Power and money media amplify each other’s binary disjunctions

Evidence

Differentiation between different media and different binary schematizations leads to complex interdependencies, since the binary paradigms will not let themselves be brought together. The action of increasing one medium has a diffuse effect on the others. Sometimes there are structurally significant connections. In this way constitutional peace guaranteed by power makes it possible to increase possibilities of having or not having property. And, as even Locke realized, property, for its part, is a precondition of justice or injustice. Thus in this relationship between the media of power and money the operation of one medium increases the disjunction of the other. It is the complex tension resulting from this – and not, for instance, the naive assumption that property-owners possess power – which characterizes the ‘political economy’ of bourgeois society. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 666

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s overarching thesis: Luhmann’s account of how power (institutional hierarchy) and money interact — relevant to Stevens’s devotion to Lord Darlington’s household where personal service substitutes for both.