How to See Power: Three Quarters in the SOSC Core

In How to ThinkI reduced the entire SOSC core to one idea: structure is the thing. That was the honest summary, and it was also a cheat. The core was not one idea. It was a year. Three quarters with three different professors, and a reading list long enough that the syllabus warned us, in writing, that the course was “nights of lots, and lots, and lots of reading.”

Power, Identity, Resistance is one of the sequences UChicago uses to teach the social-science half of the Core. You read the canon in order and you argue about it, in seminar and on paper, until you can break any argument down to its premises and decide whether it holds. The point was never the conclusions. The point was learning to read a lot, quickly, as part of a group, and to come out able to say what an author actually claimed versus what you wished they had.

What I did not see at nineteen is that the three quarters are not three subjects. They are one argument, told three times, each time about a location one level deeper than the last. The first quarter finds power on a throne. The second finds it in a price. The third finds it in a mirror. By June I could no longer point at the thing that constrains a person, because the third quarter had taught me that some of it is the person.

The first quarter starts from one assumption: political systems begin with human decisions about how we should relate to one another, not with cosmic order or inherited tradition. That set of decisions is the social contract. The whole quarter is an argument among people who agree on that premise and agree on almost nothing else, because they each start from a different theory of what human beings actually are.

Hobbes begins in the dark. Without a sovereign, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” so we hand a strongman almost everything to escape it. Locke softens the bargain. The state does not own you; it exists to protect what is already yours, and if it fails that job, the deal is off.

Rousseau goes underneath both of them. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” he opens, and then he asks where the chains came from. His answer is not the state. It is the moment someone first drew a line around a piece of land.

Then the quarter turns on the canon it just built. Burke defends the inheritance: society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” so tearing it up in one generation is theft from the others. Wollstonecraft attacks from the opposite side. The problem is not that the contract goes too far. It is that it stopped halfway.

The book that closes the quarter is the one that breaks the frame entirely. C.L.R. James tells the story of the Haitian Revolution, where the people liberalism explicitly excluded, the enslaved, read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and decided it applied to them. They did not ask for the contract to be extended. They enforced it.

The question of where authority comes from when no one is born holding it never closed for me. Years later I was still chasing it sideways, into how public law manages to bind states when no sovereign sits above them to enforce it — the social contract problem, scaled up to the whole world (law for states).

The second quarter takes the question the first one dropped and refuses to let it go. If the contract is real, who owns your labor after you sign it? The course description called this the study of “modern internal self-discipline” and of power’s relationship “to knowledge and the self.” That phrasing is the whole point. Power has left the throne. It is in the wage now, and it is starting to get into the worker.

Smith makes the case that has run the world ever since: cooperation does not require benevolence, only self-interest pointed in the right direction.

Marx accepts the machinery and turns it over to look underneath. The wage looks like a free exchange of equals. That, he argues, is exactly the trick: the worker is paid for the day and produces more than the day costs, and the difference quietly becomes someone else’s. The freedom is real and the extraction is also real, at the same time, in the same transaction.

Friedman answers directly. The market is not the threat to freedom, it is the thing that makes freedom possible, because it lets people coordinate without anyone’s permission.

Kropotkin answers from the other flank entirely, arguing that mutual aid, not competition, is the older and deeper human fact, and that “well-being for all is not a dream.” Reading them back to back is the actual education: the argument has a left wall and a right wall, and you are made to stand between them.

Then Rodney and Mintz move the whole debate out of the seminar room and onto a map. Rodney states the thesis you cannot un-read:

Mintz follows one commodity, sugar, from Caribbean plantations into the English working-class cup of tea, and shows that the appetite itself was manufactured: a taste, a labor system, and a discipline, produced together. This is where the quarter’s promise pays off. Power is now literally inside the body, as a craving. It is the same political economy I went looking for, years later, in a ten-rupee cup of chai.

The third quarter names its target on the first day: forms of domination that are “neither simply economic nor simply political,” the ones that shape who we take ourselves to be. Racism and sexism, read not as attitudes but as structures that get inside identity and stay there. This is the quarter where the detection system from How to Think stops being about the world out there and starts being about you.

Tocqueville starts the inward turn gently, worried that democracy could produce a new kind of unfreedom, where no tyrant is needed because the majority does the policing on its own.

Nietzsche goes the furthest underground. He argues that even our morality has a history, that the values we experience as eternal were forged in a fight, and that “the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.” Once you have read that, you cannot unsee it: the things that feel most like conscience are also, partly, the residue of an old struggle over who gets to define good. (I had already wrestled with Nietzsche on a different book, and taken the same underground into Dostoevsky’s crystal palace; the Genealogy is the one that made the structural point land.)

Then the quarter brings the structure all the way home, into the experience of being a self that is watched. Du Bois writes whiteness not as a feeling but as a form of ownership.

Baldwin writes the cost of the same structure from the inside, in the first person, with no theoretical distance left.

And the sequence ends on de Beauvoir, which is also where I ended it personally: I gave my seminar presentation on The Second Sexin the closing weeks of the course. Her sentence is the cleanest statement of the entire year’s argument, because it is about the self and not about the state.

Two of the papers I wrote in this sequence are on this site, rebuilt as essays. I did not save them because they were good. I saved them because they were the first time I argued, in my own voice, that a self is something a structure produces rather than something a person simply has. Everything I write now is downstream of that claim.

Baldwin in particular did not stay in 2019. He shows up again in the genealogy of the self I traced years later, sitting between Fromm and Morrison, because the question he asked in that paper is the one I am still asking.

If How to Thinkgave me a detection system, Power, Identity, Resistance gave me the thing the detector is for. The sequence is why I treat identity as something assembled rather than issued. The same habit makes an economic statistic look like an outcome instead of a fact, and turns a stated “preference” into a question about what produced it.

That last claim became load-bearing for me, and not only in arguments about politics. It is the structural reading turned on data: why I read a city’s mobility map as a product rather than a fact, and why I treat falling fertility as a rational response to conditions rather than a change of heart. And once you accept that a self can be produced, you get to ask whether it can be re-authored. De Beauvoir said the self is made by being seen. The corollary I keep working out is that being seen differently can remake it, which is why I keep returning to what it means to be witnessed, and to how a person is read before they are known.

Three quarters, eighteen thinkers, one motion. Power left the throne, passed through the market, and walked into the mirror. The whole education was learning to follow it that far in. The work since has been learning to walk it back out.

The full canon of the sequence, in the order it was assigned, plus the two papers of mine that survived as essays. Each entry names the concept it contributed to the year’s argument.

Note: all quotations are from the primary texts. The reading order and course framing follow the actual SOSC 11400 / 11500 / 11600 syllabi (Sheldon, Vargas, Benanav; 2018–2019).