Books in Brief: The Poverty of Power

The Poverty of Power, by Barry Commoner (Knopf, 314 pp., $10). Thirteen years more and this book would be the perfect bicentennial commemoration for the revolution—the French Revolution, for it is a superb 1789 reprise. Its ideas on property are in lineal descent from Gracchus Babeuf, who proclaimed that institution a form of theft and even homicide. Moreover, its pastoral chic faithfully echoes the milkmaids of Versailles or, better yet, the Paul et Virginie overtones from some philosopher’s salon. On the other hand, if it had appeared just a few years ago, its apocalyptic ramblings on the fundamental interrelationship of economic, ecological, and energy crises would have perfectly complemented the prose of Charles Reich and Teilhard de Chardin, especially as Poverty bears about the same relation to the analytics of power as The Greening of America does to politics, or The Phenomenon of Man to theology. Significantly, trendy reviewers, while plugging the book, caution avoidance of both its science and its economics, where some critical arguments—such as Commoner’s extrapolation of the falling rate of profit—seem capable of inversion into an apologia for finance capitalism. One is left with no answers, but a few good questions. And indeed, if the right question is more important than the right answer, Poverty of Power is—quite by accident—an abrasive and uncivil contribution to the social device we know as the dialogue.

GD

About the Author

Gerald T. Dunne

Featured Tags

The Poverty of Power, by Barry Commoner (Knopf, 314 pp., $10). Thirteen years more and this book would be the perfect bicentennial commemoration for the revolution—the French Revolution, for it is a superb 1789 reprise. Its ideas on property are in lineal descent from Gracchus Babeuf, who proclaimed that institution a form of theft and even homicide. Moreover, its pastoral chic faithfully echoes the milkmaids of Versailles or, better yet, the Paul et Virginie overtones from some philosopher’s salon. On the other hand, if it had appeared just a few years ago, its apocalyptic ramblings on the fundamental interrelationship of economic, ecological, and energy crises would have perfectly complemented the prose of Charles Reich and Teilhard de Chardin, especially as Poverty bears about the same relation to the analytics of power as The Greening of America does to politics, or The Phenomenon of Man to theology. Significantly, trendy reviewers, while plugging the book, caution avoidance of both its science and its economics, where some critical arguments—such as Commoner’s extrapolation of the falling rate of profit—seem capable of inversion into an apologia for finance capitalism. One is left with no answers, but a few good questions. And indeed, if the right question is more important than the right answer, Poverty of Power is—quite by accident—an abrasive and uncivil contribution to the social device we know as the dialogue.