Introduction

Critical Theorists in the tradition of the Frankfurt School seek to uncover the power relations intrinsic to social, political and economic practice. In the process, they argue that bureaus and agencies are necessarily hostile to human freedom and self-determination. Necessarily taking on self-sustaining, self-directing lives of their own, such bureaus evolve values and goals contrary to the actual interests of those they govern and ineluctably dominate the individualâs ãlifeworld.ä To defeat this natural tendency, critical theorists maintain that public agencies must either be captured as social (as opposed to political) institutions, or contained within a  ãminimalist administrative stateä that is responsive to a radically democratic public sphere operating according to the principles of the ideal speech situation. The current progress of the administrative state worldwide thus leaves them in despair.

Recent scholarship suggests that Thorstein Veblen articulated a more thoroughgoing and comprehensive version of Critical Theory (ãEvolutionary Critical Theoryä) than that developing out of the Frankfurt School (Sementelli and Abel, 2000). While he shared the goals, methods and critiques of traditional Critical Theory, Vebelnâs emphasis on non-teleological and non-deterministic social evolution enabled him to posit a more dynamic social constructionism than that of either the Frankfurt theorists or their Habermasian heirs. In particular, evolutionary Critical Theory denies that highly responsive forms of democratic pluralism necessarily ãemancipateä and that the ãbestä institutional arrangements are necessarily free of power relationships (Sementelli and Abel, 2000).

This paper argues that traditional Critical Theoryâs conviction that an inherent contradiction obtains between bureaucracy and emancipation and between agencies and agency, stems both from its over sensitivity to the ãinvidiousä aspects of public organizations and from its ãover-totalizingä estimation of their actual and potential impact.  This insensitivity to the ãindeterministicä and (ãnon-invidiousä) emancipating characteristics of public organizations results from both Critical Theoryâs inadequate conceptualization of ãpowerä and its consequent misunderstanding of the relationship ãpowerä and ãemancipation.ä The more ample view of ãpowerä held by Veblen and elucidated by Foucault, provides a better understanding of the relationship between power and emancipation, increases critical theoryâs explanatory potential and suggests that the right kinds of public bureaucracies may help to advance greater freedom to individuals than has yet prevailed.

Traditional Critical Theory and the Administrative State

Traditionally, Critical Theory argues that the administrative state is inherently dysfunctional, oppressive and conflict engendering. Administrative organizations are designed to procure ends and implement decisions that originate in society-wide processes of domination (Clegg and Dunkerly, 1980). Domination is an exercise of power made possible through the colonization of individual ãlifeworldsä by instrumental, ãscientificä ideologies (Habermas, 1984; Forester, 1983). Discourses embodying instrumental reasoning are the mediums for exercising this power and securing this domination (Mumby, 1988). They accomplish this both by imposing specialized categories, ãtechno-rationalä logics, means-end calculations and routinized techniques upon individual ãlifeworlds,ä and by ignoring or explaining away ãdeviantä features of life. When the attainment of assigned goals or the implementation of imposed decisions is frustrated, administrative action reduces to an exercise of coercive power, controlling, containing or removing the source of resistance. Thus, by virtue of both the control they exercise and the purposive rational action they employ, administrative agencies limit what is really possible, constitute themselves a form of domination (Habermas, 1970) and establish loci of power struggles originating in and reinforcing society-wide processes of domination. In these ways, administrative agencies both reinforce the image of their expertise (Schon, 1983) and ãcontradictä individual and group interests in emancipation (Marcuse, 1985).

Most importantly for our purposes, the techno-rational desideratum of consistency requires that a society administered by public organizations be erected upon the foundational assumption that citizens are utility maximizers functioning within a ãtechno-rationalä consumerist system (Macpherson, 1977). ãSuccessfulä navigation through such a system requires that individuals not only think techno-rationally and unambivalently in means-ends categories, but trust their fate to large-scale organizations that administer the apparatus that is rationally and ãscientificallyâ constructed to pursue rational consumerist ends. Thus bureaucratic power, legitimized through dominant discourses, subjugates individuals subtly but nevertheless aggressively until they are denied both their true interests and their ability to think in any other way.  In fact, the idea of individuals as free, reflective, creative and self-determining agents is called into question as a construct engendered by the dominant techno-rational ideology and discourses embedded in public agencies (Newton, 1998).

Together, these characteristics of public organizations restrict the exercise of free choice to smaller and smaller, more and more marginal, spheres of public and private life.  As the administrative state grows, administrative discretion increases. Administrators determine policy outcomes by controlling the flow of daily activities, specifying the details of programs, implementing agendas and defining regulatory language. They direct our efforts through narrowly techno-rational definitions of what our problems really are, trigger routinized, ãlegalizedä and rationalized ãappropriate responses,ä and either impose sanctions or deny aid and reward should we fail to regulate our behavior accordingly. In this way, an administrative state where government is dominated by bureaucracies that have taken on a self-sustaining, self-directing life of their own, becomes inherently hostile to human freedom and self-determination. ãThe pattern of all administration tends of its own accord ·toward Fascismä (Adorno, 1978).

TCT, Power and the Administrative State

As its view of the administrative state indicates, Critical Theoryâs understanding of ãpowerä falls within a familiar conceptual tradition that may be thrown into sharp relief by a few of its salient works. These works constitute neither the extent of the debate nor the panolply of ideas over the meaning of power within the tradition. But they do provide a sufficient delineation of the tradition to justify the inclusion of Critical Theoryâs understanding within it, and to distinguish Veblenâs understanding from it.

In ãThe Concept of Power,ä Robert Dahl (1957) articulated the elemental notion of ãpowerä in this tradition. Simply put, power is the ability to get people to do something they otherwise wouldnât. ãPowerä is thus a characteristic of conflictual relationships in contradistinction to the contractarian tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Parsons (See Lukes, 1974, 28) and Arendt (1970). The latter tradition understands power as an ability or capacity that might be held, transferred or utilized. Thus, individuals may hold power by themselves alone, or transfer power to others to act on their behalf, or generate power through cooperation and employ it to attain particular ends. Individuals utilizing their power may come into conflict, but the conflict is not inherent to the ãpowerä itself.

According to the tradition of Dahl, however, individuals cannot hold power; it is only extant in exercises against another. That is, power obtains only when people would have acted differently and only when definitive action is taken in order to induce a desired change in their behavior. This tradition is also distinct from the ãstructural determinismä of thinkers like Poulantzas (1979), who retain the relational view but condition the existence of power on a ãsystem of material places occupied by particular agentsä (Poulantzas, 1979, 147). Under this view, power is an attribute of total systems, individual behaviors being determined by the role of the person in the overall structure. For Dahl no such inclusive system is necessary. ãNon-enrolledä individuals may utilize power; all that is necessary is another with a contrary disposition.

Bachrach and Baratz (1962) initiated much of the debate over ãpowerä within this relational tradition, arguing that the concept should include both getting others to do what the otherwise wouldnât and the ability to prevent people from doing things they otherwise would. They went on to include within the exercise of power the ability to create or reinforce such values and institutional practices as limit the scope of public debate and action to relatively innocuous issues. Although apparently at odds or at least somewhat divergent, both ideas nevertheless characterize power as a conflictual relationship among self-determining agents consciously advancing their individually defined interests against the understood interests of equally self-determining others.

Carrying on in this tradition,ä Lukes (1974) maintained that power is also exercised when people willingly do something against their interests. According to this view, power can operate ãunseen. ä That is, it can operate both through the control of situations and thus over perceptions, and through a control over what is possible and thus over behavioral dispositions. In these ways the very desires and goals of people may be manipulated so as to facilitate their acting voluntarily in ways that are not self-defined and quite often contrary to their real interests objectively understood (Lukes, 1974, 23).

Critical Theory adds to this tradition the idea that power may be exercised to control not only the actions, desires, goals, perceptions and behavioral dispositions of others, but paradigms and epistemologies as well. According to Critical Theoryâs version, this dynamic occurs not because of the intent of any group or individual but because of the relationships of domination (structural, ideological and discursive) that determine the routines of daily activity among the groups. Again, though the views of those in this tradition are somewhat at odds, all of them conceptualize ãpowerä as both completely negative and operative through sets of social (interpersonal) relationships characterized by certain individuals and groups securing regularly their interests, goals, and desired outcomes at a noticeable cost to others.

In this critical extension of the tradition, domination may be discerned whenever the individualâs desired outcomes and the means of attaining them are prescribed (Marcuse, 1970).  Thus public administrative agencies are loci of domination as their goals, interests, preferences and desired outcomes mediate the underlying power distribution ultimately founded upon society-wide structural, ideological and discursive domination (Benson, 1977). By transmitting sets of decision premises and cognitive expectations that constrain choices to those pre-patterned by the dominate ideology and discourses, public organizations exercise a discipline over both perception and understanding that induces individuals to perpetuate relationships of advantage and disadvantage in their day to day ãrationalä decision-making (Deetz, 1992). In Habermasian (1984) terms, public bureaucracies induce coordinated action outside of the ãlifeworld,ä developing by themselves a structure of expectations, cognitions and epistemologies (reflecting society-wide relationships of domination) beyond the interests of the individuals and groups to whom they administer. Thus the exercise of domination through the power of public agencies inhibits the capacity of individuals to act as creative, reflective agents free of misconceptions about their own interests.

TCT, Emancipation and the Administrative State

Despite the apparent totality of oppressive power operating through the relationships of domination in society, critical theorists currently insist that people can be emancipated. Emancipation requires both a liberation from ideologies, power relationships, limiting paradigms and constraining epistemologies, and an empowerment through a transformative fusion of theory and practice that is itself critically reflected upon both society-wide and in situ (Fay, 1987; Fromm, 1986; Habermas, 1984; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947). Thus Îemancipationä is a complex concept involving the absence of domination, an authority once denied and the ability to apply certain capabilities (e.g., to employ available yet unfettering means to desired ends, to transform dominating practices and discourses, to evolve new emancipatory practices and discourses). In brief, ãemancipationä involves releasing people to exercise power over their thought processes, lifeworlds and anyone who would intrude upon them, while empowering them individually with the abilities necessary to realize their true interests in practice.

How to achieve this has always been a problem. Critical theory argues that people understand their ãtrue interestsä only upon emancipation from dominant ideologies, epistemologies, practices and discourses. Immanent critique is the primary method employed to alert people to their domination. But, domination ipso facto seems to neutralize immanent critique. Domination distorts consciousness, controls practice and directs discourse, leaving people without the possibility of either discovering anything that is not already posited in the dominate ideology or understanding anything except through its prescribed epistemologies, practices and discourses.  In brief, all consciousness is a totalizing tautology.

Just as individuals lack recourse to the prescribed alternatives, groups and institutions are incapable of generating undistorted options. In fact, group participation and recourse to institutions transfers the prerogative of generating alternatives to some collectivity, subjecting individuals to another loci of domination and leaving them worse off than before. As dominated agents, then, neither individuals nor groups can enlist either public agencies or any other ãauthorityä or ãexpertä in any project of ãemancipationä that is not pre-defined by the society-wide practices and discourses of domination.  By the same token, as public agencies, experts and authorities arise from, mediate and express practices and discourses of domination, they cannot themselves be so constructed as to aid in the emancipation of individuals and groups (at least not prior to emancipation). Thus critical theory is ã the melancholy scienceä (Rose, 1978) and the Frankfurt theorists turned to pessimism, nihilism and abstract negation (Jay, 1973; Slater, 1977). The most that can be hoped for is that the Habermasian appraisal of the potential for emancipatory discourse and practice in the current dominant ideology will be realized in practice, and qultimately reconstruct administrative and authoritative structure and practice toward emancipatory ends.

Problems and Paradoxes

For our purposes, the most important problem in traditional Critical Theory stems from the fact that it depicts the entire debate in organization theory over how to best achieve ãresponsive,ä or  ãdemocratic,ä or ãreflectiveä or  ãeducativeä or ãresponsiveä public agencies as misconceived. Given its conceptualization of power, domination and emancipation, there seems a certain futility in attempting to invent or shape public institutions capable of enabling individuals and groups to live not just cooperatively but in a freely creative way with conflict, dissent and the inability to reach consensus. Yet, many of the freedoms individuals experience depend upon extant institutions. As indicated above, ãemancipationä in Critical Theory includes not only the absence of interference but the effective power to act. This suggests that forgoing a certain amount of self-rule may be necessary to organize effectively in order to accomplish things one cannot do alone. Therefore, both allowing interference with personal choices and allowing others to make certain choices for you may sometimes be necessary to be free.

For this reason, Critical Theory is in a quandary regarding public institutions. Marcuse, for example, argues that ãall domination assumes the form of administration.ä Power transmutes into ãsalaried members of bureaucracies who their subjects meet as members of another bureaucracy. The pain, frustration, impotence of the individual derive from a highly productive and efficiently functioning system in which he makes a better living than ever beforeä (Marcuse, 1970, 1-2). So the individual is always dominated when presented with pre-packaged options and they always suffer as a consequence. Yet, as Marcuse also notes, they live better than ever before. As this is the case, critical theorists sometimes recognize a need for ãobjectifyingä a rationalized ãlifeworldä in social and political institutions. (Wellmer, 1985). As Marcuse also says, freedom is a form of domination wherein the means provided [by bureaucracies] satisfy the needs of the individual with a minimum of displeasure and renunciation (Marcuse, 1970, 1-2). So Marcuse must recognize that in some sense freedom (at least from want) is institutionally dependent as both the needs of individuals and their capabilities (and hence the minimum necessary renunciation), vary with the level of economic and cultural development of those institutions. More definitively, Habermas ties the very possibility of emancipation to the emergence of more enabling political institutions made possible by the currently dominant ideology (Habermas, 1984).

Thus, while the forms of power acting through the administrative state are fundamentally at odds with emancipation, public agencies are among the instruments that can lead to the recognition and preservation of interests that must be addressed to secure emancipation. Sorting this out must involve discerning unnecessary constraints (Schroyer, 1975), and these will vary with the totality of objective and subjective conditions. But overall, to make everything consistent, TCT seems to require either the capture of administrative agencies as social (as opposed to political) institutions, or a ãminimalist administrative stateä informed by and responsive to a radically democratic public sphere that operates according to the principles of the ideal speech situation. Still, all of this seems impossible given the negative nature of power and the domination it entails. Indeed, the idea of an ãenabling public agencyä seems oxymoronic. Ultimately, then,  ãpowerä and its relationship to ãemancipationä as conceptualized by critical theory, entails an ãenabling public agenciesä paradox in practice.

A second problem arises from the fact that at the heart of Critical Theory is an assumption that reflecting upon a clear vision of extant power relationships, practices and discourses is a sufficient emancipatory force. Reflective reasoning may be inhibited and distorted by administrative agencies, or by the pleasures and satisfactions of consumerism, or by religious ideologies, but ultimately the unhappiness, frustration, suffering or alienation experienced as a consequence of being dominated and unfulfilled will spark the thinking required for emancipation (Fromm, 1976). However, recent critical scholarship suggests that change may require more than simply a clear head and the proper occasion for improved reasoning. The very ability to reason and to respond to reasoned argument may be inhibited by oneâs ãcultural identityä (Fay, 1976). As ãhistorical, embodied, traditional and embedded creatures,ä people may experience dominant practices and discourses as profoundly anchored ãsomaticä realities constituting the ãdeep structureä of the individualâs identity and experience of ãself.ä This, of course, significantly affects Critical Theoryâs hopes for emancipation.  Both the liberation and the empowerment dimensions of the concept become questionable and another paradox is born. In practice, people suffering the most obviously unnecessary oppression and offered the most obvious institutional solutions often embrace and defend the oppressing ideologies and practices. Hence the ãconservatismä paradox so dispiriting to traditional Critical theorists (Marcuse, 1964; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989).

A third problem arises from another of Critical Theoryâs foundational assumptions to the effect that domination is ãarbitrarilyä created by historical happenstance. Consequently, the relationships, discourses and practices through which power operates may be done away with relatively easily given the proper perceptions, circumstances and will. In this sense Critical Theory anticipates transformation not evolution. But it seems more likely that previous institutions, discourses, practices and relationships both served some human interests at one time and provid an evolutionary foundation upon which reconstructions can be built. Consequently, as Wittgenstein demonstrated, though many discourses are possible not just any will do. The terms of any ãnew discourseä must bear a reasonable ãfamily resemblanceä to previous usages of its terms if anyone is to understand it at all (Wittgenstein, 1953). Likewise, social practices and institutions can be structured in many ways. However, just as the foundation of a building is connected to the structure erected upon it, so are social practices and institutions linked to the pre-existing cultural base. Early discourses, practices and relationships grew out of simple biological needs and of course took many forms depending upon exigency and environmental situation. Nevertheless, current forms are built upon and still attached, however indirectly, to these foundations. To the critical theorist, however, this is simply another instance of that paradoxical ãconservatismä they find so dispiriting (Marcuse, 1964; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989, 222).

A fourth problem arises from the assumption that the exercise of power through dominant practices, ideologies and discourses as mediated by public agencies are capable of a totalizing impact. However, much scholarship indicates that the ãbounded rationalityä, informal group processes and psychological needs of bureaucratic actors prevent public agencies from functioning as efficient machines of domination (March and Simon, 1958). Instead they ãmuddle throughä and perhaps function better when employing noncoercive organizational structures and decision-making processes. (Wildavsky, 1979, Landau, 1969, Kaufman, 1969). Outside of the agency context, a number of interesting studies indicate that in practice the dominated (e.g., ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals) manage enough power to establish and maintain their identities through complex socio-psychological coping mechanisms (Gould, 1984; Hearn, 1987; Adam, 1978; Memmi, 1968). Moreover, Individuals and groups may employ the dominant vocabulary and discourses in inventive ways (Abel and Marsh, 1993). Consequently, diverse, sometimes contradictory discourses may evolve and vie for acceptance within the dominant regime of meaning and practice, thereby enabling individuals to act accordingly.  Abel and Marsh (1993), for example, describe how dominated individuals and groups have historically adopted dominant vocabularies with subtle variations in the meanings of key terms in order to advance a variety of causes within American legal institutions. Again, these instances of ãinterstitial emancipationä in practice can only seem paradoxical to traditional critical theory. They shouldnât be possible, yet they happen.

In sum, Critical Theoryâs negativity toward the administrative state derives ultimately from its conceptualization of ãpower.ä This conceptualization accounts for its ambivalence toward the role of institutions in the emancipatory process, for its over reliance on reason as a sufficient emancipatory force, for its idea that extant relationships of domination are simply dispensable, and for its view that the power exercised through domination is totalizing in effect. In turn, these assumptions produce paradox upon paradox in practice.

Evolutionary Critical Theory and the Administrative State

Recent scholarship indicates that Veblenâs Evolutionary Critical Theory closes the theory-practice gap while retaining critical theoryâs traditional critiques (e.g., of positivism and scientific reasoning), methods (e.g., deconstruction and immanent critique) and goal of emancipation (Sementelli and Abel, 2000). If the above analysis is correct and the theory-practice gaps result from Critical Theoryâs concept of power, Evolutionary Critical Theory should provide some concept of power that resolves the paradoxes of ãinterstitialä emancipation, ãconservatismä and an ãenabling public agency.ä It accomplishes these resolutions by positing a unified field theory of ãpower.ä This theory of ãpowerä retains the negative relational, conflictual dimension observed and analyzed by traditional critical theory, reintroduces the personal, cooperative and positive dimension observed by Hobbes, Locke, Parsons and Arendt, and encompasses the ãtotal structuralä insights of Poulantzas. If the following analysis is correct, this conceptualization not only resolves the paradoxes engendered by Critical Theory and increases its explanatory power while retaining its critiques, methods and ultimate goal.

Power, Emancipation and Veblen/Foucault

Veblen examines the question of power first through a study of ãthe leisure class,ä and then through a study of  ãthe vested interestsä (a more inclusive term encompassing the leisure class).ä As a result of these studies, Veblen conceives of power as both much more diffuse and much more personal than does traditional Critical Theory. Power is found in individual ãbeingness,ä society-wide patterns of domination and everywhere in between. Power is an ontological concept linking both different states of being (individual, social, institutional) and potentialities with actualities in the day to day flux of contending possibilities and tendencies. As a result, Veblen has very different ideas about how power is evaluated, how it relates to subjects, where it is found, how it is exercised, and how it may be discerned.

To begin grasping the nature power, Veblen directs our attention to three everyday experiences. First, a personâs mere existence elicits attention. Just the fact of our being engages a cluster of others in reacting to our actuality, in taking us into account and in compensating for us. This is an unintended capacity to produce effects and it impacts those around us regardless of whether it is thoughtfully employed. While just our presence engenders reaction, we also experience unintended reactions to our natural propensity to act. ãEvery person is born a bundle of potentialities·[and delights] at the maturing of these potentialities into powers [as he or she begins to] talk, to crawl, to walk, to run.ä (May, 1972, 121-22]. As Veblen puts it, ãas a matter of necessity·man is an agent·a center of unfolding, impulsive activity·seeking some·impersonal end (Veblen, 1934, 15). This ãinstinct of workmanshipä (Veblen, 1934, 15) is a second unintended capacity to produce effects as it requires others to cope with us.

As our existence inevitably embraces a stream of others, we become known and know ourselves through the trail of these two simple experiences and their multiple effects through life. Of course we react and adjust to the effects, to the ãfeedbackä of reactions by those around us; but we also affirm ourselves. We define our boundaries synergistically with others, but we also put others on notice and engender an identity in the lives of others. Throughout his ãIntroductoryä to The Theory Of The Leisure Class, Veblen describes the many forms of unfolding taken by this personal power (this ãinstinct to workmanshipä) that everyone experiences; the power of being affirming being (Veblen, 1934, 1-21).

May (1972) points out that in addition to the reactions others inevitably have to oneâs being, people subconsciously seek out opposition just in order to actualize this power. That is, ãbeing is manifested only in the process of actualizing its power·power becomes actualized only in those situations in which opposition is overcomeä (May, 1972, 143-144). Veblen also notes this aspect of ãbeing power.ä It is the innocent origin of ãinvidious discriminationsä as ãesteem is gained by putting oneâs efficacy in evidence (Veblen, 1934, 16). Thus Veblenâs ãpersonal powerä has a dimension akin to Neitzscheâs notion that ãto impose upon becoming the character of being÷that is the supreme will to power (Neitzsche, 1968, 340). It anticipates Tillichâs ontological claim that ãevery being affirms its own being ·even if its self-affirmation has the form of self surrenderä (Tillich, 1954, 39). And it is echoed in the psychoanalytically identified archetype of striving for the solution to lifeâs problems as encountered in the evolution of the individual (Ansbacher and Ansbacher, 1956). In brief, Veblenâ s ãpersonal powerä is the capacity everyone has to produce unintended effects around themselves simply by virtue of their being; and opposition (resistance) followed by the continued force of being, the continued self-affirmation of simple persistence, is a natural (unintended) expression of this capacity.

Finally, Veblen calls attention to the third shared experience of reality imposing itself upon us. Against this we act out both physically and psychologically. That is, personal ãbeing powerä may be employed toward the gratification of our interests in opposition to the frustrations of reality. So in addition to unintended effects, ãbeing powerä may have intentional effects. Vebelen understands clearly that these ãintentionsä may be manipulated and dominated by extant ideologies, discourses and practices. These are elements of the complex reality imposing itself upon us. Nevertheless, it is each of us as an individual who is asserting these interests and that is in and of itself an actualization of our personal ãbeing power.ä

As we have seen, Critical Theory understands ãpowerä as a society-wide phenomenon not attributable to any individual. However, Veblenâs observations concerning personal ãbeing powerä justify his closing of the theory-practice gap by focusing on the ãmicrophysics of power.ä That is, they indicate that to really understand the nature of domination, to discern its actual origin and to accurately depict how it works, Critical Theory must expand its scope to include a critical analysis of the everyday one-on-one relationships and struggles of simple interpersonal being. And they suggest that these should not be approached as echoes of an over-arching total domination but as the very ãstuffä of domination and emancipation that is ãbuilt-upä into society-wide practices through emulation, repetition and habituation.

Fundamental to Veblenâs analysis is an understanding of the diffusion and reactivity of power as explicated by Foucault. As does Veblen, Foucault understands power as neither a ãgroup of institutions and mechanisms·[nor] a mode of subjugation·nor a general system of dominationä (Foucault, 1979, 92). These are only certain elaborate forms that power may take. Power originates in any relationship where force is employed (Foucault, 1979, 92). That is, if we imagine a domination free context, as each person meets another the necessity of adjustment arises; and this entails necessarily doing something we otherwise wouldnât (even if it involves getting someone else to do something they otherwise wouldnât or keeping them from doing what they otherwise would). Even in contexts of domination, when socially prescribed meetings occur (e.g., guard and prisoner, doctor and patient, professor and student), the tactics of employing power in situ produce shifts resonating in the overall pattern of power. They produce a sort of unintended and often unnoticed ãdrift,ä as each partner to the relationship compensates for the context and copes with the other under the exigencies of circumstance. As Foucault puts it, ãpowerâs condition of possibility·is the moving substrate of force relationships which, by virtue of the inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstableä (Foucault, 1979, 92).

Veblen's identifies four sources of ãdriftä(Veblen, 1967; 1904, 400) First, as people are active agents by virtue of their ãbeing power,ä they manipulate, adapt, and mould dominant power relationships, practices and discourses to achieve various objectives (many of them culturally dictated) in situ.. As a consequence, unusual interpersonal behaviors, with uncertain consequences, will normally arise without comment. If emulated and summed across all individuals, larger shifts in practice, discourse and power relationships emerge. Next, the sheer complexity resulting from both such cumulative emulation and the simple diversity of where individuals and groups find themselves in the social structure at any given time, always yields some novel reaction to the dominant ideology, its practices and discourses.  Third, attempts (successful and unsuccessful) by institutions mediating the dominant ideologies and practices, to ãnormalizeä the impact of both the ãinstinct to workmanshipä (the natural ãacting outä of human beings) and the unique patterns of interaction necessary for solving unforeseen problems, produces its own ãdrift.ä That is, attempts to keep ãdriftä from happening, partially by realistic considerations, partly by the mythical beliefs of ãimbecile institutions,ä itself constitutes a ãdrift,ä sometimes by misdirecting the intentional behaviors of individuals.  Finally,  ãbackward drift" may occur. Where the dominant, practices and discourses attempt to cope with information or experiences unaccounted for in the dominant ideology by reinterpreting, ignoring or suppressing them, the blind lead the blind. The resulting ignorance of whatâs really happening results in a ãdriftä to waste and ineptitude.

Including this dimension of power resolves the paradox of ãinterstitial emancipation.ä Veblen/Foucaultâs unified field conceptualization of power disputes the totalizing impact of the dominant ideology on both individual thought and the circumstances under which people act. Throughout The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen is at pains to demonstrate how the prescribed practices of the dominant capitalist ideology instill proclivities in people for both activities and commodities that enlist their enthusiastic participation in maintaining their own domination. Thus, for example, the practice of invidious discrimination enjoins the conspicuous consumption of peculiar clothing, lawns, delicate women and pedigreed, largely dysfunctional dogs. However, these are proclivities only. While, people may be ãencouragedä tacitly and subtly to think and act in certain ways (Foucault, 1977), their personal ãbeing powerä and the exigencies of circumstance constitute a moving substratum of power productive of ãdrift.ä

But this personal ãbeing powerä is not all there is to power. From these unstable, drifting, necessarily heterogeneous one-on-one force relationships are thrown up patterns of interaction that if repeated often enough by enough people (i.e., if  ãstrengthenedä through ãemulationä), become habits (Veblen) and strategies (Foucault) eventually acquiring the appearance of a coordinated whole emanating form a single source (Foucault, 1979, 92-93).  Crystallizing habits and strategies eventually institutionalize into state agencies and ãsocial hegemoniesä (Foucault, 1979, 93), that may then be mobilized against the drift. That is, widely practiced ãhabits of thoughtä (Veblen), patterns of power (Foucault) and practices of domination may be fed back, conditioning both ãbeing powerä and one-on-one relationships of force, inhibiting change and stabilizing certain emerging patterns of power at the expense of others.

At the same time, even as institutionalized ãsocial hegemoniesä inhibit change and stabilize patterns of domination, they reveal ãtruthsä and thus may empower and emancipate. ãTruth is not the reward of free spirits·[it is] a thing of this world·produced only by virtue of multiple constraintsä (Foucault, 1980, 131). We do not know how imprisonment works, for example, or its effects on people until we imprison. We donât know the nature or extent of the emancipation or domination an institutional structure may provide until we establish it. Hence, the truths we know depend upon the patterns of practices constituting our societyâs ãregime of truthä (Foucault, 1980, 131); and what we are empowered to accomplish is similarly dependent.

Veblen expresses this same complex of ideas in his theory of endogenous evolution. Social evolution according to Veblen, does not proceed through a selection of traits by the external environment. There are no ãexogenous constraintsä or selection mechanisms outside of the social system. Change emerges from internal variation through endogenous forces, ãdrift,ä cumulative emulation, habituation and institutionalization. External influences do impact the system but they must be included in the system to matter to the people in it, and the understanding of those external influences is mediated by the dominant ideology, practices and discourses of the system (Veblen, 1932). For this reason, evolution is not necessarily progressive or emancipating. Societies may fail to ãinternalizeä exogenous forces, they may misconstrue them or otherwise fail to replace obsolete understandings.  Endogenous ãimbecile institutionsä might inhibit or preclude effective response to internal or external forces, and endogenous changes might themselves produce patterns of response and emulation that the system cannot respond to in a progressive, emancipatory fashion (Veblen, 1964).

This has two important implications. First, as what we can know and accomplish is limited by our ãregime of truth,ä sooner or later we will run up against the limits of that regime. We will come across something, or feel something or something will happen that the regime of truth handles at best very clumsily if at all. We encounter something the regime enjoins to silence or affirms as non-existent (Foucault, 1979). The things that are arenât spoken about become obvious by their omission from discourse. Veblen certainly understood Darwinism as just such an example of how sooner or later one runs up against the limits of established accounts.  While contradictions between experience and ideology (the fossil record versus the biblical dating of creation), and such incongruities as dinosaurs may be accommodated or explained away by dominant epistemologies and paradigms (Genesis 6:4,ãthere were giants on the earth in those daysä), some slight redefinition of reality, some drift occurs. The mere fact that evolution is asserted requires an accommodation, even if it is only to ignore it or enjoin people to silence about it; and denying change is itself a change.

The second important implication is that as ãwe cannot exercise power except through the production of truth, · power never ceases·its acquisition of truth: it institutionalizes and rewards its pursuitä (Foucault, 1980, 93). Under this conceptualization, power can emancipate as emancipation does not imply the absence of constraint as in the conceptualizations suggested by the contractarian, structuralist and critical theory traditions. Rather, emancipation requires the presence of certain abilities and supporting conditions, a certain ãregime of truth,ä that makes agency possible. One the one hand, then, the Veblen/Foucault concept of emancipation is true to the Critical Theory tradition as it encompasses the empowerment to realize individual interests in practice. Contrary to traditional critical theory, however, it does not see power as the enemy of emancipation and has no ambivalence about the positive role public agencies can play in emancipating. They are instituted in pursuit of truth, dominating and emancipating simultaneously.

Clearly, including this understanding of how power works resolves the oxymoronic  paradox of ãenabling public agencies.ä But it resolves the paradox of ãconservatismä as well. Persistent conservatism in both American and European societies despite the advance of democracy, was a significant factor in the Frankfurt Schoolâs ultimate loss of hope for a final emancipation in practice. The thinkers of that School attributed conservatism to the power of both the growing administrative state and the media based domination of a capitalist ideology that produced a mass consciousness suitable for the market economy and amenable to control through the promise of consumer satisfaction (Marcuse, 1964; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989, 222). In the face of what they took to be the totalizing impact of these two factors, the Frankfurt theorists were incapable of suggesting a critical praxis other than Marcuseâs (1965, 116) endorsement of violence as a ãnatural rightä of oppressed minorities (Jay, 1973, 279).

Veblen, however, understands conservatism as a matter of necessity, It is a matter of building upon the regime of truth already in place through a cumulative process of ãinternalizingä exogenous and endogenous forces äthat cumulatively change as the process goes on, both the agent and the environment being at any point the outcome of the last processä (Veblen, 1932, 74-75). It is also the result of the complexity of forces ãover-determiningä individual choices, the different forces acting upon people occupying different places in the social structure and the resultant acts of force rippling through society. Leisured individuals, for example, are loath to change as their comfortable position insulates them from perceiving the need. Moreover, others in society ccord honor to their habits and grant them authority. All of this joined with the a general hesitancy regarding the unknown and the emotional stress and physical exertion necessarily involved in any (even attractive) change results in an understandable inertia. Hence, complex economic, social, psychological and political forces that no one intends encourage individual decisions to continue behaving in ways that reinforce patterns of dominance. The inertia of the leisured in turn becomes a force, obvious to everyone and requiring accommodation in the course of everyday interaction. The force of this inertia thus ripples through the ãlower classesä who not only fear the unknown and eschew the emotional and physical exertion necessary for change, but lack innovative energy as it is sapped by the necessity of working much longer and harder to make ends meet.  Those in the middle classes who have ãsurplus energyä expend it in the pursuit of ãconspicuous decency,ä a response to the social forces encouraging people to meet certain standards of reputability and social acceptance. Finally, everyoneâs behavior feeds back to everyone else, who interpret the behaviors of the others as a vindication of the status quo, either as just the way things are naturally, or the way they must be to secure a well ordered society (Veblen, 1934, 198-211). Everyone thus responds to a complex of forces emanating from everywhere at once, and everyone acts intentionally in ways that unintentionally reinforce the distribution of advantage and disadvantage. ãDriftä occasioned by ãbeing powerä and the adjustments made in the moving substratum of force relationships are the forces of change. They, too, are intentional at the micro-level but unintended in their systemic effects.

Conclusion

Critical Theory foundered because of its inadequate understanding of power and how it works. Understanding ãpowerä as a society-wide phenomenon not attributable to any individual, as totally negative, and as totalizing in impact as exercised through the institutions of capitalism, lead to both an assumption that the administrative state could do not but dominate and an abundance of paradox.

Evolutionary Critical Theory resolves the paradoxes and carves out an emancipatory role for public agencies by conceiving of power as ontological concept both linking different states of being (individual, social, institutional) and connecting potentialities with actualities in the day to day flux of contending possibilities and tendencies. Evolutionary Critical Theory perceives power as coming from everywhere, circulating in all directions, unifying everyone affected into a single social field, constructing individuals and groups, revealing those constructions to us and establishing the conditions and contexts enabling people to act as agents or inhibiting their ability to do so. Every institutional situation and public agency is similarly a product of power circulating all about from everything that precedes and is concurrent with it, and may similarly help to advance or retard emancipation. The totality is a sort of organism within which everything is explained by the power relationships and practices of everything (and everybody) else. People, groups, institutions and all other relational forms are both agents and ãdependant variables.ä Emancipatory effects, regression, inertia, unification and the totalities of structure and place emerge from the intentional acts of agents, but the overall pattern of power relationships and the resulting institutional and ideological domination and opportunities for emancipation are unintended. As people are both sources and symptoms of power, power is both more personal and more diffuse than understood by traditional critical theorists. Including these ãevolutionaryä dimensions of ãpowerä into critical analysis greatly enhances its explanatory power and uncovers potentials for emancipation traditional Critical theory overlooked.

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