Friday’s Big Idea
Today's Big Idea: The Rules of Power
In a presidential election year, when we’re not focused on some irrelevant detail about a politician’s sordid past, we’re focused on the issues of the day – education, military spending, taxes . . . But as the philosopher Michel Foucault demonstrated in sweeping historical analyses like The History of Sex and Discipline and Punish, power is its own animal.
In the family, in the workplace, and on the political stage, people rarely gain and maintain power by accident and without breaking the rules of polite society.
