Power is the oldest question in politics. Machiavelli said it comes from force. Hobbes: from fear. Locke: from consent. Rousseau: from the general will. Marx: from economics. Arendt — after Auschwitz and the Gulag — said that power is born when people act together. And dies when they stop. This is not theory; it is what happened in the twentieth century before our eyes.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 — after he had lost his office and been tortured. His book is the first honest analysis of power without moralizing. The prince must be lion and fox at once: force and cunning. Morality is an instrument, not a limit. The end justifies the means — not because Machiavelli is a villain, but because he was looking at real rulers rather than ideal ones.
Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English Civil War — he saw what happens without power. Without a state, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." People enter into a social contract — they hand power over to a sovereign for the sake of safety. The sovereign is absolute; otherwise there is no point. It is a hard logic. And it explains why people accept authoritarian rule — not out of stupidity, but out of fear of chaos.
Locke wrote his treatises after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 — when England changed kings without blood. His conclusion: power comes from the consent of the governed. Every person has natural rights — life, liberty, property. The state exists in order to protect them. If it fails to protect them, the people have the right to replace it. This became the foundation of the American Declaration and of the whole liberal order.
Rousseau overturned the foundation: power is legitimate only if it expresses the general will. Not the sum of private interests — but what the people want as a whole. That sounds like democracy. But for Rousseau the general will is indivisible and inalienable. Whoever knows what the general will is speaks in the name of the whole people. And whoever disagrees is an enemy of the people.
Marx stripped every mask off power. Right, the state, morality — a superstructure over an economic base. Power belongs to whoever controls the means of production. Bourgeois democracy is class rule in fine words. To change the world means to change economic relations. It is a convincing theory. And it demanded a convincing practice.
Arendt — a Jewish woman who fled the Nazis — wrote the twentieth century's central book about power: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her discovery: totalitarianism is not simply dictatorship. It is a new phenomenon: a power that wants to destroy the very possibility of human action and thought. And her conclusion about power itself: it is born when people act together. Power is not a possession, not a resource. It exists only as long as people act.
If power is born when people act together — why is acting together hardest exactly when it is needed most?