Power Is Not a Problem to Be Solved but an Idea to Be Differentiated — and the Failure to Differentiate Is Itself the Pathology

Hillman opens Kinds of Power with an audacious claim: the contemporary epidemic of “disempowerment” is not a deficit of resources, technique, or self-esteem but a catastrophic impoverishment of the idea of power itself. “If my mind is still entranced by wishful fantasies of growth and efficiency or by simplistic ideas of control, authority, leadership and prestige, I will remain thwarted in my daily struggles with the operations of power in the actual world.” The therapeutic move here is unmistakable: Hillman treats the monotheistic equation Power = Force (or Power = Control) as a complex — an autonomous idea that has seized the American psyche and now determines behavior from behind. This is the same move he made throughout his archetypal psychology, but applied here to the collective unconscious of business culture rather than to the individual consulting room. Where Jung’s Collected Works (Vol. 7, §78) set up the fateful opposition — “Where love reigns, there is no will to power” — Hillman dismantles it by pluralizing both terms. Add an s: not power but powers, not profit but profits of multiple kinds. The monotheism of the profit motive, like the monotheism of any single definition of power, generates its own shadow: a loveless domination on one side, a powerless sentimentality on the other. Hillman’s move from singular to plural is not rhetorical decoration; it is the book’s entire therapeutic action.

Treblinka as Phenomenological Limit-Case: Efficiency Unmasked as Power’s Most Dangerous Servant

The most disturbing and intellectually rigorous section of the book is Hillman’s extended analysis of Treblinka as a case study in pure efficiency. He is explicit that this is not moral philosophy or Holocaust theology; it is a phenomenological investigation into what happens when a single idea of power — “ability to do or act; capability of accomplishing something” — is pursued to its logical endpoint without friction from competing values. Franz Stangl, Treblinka’s commandant, becomes “the shadow figure looming behind Everyman at an office desk.” The extermination of five thousand human beings in a morning represents maximum throughput with minimum waste — the managerial ideal stripped of every euphemism. This passage does philosophical work that connects directly to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil, but Hillman’s contribution is distinct: he is not analyzing a person (Stangl’s conscience, Eichmann’s obedience) but an idea (efficiency) and the way that idea, when unchecked by other kinds of power — service, maintenance, resistance, authority — becomes lethal. The lesson for business is not an analogy but a structural diagnosis. Denial, the psychological mechanism that allows efficiency to proceed unimpeded, is the same mechanism operating in any organization that refuses to count certain costs. “Denial” in Hillman’s usage is not repression of feeling; it is the systematic exclusion of information that would introduce friction into an efficient system. This resonates powerfully with Robert Jay Lifton’s work on psychic numbing and with Gabor Maté’s accounts of how dissociation enables the continuation of systems that damage living beings.

Archetypal Grids Replace Management Models — and This Is the Book’s Most Subversive Claim

Part Three of Kinds of Power shifts from phenomenology to mythology, and here the book reveals its deepest allegiance to the polytheistic psychology Hillman developed across his career, most fully articulated in Re-Visioning Psychology. The argument is that the “styles” of power catalogued in Part Two — control, prestige, ambition, charisma, tyranny, purism — are not merely psychological traits or management competencies but expressions of archetypal patterns. Mars governs the staccato rhythms of television and the speed of media delivery. Hestia holds the focused interiority of the hearth against Hermes’s frantic boundary-crossing. These are not metaphors laid over experience; they are, for Hillman, the generative structures within which experience takes form. The Renaissance is his evidence: “Single-mindedness was splintered into a pantheon of possibilities. Meanings proliferated. Yet action during this same period was spectacularly decisive and enduring.” Complexity of thought enables simplicity of action. This directly inverts the corporate preference for simple frameworks and complex execution. Hillman’s bumper sticker — “Think subtly; act simply” — is a rebuke to every management bestseller that promises three steps, four quadrants, or five forces. It also connects to the tradition running from Jung through Marie-Louise von Franz: the idea that conscious differentiation of psychic contents is itself the work, and that undifferentiated material erupts as compulsion, symptom, or catastrophe.

The Closing Argument: Why Pluralism Is Not Relativism but Precision

The book’s final move — “Just add an s” — is deceptively simple. Hillman is not advocating relativism or the abandonment of judgment. He is arguing that precision about power requires acknowledging its plurality. The Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible use at least twenty-five different terms — el, zeroa, chayil, koach, dynamis, arche, kratos — that English translation collapses into the single word “power.” This linguistic compression is itself a power operation: it enables the very domination it describes by preventing the mind from discriminating between kinds of agency. When you cannot distinguish authority from tyranny, influence from control, resistance from obstruction, you are conceptually disarmed in the face of power’s actual operations. This book matters today not because it offers a better theory of leadership or a more humane management philosophy, though it does both incidentally. It matters because it is the only sustained depth-psychological examination of power as an idea — not power as political science studies it, not power as sociology measures it, but power as it inhabits the mind, shapes perception, and determines what actions feel possible. No other work in the depth psychology tradition — not Adler’s individual psychology, not Jung’s chapter on the power complex, not Guggenbuhl-Craig’s Power in the Helping Professions — performs this specific operation of treating the concept itself as the patient. For anyone navigating institutional life, organizational politics, or their own ambivalence about authority, Kinds of Power provides not answers but the differentiated vocabulary without which the right questions cannot even be formulated.