Freud and Machiavelli

Power by Adolph A. Berle. Harcourt, Brace and World, $10.00.

Berle tells us: “Implaecably . . . The balance of twentieth-century currents undermines the possibility of concentrated power. Power exists, as it always has, but fragmented, lodged among men administering all manner of diverse institutions—political, commercial, military, educational—and is subdivided among and within each of these. Yet strangely and paradoxically, never has power been more urgently invoked, perhaps, than at present.” Berle adds that the subject of power has thus become more complex for a modem Machiavelli but is essentially the same. It is Machiavelli’s powerful sense of order that Berle admires; indeed, it is perhaps the central preoccupation of his book. Berle repeatedly speaks of power vacuums having to be filled: “Power is always preferable to anarchy; tyrannical order is less noxious than chaos. . . . Power is an essential ingredient at every level of human organization.” Berle also believes that power cannot exist “without order.”