Achieving good goals requires acquiring and wielding power realistically

Evidence

The man who had had to wait outside so many offices liked being on the inside of everything. He talked—perhaps a bit more than was discreet—about what Jimmy Walker had said to him and about what he had said to Walker. He liked to describe how some assemblyman had refused his instructions on a bill and how he had told the Governor about it and how the Governor had laid down the law, and, thereafter, how the assemblyman had jumped to obey when he, Moses, gave him instructions. If what he was on the inside of was a world he would once have despised, he did not seem to remember those earlier feelings now. Reform work was, more and more, an irritating intrusion on his time. The hours he put in at the New York State Association office each week became fewer and fewer. The gaps between issues of the State Bulletin, once a monthly publication, grew longer and longer. And when the Bulletin did appear now, it made less and less pretense of being a reform pamphlet. More and more, it resembled a Tammany Hall broadside in support of Al Smith. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 620 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Second, they show that leaders themselves can only succeed where they enable followers to become successful agents. It was because DMp allowed the prisoners to become masters of their own fate that his vision and his position was secure. It was because the organizers of the Commune failed to establish a communal society that both they and their vision were swept aside. Agency, according to this position, is not a limited resource to be distributed between followers and leaders. It is something which followers have because of their leaders and vice-versa. — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 123 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Power operates as modalized possibility rather than actual force or capability — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 629; Treating power as relational redistributes agency toward the subordinated.; The Leader’s power becomes structural necessity rather than personal superiority (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Realist political theory adopts the powerholder’s viewpoint #expands (0.88)
• Deferential invisibility inside power corrupts an idealist’s stated goals #complicates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 620
• Leadership success depends on granting followers effective agency. #qualifies (0.79) — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 123
• Treating power as relational redistributes agency toward the subordinated. #complicates (0.78)
• Power operates through passionate attachments, not just constraint #qualifies (0.77)
• Power cannot self-realize but depends on societal-structural conditions for legitimacy #qualifies (0.76)
• Power operates as modalized possibility rather than actual force or capability #qualifies (0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 629
• Power produces the individual rather than merely repressing it #complicates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 301
• Power as a medium frees influence from contingent motivational and historical preconditions #qualifies (0.75)
• The Leader’s power becomes structural necessity rather than personal superiority #exemplifies (0.74)
• Power produces subjects and desires rather than merely repressing them #complicates (0.74) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 131
• Power grows as both the power-holder and the subjected gain freedom #qualifies (0.74)
• Undifferentiated power conflates truth with decision-making authority #complicates (0.73)
• Rapid ascent to power can exhaust ordinary ambitions and motives #complicates (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2381
• Perfect impartiality dissolves the self-attribution that makes action meaningful #complicates (0.72) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 134