Power: Where is it?

Power: Where is it? is an informative critique of contemporary leadership, where renowned political scientist Donald Savoie poses and answers the crucial questions: where is power located, and who is in charge?

The Literary Times recently reviewed Power:

Nevertheless, the conclusion of Power: Where is it? points to a new politics, a politics that seeks to regulate the market. That, perhaps, is the historic task of social democracy. Indeed, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington once defined the role of social democracy as seeking to recreate "through political means the social unity which modernization has destroyed". In the neo-liberal era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, so it seemed, governments had to come to terms with markets. If you try to buck the market, Margaret Thatcher once declared, in relation to Nigel Lawson's policy of shadowing the Deutschmark, the market will buck you. Today, by contrast, governments have to come to terms with the failure of markets. In the United States, Larry Summers, speaking as Barack Obama's chief economic adviser, declared that the political pendulum "should now swing towards an enhanced role for government in saving the market system from its excesses and inadequacies". So far, however, the credit crunch, despite what it has revealed about the fallibility of markets, does not seem to have inaugurated a new social democratic age. On the contrary, social democratic parties, in Western Europe, at any rate, find themselves in headlong retreat. That is a puzzle which badly needs explanation.

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Read The Guardian's Politics has lost its soul by Donald Savoie