I often talk here about power, motivations and pleasures surrounding power, and the role they play in the psycho-politics of patriarchy, capitalism, and other such forces of oppression. I sometimes get a desire to try and systematise this, or a feeling that there’s the potential here for something similar to economics in its rigour (which is of course not all that rigorous). As a gesture in that direction, I started thinking about what sort of ‘laws of motion’ might be involved in such a ‘mechanics of power’.
A few sprang to my mind, but I’d be very interested in hearing thoughts or suggestions in comments. So I pose the question: if power is the subject of politics, and if the psychology of power is therefore the key political part of psychology, what could be the ‘axioms’, ‘theorems’, and ‘hypotheses’ of this study?
(of course I haven’t defined exactly what I mean by ‘power’, because it might be complex and potentially it’s more interesting to see how others define it)
So my thoughts were:
