Reading Lukes in the Age of ICE

On power, and the dimensions of it we're built never to see.

Photo by Felipe Bastias on Unsplash.

Power: A Radical View (PRV) by Steven Lukes was, in its original 1974 form, part of an ongoing conversation among political scientists about a seemingly deceptive question of how to actually measure power. It was a method argument, waged between figures like Robert Dahl, who saw power in the decisions you could watch unfold, and challengers who countered his ideas by theorizing that power also worked by keeping things off the table entirely. But Lukes was thinking inside the particular world of the Cold War, its two superpowers underwriting the covert apparatuses of every nation they claimed as their own, and an age of hardening security states from Santiago to Saigon. The mood of that era hums beneath the argument even when the argument is nominally about something smaller, like community relations in Gary, Indiana.

Lukes ponders the nature of power and proposes three dimensions to it. The first concerns the visible actions of those in authority. The second concern is around the decisions never allowed to reach the table. But it is the third dimension that Lukes was most interested in, and the one I keep turning over in my head. PRV is concerned with the way people’s very preferences can be shaped to serve those in power, so that no conflict surfaces because no grievance ever forms.

I find reading Lukes from the far side of the Vietnam War, détente, and the decolonial uproar across the Global South to be genuinely enriching. As eager as I am to reach his later editions and finally decide whether I agree with him — something I’m honestly still unsure of — I can’t help but first sit with the original ideas in the light of the present.

Because we live in a time that seems almost designed to make you think about power’s third dimension. The pundits and newsmakers still analyze the surface through the congressional vote, the public polling, the ruling class’s personalities, and the news cycles' wins and losses tallied nightly. That accounting is comfortable because it is legible. But so much of what unsettles people now seems to happen somewhere beneath it. I have been reading Lukes while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) scandals are in the headlines, while bureaucratic machinery grinds in places no vote quite reaches, and while the news we absorb feels less like information and more like something arriving pre-authored. This reading has made me feel, more than argue, how thin the surface accounting really is. To be clear, I don’t have a verdict on any of it. I only notice how much of it lives in Lukes’ third dimension, the one the nightly tally cannot see.

I already suspect Foucault is going to complicate all of this and that he’ll object that there’s no shadowy hand doing this to us. That the whole ecosystem is something we participate in and move forward along with ourselves. Unpacking that argument and figuring out where I actually land is half of why I’m eager to keep reading. For now, I only want to mark that the objection is coming, and that it may be the more honest description of the machinery.

Still, whatever its troubles, Lukes’ basic intuition holds a strange power of its own. When preferences can be shaped as efficiently as ours seem to be — by the news we take in, the pressures we inherit, the pathologies we mistake for instinct — then the study of power can’t stay on the surface. It has to reckon with an apparatus that reaches down and stirs older hierarchies once thought safely pushed to the fringes.

And that is where the musing leaves me, unresolved and a little unsettled by the sense that power is a far more nebulous thing than our confident daily accounting of it admits. We have probably underestimated how many dimensions there are to understanding power relations, and the most effective ones may be precisely the dimensions built never to be noticed at all.