Power: A New Social Analysis

Bertrand Russell

Philosophy

Russell's 1938 attempt to place power — not economics, not class — at the centre of social analysis. Argues that the love of power is the fundamental social impulse, that the forms of power shift between military, economic, and governmental, and that a good society requires institutional constraints on power rather than utopian abolition. Written on the eve of World War II; one of his most prescient books.