.

References

Berlet, C., & Lyons, M. N. (2000). Right-wing populism in America: Too close for comfort. New York: Guilford.

Domhoff, G. W. (1969). But why did they sit on the king's right in the first place? Psychoanalytic Review, 56, 586-596.

Ellis, R. J. (1998). The dark side of the Left: Illiberal egalitarianism in America. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Hertz, R. (1960). Death and the right hand. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Lakoff, G. (1996). Moral politics: What conservatives know that liberals don't. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lalich, J. (2004). Bounded choice: True believers and charismatic cults. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Laponce, J. A. (1981). Left and right: The topography of political perceptions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Needham, R. (1973). Right and left: Essays on dual symbolic classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Osgood, C., May, W., & Miron, M. (1975). Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective Meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Rossmann, J. E., & Campbell, D. P. (1965). Characteristics of political liberals and conservatives. Unpublished manuscript, Chicago.

Starr, P. (2007). Freedom's power: The true force of liberalism. New York: Basic Books.

Thass-Tienemann, T. (1955). Left-handed writing. Psychoanalytic Review, 42, 239-261.

Thass-Tienemann, T. (1967). The subconscious language. New York: Washington Square Press.

Tomkins, S. (1964). Left and right: A basic dimension of personality and ideology. In R. W. White (Ed.), The study of lives (pp. 388-411). New York: Atherton Press.

This document's URL: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.html

This document explains why and how organizations are the starting point for understanding power. It focuses on four main organizational networks -- ideological, economic, military, and political -- as the building blocks for power structures. To provide a backdrop for understanding the American power structure, it then briefly applies the theory to Europe from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, showing how the economic and political networks gradually subordinated the ideological and military networks. Finally, it shows how the theory explains the class domination that characterizes the American power structure.

The theoretical starting point for power structure research is a seemingly mundane one, but that's what makes it very useful: power is rooted in organizations. From that humble beginning we can soon reach classes, states, the military and the ideological organizations that provide the basis for the collective search for meaning and forgiveness (organized religions).

Organizations at their most basic are simply sets of rules, roles, and routines developed to accomplish some particular purpose. They are ways of doing something together that people agree on, or at least accept for the time being. Religious rituals, for example, are routines that become the basis for the institutions called churches. The established routines for face-to-face economic exchanges become one basis for the more complex economic system of markets.

This too sounds very banal. But organizations can quickly become hierarchical and/or fierce when they begin to grow larger or face an outside threat. People will fight to hold on to their organizations. They like their roles and routines, which often become rituals.

Since human beings have a vast array of "purposes," they have formed an appropriately large number of organizations. But only a few of these purposes and organizations weigh heavily in terms of generating power.

According to sociologist Michael Mann's theory -- in my opinion, the theory that best suits power structure research -- the power structures within Western civilization, and probably other civilizations, too, are best understood by determining the intertwinings and relative importance at any given time of the organizations based in four "overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power" (Mann, 1986, p. 1). These networks are ideological, economic, military, and political -- "The IEMP model" for short.

It is important to stress right away that the theory is not derived from any psychological assumptions about the importance of different human purposes. Instead, the point is strictly sociological: these four networks happen to be the most useful organizational bases for generating power. In Mann's (1986, p. 2) words, "Their primacy comes not from the strength of human desires for ideological, economic, military, or political satisfaction but from the particular organizational means each possesses to attain human goals, whatever they may be."

In focusing on these four networks, Mann's concern is therefore with the "logistics" of power (1986, pp. 9-10, 518). In terms of human history, no one network comes first or is somehow more "basic" than the others. That is, each one always has presupposed the existence of the others. However, that does not mean that the networks are usually equal in their importance. Generally speaking, one or two networks usually are more dominant than the others. For example, as I explain later in this document and elsewhere on this website, the economic network is predominant over the others in the United States, leading to class domination.

Furthermore, one kind of organizational power can be turned into any one of the others. Economic power can be turned into political power. Religious power can generate military power. Military power can conquer political power. And so on. In that sense, power is like the idea of "energy" in the natural sciences: it cannot be reduced to one primary form. Thus, there can be no "ultimate primacy" in the "mode of production" or "the normative system" or "the state," as in rival theories. Mann's summary statement on his overall framework is as follows:

A general account of societies, their structure, and their history can best be given in terms of the interrelations of what I call the four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP) relationships. These are (1) overlapping networks of social interaction, not dimensions, levels, or factors of a single social totality. This follows from my first statement. (2) They are also organizations, institutional means of attaining human goals. (Mann, 1986, p. 2.)

The four networks vary in size and reach at different times in history. For example, military power had a greater range throughout most of history than either political or economic power, but economic networks became even more extensive in recent centuries. Since the four networks are not encompassed within a larger social framework or any one physical territory, there is no need for concepts such as a "bounded society" or a "social system." Since there is no "totality," there can be no "subsystems," "levels," or "dimensions." Instead, social organization must be understood in terms of the four overlapping networks of power that run off in different directions and have varying extensions in physical space.

Since the emphasis is on people acting through social networks, the distinction between "social action" and "social structure," is cast aside. There no longer needs to be a periodic revival of the "agency vs. structure" debate. Because the four networks have different and constantly changing boundaries that vary with the invention of new technologies and the emergence of new organizational forms, the old division between "endogenous" and "exogenous" factors in the understanding of social conflict is discarded as "not helpful" (Mann, 1986, p. 1).

Mann underscores his general point about the interacting and intersecting nature of the four power networks by noting "the promiscuity of organizations and functions" (1986, p. 17). That is, the four networks can fuse and borrow from each other in complex ways. There are always power structures, but they vary from time to time and place to place in how the four power networks are interrelated. For example, medieval European states were "overwhelmingly, narrowly political" (Mann, 1986, p. 17) and they were autonomous, but states in modern capitalist societies are both political and economic, and they usually are not autonomous (Mann, 1993).

Mann defines the ideology network in terms of those organizations concerned with meaning, norms, and ritual practice (1986, p. 22). It generates "sacred" authority and intensifies social cohesion. Its usual manifestations are in organized religion, and its most prominent historical power actor was the Catholic Church. In all cases, it gains loyalty and financial support by providing answers to universal concerns about the origins of humanity, death, the purpose of life, the reasons for guilt feelings, and other existential questions.

The economic network is that set of institutions concerned with satisfying material needs through the "extraction, transformation, distribution and consumption of the objects of nature" (Mann, 1986, p. 24). The economic network gives rise to classes, which can be defined as positions in a social structure that are shaped by their power over the different parts of the economic process. The most powerful economic class is called a "ruling" or "dominant" class if it "has successfully monopolized other power sources to dominate a state-centered society at large" (Mann, 1986, p. 25). Geographically extensive classes arose only slowly in Western history, because they were dependent upon advances in infrastructure made possible by developments in the other power networks. For the first 2500 years of Western civilization, economic networks were extremely localized, especially in comparison to political and military networks.

Because economic classes are also social relationships between groups of people who often have different interests, the economic network can generate class conflicts, which are disagreements over such matters as ownership, profit margins, wage rates, working conditions, and unionization. Class conflicts can manifest themselves in ways that range from workplace protests and strikes to industry-wide boycotts and collective bargaining to nationwide political actions.

However, class conflict is not inevitably present because both owners and workers, the most likely rival classes in recent times, have to have the means to organize themselves over an extended area of social space for conflict to occur. For much of Western history, there have been well-organized dominant classes, but class conflict has been important only in certain periods of Western history, such as ancient Greece, early Rome, and the present capitalist era. That's because non-owning classes usually find it very difficult to organize themselves.

The military network is defined in terms of organized physical violence. It is the power of direct and immediate coercion. As already noted, military power had a greater range throughout most of history than either political or economic power. Even so, we often forget that until very recently an army could only carry enough food for a 50-60 mile march, which forced it to rely on the local countryside in extensive military campaigns.

Historically, many armies fought for the benefit of their own leaders, who created "empires of domination" by taking over newly arisen civilizations based on the economic, ideological, and political networks. In more recent centuries military networks usually are in the service of a political network, but they still can be separate from it, as seen with guerrilla armies based in subjugated ethnic groups and terrorist organizations based in ideological networks.

Although most theorists regard military power as one aspect of state power, there are four good historical reasons for distinguishing political and military power. First, the original states had little or no military capability. Second, most historical states have not controlled all the military forces within the territory they claim to regulate. Third, there are historical instances of conquest undertaken by armies that were not controlled by the states where they resided. Fourth, the military is usually separate from other state institutions even when it is officially controlled by the state, making possible the overthrow of the political elite by military leaders (Mann, 1986, p. 11).

The fourth and final network, "the state," is defined as a political network whose primary function is territorial regulation (Mann, 1986, p. 26-27). Its usefulness in laying down rules and adjudicating disputes in specific territories is the source of its uniqueness (Mann, 1984; Mann, 1986). This unique function is the basis for its potential autonomy, but it gains further autonomy due to the fact that it interacts with other states, especially through warfare (Mann, 1986, p. 511). The state can take on other functions besides territorial regulation and has had varying degrees of influence at different phases of Western history ( (Mann, 1977; Mann, 1986, p. 514).

People in general, and the economic network in particular, desperately need the regulatory and judicial services offered by the political network. Groups of people may be in general cooperative, but there are always disagreements here and there, and inevitably a few people who are a real pain in the neck, disputing every little issue, pushing themselves forward, and on and on (you know them well, no doubt). No other network is capable of providing regulations and a judicial system for sustained periods of time. Thus, the Four Networks theory does not put any emphasis on coercion or domination in explaining the origins of the state. Archaeological and historical evidence support this view. The earliest states had coordination functions, and were most closely allied with religious institutions, if not a direct outgrowth of them. Organized violence and class domination came later (Mann 1986, pp. 49-63, 84-87).

Looking at the growth and development of the four networks in Western history, Mann concludes that our theoretical goals as social scientists must be tempered by a respect for the complex realities of history. The historical record does not bear out the claims of any one "grand theory." There are too many exceptions. Lower-level, contingent generalizations are the best we can do. There seems to be a pattern in Western history, but only barely, and this pattern is conditioned by a number of historical accidents, not by some inevitable and immanent societal principles (1986, pp. 531-532). The "European miracle," meaning the tremendous growth in power resources over the past several hundred years, is seen as "a series of giant coincidences" (Mann, 1986, p. 505).

In the terminology that has been adopted since the 1990s, history is "path-dependent." It follows along the path that was taken at key choice points where things could have gone more than one way. Although these new paths sometimes involve mundane choices like the way in which typewriter keyboards were organized, the most important new paths usually involve power struggles between nation-states or classes within nation-states. For example, the world would be very different today if Hitler had not attacked Great Britain and the Soviet Union at the same time, undercutting the strong possibility that he might have solidified his control of continental Europe.

Because all large-scale civilizations and nation-states have been connected to each other in one way or another for several thousand years, comparative studies are far more limited in their usefulness than many social scientists believe. That's because there really aren't enough separate social systems to make meaningful comparisons, and comparisons back and forth in historical time can be downright silly due to the vastly different levels of power development at different historical epochs (Mann, 1986, pp. 173, 501-503, 525). For the most burning questions, historical studies of specific countries or systems of nation-states are the best we can do. This historical emphasis recalls C. Wright Mills's (1962, pp. 119-126) similar admonitions, and it justifies the kind of detailed studies that have characterized research on contemporary power structures.

Even the rise of independent civilizations in only four or five separate places was in good part due to a combination of relatively rare geographical coincidences, not evolutionary inevitability. Mann shows that in many times and places pre-historical social groups reached a level of social development that seemed to suggest that civilization -- defined in terms of cities, ceremonial centers, and writing -- was about to appear, only to fall back or remain at the same level. Significantly, one factor in this "failure" to develop civilizations may have been the ability of ordinary people to control the actions of their leaders, either by resisting or moving to a new group, thereby depriving the would-be power trippers of their base. People seemed to fear the development of full-fledged power structures (Mann, 1986, pp. 38-39, 67-68).

Before civilizations emerged, there may have been "inverted power structures" in which the rank-and-file could discipline would-be dominators through gossip, scorn, shunning, and if need be, assassination (Boehm, 1999). Only where river flooding allowed the possibility of alluvial agriculture, in conjunction with close proximity to geographical areas that encouraged different but complementary networks, did the "caging" of populations make possible the development of the fixed power structures of domination and exploitation that have characterized all civilizations. The strong egalitarian tendencies that characterized pre-historic social groups were submerged when power seekers could build on a religious, economic, military, or political base to gain control of others.

The Origins of Modern-Day Power Structures in Europe

To understand the American power structure, we first have to consider briefly the power structures in the European civilizations that created colonies in what is now the United States.

The modern era of state and class relations in Europe had its origins in the first few centuries after the disintegration of the Roman Empire between 337 and 476 A.D. The institution of private property developed in the context of a system of numerous small, weak states that struggled along in the territory previously dominated by the militarized Roman state. This economic development was made possible by the "normative pacification" provided by the Catholic Church, which increased greatly in its power, and by the predominance of military techniques that rendered armored knights on horseback ascendant over serfs and peasants (Mann, 1986, pp. 376-378, 390-391).

In this context, it is important to note, feudal lords did not need "states" to protect their private property and increase the exploitation of producing classes. They dominated the peasantry through their own military capabilities in a context where religion played a role in sustaining and justifying hierarchy. Moreover, the weakness of the many small states was one factor that allowed the system of private property to take deeper root without the danger of state appropriation, and for an independent merchant class to develop. The result was a growing independence for the economic network in general: "By the time trade was really buoyant (1150 to 1250 A.D.)," claims Mann (1986, p. 397), "it was accompanied by merchant and artisan institutions with an autonomy unparalleled in other civilizations."

Put more strongly, weak states and a common religious ideology made it possible for economic networks in Europe to obtain a degree of independence that is not found elsewhere. The history of China, for example, is a history of states fighting back and forth to gain the upper hand. First, there were many small states, then one big state that eventually overextended itself, followed by hundreds of years of many smaller states, and then the cycle repeated itself into the 20th century, when the Chinese Communist Party created an extremely strong state after its 1949 triumph. The ideology network is always at the service of the state -- no independent religious organizations developed in China. And the means of organized violence are controlled by states, except when militarized outsiders march in and conquer the Chinese state or states. Then these warlords monopolize violence for themselves as the new state rulers, and become assimilated into Chinese society.

Where are the economic networks in Chinese history? Well, agricultural surpluses and trading networks were important in making it all possible, but they were always under the thumb of the state. There was no significant period, let alone a 1000-year time span, as during the Middle Ages in Europe, when economic networks had a fair degree of independence. This comparison does not make European history any less hierarchical and brutal for the great mass of people, but it does make it different.

During Europe's Middle Ages, to repeat, the state had very few functions. It consisted primarily of the king and his retainers, and the bulk of its revenues came from the king's own lands and judicial fees. It tried to guard its borders and control armies in its territory, and it had a role in settling some types of disputes within its confines, but it was not a major player. Strikingly, any increases in its budget were directly tied to warfare and war debts. That continued to be the case even after the state began to gain some importance as a regulator of economic activity within its boundaries (Mann, 1986, pp. 486, 511) and to supplant the Church as the primary means of normative pacification. As late as 1505, the powers of the state were minimal:

Paying the expenses of his household, buying the political advice of a few counselors, administering supreme justice, regulating trade across territorial boundaries, issuing a coinage, and waging occasional war with the help of loyal barons -- that was the sum of state functions, which almost certainly involved less than one percent of national wealth and were marginal to the lives of most of the state's subjects. (Mann, 1986, p. 452.)

Although private property and the first stages of capitalism developed without strong states, the situation began to change in the 12th and 13th centuries for a number of reasons. As markets grew within state boundaries, there was more and more need for state regulation. As merchants increased the scope of their trade into larger and larger territories, they needed more protection against bandits and the petty rulers of small territories (Mann, 1986, pp. 423-424, 431-32). Merchants also developed an interest in aggressive wars that would widen the territory in which they could operate: "From now on commercial motivations, the conquest of markets as well as land, were to play a part in wars" (Mann, 1986, p. 432). Merchants thus quietly encouraged the growth of the state, lending it the money necessary to raise a larger army.

Moreover, dramatic -- and, of course, unanticipated -- developments in the military network also triggered changes in the relationship between private property and the state. The sudden emergence of the disciplined military phalanx, that is, spear-armed infantry in close formation, quickly led to the defeat of nobles on horseback in a series of dramatic battles between 1302 and 1315 (Mann, 1986, pp. 18-19, 428). In this new context, the nobility had to turn increasingly to the state to raise a standing army of full-time foot soldiers to protect its lands. Now it started to be the case that the state was an "instrument of domination" in the service of the economic elites in general.

There soon followed a series of technological innovations that added up to a "military revolution" (Mann, 1986, pp. 453-454). In particular, large artillery guns made it possible to destroy castles. The arms race among states was on. It didn't begin after World War II ended in 1945. To the contrary, there have been few peaceful interludes between 1300 and the present. Only states with large armies could survive, and only states that could gain the loyalty of lords and merchants could afford large armies.

So, from that point forward capitalism and the nation-state gradually grew powerful together because they needed and aided each other. As the alliance between these two power networks solidified, they subordinated the previously independent ideological and military networks. States now began to fit the usual sociological definition: the organization that controls the military and police within a given geographical area. And when a state extended its regulatory powers over a new territory, so too did capitalism diffuse more fully into that territory. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that classes and states are antagonistic, they became closely intertwined in Western history.

True enough, the class system generated by capitalism was segmented into a small number of "class-nations" of roughly equal power that together formed a multi-state system. And, yes, from the start there was also tension within each state between the top bananas in the two dominant networks of modern Western civilization -- between economic elites and political elites. Feudal lords wanted protection for their lands, and merchants wanted protection and regulation for their goods and markets, but both feared the taxing power of the state elites (Mann, 1986, p. 433). Conversely, state elites tried to gain as much autonomy as they could. Much of Western history from this time forward is about the deadly bickering between economic and political elites, with an occasional time-out to deal with peasants or artisans who tried to take advantage of the divisions in elite circles.

As the power of the market system developed, merchants, lords, and rich peasants gradually merged into a capitalist class in many of these countries. However, there were some differences from country to country. Constitutional regimes fostered the unity of a property-owning class. Absolutist regimes tended to preserve the social structure of feudalism. Either way, these European states were not very powerful in relation to the dominant class or classes:

Thus constitutional and absolutist regimes were subtypes of a single form of state: a weak state in relation to the powerful groups of civil society, but a state that increasingly coordinated those groups' activities to the point where we may begin to talk of an organic class-nation whose central point was either the court or the court/parliament of the state. (Mann, 1986, p. 481.)

Gradually, but only gradually, the relationship between dominant classes and the state became even closer and their interests began to merge. "In the 17th and 18th centuries," concludes Mann (1986, p. 516), "it begins to make sense to describe the state -- paraphrasing Marx -- as an executive committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist class." This is because the state had no distributive power over the classes of "civil society" and because power flowed "primarily from economic power relations to the state" (Mann, 1986, p. 516). Within this general framework, there were large differences among European countries between 1760 and 1914, as Mann (1993) also documents with unique data sets and many historical comparisons.

Although Mann's Four Networks theory and Marxism come to somewhat similar conclusions for the years after, say, 1790, this does not mean that Marx's analyses of key historical events in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries were necessarily correct. In fact, there is reason to believe from historical studies that they were not. Generally speaking, Marx overstated the importance of industrial capitalists as compared to landed elites within the ruling circles of the 19th century, and of urban workers as compared to other urban dwellers and peasants (Hamilton, 1991).

Based on this history, it's clear to me that questions about the relative power of states and social classes cannot be answered in the abstract for any time period, including the modern era. States may become relatively autonomous by playing nobles off against merchants, or one set of capitalists against another. But they also can be dominated by a coalition of social classes, or by a single dominant class. They can become so powerful militarily that they can extract resources from civil society. And they even can be dominated by a fervent ideological network under the right circumstances (Iran since 1979, for example). None of these possibilities should be precluded beforehand.

And that brings us to a very general overview of the structure and distribution of power in the United States. How does power operate in this particular democratic capitalist country? Does power belong to the people through their elected representatives and their organized interest groups, as the pluralists claim, with the state serving as an impartial umpire that tries to reach compromises among the differing classes and factions?

Or is power lodged in the institutional elites who run the corporate, political, and military institutions of the society, as Mills (1956) claimed? Or is there a dominant capitalist class, as Marxist and non-Marxist class-domination theorists claim? Or do state elites dominate both capitalists and non-capitalists, either in their own interests or in the interests of the capitalist system, as the state autonomy theorists claim?

To a certain extent, these issues are a matter of degree. A class-domination theorist such as myself, for example, certainly agrees that elections can matter, and that workers, environmentalists, or other challengers can win on some issues. It is the more general framework that is being argued about.

The Four Networks in the United States

How does the Four Networks theory apply to the United States? This section shows why it is plausible to suggest that there is class domination in the United States, especially compared to most other democratic capitalist countries. Economic elites have had no serious power rivals in the United States for a number of complex historical reasons.

When the United States is viewed in historical-comparative perspective as a fragment of the European system of capitalist nation-states, there is a prima facie case that leaders from the capitalist class are more powerful than in European nations and in comparison to any other group or the federal government. First, America did not have a feudal past, so its capitalists were not hindered by a rival economic class that had to be battled, assimilated, or deferred to in attempting to dominate the state. Conversely, the absence of such a rival economic elite meant that the state could not play off one strong economic class against another in an attempt to gain autonomy from the capitalist elites.

In Europe, the feudal landlords and state elites were able to limit the rise of corporate capitalism, and even to insist that capitalists had to bargain with organized workers. In the United States, there were no restraints on the rise of giant corporations from these sources, and the corporations were able to eliminate most attempts at union organization. That is a huge difference in terms of the wealth and income distribution, and in terms of the use of government to provide collective social benefits like health care insurance and a good retirement income.

By the late 19th century, the nationwide nature of the transportation and communication systems, and the commonality of language, education, and culture, meant that the bases for class solidarity were present for both corporate owners and their employees, although the corporate community was far more cohesiveness than the working class for a variety of reasons. Still, class conflict over wages, hours, working conditions, and other issues has frequently manifested itself since the late 19th century. Contrary to pluralists and state autonomy theorists, and in agreement with Marxists on this issue, I believe class conflict was the single most important factor (but not the only factor) driving American politics in the 20th century, even overshadowing the more visible and violent struggles over racial inclusion and exclusion.

But it was not just the absence of a rival economic elite (a feudal nobility rooted in the exploitation of peasant agriculture) that made it possible for capitalists to become dominant. There was no institutionalized church either, which meant that there was no ideology network that could rival them for power. Fragmented as it was from the outset into many rival Christian denominations, the ideology network has been subordinate to the economic and political networks. The historical role of churches also has been limited through the separation of church and state by the Founding Fathers, reflecting both the weak nature of the church network at the time and the Founders' own secular tendencies.

Since the 1960s, secular organizations like self-help groups and psychotherapy cults have enjoyed some success in providing meaning to the college-educated middle class, but churches remain the most important organizations in fulfilling this human need for Americans. Protestant churches in particular always have had an enormous role in producing American morality and culture. However, their constant splintering into new denominations, and then further schisms within the dominations, has limited them as a source of power.

True, the Catholic church was a power base in some urban areas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the Democratic party, often making alliances with local political machines. More recently its power has been limited to realms like abortion and school prayer, where it plays a potent role. When thinking of religious power today, it is conservative Christian churches that often come to mind, but African-American churches, especially in the South, are a significant power base. So, I can agree that ideological organizations have some political influence in the United States, but they are less important than in many other countries.

Furthermore, capitalists were able to come to power because the United States has not had a strong, independent, centralized state for a variety of historical reasons that are very familiar. First, the pre-revolutionary history of the United States as a set of separate colonial territories outside the context of the European multi-state system led to a federal form of government with many government functions located at the state as compared to the national level. The state level in turn ceded some of its power to the city level, where landed elites -- "place entrepreneurs" -- have been able to form growth coalitions that persuade local governments to protect and enhance their interest in intensifying land use (Logan & Molotch, 1987; Molotch, 1976; Molotch, 1979; Molotch, 1999).

The rivalries among the economic elites of the various states within the new United States were a second major factor in keeping the American national government limited in its scope until the 1930s at the earliest. The Founding Fathers created a system of checks and balances at the national level that has made the powerful legislative branch of the American government very accessible to elite economic groups. In particular, the rural agricultural party of Jefferson (the Democrats), which won out politically over the urban industrial party of Hamilton (roughly speaking, the Federalists/Whigs/Republicans) until the Civil War, worked very hard to keep the federal government small. It is my claim that the plantation capitalists of the South, after finding a few allies in the North, played an enormous role in restraining the growth of a strong centralized state that might challenge their domination of their African-American workforce, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow laws and the share-cropping system.

Even under these circumstances, the federal government has forced changes in power arrangements in the South twice, first through the Civil War in the 1860s, then through its support for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. These defeats at the hands of Washington reinforced the anti-government ideology of white Southerners, who refuse to forget what they see as a humiliation. Even today, the fiercely anti-government stance that pervades Southern white culture is a major barrier for those who would like to have the federal government take more responsibility for many social, educational, health, and science programs. This does not mean that wealthy white Southerners reject the many subsidies they have extracted from the federal government since the 1870s, but it does mean they have created an ideology that allows them to keep that government from helping ordinary citizens to any great extent.

The small size of the 19th-century American state meant there were powerful corporations before there was a large national government, another contrast of major importance with Europe (Mills, 1956, p. 272). The corporate elites that arose after the Civil War thus had a big impact on how the national government grew, contrary to what the pluralists and state autonomy theorists claim (Domhoff, 1970, Chapter 6; Domhoff, 1990, Chapters 4-6; Domhoff, 1996, Chapters 3-5). With the coming of World War II, and the Cold War, of course, there was no choice but to expand the state dramatically, but that expansion was completely controlled by the corporate capitalists (Domhoff, 1996, Chapter 6).

Finally, the lack of any dangerous rival states on American borders, along with the protection from European states provided by the British navy throughout most of the 19th century, meant that the capitalist class in the United States did not have to contend with a "permanent military establishment" until World War II ( see Mills, 1956, Chapter 8, for an excellent account of these matters). The American government most certainly had an army that played a large role historically in taking territory from Native Americans, Spain, and Mexico. However, it was never big enough for long enough until the second World War to be considered a serious contender for power. By that time civilian traditions were long established.

As for the many wars in which the United States has been involved since 1949, they were decided upon by elected officials and by corporate leaders appointed to important positions in the state and defense departments, not by military leaders itching for a fight. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is a perfect example. It was the product of assertive nationalists like Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, both former corporate CEOs, and the neoconservative ideologues they brought with them to government from right-wing think tanks. Most, if not all, of these pro-war civilians had carefully avoided military service in Vietnam after their graduation from college. President George W. Bush found refuge in the Texas Air National Guard, from which he took an extended leave of absence (Schweizer & Schweizer, 2004, pp. 191-195).

The United States Army was so small after the Civil War that the increasingly ascendant corporations often created their own organizations of violence to break strikes or resist unions, or else hired private specialists in such work. The largest of the private armies in that era, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, "had more men than the U.S. Army" (Mann, 1993, p. 646). The American government did not even try to stop organized corporate violence until the 1930s. That's because most of the unionization efforts by workers were defined by judges as violations of property rights and/or of the right to freedom of contract. Employers thus had a legitimate right to "defend" their property and hire replacement workers. When it came to using organized violence to enforce the law, though, the corporate leaders had to hire private armies (Mann, 1993, pp. 645-48).

So, when we turn to the current power structure in the United States, and look into the details of class domination by the corporate community and its power elite, we have to remember that the absence of feudal economic elites, the fragmented nature of the ideology network, the weakness of the decentralized government, and the small size of the military -- each explainable in historical terms -- all contributed to this outcome. It's not that the capitalists were somehow stronger or better in the United States. Instead, they found themselves in ideal circumstances in terms of the relationships among the four major power networks.

References

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Domhoff, G. W. (1970). The higher circles. New York: Random House.

Domhoff, G. W. (1990). The power elite and the state: How policy Is made in America. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Domhoff, G. W. (1996). State autonomy or class dominance? Case studies on policy making in America. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Hamilton, R. F. (1991). The bourgeois epoch: Marx and Engels on Britain, France, and Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Logan, J. R., & Molotch, H. (1987). Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mann, M. (1977). States ancient and modern. Archives of European Sociology, 18, 226-298.

Mann, M. (1984). The autonomous power of the state: Its origins, mechanisms, and results. Archives of European Sociology, 25, 185-213.

Mann, M. (1986). The sources of social power: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760 (Vol. 1). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mann, M. (1993). The sources of social power: The rise of classes and nation-states, 1760-1914 (Vol. 2). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mills, C. W. (1962). The Marxists. New York: Dell.

Molotch, H. (1976). The city as a growth machine. American Journal of Sociology, 82, 309-330.

Molotch, H. (1979). Capital and neighborhood in the United States: Some conceptual links. Urban Affairs Quarterly, 14, 289-312.

Molotch, H. (1999). Growth machine links: Up, down, and across. In A. Jonas & D. Wilson (Eds.), The urban growth machine: Critical perspectives, two decades later (pp. 247-265). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Schweizer, P., & Schweizer, R. (2004). The Bushes: Portrait of a dynasty. New York: Doubleday.

This document's URL: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/theory/four_networks.html

Introduction

When Daniel Scheibe invited me to speak at Middlesex, my first response was a combination of curiosity and pleasure. I have heard about, and written about, Middlesex, for years, but, until today, I've never been to the school. I even emailed my friend and co-author, Bill Domhoff, with whom I've written about the American power structure, telling him that I might be adding Middlesex to my "life list." He wrote back and asked: "What's a 'life list?'" I explained to him (maybe some of you don't know either) that serious bird watchers, of whom I'm not one, often keep a list of the various species of birds they have seen, with special pride in the rare ones. So I'm happy to add Middlesex, a rare bird, to my life list of the elite boarding schools I've been writing about for more than twenty-five years.

My second response to Dan's invitation was to ponder whether I had anything meaningful to say about the class system in America, and, more generally, about social justice, to a group of Middlesex students. I'm not sure if I do -- you'll be the judge of that -- but I do have some thoughts about social class, social justice and how social change comes about. More specifically, I have some thoughts I wish to share with you about working from the inside, and pushing from the outside, in order to bring changes to institutions and societies that discriminate against African-Americans, Latinos, women, the handicapped, homosexuals, those at the bottom of the class structure...take your pick. Historical and contemporary examples of institutional oppression are not hard to find.

One of the books I assign in one of the courses I teach is titled The American Class Structure: In an Age of Growing Inequality. The author provides compelling data to demonstrate that the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom of the class hierarchy in this country has been increasing dramatically since the mid-1970s.[1] Most demonstrably this can be seen in the difference in pay for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of Fortune-level companies and the lowest paid workers at those companies. That gap has skyrocketed over the past 25 years. A recent report puts the average pay of a Fortune-level CEO at 821 times as much as a minimum wage earner; this means, that the CEO, as the report puts it, "earns more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earns all year."[2] Or, perhaps another example will speak to the experiences of some people in this room: that CEO will earn more in one day than a teacher here at Middlesex earns in an entire year.[3] Long, long ago, back in 1980, CEOs also earned more, but only 42 times as much as the lowest-paid workers.[4]

The phrase "growing inequality" in the subtitle of the book I've just referred to, and the comparative data from 1980 and 2006, serve to underscore the fact that the class structure, and the distribution of this country's wealth, are not static. In the 1950s and the 1960s, a period the author of the textbook calls the "age of shared prosperity," the gap between those at the top of the class system and those at the bottom decreased. Many factors affected the reversal that began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, a reversal some economists call "the great U-turn,"[5] but I wish to stress that these were not random patterns -- they were the result of actions and decisions made by men and women. Many of the articles in your packet of summer readings ("Drawing the Line") seem to assume that there are inexorable economic forces that lead to the distribution of wealth in this country. As Geraldine Fabrikant puts it in her article about old and new money in Nantucket, "the hyper-rich...emerged in the 1980's and 1990's, when tectonic shifts in the economy created mountains of wealth."[6] Her choice of geological imagery suggests that these mountains of wealth were created by forces beyond human control, but, in fact, political, social and economic decisions determine who gets what portion of the pie. Ronald Reagan and the United States Congress were not innocent bystanders in the 1980s when many became "hyper-rich" and when, as Fabrikant points out, many working class people could no longer afford to live in places like Aspen and Nantucket, just, as we'll see in a bit, some people became "hyper-rich" in the 19th century based on the system of slavery.

Despite the widespread myth that ours is a relatively classless society, as you can see quite clearly in the various articles in your summer reading, there is a class system in this country, and it is very much related to issues of social justice. The USA, like other capitalist countries, has seen the need for laws and regulations to curb certain behaviors that ensue if the so-called free market is left to operate totally on its own. Here we could consider child labor laws, civil rights laws, or laws that require that workers be paid at least a minimum wage and how much that minimum wage is. Just how much protecting, and the extent to which such laws and regulations are enforced, has varied tremendously over time, again based on the decisions (and often the ideology) of men and women in positions of power.

I've chosen three examples for us to examine. Collectively they may help us draw some conclusions about what leads institutions to change. Each concerns both race and class. The first is the racial integration of elite boarding schools. Why, in the early 1960s, did a group of 16 prestigious boarding schools decide to put effort and money into recruiting African American students from working and lower class backgrounds through a program called "A Better Chance"? The second example concerns the racial integration of the boards of directors of the country's largest corporations. The third example is even more historical than the first two, which means it happened before the 1960s (putting it, I guess, in the realm of "ancient history"). It's about the movement to end the slave trade in England, a movement that began in 1785 when a divinity student won an essay contest, in Latin, and culminated 51 years later with the passage in the British parliament of legislation that banned the trade of human beings.

The origins of the ABC program

The story of the A Better Chance (ABC) program begins in the early 1960s with a conversation between two headmasters at Massachusetts boarding schools, Howard Jones at Mount Hermon and John Kemper at Andover. They sought to create a way to find talented African American students who could not only survive, but thrive, both academically and socially, at schools like theirs. Although black students had attended both Mount Hermon and Andover for many years, this was not the case at many other boarding schools; moreover, Mount Hermon, Andover, and other boarding schools that wanted to enroll black students had difficulty finding qualified applicants, they had difficulty persuading them to come, and many who did come did not stay. After this initial conversation, Jones and Kemper scheduled a meeting at Andover in February 1963 that was attended by headmasters from 23 New England prep schools. An executive committee was formed that consisted of Jones, Kemper and Charles Merrill; Merrill was the son of the Merrill who founded the company that was to become Merrill Lynch, and he was also the headmaster at the Commonwealth School, a school in downtown Boston that he funded and started in 1958.

From these efforts, an organization was formed that was soon to be named the A Better Chance (or ABC) program. What motivated these three men? Well, the civil rights movement was in full swing. In 1961, just a few miles from where I teach in Greensboro, North Carolina, four students at North Carolina A&T had defied the law by sitting down at the segregated lunch counter at the local Woolworth's. They refused to leave when told to do so, they were arrested, and that act of civil disobedience sparked a movement that led to marches, protests, many more arrests and, it is crucial to add, beatings and murders. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered to thousands and thousands of people who had taken to the streets in Washington, D.C. in August 1963. Perhaps these three New England headmasters would have decided it was time to integrate their schools even if there had been no civil rights movement, but I doubt it. As one of them said to me in an interview in 1988, "The revolutionary implications [of the civil rights movement] hit even us, we the headmasters. I mean, we knew history was moving fast." It is therefore important to give these men credit for their willingness to use their influence, to work from inside their mostly segregated institutions to bring about change, and to acknowledge that they and other headmasters faced considerable opposition from their boards, from alumni, and in some cases from their student bodies (to cite just one example: at Pomfret, in 1960, the headmaster was dismissed and considered a Bolshevik by some because he advocated accepting black students into the student body).[7] It is, however, also important to acknowledge that these headmasters acted in a larger context, and that the protests at lunch counters and in the streets played an indirect role in the integration of many prep schools.

Let me tell you an additional piece of the story that reveals what can be the indirect and unintended effects of challenges to the status quo. This new program needed money and it needed a home for a summer orientation program that the headmasters considered essential to prepare these new students for the dramatic changes they were about to experience. The money came from three sources: the Merrill Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and from 16 schools that signed on as charter members. The money from the Merrill Foundation was a snap, since Charles Merrill was on the foundation's executive committee. The money from the Rockefeller Foundation turned out to be a snap also, and the reason reveals the way power works internally and the way external pressures have their effects, even when it is not as obvious as civil disobedience at lunch counters. In the summer of 1963, the president of Dartmouth came to Mount Hermon to give a speech. That night, the Mount Hermon headmaster, told him about the various efforts taking place to get the ABC program started. As it turned out, Dartmouth's president was under pressure to do more to demonstrate Dartmouth's commitment to equal educational opportunity. In fact, that very same week, he had received a proposal that called on Dartmouth to establish a secondary school on campus for black students from poor backgrounds, to reduce the size of Dartmouth's freshman class to make room for 80 black students, and to allocate at least one percent of its annual budget to this effort. The Dartmouth president had turned down the proposal, but when he visited Mount Hermon he was still trying to figure out a way to satisfy those who were pushing for a greater commitment to bringing black students to Dartmouth. He was also on the executive committee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Without hesitation, he told the Mount Hermon headmaster that Dartmouth would house the ABC summer program, and that he would obtain funds for the program from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The third source of funds came from the 16 schools that joined the ABC program as charter members. The executive committee had mailed 50 invitations, 30 schools responded favorably, and the following 16 schools actually joined: Choate, Commonwealth School, Deerfield, Emma Willard, George School, Groton, the Gunnery, Hotchkiss, Northfield-Mount Hermon, Phillips Academy (Andover), Pomfret, the Putney School, St. George's, St. Paul's, Taft and Western Reserve Academy. Two of these schools are on my life list, but, as you perhaps noticed, Middlesex was not among the charter members. I encourage any of you with an interest in local institutional history to look carefully at when Middlesex became involved with ABC, and why, and, more broadly, to explore what the internal and external factors have been that have led to the current diversity in your student body. (I note that Milton is also not on the list -- but I also note that an ABC graduate of Milton may be the next governor of Massachusetts).

The corporate boardroom

Let's move from prep schools to the corporate boardroom (a pathway that some of your fathers, and now perhaps some of your mothers, have traveled, and perhaps some of you will travel). When did America's largest corporations first invite African Americans to sit on their boards of directors, and why did they do so? Again, the answer is the mid-1960s, and the very same civil rights protests that motivated the headmasters motivated the men who sat on the boards of the largest companies in America. In fact, one of the first two corporations to invite a black onto its board was a company called W. T. Grant, a general merchandise chain of 1000 stores which, like Woolworths, included many segregated lunch counters in its stores in the south. W. T. Grant had been picketed, and the publicity was not good for business.

When I looked at the first dozen companies to ask African Americans onto their boards, there was a very clear pattern in terms of who was invited to join: all were professional men, well-educated and from relatively privileged families. They were not likely to rock the boat. There was one exception and it, too, demonstrates the residual effects of protest.

In 1971, General Motors, the largest corporation in America, was under fire for its hiring practices, and for its lack of corporate responsibility. An anti-management group formed, and by buying GM stock the group managed to place some proposals on the annual shareholders' ballot. Even though none of these proposals garnered more than three percent of the vote, they had a number of indirect effects. One was the result of something that took place at the annual shareholders' meeting. James Roche, the CEO, was on his feet for most of what turned out to be a contentious six and a half hour meeting. Near the end of that meeting, he was challenged by a young activist, a minister from Ohio, who asked if GM was not a public corporation. Tired and frustrated, Roche answered with a racist slip of the tongue (it had to do with being "free" and "white").[8]

A few months after this embarrassing episode, one that was widely reported in the press, Roche approached Leon Sullivan, an African American minister in Philadelphia well-known for his activism -- this was a man who did rock the boat. When Roche called Sullivan to ask if he'd come to New York to discuss joining the GM board, Sullivan told him he was too busy but he'd be glad to talk with Roche if he came to Philadelphia. Roche accepted this demand for respect, and Sullivan went on to join the GM board. Sullivan later became central in the movement to divest holdings from companies that did business in South Africa during its apartheid regime (many know of him for what came to be called "the Sullivan principles").

So, again we can conclude that the men in power at some major corporations did the right thing by integrating their boards, but they did so only because of various kinds of protests from below, some in the streets and some at the annual shareholders' meeting.

The end of the slave trade in England

On one of his records, Arlo Guthrie, an old hippie singer-songwriter from my generation, and the son of Woody Guthrie, the great protest singer from the mid-20th century ("This Land is Your Land"), tells a great story in the middle of a moving rendition of "Amazing Grace." It's about a ship captain who halfway across the ocean had an epiphany in which he realized that slavery was wrong, so he turned the ship back, and set the slaves free. It's a powerful story, but unfortunately it is incorrect. John Newton was a ship captain, he did have a religious epiphany, he did leave the slave trade, he did become a minister and he wrote many hymns, including "Amazing Grace." However, after having become a very rich man because of the slave trade, and after he became a man of the cloth, Newton made no public comments against slavery for more than thirty years, even though he preached thousands of sermons. Finally, when he was in his sixties, when the abolitionist movement in England had gained unstoppable momentum, he spoke out against the slave trade.[9]

But who were the abolitionists in England? As I have mentioned, a key figure was a twenty-five year old divinity student who in 1785 won an essay contest at Cambridge University -- in Latin -- in response to the question, "Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?" Adam Hochschild, the author of an excellent recent book on this topic titled Bury the Chains, writes that winning this essay contest was a widely celebrated event. As he puts it: "Latin and Greek competitions were a centerpiece of British university life. As with the Heisman trophy or a Rhodes scholarship today, to win one was to gain an honor that would be bracketed with your name for a lifetime."[10]

Thus catapulted into instant celebrity, Clarkson soon found himself communicating with a group of Quakers who had been working on this issue for many years with little success. These Quakers saw the value in working with a young, celebrated, essay winner; he saw the value in working with a group of like-minded people who had long been committed to changing the status quo. According to Hochschild, Clarkson's meeting with 12 Quakers in London in 1787 was the start of a movement. Within five years, 300,000 Britons were boycotting sugar (the chief slave-grown product), but it took another 51 years before the powers that be in England legally banned the slave trade (this, of course, was decades before slavery was declared illegal in the United States). It is a remarkable story that begins with a mere handful of deeply committed people, astute political organizing, and both disruption and working within the legal system.

Thomas Clarkson, the divinity student who won the contest in 1785, spent his entire adult lifetime agitating to end the slave trade. Another who worked on this issue from the 1780s through the 1830s was a man named William Wilberforce. Clarkson was an outsider to the halls of power, described by Hochschild as "an agitator," and "a fiery radical;" Wilberforce was an insider, a member of Parliament, a cautious conservative and an Evangelical Christian. Together they were "one of history's great partnerships" (p. 352). Hochschild explains this in the following way:

Absent revolution, the usual purpose of building a movement, after all, is to get legislators to change laws. Clarkson would not have been an effective agitator had he not shared the dreams of change and freedom in the air during this pregnant interlude between the American and French revolutions. Wilberforce would not have been an effective member of Parliament had he not shared the worldview of his fellow M.P.s who were mostly reactionary landowners.

I very much recommend Hochschild's book, which I've given only the briefest treatment to here, but for now I encourage you to consider these three examples and what they reveal about what leads institutions and societies to change in ways that bring about greater equality and move us closer to social justice.[11]

Conclusions

Whether one looks at the integration of prep schools, the integration of corporate boards, or the end of the slave trade in England, or if one looks at a larger sample of social protests in the last two hundred years, as one sociologist has done,[12] it is clear that there is a role for the agitator and a role for the insider in order for change to occur. Agitators can be, well, disruptive, self-righteous, and in some cases quite obnoxious, and part of my purpose today is to encourage you to keep in mind the crucially important role that agitators play in making the world a more just place.

Especially those of us who benefit from the status quo can find such agitation off-putting not only because agitators can be annoying but because they make us feel uncomfortable. Many people, perhaps most people, avoid taking a stand on issues of injustice. Many join in as best they can -- the 300,000 Brits who gave up sugar in the 1780s were doing their part to end the slave trade. Some individuals provide invaluable leadership, either as insiders or as outside agitators.

As each of you considers what role you wish to play, and what issues you wish to confront, I encourage you to keep in mind the importance of working from within and from the outside. Some of you might become great agitators (many of history's most successful rebels have come from economically privileged circumstances). Others of you might, like those headmasters at Andover and Mount Hermon, like those corporate board members who decided to break the color line at their companies, or like William Wilberforce, the evangelical Christian member of parliament who was central to the legislation that ended the slave trade in England, be insiders who contribute to changes that make for a more just world. As I've tried to demonstrate, insiders and outsiders are often in opposition, but they also, sometimes in unexpected ways, can be interdependent.

 the

I teach a course entitled "The American Upper Class." I first taught it in the early 1980s after having spent the previous few years writing about the extent to which Jews were and were not allowed into the Protestant Establishment. Drawing especially on the work of E. Digby Baltzell, an upper class sociologist from the Main Line of Philadelphia, and the work of C. Wright Mills, a radical sociologist from Texas whose father sold insurance, I had written a series of articles, and then coauthored a book titled Jews in the Protestant Establishment.[1] In the process of studying upper class Protestants, and the ways they had and had not allowed Jews into their midst, I began to focus more on the relationships between the American upper class (including elite boarding schools, exclusive city and country clubs, and debutante balls) and the American power structure.

Most colleges have sociology courses on "Stratification" that seek to teach students that there is a class structure in the United States (a big surprise to some students). By the 1980s most colleges had courses titled "Race, Class and Gender" (I've taught that one, too, though I title my course "Class, Race and Gender"). So, too, do most colleges include courses that focus on poverty in the USA. Not many have courses on the American upper class.

In this class I have sought to address some basic issues. First, though most students, like so many Americans, deny it, I try to help students understand that there is a class system in this country and that it has for the most part worked in rather predictable ways throughout the last 110 years. Second, I hope to show students that those in the upper class not only have a lifestyle that is much-admired, and much-emulated, but that they are clearly connected to, but not the same as, those who run the institutions of power in the USA. Third, I hope that students will come to realize that those who are not in the upper class, and especially those who are at the bottom of the class structure, are very much affected by the advantages that those in the upper class have and work to maintain Fourth, although the class differs substantially from the course I teach called "Class, Race and Gender," I try to help my students understand that one can't really understand class without also considering race and gender -- the three (and other forms of oppression or discrimination) interact in complex ways. Fifth, I encourage students to think about how the American upper class is now part of an international upper class, and the way those atop the class hierarchy in this country connect with those in the upper classes around the world (hint #1: there are now far more international students at the most elite boarding schools in the USA than there used to be; hint #2: there are now a number of foreign-born CEOs of Fortune-level corporations, men from upper class backgrounds in their home countries).

I teach at Guilford College, a Quaker liberal arts school in Greensboro, North Carolina. Guilford is somewhat selective, but not nearly as selective as many New England colleges. The students are geographically diverse (mostly from up and down the east coast, but some from the west, and some international students), and there is considerable diversity in terms of their class backgrounds. These days the tuition, room and board runs about $33,000, though most students do not pay the full rate, and some are here mostly or fully on scholarships. Some students are from very wealthy families, many are from the upper middle class, and many are from middle and working class families. Many students are from rural North Carolina, or from small southern towns, and they see Greensboro as the big city. Therefore, when I teach this class, I do not assume that my students are from economically privileged backgrounds, or that they have ever heard of schools like Choate, or Andover, or Exeter, though some have (and one or two may have attended those schools).

I use a chronological approach in this course, not only because it makes intuitive sense, but because I have become more and more aware of how limited my students' knowledge of American history is.[2] Although I have varied the reading in different iterations of the course, I've tended to use four books that I consider classics, published in 1899, 1924, 1956, and 1984. This allows us to consider what was going on in the country at those times, to examine the ways the upper class was portrayed in these works, and to explore the extent to which things seem to have changed (or not) since then.

I lead off with Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.[3] Veblen's book provides historical perspective, not only because he wrote it in the late nineteenth century, but because he begins with an anthropological look backwards to earlier civilizations and a (very) hypothetical treatment of the evolution of systems of stratification. His erudite and flowery (but also humorous) language is very much of a bygone era, but, surprisingly, most students like his book, and appreciate his sense of humor. Many of the concepts that Veblen introduced, most especially "pecuniary emulation," "conspicuous leisure" and "conspicuous consumption," are quite useful as we move to the other books, and move forward chronologically to the present.

When we finish reading Veblen, I ask the students to take a driving tour of Greensboro, and to use Veblen's ideas to write a paper about what they have seen ("Thorstein Veblen Comes Back From the Dead and Takes a Driving Tour of Greensboro, NC"). Like every American city of about 240,000 people, Greensboro has opulent houses (mansions really) and it has crowded projects. I detail a route for them which takes about an hour to drive. It sends them through the downtown, right past the Woolworth's where in 1960 four students from nearby North Carolina A&T University sat in at a segregated lunch counter in a protest that is generally considered to have sparked the sit-ins and economic boycotts that were central to the civil rights movement. The route also includes the projects where in 1979 at a "Death to the Klan" rally, sponsored by the Communist Workers Party, five people were killed, and several others were injured, by members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party (six Klansmen and Nazis were later acquitted in a state trial). The route also includes working class neighborhoods, middle class neighborhoods, and the neighborhood that surrounds "the" country club (this neighborhood, with the unlikely name of Irving Park -- which always reminds me of one of my Jewish relatives in Brooklyn -- provides ample opportunity to write about conspicuous consumption).

We then read Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, and set in New York during the years following World War I. Many students previously have read this book -- it is a favorite in high schools[4] -- but they have not focused on the text as a source for a class analysis. They know Daisy and Tom Buchanan are rich, and that Nick is not so rich, and that Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, is from the working class, but they have not really thought much about Nick's family background and why it is important to understanding what Fitzgerald is saying about the Buchanans, about Gatsby, and about the Wilsons. They know that Gatsby is rich, and that he grew up poor, and that the source of his wealth is shady. This book provides a nice opportunity to look at the relationship between class and wealth, the distinction between new money and old money, the difference between celebrity and power, and the way that the relationship between wealth and class can change over two or three generations. (I ask my students if Bruce Springsteen is part of the upper class. What about LeBron James? What about Ice Cube? How might the children of these wealthy athletes and entertainers become part of the upper class? Would sending them to Lawrenceville, or Andover, help? Why?).

Batting third, bringing us into the 1950s, is C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite, a book that resonates now, over fifty years after it was written, more than one might think. Mills address directly some of the questions raised by Gatsby. Mills presents a readable, though extensively documented, argument that by the 1950s power in America no longer resided in wealthy families but was in the hands of the white Anglo-Saxon protestant men who held the highest positions in three institutions -- more specifically, those who were in the corporate elite, the political elite and the military elite. Mills showed empirically that those in the upper class were very much over-represented in these powerful positions, but he also showed that they were not one and the same (there were some Horatio Alger stories -- but not as many as the publicists claimed). Still, he argued, the system functioned to perpetuate the wealth of those who had it, and those in the power elite who were not from the upper class were typically, though not always, doing the bidding of the those in the upper class. Mills admired Veblen (he called him "the best critic of America that America has produced") but he also provided an important critique of Veblen's limited portrayal of the upper class (and indirectly of Fitzgerald's as well).

The fourth book that I assign, published in 1984, is Susan Ostrander's Women of the Upper Class. Based on interviews with 36 upper class women in a Midwest city, Ostrander looked at how these women fit into their families and into the local upper class. The book includes poignant descriptions of their work with the Junior League and other volunteer organizations, their relationships with their husbands and children, and their attitudes about the cultural changes taking place around them. They were clearly privileged economically, but many were also quite subservient to their husbands, and Ostrander's portrayal is rich with nuance. Here, especially, given the considerable changes in women's worlds that have taken place in the decades since the book was written, my students have a great deal to say about the changes they think have occurred, and we often spend time designing the follow-up study on this topic that I would love to see someone do.

I've taught this course three times since 1999, and in those classes the last book I've assigned has been either the first edition or the second edition of a book that I coauthored; the first (published in 1998) was titled Diversity in the Power Elite: Have Women and Minorities Reached the Top? And the second (published in 2006) was titled Diversity in the Power Elite: How it Happened, Why it Matters.[5]

This book updates C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite by examining the extent to which Jews, women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and gay men and lesbians have become a part of the corporate, political and military elites. When Mills wrote his book, all three institutions were run by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, but, as was quite obvious in the spring of 2008, as Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton vied for the Democratic nomination, there are now some African Americans and some women in positions of power. In the book, we detail just how many people from these various groups have made it to the top of these three institutions of power, and we look at the class backgrounds of those who have made it. It will not be a surprise to the readers of Radical Teacher that each of the Republican and Democratic Presidential nominees in the 21st century attended an elite boarding school (Bush: Andover; Gore: St. Albans; Kerry: St. Paul's; Obama: Punahou; McCain: Episcopal), but it is news to some of my students, and as we read and talk about this book we put the role of elite boarding schools into the larger context of understanding the upper class and the power elite.

The end-of-semester evaluations indicate that the students very much like the class, and think that they have learned a lot. Guilford uses a standardized form with both quantitative measures (24 questions) and open-ended questions asking for narrative comments. The numerical ratings have been consistently high, with scores higher than the college's average and, in fact, higher than I receive in many of the other classes I teach (the last time I taught the course, the scores were between 5 and 6 -- on a six-point scale -- on all 24 items, with 6 as the modal response to most items).

The narrative responses to the open-ended questions indicate that, for many students, the class is an eye-opener. As one student put it, the course "completed changed my perceptions of the class structure." In response to a question which asked what aspects of the course contributed the most to their learning, many students wrote about the short response papers that they were required to write and bring to each class. These short papers were designed to increase the likelihood of students actually reading the assigned material before they came to class, and to enhance the quality of the discussions. It seems to have worked. As one student wrote, "We had assignments due every class which forced us to do the reading and generated GREAT class discussions."

Many students mentioned the class discussions, at times focusing on the way they were structured ("The class discussions were set up to encourage us to interact with one another") and at times emphasizing the diverse make-up of the students in the class ("the varied backgrounds and perceptions of classmates reflected great diversity, and therefore provided an opportunity to learn").

Only one student raised a concern about bias, and this concern seemed to apply to the comments of students instead of (or perhaps in addition to) the make-up of the readings or the views I expressed. In response to a question about how the course could be improved in the future, this student wrote that I should "encourage the class to be open-minded about the upper class."

I, of course, do not tell them what to do with what they have learned, but I do encourage them to think about the choices they make. For those few very wealthy students, I'm always sure to mention Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change, a book published in 2000 that encouraged extremely wealthy progressives to give their money away in ways that promote social justice rather than spending their lives trying to accumulate more.[6]

I also try to get them to think about the symbiotic relationship between social protests (for example, those who participated in sit-ins during the civil rights movement) and legislative changes (for example, the Voting Rights Act of 1965). The next time I teach the course I plan to tell them about Adam Hochschild's 2005 book about the end of the slave trade in England, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.Although his book is not about the American upper class, it does show just how important it is to have both disruptive protest from the outside and people of commitment on the inside to bring about meaningful change.[7] Whether my students disrupt from the outside, or try to work from the inside, is, of course, up to them, but I do hope that they will do what they can to bring about much-needed change in the way the class system is stacked in favor of those born into the upper class in America.[8]

This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators.

Some of the information might be a surprise to many people. The most amazing numbers on income inequality come last, showing the change in the ratio of the average CEO's paycheck to that of the average factory worker over the past 40 years.

First, though, some definitions. Generally speaking, wealth is the value of everything a person or family owns, minus any debts. However, for purposes of studying the wealth distribution, economists define wealth in terms of marketable assets, such as real estate, stocks, and bonds, leaving aside consumer durables like cars and household items because they are not as readily converted into cash and are more valuable to their owners for use purposes than they are for resale (see Wolff, 2004, p. 4, for a full discussion of these issues). Once the value of all marketable assets is determined, then all debts, such as home mortgages and credit card debts, are subtracted, which yields a person's net worth. In addition, economists use the concept of financial wealth -- also referred to in this document as "non-home wealth" -- which is defined as net worth minus net equity in owner-occupied housing. As Wolff (2004, p. 5) explains, "Financial wealth is a more 'liquid' concept than marketable wealth, since one's home is difficult to convert into cash in the short term. It thus reflects the resources that may be immediately available for consumption or various forms of investments."

We also need to distinguish wealth from income. Income is what people earn from wages, dividends, interest, and any rents or royalties that are paid to them on properties they own. In theory, those who own a great deal of wealth may or may not have high incomes, depending on the returns they receive from their wealth, but in reality those at the very top of the wealth distribution usually have the most income.

The Wealth Distribution

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2009).

In terms of types of financial wealth, the top one percent of households have 38.3% of all privately held stock, 60.6% of financial securities, and 62.4% of business equity. The top 10% have 80% to 90% of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate. Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of America.

Figures on inheritance tell much the same story. According to a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, only 1.6% of Americans receive $100,000 or more in inheritance. Another 1.1% receive $50,000 to $100,000. On the other hand, 91.9% receive nothing (Kotlikoff & Gokhale, 2000). Thus, the attempt by ultra-conservatives to eliminate inheritance taxes -- which they always call "death taxes" for P.R. reasons -- would take a huge bite out of government revenues for the benefit of less than 1% of the population. (It is noteworthy that some of the richest people in the country oppose this ultra-conservative initiative, suggesting that this effort is driven by anti-government ideology. In other words, few of the ultra-conservatives behind the effort will benefit from it in any material way.)

For the vast majority of Americans, their homes are by far the most significant wealth they possess. Figure 3 comes from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances (via Wolff, 2009) and compares the median income, total wealth (net worth, which is marketable assets minus debt), and non-home wealth (which earlier we called financial wealth) of White, Black, and Hispanic households in the U.S.

Besides illustrating the significance of home ownership as a measure of wealth, the graph also shows how much worse Black and Latino households are faring overall, whether we are talking about income or net worth. In 2007, the average white household had 15 times as much total wealth as the average African-American or Latino household. If we exclude home equity from the calculations and consider only financial wealth, the ratios are in the neighborhood of 100:1. Extrapolating from these figures, we see that 70% of white families' wealth is in the form of their principal residence; for Blacks and Hispanics, the figures are 95% and 96%, respectively.

Historical context

Numerous studies show that the wealth distribution has been extremely concentrated throughout American history, with the top 1% already owning 40-50% in large port cities like Boston, New York, and Charleston in the 19th century (Keister, 2005). It was very stable over the course of the 20th century, although there were small declines in the aftermath of the New Deal and World II, when most people were working and could save a little money. There were progressive income tax rates, too, which took some money from the rich to help with government services.

Then there was a further decline, or flattening, in the 1970s, but this time in good part due to a fall in stock prices, meaning that the rich lost some of the value in their stocks. By the late 1980s, however, the wealth distribution was almost as concentrated as it had been in 1929, when the top 1% had 44.2% of all wealth. It has continued to edge up since that time, with a slight decline from 1998 to 2001, before the economy crashed in the late 2000s and little people got pushed down again. Table 3 and Figure 4 present the details from 1922 through 2007.

Here are some dramatic facts that sum up how the wealth distribution became even more concentrated between 1983 and 2004, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s (Wolff, 2007).

The rest of the world

Thanks to a 2006 study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research -- using statistics for the year 2000 -- we now have information on the wealth distribution for the world as a whole, which can be compared to the United States and other well-off countries. The authors of the report admit that the quality of the information available on many countries is very spotty and probably off by several percentage points, but they compensate for this problem with very sophisticated statistical methods and the use of different sets of data. With those caveats in mind, we can still safely say that the top 10% of the world's adults control about 85% of global household wealth -- defined very broadly as all assets (not just financial assets), minus debts. That compares with a figure of 69.8% for the top 10% for the United States. The only industrialized democracy with a higher concentration of wealth in the top 10% than the United States is Switzerland at 71.3%. For the figures for several other Northern European countries and Canada, all of which are based on high-quality data, see Table 4.

The Relationship Between Wealth and Power

What's the relationship between wealth and power? To avoid confusion, let's be sure we understand they are two different issues. Wealth, as I've said, refers to the value of everything people own, minus what they owe, but the focus is on "marketable assets" for purposes of economic and power studies. Power, as explained elsewhere on this site, has to do with the ability (or call it capacity) to realize wishes, or reach goals, which amounts to the same thing, even in the face of opposition (Russell, 1938; Wrong, 1995). Some definitions refine this point to say that power involves Person A or Group A affecting Person B or Group B "in a manner contrary to B's interests," which then necessitates a discussion of "interests," and quickly leads into the realm of philosophy (Lukes, 2005, p. 30). Leaving those discussions for the philosophers, at least for now, how do the concepts of wealth and power relate?

First, wealth can be seen as a "resource" that is very useful in exercising power. That's obvious when we think of donations to political parties, payments to lobbyists, and grants to experts who are employed to think up new policies beneficial to the wealthy. Wealth also can be useful in shaping the general social environment to the benefit of the wealthy, whether through hiring public relations firms or donating money for universities, museums, music halls, and art galleries.

Second, certain kinds of wealth, such as stock ownership, can be used to control corporations, which of course have a major impact on how the society functions. Tables 5a and 5b show what the distribution of stock ownership looks like. Note how the top one percent's share of stock equity increased (and the bottom 80 percent's share decreased) between 2001 and 2007.

Third, just as wealth can lead to power, so too can power lead to wealth. Those who control a government can use their position to feather their own nests, whether that means a favorable land deal for relatives at the local level or a huge federal government contract for a new corporation run by friends who will hire you when you leave government. If we take a larger historical sweep and look cross-nationally, we are well aware that the leaders of conquering armies often grab enormous wealth, and that some religious leaders use their positions to acquire wealth.

There's a fourth way that wealth and power relate. For research purposes, the wealth distribution can be seen as the main "value distribution" within the general power indicator I call "who benefits." What follows in the next three paragraphs is a little long-winded, I realize, but it needs to be said because some social scientists -- primarily pluralists -- argue that who wins and who loses in a variety of policy conflicts is the only valid power indicator (Dahl, 1957, 1958; Polsby, 1980). And philosophical discussions don't even mention wealth or other power indicators (Lukes, 2005). (If you have heard it all before, or can do without it, feel free to skip ahead to the last paragraph of this section)

Here's the argument: if we assume that most people would like to have as great a share as possible of the things that are valued in the society, then we can infer that those who have the most goodies are the most powerful. Although some value distributions may be unintended outcomes that do not really reflect power, as pluralists are quick to tell us, the general distribution of valued experiences and objects within a society still can be viewed as the most publicly visible and stable outcome of the operation of power.

In American society, for example, wealth and well-being are highly valued. People seek to own property, to have high incomes, to have interesting and safe jobs, to enjoy the finest in travel and leisure, and to live long and healthy lives. All of these "values" are unequally distributed, and all may be utilized as power indicators. However, the primary focus with this type of power indicator is on the wealth distribution sketched out in the previous section.

The argument for using the wealth distribution as a power indicator is strengthened by studies showing that such distributions vary historically and from country to country, depending upon the relative strength of rival political parties and trade unions, with the United States having the most highly concentrated wealth distribution of any Western democracy except Switzerland. For example, in a study based on 18 Western democracies, strong trade unions and successful social democratic parties correlated with greater equality in the income distribution and a higher level of welfare spending (Stephens, 1979).

And now we have arrived at the point I want to make. If the top 1% of households have 30-35% of the wealth, that's 30 to 35 times what we would expect by chance, and so we infer they must be powerful. And then we set out to see if the same set of households scores high on other power indicators (it does). Next we study how that power operates, which is what most articles on this site are about. Furthermore, if the top 20% have 84% of the wealth (and recall that 10% have 85% to 90% of the stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity), that means that the United States is a power pyramid. It's tough for the bottom 80% -- maybe even the bottom 90% -- to get organized and exercise much power.

Income and Power

The income distribution also can be used as a power indicator. As Table 6 shows, it is not as concentrated as the wealth distribution, but the top 1% of income earners did receive 17% of all income in the year 2003. That's up from 12.8% for the top 1% in 1982, which is quite a jump, and it parallels what is happening with the wealth distribution. This is further support for the inference that the power of the corporate community and the upper class have been increasing in recent decades.

The rising concentration of income can be seen in a special New York Times analysis of an Internal Revenue Service report on income in 2004. Although overall income had grown by 27% since 1979, 33% of the gains went to the top 1%. Meanwhile, the bottom 60% were making less: about 95 cents for each dollar they made in 1979. The next 20% - those between the 60th and 80th rungs of the income ladder -- made $1.02 for each dollar they earned in 1979. Furthermore, the Times author concludes that only the top 5% made significant gains ($1.53 for each 1979 dollar). Most amazing of all, the top 0.1% -- that's one-tenth of one percent -- had more combined pre-tax income than the poorest 120 million people (Johnston, 2006).

But the increase in what is going to the few at the top did not level off, even with all that. As of 2007, income inequality in the United States was at an all-time high for the past 95 years, with the top 0.01% -- that's one-hundredth of one percent -- receiving 6% of all U.S. wages, which is double what it was for that tiny slice in 2000; the top 10% received 49.7%, the highest since 1917 (Saez, 2009).

A key factor behind the high concentration of income, and the likely reason that the concentration has been increasing, can be seen by examining the distribution of what is called "capital income": income from capital gains, dividends, interest, and rents. In 2003, just 1% of all households -- those with after-tax incomes averaging $701,500 -- received 57.5% of all capital income, up from 40% in the early 1990s. On the other hand, the bottom 80% received only 12.6% of capital income, down by nearly half since 1983, when the bottom 80% received 23.5%. Figure 5 and Table 7 provide the details.

Another way that income can be used as a power indicator is by comparing average CEO annual pay to average factory worker pay, something that Business Week has been doing for many years now. The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, when CEOs were cashing in big stock options;. It was at 411:1 in 2005. By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe. The changes in the American ratio are displayed in Figure 6.

It's even more revealing to compare the actual rates of increase of the salaries of CEOs and ordinary workers; from 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300% (adjusted for inflation), while production workers gained a scant 4.3%. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage actually declined by 9.3%, when inflation is taken into account. These startling results are illustrated in Figure 7.

If you wonder how such a large gap could develop, the proximate, or most immediate, factor involves the way in which CEOs now are able to rig things so that the board of directors, which they help select -- and which includes some fellow CEOs on whose boards they sit -- gives them the pay they want. The trick is in hiring outside experts, called "compensation consultants," who give the process a thin veneer of economic respectability.

The process has been explained in detail by a retired CEO of DuPont, Edgar S. Woolard, Jr., who is now chair of the New York Stock Exchange's executive compensation committee. His experience suggests that he knows whereof he speaks, and he speaks because he's concerned that corporate leaders are losing respect in the public mind. He says that the business page chatter about CEO salaries being set by the competition for their services in the executive labor market is "bull." As to the claim that CEOs deserve ever higher salaries because they "create wealth," he describes that rationale as a "joke," says the New York Times (Morgenson, 2005, Section 3, p. 1).

Here's how it works, according to Woolard:

The compensation committee [of the board of directors] talks to an outside consultant who has surveys you could drive a truck through and pay anything you want to pay, to be perfectly honest. The outside consultant talks to the human resources vice president, who talks to the CEO. The CEO says what he'd like to receive. It gets to the human resources person who tells the outside consultant. And it pretty well works out that the CEO gets what he's implied he thinks he deserves, so he will be respected by his peers. (Morgenson, 2005.)

The board of directors buys into what the CEO asks for because the outside consultant is an "expert" on such matters. Furthermore, handing out only modest salary increases might give the wrong impression about how highly the board values the CEO. And if someone on the board should object, there are the three or four CEOs from other companies who will make sure it happens. It is a process with a built-in escalator.

As for why the consultants go along with this scam, they know which side their bread is buttered on. They realize the CEO has a big say-so on whether or not they are hired again. So they suggest a package of salaries, stock options and other goodies that they think will please the CEO, and they, too, get rich in the process. And certainly the top executives just below the CEO don't mind hearing about the boss's raise. They know it will mean pay increases for them, too. (For an excellent detailed article on the main consulting firm that helps CEOs and other corporate executives raise their pay, check out the New York Times article entitled "America's Corporate Pay Pal", which supports everything Woolard of DuPont claims and adds new information.)

There's a much deeper power story that underlies the self-dealing and mutual back-scratching by CEOs now carried out through interlocking directorates and seemingly independent outside consultants. It probably involves several factors. At the least, on the worker side, it reflects an increasing lack of power following the all-out attack on unions in the 1960s and 1970s, which is explained in detail by the best expert on recent American labor history, James Gross (1995), a labor and industrial relations professor at Cornell. That decline in union power made possible and was increased by both outsourcing at home and the movement of production to developing countries, which were facilitated by the break-up of the New Deal coalition and the rise of the New Right (Domhoff, 1990, Chapter 10). It signals the shift of the United States from a high-wage to a low-wage economy, with professionals protected by the fact that foreign-trained doctors and lawyers aren't allowed to compete with their American counterparts in the direct way that low-wage foreign-born workers are.

On the other side of the class divide, the rise in CEO pay may reflect the increasing power of chief executives as compared to major owners and stockholders in general, not just their increasing power over workers. CEOs may now be the center of gravity in the corporate community and the power elite, displacing the leaders in wealthy owning families (e.g., the second and third generations of the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart). True enough, the CEOs are sometimes ousted by their generally go-along boards of directors, but they are able to make hay and throw their weight around during the time they are king of the mountain. (It's really not much different than that old children's game, except it's played out in profit-oriented bureaucratic hierarchies, with no other sector of society, like government, willing or able to restrain the winners.)

The claims made in the previous paragraph need much further investigation. But they demonstrate the ideas and research directions that are suggested by looking at the wealth and income distributions as indicators of power.

Further Information

• The 2007 Wolff paper is on-line at http://www.levy.org/vdoc.aspx?docid=929
• The Census Bureau report is on line at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/wealth/wealth.html
• The World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) report on household wealth throughout the world is available at http://tinyurl.com/wdhw08; see the WIDER site for more about their research.
• For good summaries of other information on wealth and income, and for information on the estate tax, see the United For A Fair Economy site at http://www.faireconomy.org/
• The New York Times ran an excellent series of articles on executive compensation in the fall of 2006 entitled "Gilded Paychecks." Look for it by searching the archives on NYTimes.com.
• To see a video of Ed Woolard giving his full speech about executive compensation, go to http://www.compensationstandards.com/nonmember/EdWoolard_video.asp (WMV file, may not be viewable on all platforms/browsers)
• The Shapiro & Friedman paper on capital income, along with many other reports on the federal budget and its consequences, are available at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities site: http://www.cbpp.org/pubs/recent.html
• The AFL-CIO maintains a site called "Executive Paywatch," which summarizes information about the salary disparity between executives and other workers: http://www.aflcio.org/paywatch/
• More raw numbers about the unequal wealth distribution in the U.S. are available at Inequality.org: http://www.inequality.org/facts.html
• Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, has written or co-authored a number of papers on income inequality and related topics: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/

References

Anderson, S., Cavanagh, J., Klinger, S., & Stanton, L. (2005). Executive Excess 2005: Defense Contractors Get More Bucks for the Bang. Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies / United for a Fair Economy.

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Dahl, R. A. (1958). A critique of the ruling elite model. American Political Science Review, 52, 463-469.

Davies, J. B., Sandstrom, S., Shorrocks, A., & Wolff, E. N. (2006). The World Distribution of Household Wealth. Helsinki: World Institute for Development Economics Research.

Domhoff, G. W. (1990). The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Gross, J. A. (1995). Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Johnston, D. C. (2006, November 28). '04 Income in U.S. Was Below 2000 Level. New York Times, p. C-1.

Keister, L. (2005). Getting Rich: A Study of Wealth Mobility in America. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kotlikoff, L., & Gokhale, J. (2000). The Baby Boomers' Mega-Inheritance: Myth or Reality? Cleveland: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View (Second ed.). New York: Palgrave.

Morgenson, G. (2005, October 23). How to slow runaway executive pay. New York Times, Section 3, p. 1.

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Saez, E. (2009). Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Update with 2007 Estimates). Retrieved August 28, 2009 from http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2007.pdf.

Saez, E., & Piketty, T. (2003). Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 1-39.

Shapiro, I., & Friedman, J. (2006). New, Unnoticed CBO Data Show Capital Income Has Become Much More Concentrated at the Top. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Stephens, J. (1979). The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. London: Macmillan.

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Wolff, E. N. (2007). Recent trends in household wealth in the United States: Rising debt and the middle-class squeeze. Working Paper No. 502. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Wolff, E. N. (2009). Recent trends in household wealth in the U.S., update to 2007: Rising debt and the middle class squeeze. Working Paper in progress. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Wrong, D. (1995). Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses (Second ed.). New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

This document's URL: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

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