Books: A Concert of Empires

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

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

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

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

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