Vol.:(0123456789) Human Studies (2018) 41:493–502 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9476-6 1 3 SCHOLAR’S SYMPOSIUM Heinrich Popitz and the Power of Violence and Technical Action in the Revolutionary and Information Ages Erik Garrett 1 Published online: 20 August 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract The publication of the Phenomena of power: Authority, domination, and violence into English allows for the English-speaking world to engage the work of Heinrich Popitz. Popitz provides a thorough and organized description of how power operates in social relations that should be valuable to any scholar of the human sciences. This essay is supportive of Popitz’s project, but seeks a critical engagement by extending the analysis on violence and technical power. I argue that reading Popitz alongside the decolonial thinker, Franz Fanon and the media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan can provide important correctives. In particular, Fanon’s analysis that the colonial use of rhetorical power to dehumanize the oppressed and McLuhan’s comment on the importance of the control of medium are missing in an otherwise very thorough philosophical anthropology on the phenomena of power. Keywords Popitz · Fanon · McLuhan · Power · Violence · Technology Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human afairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few. (David Hume cited by Heinrich Popitz in the Phenomenon of power: 131) Heinrich Popitz was one of the most important German sociologists of the past generation, yet he is not as well-known in the English-speaking academic world. The publication of Phenomena of power: Authority, domination, and violence translated into English by Gianfranco Poggi and edited by Andreas Göttlich and Jochen Dreher may change Popitz’s current level of obscurity in American and British universities. In this book, Popitz provides a very thorough, concise and non-jargonistic assess- ment of power. His approach is a philosophical anthropology of power that focuses more on types, processes, and mechanisms of power formation in the lived world instead of a history of philosophy dealing with the ideas of particular philosophers or * Erik Garrett garrette@duq.edu 1 Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA