Article

European Journal of Social Theory

15(1) 73–92
Power and truth ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431011423591
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Mark Haugaard
National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Abstract
In the literature, the power debate is divided between modern and postmodern posi-
tions. The former hold that power and truth are opposites, while the latter view them as
mutually constitutive. These debates mix epistemological, normative and sociological
claims. Using classical sociological methods, strict criteria for valid functional explana-
tions are set out and the relationship between power and truth is explained in these
terms. It is argued that agents use truth to create local social capital for themselves,
which has the unintended functional effect of reinforcing the effectiveness and stability of
social systems. This entails an account of authority as a performative act that meets with
a felicitous reaction by others.

Keywords
authority, power, social capital, structures, truth

The relationship between power and truth was central to the work of Michel Foucault,
post-structuralist theory (for instance, Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Clegg (1989) and
is central to Lukes’s analysis of power (1974, 2005). In simple form it could be argued
that what divides so-called modern and post-modernist or post-structuralist traditions of
social thought is a dichotomous view of the relationship between power and truth. To the
modernist followers of the Enlightenment tradition – for instance, Lukes (1974, 2005,
2008) and Elias (2008) – the ideal of emancipation is a world in which truth exists unen-
cumbered by power. In this regard, Rawls’s ‘original position’ (1971) and Habermas’s
‘ideal speech’ (1984) would be paradigmatic. The normative opposite of these ideals
is the third-dimension of power, which constitutes domination through ‘false-conscious-
ness’ (Lukes, [1974] 2005). In contrast to Lukes, Foucault (1980, 2007), Clegg (1989;
Clegg et al., 2006), Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Laclau (1990) argue that the idea
of truth unencumbered by power is an illusion, which reinforces relations of domination.

Corresponding author:
Mark Haugaard, School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Email: [email protected]
74 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

From my theoretical perspective, this debate or opposition is partly confused by

a slide from sociological observation to normative conclusion, from is to ought.
This entails a move from sociology, concerning the use of truth, to philosophy, concerning
the epistemological status of truth, which takes place without an explicit understanding or
acknowledgement of a switch of language games. In this article we shall deal with the is
side of the question.
In essence, this article takes one of the theoretical cornerstones of post-structuralist
theorizing and returns it to the premises of classical sociological method. In so doing,
it follows Foucault when he claimed that what interested him was the use of truth
(Foucault, 1980: 66; 1988: 107), which was an assertion that, in my opinion, he did not
follow with sufficient resoluteness. By couching these observations in the language
game of sociological theory, the great epistemological philosophical issues concerning
the status of knowledge, relativism versus empiricism, and so on, are momentarily
methodologically bracketed. What emerges is an account of social practice and system
reproduction, which is relatively self-contained. Many of the basic intuitions concerning
the use of truth that inspire post-structuralist authors are analyzed within this framework
without being obscured by language game interference from the big philosophical ques-
tions concerning the normative and epistemological status of truth which have preoccu-
pied Western philosophers since Descartes.
By grounding theory in social practice, this perspective has the advantage of not pos-
tulating any metaphysical form of will to truth. While struggles for power can be found
everywhere, power is not some kind of metaphysical force which is everywhere. Power
does nothing, wills nothing and, as a thing in itself, is nowhere. It is agents who are and
who will, it is agents who struggle, it is agents who create truth claims and use them to
empower themselves to positions of authority. Yet, these agents are not free to do so as
they wish. They are constrained, but not by structure as a metaphysical force, or by sys-
tems. Rather, they are constrained by the necessity to make their structuration practices
count as valid in the eyes of others. As will be seen, truth is useful in making certain
forms of social capital count.
In arguing that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between power and truth,
I am going to use a functionalist form of explanation. However, as functionalism has had
such a bad press (for instance, Giddens, 1977), I will begin by briefly giving an account
of the criteria for valid functional arguments. As will be seen, when social scientists use
the terms functional or functionalism as terms of critique, what they have in mind is
not what is meant by a functional explanation in this article. Rather, what they mean are
teleological arguments, which impute metaphysical intentions to social systems, which
render social actors cultural or systemic dupes.

Functional explanations
I apologize for the fact that this account of functional explanations is highly schematic
and appears obvious; yet, in my experience, constructing such an account is necessary, as
what most people understand by a functional explanation constitutes a caricature of what
is a perfectly valid and important mode of understanding social life. Nonetheless,
I intend to keep it brief, as the account is merely a ‘conceptual tool’, a ‘means to an end’.
Haugaard 75

Functional explanations were central to the methodology of the classical sociological

theorists and are frequently used implicitly today. However, the explicit admission of the
use of this form of explanation is tainted because functionalism is in bad odour at the
moment. One reason for this is the damage done to that method of explanation by
Parsons’s structural functionalism, which reified the social system and made the social
actor into cultural dupes – or ‘dopes’ as it is usually less accurately stated. However,
Parsons’s functionalism was teleology, which is an entirely different beast from what
I shall be putting forward here.
In teleological arguments, the cause of a phenomenon is inferred from the outcome.
To take a well-known Aristotelian example, the reason that an acorn becomes an oak is
that it is driven by its final cause or the desire to realize the essence of ‘oakness’ within it.
What is obviously problematic in this case is conferral of desire to become an oak upon a
seed, which is an unthinking natural phenomenon. In social science, this takes the form
of arguing that a given social outcome, which benefits a social system, occurs because of
that benefit. So, for instance, if it is observed that Calvinism was beneficial to the genesis
of capitalism, or Christianity to feudalism, it is therefore inferred that Calvinism and
Christianity constitute the outcome of capitalism and feudalism. The latter causal infer-
ence is illegitimate because neither capitalism nor feudalism constitutes an agent with
intent or the capacity to invent these religious forms in order to serve their needs.
Furthermore, even if they could, it does not follow that the social agents would find these
faiths attractive – the assumption that they should because the system ‘requires’ them to
do so in order to fulfil ‘its needs’ makes social agents into dupes of the system. The flaw
is one of misplaced intentionality. Agents can intend, but systems cannot, therefore the
latter do not have the capacity to serve their own needs. Thus, the genesis of Calvinism
and Christianity came from social agents, while the persistence of these two religious
forms, and the systems they help sustain, is explicable in terms of the functional relation-
ship between the faiths and the system that they reinforce.
It should be noted that this does not entail that all teleological explanations are false.
If, and only if, there are identifiable agents consciously managing a social system, tele-
ology has its place as a valid explanation. If a teleological explanation is used, inferring
cause from consequence, care should always be taken to ensure that unintended effects
are not confounded with the intentions of the agents managing the system. However,
agents may initiate social change for the purposes of saving a social system. This kind
of explanation has applicability in modernity, when agents attempt to manage the evolu-
tion of systems. Attempts by contemporary economists to save the Western economies,
after the financial collapse of September 2008, would be a case in point. However, in
most instances of survival and advancement, systems are served functionally by social
phenomena that are the consequence of the unintended effects of social actors. Thus tele-
ology has no place.
In giving functional explanations, the social theorist must separate functionality from
the intentions of social agents. To take a couple of well-known ideal type functional
accounts, according to Nietzsche-inspired functional explanation, early Christian piety
made religious subjects tolerant of material inequality and encouraged them to think
in essentialist terms. Thus they were unlikely to challenge the inequalities of feudalism
and were susceptible to the logic of ‘the Great Chain of Being’. Similarly, according to
76 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

Weber,1 early Calvinists lived in fear of a vengeful God who made the pursuit of pleasure
a moment of temptation from the path of righteousness, thus these social subjects were
hard-working and incapable of spending the fruits of their labours, except on the tools
necessary for further hard work. Hence, they engaged in patterns of behaviour which
resulted in capitalist accumulation. The early Christians worshipped poverty and the
Calvinists otherworldly piety, yet the unintended consequence of the behaviours was
inequality and vast worldly accumulation of wealth. Thus their intent, which was the
cause of their behaviour, cannot be inferred from its consequences. In fact, like many
exemplary functionalist accounts, the consequences are counterintuitive relative to the
intent of the actors involved.
Many of Foucault’s observations follow an implicit functional logic. For instance, in
Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses a (non-teleological) functionalist argument to
account for the survival of the prison system. The prison system created the criminal
as an object of knowledge (1979: 256), which was to be reformed by the prison system.
Understood metaphorically, the Panopticon was essentially a socialization machine for
re/forming individuals. In factories and schools it could be used to create new subjects,
while in prisons it could be used to correct so-called deviant individuals. However, when
used to reform individuals in prisons, the system failed in its ostensible aims: most
inmates actually became more deviant. Petty criminals came into contact with estab-
lished criminals, thus the prison became a virtual university of crime. After release,
offenders had a prison record, which entailed that they found it difficult to find employ-
ment, thus they were forced back into a life of crime. Hence, the first-time criminal
became turned into the so-called perpetual offender. However, failure of the prison sys-
tem reinforces the world-view necessary for the social construction of individuals who
are perceived of as inherently criminal. In turn, this legitimates having prisons to lock
up these inherently dangerous individuals. It is for this reason ‘that for the past 150 years
the proclamation of the failure of the prison has always been accompanied by its main-
tenance’ (Foucault, 1979: 272). As a social construction, the criminal personality consti-
tutes a common enemy for all members of society, thus their existence as a social fact
creates solidarity across classes, diffusing conflict. The existence of the sociopath
legitimates increased surveillance and control, which reinforces systemic integration.
Following a functionalist logic, the prison is created for the intended purpose of reform-
ing criminals. However, for various unintended reasons the prison not only fails to do
this, rather, it contributes to recidivism. The latter creates the conditions of possibility
for the social construction of new ontologies with attendant signifiers, such as patholo-
gical individuals, who have to be contained. Hence, the unintended effect of reform,
which is failure, is more prison and social integration reinforced by the construction
of a common enemy whose existence legitimates surveillance.
In attributing causality to systems, to culture or to power, teleological explanations
become metaphysical, which contrasts with a functional argument in which social phe-
nomena like this do not have agency. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault observes that:

Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is
not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because
they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised
Haugaard 77

without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that they result from
the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters . . . .
(Foucault, 1981: 94–5)

Interpreted in functional terms, power relations are intentional because they are the
effect of individual actors pursuing their specific ends. Yet, as an assembled set of struc-
tures, these relations are the unintended effect of individual strategic acts. If there were a
‘headquarters’, either in the form of the economy (as another instance that explains
them) or the state, this would constitute teleology. However, in a different context, when
Foucault writes statements such as ‘power produces; it produces reality, it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1979: 194), he is being teleological
by giving a metaphysical presence to power. Power produces nothing because there is
no such thing as power that does anything, in the same way that there is no system that
has agency, as in Parsonsian structural functionalism (correctly termed structural tele-
ology!). Rather, social actors create reality and produce domains of objects and rituals
of truth in order to empower themselves. In short, Foucault is inconsistent, sometimes
using valid functional explanations and at others slipping into the metaphysics of teleol-
ogy by ascribing agency to power, It is part of the aim of this article to save some of
Foucault’s insights from these metaphysical teleological flights of fancy on his part and,
in so doing, move beyond his paradigm.
To summarize, a sociologically legitimate functional argument has two parts which
are disassociated, as follows: (1) at a systemic level, it contains an analysis of how cer-
tain behavioural patterns or structures serve to sustain a social system, which is in com-
petition with other social systems. This analysis must not include either any deep
structures or system (as in Parsons’s work), or power, determining anything, nor should
there be any form of conspiracy by a group or institution. The genesis of this behaviour or
pattern of structuration is the unintended effect of actors acting intentionally. (2) The latter
necessitates an account of the behaviour which produces these unintended beneficial
effects that is explained by the intentions and strategies of the social agents engaged in
everyday social practices, not the ‘needs’ of the system. To repeat, because it is the unin-
tended effects of behaviour that are functional, these beneficial effects are not the cause of
genesis. Rather, their intentional source is the local strategies of actors pursuing goals.
In presenting a functional account of the relationship between power and truth, it will
be argued that the pursuit of truth is functional to social systems due to unintended
effects. For social actors, the motivation to make truth claims is derived from the logic
of the desire for power. Reversing the logic, thinking from micro to macro, actors use truth
to gain power. The use of truth has the unintended effect of reinforcing the social system,
by reifying social structures. The details of this process will be explained, beginning with
agency, power and truth, ending with the functionality of truth to the social system.

Agency and power

Social power has two aspects, power to and power over (Allen, 1999; Clegg and
Haugaard, 2009: 1–25). The former entails the capacity for action, as empowerment,
while the latter concerns the capacity of ego to make alter act in ways that alter would
78 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

not otherwise. There are two sources for these forms of power: physical resources and
social structures. With regard to power to, physical resources refer to natural power,
as in muscle power or the use of engines. With respect to power over, the use of physical
resources takes the form of direct violence over another, in which case the other becomes
a physical object to be manipulated, or annihilated. Coercion is a hybrid of physical
power combined with social power.
Social power to is, to use Arendt’s felicitous phrase (1970: 49), the ‘capacity to act in
concert’. This presupposes the predictability of other. We know that steam expands
because of the laws of physics, and ego knows that alter behaves in manner that is other
than random, thus alter can be harnessed to realize a joint endeavour. In the case of vio-
lence or coercion, which constitute derivatives of natural power, this predictability arises
from a straight felicity calculus as in utilitarianism – the bodily pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain. However, in the case of more sophisticated forms of social and
political power, predictability arises from shared systems of meaning and internalization
of restraint through socialization. The capacity for common meaning and restraint is the
source of empowerment, which constitutes the power to of social agency. As long as
goals can be constituted and represented as broadly similar, this massively potent source
of power to can be harnessed independently of coercive power or violence – which
deserves emphasis because of the prevalent assumption that power is inherently negative
and coercive.
Power over is a subset of power to, in which ego commands alter to act. While
violence and coercion are significant sources of power over, social structure is a highly
significant source of power over. Again this deserves emphasis; power over is not neces-
sarily based upon coercion. In fact, democracy and most sophisticated political systems
are premised upon non-coercive power over which is derived from authority. Similarly,
the power over of those placed in positions of expert authority is not derived from coer-
cion. Thus, power over does not equate with domination, nor is power over necessarily
zero-sum. The power of A over B is not necessarily at the expense of B, although it may
be. Authority constitutes the channelling of both power to and power over into institu-
tional form. Authority is the key to routinization of power over within complex social
systems. Of course, such systems have recourse to coercion and violence in the last
instance but such recourse constitutes the exception, the limit of authority, not its base.
In political science and sociology we tend to think of authority in limited form, in
terms of deliberately created organization positions – heads of corporations, political
or military figures. In fact, authority is dispersed right across society associated with
every social role imaginable – father, mother, customer, client, student, person, child,
etc. Authority comprises two elements that are inextricably intertwined: meaning and
social norm, which together constitute a social structure. To take an everyday example:
imagine a father and daughter; being a father entails certain meaning and norms that are
inextricably tied together and, in turn, make sense relative to other social roles, including
daughter. In modern Western society, father entails concern for details of your daugh-
ter’s upbringing including, in the early stages, toilet training, diet, and so on. Later it
includes support in Second Level, and towards Third Level, education. However, it does
not include choice of marriage partner. In certain traditional societies, the role of the
father would exclude concern over toilet training and diet but include power over the
Haugaard 79

choice of marriage partner. In these traditional societies, failing to choose a suitable

marriage partner would be neglectful of fatherhood. In other words, the ontology, or way
of being-in-the-world, of father, relative to daughter, is tied to certain authoritative
norms. Within Western and traditional societies, it is legitimate for fathers to concern
themselves with certain aspects of their daughter’s lives and not others. Fatherhood
entails certain authoritative resources that constitute the meaning of father through the
definition of a certain scope of legitimate power over his daughter.
In everyday life, we occupy a multiplicity of authority positions, all of which entail
certain norms and meanings that structure the society in which we live. To continue with
everyday social life: imagine a father who is a shopkeeper. As a shopkeeper he is
empowered in specific scope relative to his customers. Imagine that his grown daughter
enters the shop and decides to purchase items that he, in the capacity of father, does not
approve of. Here is a complex social situation in which two ways of being-in-the-world
overlap, and one should be suspended in favour of the other. This choice does not con-
stitute an autonomous choice, as the priority of role relative to the situation also follows
from the social norms of society. In a modern Western society, a shopkeeper is usually
defined by a ‘professional ethos’ which entails bracketing affective bonds, thus it would
expected that the father retain the role of shopkeeper treating his daughter as customer.
Hence, he should treat her in an affectively disinterested manner while she is in the shop.
Anything else would be inappropriate. In contrast, in a traditional society, in which the
exchange of goods is inextricably tied to the renewal of filial and tribal bonds of loyalty,
such professional bracketing would be incomprehensible and incommensurable with the
role of shopkeeper. Hence, in the overlap of authorities, in which choice has to be made
of social role, social norms again create realms of legitimate authority that empower and
disempower social actors relative to each other.In political systems, the normative nature
of authority is part of the practice of being a competent politician. The authority of poli-
tician is linked to a complex of other authority positions, which an actor moves in and out
of. In his campaign for the US presidency Obama appeared on television with his family,
allowing his children to be interviewed. The intent was use the sacred authority of father
and family to reinforce the bid for the authority of the presidency (Alexander, 2009: 77).
However, when certain journalists put the spin on this appearance that he was ‘exploiting’
his children, or putting them ‘in harm’s way’, there was a danger that that he was profaning
the role of father (exploitation or harm are incommensurable with that role) and, in so
doing, showing himself as unfit. As analyzed by Alexander (2009), Obama managed to
deflect this criticism, as he did in several other complex performative balancing acts, with
remarkable skill.Positions of authority are structured ways of being-in the-world in which
actors reproduce specific meanings associated with authority positions. When priests cele-
brate mass, doctors write prescriptions, or politicians legislate, these acts all reproduce the
signifiers priest, doctor and politician. Each signifier has certain powers associated with it,
which are intrinsic to what makes them what they are in accordance with a local interpre-
tative horizon. As a rule, in modern Western societies, priests cannot pronounce upon med-
icine, doctors upon the sacred and, while politicians have power over life and death
through acts of war, they are powerless in many of the everyday realms of power available
to priests and doctors. When actors assume powers inappropriate to their perceived pow-
ers, their performance is rendered infelicitous.
80 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

Austin explained the nature of performative success and failure using the following
example:

Suppose for example, I see a vessel on the stock, walk up and smash the bottle hung on the
stem, proclaim ‘I name this ship the Mr Stalin’ and for good measure kick away the chocks:
but the trouble is, I was not the person chosen to name it (whether or not – an additional
complication – Mr Stalin was the destined name: perhaps in a way it is even more of a
shame if it was). We shall agree
that the ship was not thereby named;
that it is an infernal shame.
One could say that ‘I went through a form of’ naming the vessel but that my action was void
or without effect, because I was not a proper person, had not the ‘capacity’, to perform it: but
one might also alternatively say . . . it is a mockery, like marriage to a monkey. (Austin,
1975: 23–4)

Monarchs and politicians can name ships, while ordinary citizens cannot, even if the
latter go through the correct rituals. However much someone may wish to marry a mon-
key and however correctly they go through the marriage ceremony, it will constitute
an infelicitous act of structuration. Therefore, the structures will not be reproduced.
The private citizen naming ships or marrying monkeys is engaged an act of structuration
that constitute a private language.
Wittgenstein famously argued that there is no such thing as a private language
(Wittgenstein, 1967). What he meant was not that someone cannot, in the sense of being
incapable, go through the motions of creating an artificial language (Wittgenstein, 1967:
92–3 §258–64). However, such a language would not constitute the structuration of gen-
uine systemic structures because it would not be public. While accepting that actors can
invent local practices for themselves, which are not publicly validated, Wittgenstein
would also appear to have reserved the term ‘private language’ for utterances which are
strongly private in the sense of only comprehensible to the speaker (Wittgenstein, 1967:
94 §269). In contrast, I will use the concept of private language in the weaker sense of a
structuration practice that is considered infelicitous by others and therefore not validated.
It is private, as opposed to publicly recognized as containing legitimate social structures.
The reason for alter rendering ego’s performance a private language may be that ego’s
structuration is incomprehensible to alter, as in Wittgenstein. However, more usually,
acts of structuration are rendered a private language because alter does not wish to legit-
imate the implied claim to authority, or interpretative horizon and implicit being-in-the-
world of ego. Marriage to a monkey is entirely comprehensible, but it is not considered
felicitous, therefore constitutes a private language, even if enacted most sincerely.
Marriage to monkeys is not part of the institution of marriage, and would be excluded
as such if enacted or structured by being rendered infelicitous by others. Infelicity con-
stitutes structural constraint upon action, which does not come from anonymous systems
or structures but from reaction of other agents. Individuals have the literal capacity to
invent new social roles for themselves or expand the powers of existing authority posi-
tions, but such acts will be rendered a private language (in the weak sense) unless others
Haugaard 81

respond with felicity. The felicitous act of structuring an authority position presupposes
confirming-structuration by others.
In a well-known series of breaching experiments, Garfinkel asked students to breach
minor social conventions. For instance, he asked them to interpret ‘Hello, how are you?’
literally, rather than as phatic communion. So, for instance, they responded ‘How am
I with regard to what? My health, my finances my school work, my peace of mind
. . . ? (Garfinkel, 1984: 44). These literal replies were invariably responded to by anger
and exasperation. The students had violated the shared taken-for-granted system of
meaning, thus were unreasonable and, in the eyes of others, speaking a private language.
They were speaking a language that was comprehensible but was not legitimated by the
responding other – they were not speaking a private language in the strong Wittgenstei-
nian sense of being incomprehensible. Private language acts that are comprehensible, yet
excluded, constitute a significant part of everyday life, as Garfinkel’s experiments illus-
trate. Theoretically, as is argued by post-structuralist authors, like Laclau and Mouffe
(2001) or Laclau (1990), every act of inclusion also constitutes an act of exclusion. Inter-
preting ‘Hello, how are you?’ as phatic communion takes place to the exclusion of the
interpretation of the same remark as a genuine request concerning a person’s well-
being. Socialization involves continual exposure to such rejections of interpretation and
becoming a competent social agent entails learning to avoid such infelicity.
The authority that goes with each performative signifier is a form of social capital,
which constitutes the legitimate resources that go into the constitution of positions of
authority. The highly effective social agent learns to maximize this local social capital
by keeping just inside the boundaries of felicitous action. In this usage, social capital
does not refer to social networks, as in the contemporary literature on social capital (for
instance, Putnam, 2001), or to Bourdieu’s definition, which is closer to the meaning used
in this article but exists as part of a whole plethora of other capitals, including cultural
and linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 2002). What I refer to here is much wider in scope and
more theoretically foundational than either of these. Social capital refers to the legitimate
structuring practices associated with positions of authority that empower a social agent
and are recognized as valid either by the rest of society or, in the case of a smaller group,
by relevant interacting others. These structuring practices define the levels of empower-
ment and thus the conditions of possibility of agency associated with the reproduction of
any socially constituted position of authority.
Some structuring practices can be associated with all social actors, but even when
they are, these forms of empowerment are particular to that society. Take, for instance,
the idea of citizenship or universal human rights. The implicit claim made by these terms
is that every social agent who is a citizen or a human has certain rights of empowerment
or social capital. Previous societies had rights but these rights were always associated
with social position. The idea of a citizen’s or universal rights is particular to modern
Western society, constituting a form of authoritative power that is historically contingent
to a certain social system. Within this discourse, if a given group (usually a minority of
some kind) can be shown not to have this right, we talk of the ‘violation of human rights’.
In that language, this is the violation of the norms which legitimate the structuration
practices that define citizenship or being human. Relative to the meaning of these signif-
iers, certain treatments are infelicitous, therefore ‘wrong’. Take another right, which we
82 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

assume: the right to buy and sell, or engage in trade. This is a right which all or most
(exceptions include convicted criminals, and so on) adults enjoy in Western societies,
yet this form of social capital had to be fought for by the bourgeoisie in early modernity.
In the feudal world, the right to trade was defined by differentiated status, thus the link to
authority was explicit.
When actors are ostracized, their greetings are rendered a private language and they
are denied the dignity of being recognized as a human. For instance, in 1880, Charles
Stewart Parnell addressed a crowd of landless Irish peasants asking them what consti-
tuted the appropriate reaction to tenants who bid for the farms of unjustly evicted tenants.
The crowd responded with coercive power: ‘Kill him’, ‘Shoot him’. However, Parnell sug-
gested a better way: ‘You must shun him on the roadside . . . in the streets of the town . . . in
the shop . . . on the fair green and in the market place . . . by leaving him alone, by putting
him in moral Coventry’ (Parnell, in McCarthy, 1995: 93). The method was first applied to
Captain Boycott, a British land-agent – thus, the verb ‘to boycott’ was introduced into the
English language. From the perspective of power, to boycott is a strategy of undermining
authority by rendering it infelicitous and is central to the practice of passive resistance.
This strategy turns a public language of the (perceived) oppressor into a private
language, thus undermining their authority and the purchase of their local language game.
If we take the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to a system of thought which legitimates
certain positions of authority, a counter-hegemonic strategy constitutes a strategy that
renders that language game infelicitous. A conflict that reproduces the existing relations
of felicity and infelicity, however apparently confrontational, reproduces existing hege-
monic structures. Passive resistance is counter-hegemonic as it constitutes a strategy for
rendering accepted authority structuration infelicitous. I would argue that when Foucault
observed that the conflict between Marx and the bourgeois economists was a storm in a
children’s paddling pool (1970: 262), he was, in essence, describing the fact that it con-
stituted a shallow conflict in the sense that it was not truly counter-hegemonic because it
reproduced existing conditions of meaning and norms of felicity and infelicity, such as
the labour theory of value. In essence, Marx was engaging his adversaries upon shared
socially constructed performative terrain.
Certain social roles have more or less social capital associated with them. As meaning
and norm can be manipulated, the social capital of authority positions are not fixed.
Actors have an intrinsic interest and possibility of increasing the social capital associated
with the authority that they have access to. However, these capitals cannot be increased
at will. Their actions have to be perceived of as felicitous, otherwise they are speaking a
private language. Thus they are dependent upon social norms and meanings that exist
externally to them. However, ego is not entirely impotent in this regard either, as he
or she can influence the reactions of alter. Ego can influence alter to accept innovative
structuration practices as other than a private language, as a public language, by increas-
ing the chances that these new authority performatives are rendered felicitous.
Meanings and norms constitute cultural constructs enmeshed in social systems.
Actors largely reproduce these social systems as an unintended effect of their actions,
but at times they can also act as social innovators, deliberately trying to construct and
reconstruct social structures which advantage their own social capital. The problem for
social actors is that, as cultural constructs, these structures may appear arbitrary.
Haugaard 83

However, to be binding upon others, they must be made to appear as other than
arbitrarily constructed. To take the simple example of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, in which
the authority and meaning of each member of society, and the natural world, were stipu-
lated from the sparrow, through the peasant, feudal lord, king, to God. Of course it can be
argued that the power of the feudal lord may have largely been based upon coercive
resources, thus natural power, but, to the extent to which it was based upon social and polit-
ical power derived from authority, this was premised upon the perceived legitimacy of the
‘order of things’ relative to the interpretative horizon, or being-in-the-world, of social
actors within feudal society. With the exception of coercion, the extent to which those
in relative subaltern positions were subservient to power over depended upon the percep-
tion of the Great Chain of Being as the ‘natural order of things’. Macbeth, the aristocrat
who would become king, was cursed because he violated that order. What made that order
normatively compelling was that it was the work of God. Why is God significant? Is it
solely that he is vengeful: that he wields coercive power upon those who violate his will?
No, God is the creator of nature, or maybe even stronger, he is infinite and immutable.
Thus, to the extent to which the meanings and norms of society reflect the will of God, they
are neither socially constructed, nor the will of mankind. Thus, in a theocracy, God serves
the function of reifying society, making it appear other than culture, thus not constructed
and arbitrary. Anyone who attempts a counter-hegemonic strategy is not going against
other members of society, but is violating the laws that govern the firmament of the hea-
vens, the earth and the humblest ant. Of course, as the Old Testament illustrates, the Jewish
and Christian God, or those who claim to speak on his behalf, are not entirely confident that
this reification of social norms will be effective, so they couple it with coercion – appeals
to infinity and truth are mixed with threats of eternal damnation. Power over based upon
authority constitutes an ideal type, which does not necessarily exist in its pure form.
Prior to the Enlightenment, or modernity, the prime sources of reification of social
order were God, tradition and fate. With modernity these sources of authority were
challenged. To quote the opening words of Kant’s famous essay on Enlightenment as
a paradigmatic exemplar of early modernity:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability
to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tute-
lage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it
without direction from another. Sapere aude ‘‘Have courage to use your own reason’’ – that
is the motto of the enlightenment.

(Kant, [1784] 2007: 29)

Kant’s exhortation, which was only imperfectly followed, was essentially a move from
the final vocabulary of theology, of priests, to that which moderns referred to as reason.
Speaking sociologically, or anthropologically, contrary to Kant, all social actors follow
reason, in the sense of following a broadly similar process of inductive and deductive
reasoning. What changes is the final vocabulary.
All reasoning has to be limited. The Kantian insight concerning a priori categories
(or historical a priori in Foucault, 1970) is that all reasoning has to be bound by limits
84 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

or it unravels into infinite regress. If reasons do not serve, communication fails;

structuration is no longer met with comprehension, and social order unravels. With
regard to performatives, there is no ultimate reason that private citizens cannot name
ships or marry monkeys. However, the local conditions of possibility entail that any such
acts will be considered unreasonable, therefore infelicitous. Cultural norms constrain
actors not because culture, as a metaphysical force, does anything. Rather, social actors
who have internalized a certain interpretative horizon consider some forms of structura-
tion felicitous and others infelicitous according to local perceptions of reasonableness.
However, it is neither determined that the initial structuring actors are fully informed
of local conditions of felicity (the faux pas) nor that, even if they are, they do not choose
to press ahead with infelicitous behaviour in any case (deviance) – they are not cultural
dupes. Nor is it predetermined that novel structuration practices will meet with infelicity
(social change). It is from this freedom that the possibility of counter-hegemonic strategy
arises.
A final vocabulary constitutes a point at which it is no longer reasonable to ask for
more reasons and it is irrational not to agree. Of course, social actors can be irrational
if they so wish but irrationality makes them by definition excluded – the mad, the delin-
quent, the boycotted, the other. As speakers of a private language, analytically they are
‘idiots’ in the Ancient Athenian sense of being outside society. If an actor chooses to be
infelicitous, they are, in effect, making the choice of being disempowered with respect to
relevant others. However, this may only be in the short term, as they can try to create an
alternative set of relevant others who will validate their structuration practices. Such a
move constitutes a counter-hegemonic strategy, which, if successful, may create its own
hegemonic realm of local reasonableness.
With modernity, science became a final vocabulary which, in many instances,
replaced God and tradition. Imagine a modern person questioning the power of someone
in authority, and being told that they should obey because of God and tradition.
The appeal would be infelicitous and would not bind a social agent through reason. They
would not be structurally constrained. On the other hand, imagine that an appeal to
authority that refers to an experiment which has been repeated ten times with exactly the
same result, written up in a peer-reviewed journal. To the modern social agent it is unrea-
sonable to query further (unless there is another experiment/article which can be mobi-
lized). Imagine that this experiment can be linked to the authority of a specific role, the
latter constitutes an expert whose authority it becomes unreasonable not to accept.
In other words, the power over of that expert is tied to the creation of mutually consti-
tuted language games. Within this public language game, the ‘reason’ of alter validates
positions of authority. These claims to authority do not go into infinite regress because it
is linked to a common final vocabulary of truth. It is final because truth is considered
beyond convention, and beyond the particular agent in authority. In other words,
obedience is not simply compliance to those in authority because they say so. It is neither
arbitrary, nor blind obedience to authority. Thus truth can be used to render what has the
potential be considered private structuration into a public language game, by increasing
the chances of felicitous confirming-structuration by other.
The emergence of science as a new final vocabulary entailed the creation of a plethora
of new authoritative positions. When researching Discipline and Punish, Foucault came
Haugaard 85

across the papers associated with the trial of Pierre Rivière (Foucault, 1975), in which a
whole body of expert knowledge was generated around the trial. What fascinated
Foucault was the fact that the guilt of Pierre Rivière was never in doubt – Rivière had
run out into the street waving a bloody axe, proclaiming his guilt. Despite the fact that
this was an open and shut case, a whole corpus of documents from various ‘experts’ were
generated around the trial. What was going on was that a new body of people were trying
to create a new signifier, the pathological individual (or some other such personage of the
criminal world) whose existence as a scientific fact validated the social roles that these
experts were creating from themselves in the nineteenth century. Certain professionals,
proclaiming their own self-worth, did not create the ontology of criminologist, sociolo-
gist, or psychologist out of arbitrary convention. Rather, these social roles were rooted in
scientific knowledge – they ‘gave to criminal justice a unitary field of objects, authenti-
cated by the ‘‘sciences’’, and thus enabled it to function on a general horizon of ‘‘truth’’’
(Foucault, 1979: 256). Because the language of science is premised upon the idea that the
world of scientific facts is nonconventional, tying these newly constructed authority
positions to science constitutes a strategy for apparently anchoring them outside society
by making them appear other than social constructions. They were meaningful relative to
a description of the natural world, which was populated by atoms, biological entities,
causal laws, and other ontologies. Deviant humans – the pathological individual – could
be made to appear other than normatively constructed social roles, as part of the natural-
world-out-there, which, according to the everyday discourse of the natural sciences,
exists irrespective of what we believe about it. Of course, there is no natural-world-
out-there in the strong sense of a world unmediated by concepts, but that is not how it
appears to social subjects.
The emergence of a new final vocabulary recognized by all, created a new field of
power, in which a new dramatis personae had legitimate power. In a sense, social scien-
tists replaced priests. These authority positions were not created out of thin air but had to
follow the dictates of reason based upon foundations. The pathological individual was
part of this new final vocabulary which reason could appeal to. The criminologist does
not have power over others by arbitrary convention, as with the pieces in a game of
chess. Rather, the newly created authority position has power through an appeal to truth.
When Austin developed the concept of performatives (1975), he argued that they were
qualitatively different from truth claims, which is correct analytically in the strict sense
that there is not an equivalence between truth and felicity or falseness and infelicity.
However, from a strategic point of view of social practice, it is certainly the case that
a performative that can link itself to a truth claim stands a substantially greater chance
of a felicitous response than one which cannot.
For the social actor, truth is a way of creating cultural capital. This applies not only to
the authority of experts but also to everyday life. The conflict between male and female
social capital can be played out in terms of the language of biology. If there are biolo-
gical differences between the sexes, then ‘it follows’ that there should be social differ-
ences, thus it is ‘irrational’ to contest male and female social roles – so the argument
goes. As social actors move through social life, their capacity for social action is tied
to the recognition by alter of their specific social capital. Thus ego has a vested interest
in arguing that this capital is beyond convention, by appeal to final vocabulary.The idea
86 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

that conventionality entails arbitrariness and is therefore not binding, which contrasts
with nature, can be found in many discourses, including pre-modern ones. When discuss-
ing the subject of slavery Aristotle argued that there are two approaches to this question.
One approach holds that slavery is created by social norms, or conventions, the other that
there exist humans who are born natural slaves. If the former is correct, then slavery is
wrong, but if the latter, then it can be justified, and he concluded that there were such
persons as natural slaves (Aristotle, 1941: 1130–1, ch.1 §3).
In other words, the use of truth creates the conditions of possibility for power by
reifying convention. In terms of functional arguments, at the micro-level of the agent, the
pursuit of truth, the expansion of truth to new realms, is tied to an interest in empowerment
through either the expansion of the social capital of existing positions of authority, or the
creation of new authority positions. As these expansions of authority entail the introduc-
tion of new structuration practices, there is a high probability that they will be perceived of
as infelicitous. However, if these authority positions are expanded, or created, based upon
truth claims, these novel structuration practices have a greater chance of being considered
felicitous and will meet with confirming structuration, by the responding other.
As is implicit in references to the feudal world, the use of truth to anchor convention is
not the only possible strategy for making the conventional appear other than it is. As ana-
lyzed by Alexander (2009) and Smith (2008), the sacred/profane opposition can be used
in the same way. The profane becomes the conventional, thus arbitrary and infelicitous,
while the sacred becomes transcendental, and therefore appears non-conventional.

System functionality
At a systemic level, social systems are held together by natural and social power. A social
system is a complex of interrelations between actors that contains within it the potential to
disintegration. Dysfunctionality and disintegration are mutually constitutive. A social sys-
tem in which we find each other’s behaviour arbitrary and unpredictable is a system that is
about to disintegrate. To take an example, in Discipline and Punish Foucault describes how
those who were using modern punishments argued that previous modes of punishment were
arbitrary. Actually, trial by ordeal was far from arbitrary, in that there were exact ways of
carrying out such a trial (Foucault, 1979: 40). What made it appear arbitrary, I would argue,
is that trial by ordeal made no sense relative to a modern final vocabulary. In moments of
systemic change, the strategy for those who wish to discredit the social capital of others,
while investing their own social capital with value, is to argue that the social capital of alter
is arbitrary while the social capital of ego is made to appear structured and rational. The dis-
credited other is speaking a private language relative to what now counts as the public lan-
guage game – that is, the only language game which supposedly counts.
In situations of power over in which alter does not recognize the validity of the
authority of ego, natural power (violence) is a substitute for absent social power.
However, the difficulty is that natural power is relatively crude. Ego has to be constantly
vigilant and ready to use violence against the subaltern alter. In contrast, if alter consid-
ers ego’s authoritative power based upon a final vocabulary which is endorsed by alter,
the latter will behave predictably to the extent to which they are ‘reasonable’ and con-
strained by their own powers of reason, as locally defined. In this context it should be
Haugaard 87

noted that I am using the word ‘reason’ sociologically, to refer to the perceptions of
social actors: I am not arguing that this entails that they are actually reasonable in some
transcendental philosophical way. Part of the strategy of creating local social capital is to
influence alter to believe that a certain final vocabulary is ‘correct’ and that the
authoritative power associated with ego’s social role is derived from these foundations.
The most effective way of doing this is to convince the other that a given contingent
description of the world is final, that it represents the transcendental truth.
To the extent to which the social system is reproduced through reason and belief in a
final vocabulary, it will be reproduced unproblematically. In other words, social systems
become more stable, and capable of more complex actions, the more the social agents
involved share a common final vocabulary. The emergence of modernity entails a sig-
nificant shift in final vocabulary and the conditions of possibility of legitimate authority.
Of course, there were actors who resisted this, and to the extent to which they were suc-
cessful, they succeeded in reproducing power structures that were incommensurable with
this new final vocabulary. Thus, they were behaving dysfunctionally from the perspec-
tive of the aspects of the social systems that were sustained by this new final vocabulary.
When Foucault wrote The Order of Things, he suggests that modernity entailed a mas-
sive interpretative shift, whereby there was discontinuity between Renaissance, Classical
and Modern epistemes or systems of thought. However, we must qualify this. What
actually happened was the emergence of more differentiated modes of interpretation.
Consistent with the Renaissance system, when the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer,
Tycho Brahe, petitioned the King of Denmark for a new observatory, he included among
his justifications for the expense the usefulness of an accurate astrological map.
Astrology was entirely commensurable with the Renaissance system of thought, which
was based upon resemblances. However, with modernity, astrology did not disappear, as
is suggested by the idea of the Renaissance episteme being succeeded by the Classical,
and then the Modern. Rather, it became divorced from the natural sciences, confined to
popular culture. In so doing, astrology lost purchase as social capital among natural
scientists or what is considered ‘respectable’ (i.e. felicitous) in intellectual debate. In the
modern period, it would be considered infelicitous to apply for state funding based upon
usefulness to astrology. Structural constraint in this case does not mean that an actor is a
dupe driven by the system. Actors can perfectly well imagine making, or can actually
make, an application for state funding based upon usefulness to astrology. Constraint
is external, in the sense that there is a high probability that such an application would
fail. However, high probability is not certainty. In Britain and the USA, alternative and
non-Western medicines have had some success in establishing cultural capital within the
medical establishment, even though the epistemic premises of these therapies would,
prima facie, lead one to expect that their social practices would be rendered infelicitous.
While modernity is largely characterized by functionality derived from the triumph of
scientific reason, this is not the complete story as modernity also entailed a fragmenta-
tion of language games. Contrary to the expectation of the Enlightenment philosophers
and to the chagrin of their contemporary followers, such as Richard Dawkins, their lan-
guage game did not sweep the board. We still live in a world surrounded by remnants of
the feudal world including monarchies and the House of Lords; religion is still powerful,
arguably more powerful than it was fifty years ago; many alternative medicines follow
88 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

the pre-modern logic of resemblances and balance between opposites; and everywhere
we are surrounded by ceremonies and rituals which make use of the logic of sacred and
profane, which constitutes the foundation of religious life. However, the discourse of
scientific reason had one significant advantage over the rest: it linked itself to the author-
itative power of the state.
As argued by Gellner (1983), central to the emergence of the modern state was a state
monopoly of education. While private education remains, all educational institutions
have to have their educational credentials validated by the state. Schools or universities
that are not state recognized are, in effect, speaking a private language and, as a conse-
quence, have little or no social capital. Thus, education through alternative systems of
thought is rendered infelicitous by the state. In the West, education in state-recognized
schools is predominantly based around the public language game commensurable with
Enlightenment reason. Obviously, in some countries this is more the case than others:
France versus, for instance, the emergence of faith-based schools in Britain. Overall, the
result has been the creation of an extremely powerful language game that, until recently,
within its own terms of reference is relatively stable.
It is a remarkable fact that the past two hundred years have seen the advance of
democracy from an exceptional form of government to a dominant one. In a self-
congratulatory fashion most Western democrats assume that because democracy is norma-
tively desirable, it will always win out – Fukuyama’s hypothesis of ‘the end of history’
(Fukuyama, 1993) would be a case in point. From a sociological perspective, this constitutes
a naı̈ve belief that springs from a perception of history as the advance of progress and
civilization. Sociologically, one of the functional reasons for success is that modern
democracy is based on argumentation and increasingly upon expert opinion. Politicians
debate in parliament, and, more significantly, receive their advice from bodies of ‘experts’.
The modern democratic state has taken control of education and, in so doing, has taken
control of socialization. The state issues certificates of competency in the shared final
vocabulary or, what in everyday speech are called, ‘educational qualifications’. All state and
corporate bodies are staffed by people who have authority based upon qualifications and, at
the apex of the pyramid, elected politicians justify their decisions with reference to the
advice of these holders of certificates. Consequently, non-compliance and disagreement
become equivalent to irrationality. In an increasingly global world, national educational
institutions are supplemented by international bodies of experts as sources of truth produc-
tion. As has been shown by Alasuutari and Rasimus (2009), OECD knowledge production is
constantly used to justify national government policy.
If we look to the emergence of early civilizations in Mesopotamia and China, writing and
religion were at their core (Wheatley, 1971; Giddens, 1985: 41; Mann, 1986: 126–8). This
conjuncture enabled the Ancients to give permanence to the social structures of civilization
through combining writing with ceremony. Contemporary Western democracy gives actors
the freedom to elect whom they wish. These elected elites are legitimated by expert advice
generated by the state-sponsored education systems. Through education the state creates its
own final vocabulary, which serves the same systemic function as the ceremonial centre did
for Ancient cities. These reifying centres create the conditions of possibility for felicitous
authority. The more effective they are, the less the need for coercive violence. It is ironic
that, even when at war, expert-run democracies are substantially more effective than social
Haugaard 89

systems held together by violence. In essence, the more a social system can tie itself to the
vocabulary of truth, the more integrated it is and the more capacity for action or social power
it can generate, thus the more functionally efficient it is.
At a micro-level, the processes that drive systemic functionality are social actors who
are trying to create authoritative resources from themselves. These local social capitals
are forms of restraint which ego indulges in and alter recognizes as of value. As observed
by Foucault with regard to sexuality, the bourgeoisie imposed Puritan sexual practices
upon themselves (1981: 126), as a form of distinction. These sexual practices were a
form of local capital, which was considered felicitous relative to the final vocabulary
of biogenics. Similarly, Elias argued that the manners of elites, which they described
as ‘civilization’, were a set of restraints imposed by those elites upon themselves, which
goes against the usual assumption that constraint is for others (Elias, 2000). These con-
straints were frequently reified by pseudo-scientific claims to hygiene or, more recently,
their equivalent is justified by ‘best practice’ – a social construction created by manage-
ment institutes. Through the sacrifice of freedom through constraint, these actors created
local capital, while simultaneously contributing to an overall, macro-level, increase
(or shift) in self-restraint that was functional to the social system as a whole. The
dynamics of social change are driven by a process whereby the social systems in which
the actions of actors are more predictable will tend to do better in competition with sys-
tems that are less predictable. Functionality is served by restraint, as is empowerment.
The functionality of truth and restraint to social systems does not necessarily entail a
continuous trajectory of increasing restraint, rather waves of increasing and decreasing
restraint. Epistemic shifts occur, such as that associated with the advent of Ancient cities,
monotheism in ‘axial age’ civilizations (Eisenstadt, 1982), and the Enlightenment in the
eighteenth century, which allows authority/knowledge entrepreneurs to create new forms
of capital for themselves. The unintended effect of these actions is a wave of increasing
restraint in which those systems that best embody these forms of capital become the most
capable. However, these final vocabularies are only locally final, epistemic shifts take
place and the local capital of elites becomes devalued as ‘unreasonable’ and ‘arbitrary’.
At the moment, the critique of Enlightenment logic, post-modernism, post-structuralism,
fear of Euro-centrism, post-colonial discourse, the re-emergence of a stand-off between
religion, science and the state, and so on, constitute such challenges by new authority/
knowledge elites. The tactic of these new knowledge entrepreneurs is, as one might
expect, to argue that what constitutes the truth of the system of thought which they are
challenging is ‘local’ (Eurocentric, Western or ethnocentric) and particular (Enlighten-
ment-oriented), therefore arbitrary.
The challenge to existing systems of thought constitutes a challenge to established
power structures. Hence, would-be challengers can also present their will to power as
other than it is, as a challenge to power itself. In so doing, the social construction of the
status quo is made even more visible because the existing system of thought can be seen
to rest upon truths that reinforce local interests. Authority is performative but in order to
be effective, it must disguise its performativity (Alexander, 2009). Similarly, truth and
power constitute a duality that must be disguised in order to be effective. Once truth
is seen to reinforce social order, it is easy for counter-hegemonic actors to argue that the
structures which truth sustains are local, thus arbitrary. Against that disadvantage, the
90 European Journal of Social Theory 15(1)

defenders of the status quo have the advantage of being able to exploit the existing
socialization of social subjects within the system. If local truths are well established, any
challenge to them can be made to appear as a challenge to the ‘natural order of things’,
thus infelicitous relative to local, better-established, taken-for-granted knowledge.
Truth is functional to the social system by furnishing a final vocabulary upon which
stable authority positions can be built and, through the repetition of such appeals to
the allegedly non-conventional, complex exercises of power over become routine.
This functionality of truth makes the system effective and thus ensures its survival in
competition with other systems. In keeping with the rules of functional arguments set out
in the beginning, this functionality is entirely unintended by the actors using truth.
For them, truth represents a final vocabulary which reinforces their authority positions.
They use truth in order to gain power and are oblivious to these unintended functional
effects, which renders the system stable. In the situation of a challenge between systems
of thought (hegemony and counter-hegemony), the new would-be elites employ a double
strategy of reifying their own system of thought while arguing that the ‘truths’ of other
constitute an arbitrary private language. Thus their actions are both functional and
dysfunctional at the same time, relative to different systems of felicity and infelicity.
In Power/Knowledge, Foucault wrote: ‘[T]here can be no possible exercise of power
without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis
of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we
cannot exercise power except through the production of truth’ (Foucault, 1980: 93). This
comes in the context in which he argues that there are two views of power: one in terms
of war and the other in terms of the re-inscription of the rules of war in politics through
contract (1980: 91–2) or new rules of the game (Clegg, 1989). I would argue that the
reason for the relationship between truth and the reinscription of war into the rules of
politics is the reifying function of truth relative to structuration of positions of authority. War
entails physical power, and is arbitrary relative to the habitus, or being-in-the-world, of
other. Violence circumvents the socialization of other, while politics is rooted in their habi-
tus, replacing chains and weapons with control through the soft tissues of the mind. As
observed with regard to the move from the physical containment of the ‘‘mad’’, to their cure
by in institutional care ‘[s]omething has been born, which was no longer repression, but
authority’ (Foucault, 1971: 251). In that case it was the authority of the local expert in psy-
chiatric disorders, who did not define their newly constructed authority relative to arbitrary
criteria; rather their claims were perceived to be anchored outside convention, in truth.
I began this article by stating that this constituted an analysis of the use of truth, which
methodologically brackets both the philosophical questions of the epistemological and
normative status of power and truth. I have followed this injunction and would therefore
caution against facile extrapolation from this sociological analysis to philosophical con-
clusions. For instance, contrary to appearances, this theory does not entail relativism.
However, why this is so deserves a separate explanation, as the answer is complex.

Conclusion
In conclusion, truth is the final vocabulary of power; it is the ultimate appeal beyond
which lies unreason. For individual social actors, truth is the road to authority positions
Haugaard 91

of empowerment and social capital, which include both power to and power over others.
The use of truth obscures the social construction of regimes of felicity and infelicity.
At the systemic level, the use of truth cages social action. Functionally, performative acts
that are rendered felicitous through appeals to truth constitute a source of system
stability. Through appeals to truth, structuration practices, which include power over,
become part of the perceived ‘natural order of things’, allowing the social system to
be reproduced as a matter of routine. The use of truth allows the reinscription of the rules
of conflict by constraining actors within structural practices that are constructed as reason-
able and felicitous.

Endnote
1. I present Weber’s account of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism as if it were a
purely functional account, which is not entirely correct in its detail – Weber has his teleological
moments, which I am methodologically bracketing.

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge helpful comments by Jeffrey Alexander, Phillip Smith and the anon-
ymous referees of EJST upon earlier drafts of this article.

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About the author

Mark Haugaard is founding editor of the Journal of Power (Routledge), Chair of the IPSA
Research Committee on Power (RC 36) and Senior Lecturer at the National University of Ireland,
Galway. He has published numerous books and articles on power and social theory, including:
‘Power: a family resemblance concept’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 13 (2010); ‘Power
and social critique’, Critical Horizons 11(1): 51–74 (2010); The Sage Handbook of Power (edited
with S. Clegg, Sage, 2009); Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought (with S. Malesevic,
Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is currently working on a new book, provisionally entitled,
Rethinking Power.

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