Body, heart, mind and soul: power and personhood in an impersonal world

Abstract

This essay outlines a conceptual model for thinking about how human susceptibility to power relations is anchored in basic aspects of the person, emphasising combined material, emotional, cognitive, and moral dimensions of personhood. It argues that these are primal, transhistorical aspects of personhood and society, but that the historical movement from small-scale societies of primarily interpersonal interaction to large-scale societies based on impersonal mediated relationships (markets, bureaucracies, etc.) profoundly alters how power relationships attach to persons. Small-scale interpersonal power relations remain embedded within large-scale impersonal power relations, the former constraining the latter, and the latter distorting the former.