What holding power does to your mind, and why Gramsci pictured it as a centaur
Gain power and, according to psychologist Dacher Keltner's approach/inhibition theory, you become bolder, quicker to speak, happier and more optimistic. You also grow likelier to make unethical choices, pay less attention to other people's viewpoints, and view underlings as stereotypes. Power reshapes the person holding it as much as the people beneath.
Political scientists define power as the capacity to direct how others act. It need not mean force; it can flow through institutions, and power seen as legitimate is called authority. Max Weber described it as any chance to impose your will even against resistance. Robert Dahl framed it as a relation in which one party can command another, while Hannah Arendt separated it from the ability to use violence. International relations adds a split between hard power, military and economic pressure, and soft power, the ability to persuade.
Keltner's theory rests on two basic reactions found across organisms. Approach brings action, reward-seeking and energy; inhibition brings vigilance, self-protection and lost motivation. Power pushes people toward approach, and losing it pushes them toward inhibition. The powerful plan more goal-focused work and handle executive tasks like attention and decision-making more quickly, but they spend less effort learning about subordinates, lean on coercive tactics and discount the abilities of those below them.
In a classic 1959 study, social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven set out five main bases of power, a scheme later extended by Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization in 1986. Expert power, for instance, rests on skill an organisation needs and tends to be confined to that specialty, while coercive power depends on punishments or withholding rewards. Eugen Tarnow showed that a group can amplify a leader's grip: if the others obey, the leader's hold over any one person soars, and if they refuse, it vanishes.
Antonio Gramsci, drawing on Machiavelli's The Prince, asked why no communist revolution had come to Western Europe. His answer was a centaur. Its beast half is coercion, physical or economic force; its human half is consent, and capitalism in Italy leaned mainly on consent, persuading workers that their interests matched their employers'. Michel Foucault went further, holding that power works best dispersed through an apparatus no single person runs, which makes it hard to detect.
Source: Power (political science)
