power

El poder de la kabbalah: The Power of Kabbalah, Spanish-Language Edition (Spanish Edition)
$14.95
the problem with the author is if you read one book you pretty much read them all. 80% is rehash of his prior books.

Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior
$14.95
In "Power vs. Force," David Hawkins attempts to set up an absolute test for truth using kinesiology. In brief, a person holds his arm horizontally while a second person pushes down on the arm with two fingers above the wrist. The first person is asked to resist the pushing. A concept or idea is then introduced (for example, Adolph Hitler or Jesus Christ). According to Hawkins, if a concept tests "strong," the person will be able to resist the pushing on his arm, no matter how strong. On the other hand, if a concept tests "weak," the person cannot successfully resist the push, and his arm will go down. Hawkins claims all would test strong for Jesus Christ and weak for Adolph Hitler, regardless of whether they had any knowledge or information about the subjects. Moreover, Hawkins claims that this strong and weak test is true for all people and all cultures and is absolutely valid. Therefore--and this is the outrageous part--this test can be used to test the truth of anything from a political regime to a TV commercial. Supposedly, this is because the collective wisdom of mankind is stored in one's muscles.

This is obviously absurd. While there may be some correlation between ideas and physiological responses (a polygraph is based on this claim), to assert that such responses are universal and absolute and independent of any conscious knowledge is laughable. Nevertheless, Hawkins feels compelled to base his entire book on this theory. One could just as easily claim that universal truth could be detected by how quickly one blinks his eyes and set up "tests" to prove that it is valid.

If this book has any validity, it is that human beings benefit from considering psychological and spiritual dichotomies such as power vs. force, freedom vs. domination, openness vs secrecy, and so on. Anyone can do this by using his own intuition and discernment. You don't need to hold your arm out and have someone push down on it to know that the message of Jesus Christ is more powerful than the message of Adolph Hitler.

Power: A Novel
$13.95
I was obligated to read this book for a college course. While it does have some redeeming literary value (and quite frankly the panther hunt was cool), it fails as a narrative. It moves from being a well driven story in the beginning, to an amorphous and boring fictional dissertation about the friction between tribal an western ways of viewing the world.

You will be hard pressed to find a book that is more stylistically pretentious, or one that says so much while conveying so little, or one that will take as much of your will 'power' to finish.

If you have a choice in the matter, there are other pieces of native american fiction that are more entertaining and contain more original thought.

Power: A Radical View
$30.00
This is essential reading for those interested in the dynamics of power relations and, in particular, how power works to either enhance or undermine democratic participation in society. Over the course of the three essays that constitute the second edition of this book, Lukes develops an idea of power in three dimensions. In the first dimension, power is clearly visible in decision-making processes, where A exercises power over B when A's policy preferences, reflecting A's subjective interests, prevail over B's. Here, power is discernible only where a conflict of interests informs open debate over a public issue. This conflict gives rise to divergent policy preferences competing for public acceptance and political validation.

However, if one were to confine the study of power to its effects in the first dimension, that is, to the outcomes of decision-making processes, one misses other aspects of power detected in the biases of non-decision-making. Non-decision-making power is the power to keep certain issues off the table: it is the power to deny certain individuals or groups access to decision-making processes, and thus to prevent certain grievances from being translated into public issues. While decision-making power, as seen in the first dimension, may be widely distributed among various groups and individuals who alternately succeed in promoting their interests, there may be at the same time unity among these otherwise conflicting interests in preventing certain segments of the population from contributing to the discussion. The second dimension of power consists in this ability to control the agenda, to decide what gets decided--and what doesn't. Here, as in power's first dimension, power is again seen in a conflict situation, only the conflict is now covert, rendered invisible by non-decision-making power.

The third dimension of power incorporates and transcends power's first and second faces. Those who study three-dimensional power recognize not only power as it is exercised in the first and second dimensions but also power where it need not be so exercised. This occurs in the apparent absence of conflict, where power can be seen as the capacity to secure compliance to domination and thereby prevent conflicts or grievances from arising in the first place.

The third face of power is not directly visible, because the securing of willing compliance to domination does not require an explicit exercise of power. However, the mechanisms of such power (domination) are empirically accessible. They may involve the furthering of the material interests of the dominated within certain limits, as part of a class compromise, or they may involve the inculcation of ideologies that bring the dominated to accept the power structure of society as the "natural order of things" or as being divinely ordained and established. In both cases, which are not mutually exclusive, the "true interests" of the dominated are obscured; and the dominated are misled to act contrary to their real interests, chief among them being, one may argue, an interest in being NOT so dominated and in having more freedom to live according to "the dictates of one's own nature and judgment."

Of course, as Lukes admits, "true interests" is a contested term. There doesn't seem to be a rigid set of objective interests with which everyone can readily identify. Rather than supplying a universal answer to the question of true interests, Lukes responds to this difficulty by providing a set of guidelines for identifying people's interests. The answer, Lukes argues, always depends on three things: the purpose of one's inquiry, one's theoretical framework, and the methods used.

Lukes also recognizes another difficulty in discussing the idea of true interests: It almost always leads to the notion of "false consciousness." False consciousness is a controversial idea, because it is often assumed to have condescending, elitist connotations. However, Lukes regards false consciousness as simply the result of being misled, many instances of which throughout history can easily be identified without much controversy. The mechanisms of false consciousness include censorship, disinformation, and "the promotion and sustenance of all kinds of failures of rationality and illusory thinking, among them the `naturalization' of what could be otherwise and the misrecognition of the sources of desire and belief" (p.149).

The third face of power, as developed by Lukes, expands the conceptual territory of power and reorients its study to include instances of power that escape the attention of those who conceive of power too narrowly, thereby limiting their observations to the realm of political participation. With this book, Lukes makes a vital contribution to the sociological study of power by revealing it as "capacity" and by showing how power works most effectively (and insidiously) when it is hidden.