I gave a version of the following paper on Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power in a seminar on political judgment this semester. Enjoy, dislike, ignore.

In Rationality and Power, Bent Flyvbjerg takes a close look at the effort Aalborg, a small Danish town, makes to design and implement a comprehensive renewal plan for its downtown. In providing the account of Aalborg, Flyvbjerg wants also to offer an analysis of “how knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life” (3). This emphasis on the “real” will at time put Flyvbjerg at odds with protagonists of the “Enlightenment tradition” (Flyvbjerg makes it a point several times to contrast himself with Habermas, for instance), yet also begs a question to which I will return: given his effort to outline “real” politics, what are we to make of Flyvbjerg’s repetitive remarks about how power defines “reality?”

How do knowledge, rationality, and power work in real life? Flyvbjerg believes their working out demonstrates, as he says in his oft repeated paraphrase of Pascal, “that power has a rationality that rationality does not know. Rationality, on the other hand, does not have a power that power does not know” (234). On the one hand, there is the rationality of power, power’s ability to form a “reality” according to various strategies and tactics and have that reality be upheld on account of its force. On the other hand, there is the power of rationality, the power of reason to discern the nature of things, which Flyvbjerg paints as weak in a fight and only partially capable out of one. This asymmetrical relation between rationality and power could be said to be the center of Flyvbjerg’s understanding of politics; using his understanding to judge the judgment of political actors, we would have to take into account their sensitivity to power-relations, to how the force of arguments gains purchase.

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Yourstruly has started reading some selections of Thucydides for a class on political judgment. Thucydides is, apparently, one of the landmark thinkers for people who are concerned with the correct way to gauge and respond to political situations — “correct way” here meaning the way most likely to secure one’s ends — and, at any rate, I am enjoying his quips and the way he presents his take on things.

Take his gloss on how it was that Agamemnon was able to rally troops to re-kidnap Helen. Greek tradition had it that all the suitors who attempted to wed Helen swore an oath to her father, Tyndareus, that they would come to the aid of whoever became her husband if he needed help. Thucydides dispenses with this as a cute and incorrect story, saying that Agamemnon didn’t benefit from fealty or obligation in raising his army so much as he relied on his ability to coerce. He rallied the troops because he had power to do so, and not in the form of sentiment or fidelity. Thucydides writes,

In my view, Agamemnon was able to get the fleet together because he had more power than anyone else at that time, and not so much because he was the leader of the suitors of Helen who were bound by oaths to Tyndareus.

There is little reverence for the power of words to bind people here. Instead, there is a recognition of the capacity of another sort, political power.

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