Theory Brief #3: Lionel Barber (2021), The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
If one wants to understand power today, one could do a lot worse than reading former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s memoir-esque book, The Powerful and the Damned (2020). Sociologists like to think they understand power, but it is all too liable to be a power in the abstract; Barber, though writing polished prose in the retroactive style of a “diary” (he admits in the preface that he was not in the habit of keeping a diary during his 15 years’ tenure as FT editor, so the book is a backdated construction of sorts), produces a tantalizing glimpse into the personal relations and institutional fabric that undergird what we might term, following Bourdieu, the transnational field of power, a web of interconnected organizations, groups, and individuals who make up the upper echelons of financial, political, media, and even ecclesial power around the world. (Churchmen make their appearance several times throughout the book, often in unflattering proximity to the heavy-handed wielders of temporal power.) Though perhaps unsurprising to savvy social observers, Barber shows how power finally relies upon dense webs of personal relationships, constituted in the last instance by the interaction of flesh-and-blood individuals who mobilize money and words (or economic capital and symbolic power) to promote an agenda that they are not always in control nor even conscious of. And these webs of relations both enable and ensnare the operators of power, posing particular risks to journalists, who are always at risk of becoming caught up in the heady social games of the powerful, thereby forgetting their mission: the ceaseless, remorseless critique of power in the service of reducing social domination.
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