power corrupts argumentative essay

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The Psychology of Political Power: Does Power Corrupt or is it Magnetic to the Most Corruptible?

In January 2022, I attended a conference on ‘Political Power, Morality and Corruption’. A Socratic dialogue with fellow scholars led me back to one question that epistemologically haunts political theory and philosophy to date—Does power corrupt or is it magnetic to the most corruptible? The cornerstone that this question posits on is antithetical to the idea of power duality as malefic or benefic. Instead, this problem statement is trying to explore and exact the fundamentals of political power. While the former part of the question is striving to deconstruct the soma of power itself, the latter construct of the question is focusing on the agency of an individual with political power.

Now, if you have read Frank Herbert’s  Chapterhouse Dune (1920 – 1986), he writes, “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.” Rather than saying absolute power corrupts absolutely, Herbert reveals a common metaphysical denominator: corruptibility, that fundamentally connects all those with political power. However, his sematic interpretation gives birth to more questions than answers. Suppose we take Herbert’s argument in consideration and assume that the most corruptible are indeed attracted to power. In that case, the global political infrastructure as we know today, is then built on the building block of corruption by its very virtue. For example, the 4th edition of the Global Corruption Index (GCI 2021)  covered 196 countries and territories, and provided a comprehensive overview of the state of corruption around the world based on 43 variables. This extensive data revealed that only 52 countries have a low corruption index, with Finland and Norway leading the way. On the other hand, the rest 144 countries are suffering from profane corruption. Using Herbert’s interpretation of power and corruption, should we conclude that political corruption, which is about privatization of average citizens and the use of the public sphere to promote private interests, is the foundational political infrastructure of these 144 countries? And if this assertion is true, does it mean that every government representative of these 144 countries are fundamentally corrupt? Herbert’s simplistic interpretation of the problem statement creates a moral conundrum of either this or that, rather than exploring the connection between the two variables—power and corruption.

Power does not corrupt. It amplifies and reveals a leader’s predispositional traits .

For decades, social psychologists were convinced that power corrupts. One of the key demonstrations of this assertion was the classic Stanford Prison Simulation Experiment (Zimbardo, 1971), where volunteers were randomly assigned to play the role of prisoners or prison guards. As the day passed by, it was observed that the students who were given the role of prison guards became sadistic and exercised their power to subjugate prisoners by taking away their clothes and forcing them to sleep on concrete floors. This subduing was absolute barbaric and callous in nature. The results were shocking. However, the Stanford Prison Experiment failed to explore one crucial variable—the behavioural and cognitive pattern of students who willingly participated and were recruited to be a part of ‘study of prison life.’ So, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland (2007) conducted an experiment, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty?” They wanted to study what kind of people participate and are drawn to the likes of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The research revealed that “volunteers for the prison study scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism, two qualities inversely related to aggressive abuse.”

What Carnahan and McFarland’s experiment revealed was that power doesn’t corrupt, but it is a phenomenon that is monopolized by the agency of an individual. Power amplifies and exposes cognitive and behavioral predispositions that already exists within you. It merely reveals your innate tendencies, but it does not corrupt. Let’s take another example of a democratic statesman who wants to introduce a new healthcare bill for his people, but is unexpectedly confronted with an ethical conundrum—he can either strengthen his political power and wealth by collaborating with pharmaceutical giants and increase the prices of the medicines in concern (demand-supply chain), or he can metamorphosize his proposed bill into reality and benefit his subjects. What will he do? Since he already has procured political power and is deliberating on actualizing his healthcare bill to empower people, power here has not corrupted him. In fact, the argument that power corrupts collapses because if power indeed corrupts, this democratic statesman would not have proposed a healthcare bill for the welfare of his people to begin with. However, if he decides to enact the bill in favor of pharmaceutical moguls to increase his wealth and political status quo, it would be due to his predispositioned behavioral and cognitive schema for corruptibility. How he responds to this ethical conundrum will mirror his political psyche. It has nothing to do with power being essentially corruptible. Power only amplifies and exposes a leader’s predispositioned traits. 

Friedrich Hayek   makes a similar point in his chapter ‘Why the worst get on top’ in  The Road to Serfdom (1943), where he highlights that individuals who rise to the top in the government are those who want to wield power and those who are most ruthless in using power. He writes, “Neither the government administration of a concentration camp nor the Ministry of Propaganda is suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet, positions like these create a totalitarian state. So, when a distinguished American economist concludes that the probability of people in power disliking the possession and exercise of power is low, is similar to falsely assuming that the probability of an extremely tender-hearted person to desire a position of a whipping-master in a slave plantation is high.”

Recently, psychologists have re-investigated this phenomenon and theorised that rather than being a corrupting influence, power amplifies leaders’ innate tendencies. For example, extensive research in ‘Leader corruption depends on power and testosterone’   by Samuel Bendahan, Christian Zehnder, Francois P. Pralong, and John Antonakis used incentivized experimental games to manipulate leaders in power. Here, leaders had complete freedom to decide monthly pay-outs for themselves and their followers. Now, leaders could have made a prosocial decision to benefit the public good. However, they chose to abuse their power by invoking antisocial decisions, which reduced the total pay-outs of their followers but boosted the leaders’ earnings with a high margin. The researchers write, “In Study 1 ( N  = 478), we found that both amount of followers and discretionary choices independently predicted leader corruption. Study 2 ( N  = 240) examined how power and individual differences (e.g., personality, hormones) affected leader corruption over time; power interacted with endogenous testosterone in predicting corruption, which was highest when the leader power and baseline testosterone were both high. Honesty predicted initial level of leader’s antisocial decisions; however, honesty did not shield leaders from the corruptive effect of power.” 

Concluding with Caligula—The Mad Roman Emperor!

After years of witnessing the most barbaric purges, treason laws, exiles, execution, and corruption of all time during Tiberius’s rule, Caligula (37—41 AD) was seen as a breath of fresh air when he took the throne. After going through despondent years of constant fear, Caligula’s initiation was perceived as a hope for a flourishing Roman republic. At first, Caligula lived up to the expectations of the Roman people. He brought back many people exiled by Tiberius and ceremoniously burned the records of the infamous Treason Trails held by Sejanus under the order of Tiberius. This act was celebrated and made Caligula popular and well-liked among the Senate. He then took a step further and eliminated unpopular hefty taxes, initiated constructions of harbors that created massive employment opportunities for Roman citizens, and staged lavish events like chariot races, gladiator shows, and theatre plays to entertain his people. He was indeed a breath of fresh air after Tiberius. 

But, after seven months of his rule, things changed for the worst. Caligula started to use and abuse his political powers so dauntlessly that it pushed Rome into a dark age of political and economic instability. He went on a rampage of committing murder, adultery, and acts of debauchery. His eccentricities became more murderous, including restating the very Treason Trials that he had ended. Dressed in silk robes and covered in jewels, Caligula pretended he was a god. He made it mandatory for his senators to grovel and kiss his feet and seduced their wives at lavish dinner parties. He wanted his statue to be erected in the temple at Jerusalem, which at the point, would have been highly controversial in a region that was already prone to revolt against the Romans. Luckily, Herod Agrippa, who ruled Palestine then, convinced him not to do so. Additionally, since Caligula was spending vast amount of money on his lavish lifestyle, he emptied Rome’s treasury. To reverse this damage, he started blackmailing Roman leaders and senates, and confiscated their properties and wealth. 

There is no denying that there was a method to Caligula’s political madness, but power didn’t corrupt him. If it did, the first initial seven months of ruling Rome after Tiberius, Roman republic would not have experienced economic, political, and cultural growth. However, power certainly did amplify and expose his innate characteristics of corruptibility and debauchery. Caligula’s madness of abusing political power and tyrannical reign grew out of control. An assassination plot structured against him and he was murdered after being stabbed over 30 times by a cabal of Praetorian guards in 41 A.D. This reminds me of what Robert Caro mentioned in his book  The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012), “Power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. But, as soon as the man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.” To conclude, it is not that the power corrupts or is magnetic to the most corruptible. The truth is—power only reveals who you truly are.

• Parul Verma

Parul Verma is a political analyst and a human rights activist. Using political philosophy, her work analyses power relation between State-subject, transnational conflict, peace-building and peace-keeping in relation to Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland and Kashmir. She has also written extensively on corporate governance and violence against women in India. Her work has been published in more than 20+ academic journals and international media establishments. Her part-time job involves talking gibberish to her two naughty rabbits – Whiskey and Beer! For any query or feedback, contact her at parul_edu[at] icloud.com .

• Editor: Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen
• Frank Herbert
• Philosophy of Psychology
• political power
• social psychology

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It would seem that power is an intoxicant like alcohol, reducing the inhibitions against anti-social behavior. But politicians are also embedded in a more structured system than simple social interaction and they have gradually built that system to increase their power.

Politicians over the decades have built a warehouse of intoxicants and in the past two years they have been drunk on that power.

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys” as the P. J. O’Rourke wrote. This is not simple cynicism. Those in power tend to think that their moral and intellectual superiority make them eminently qualified to do what they think is best, with decisions made in that alcohol laden warehouse of government. They have also funneled power to other institutions in order to amplify their own power. The last two years have revealed just how little power the individual has in the face of political power. Power emasculates restraint – just like alcohol.

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.” – Karl Popper

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Does power really corrupt?

An argument about whether powerful people behave better or worse than others is shaking the world of experimental psychology. matthew sweet investigates.

By Matthew Sweet

C ycling one morning over the East Bay Hills, Professor Dacher Keltner had a near-death experience. “I was riding my bike to school,” he recalls, “and I came to a four-way intersection. I had the right of way, and this black Mercedes just barrelled through.” With two feet to spare before impact, the driver slammed on his brakes. “He seemed both surprised and contemptuous, as if I was in his more important way.” Keltner’s first response was a mixture of anger and relief: no Berkeley psychology professor with surfer-dude hair had been smeared over the Californian tarmac that day. His second was more academic. Was there, he wondered, a measurable difference between the behaviour of Mercedes owners and those of other cars? Cars that didn’t cost twice the average annual income of an American middle-class family? Had the guy who nearly killed him bought something else, along with $130,000-worth of German engineering?

The professor put a group of students on the case; sent them out with clipboards to loiter on the traffic islands of Berkeley. They monitored vehicle etiquette at road junctions, kept notes on models and makes. They observed who allowed pedestrians their right of way at street crossings; who pretended not to see them and roared straight past. The results couldn’t have been clearer. Mercedes drivers were a quarter as likely to stop at a crossing and four times more likely to cut in front of another car than drivers of beaten-up Ford Pintos and Dodge Colts. The more luxurious the vehicle, the more entitled its owner felt to violate the laws of the highway.

What happened on the road also happened in the lab. In some experiments Keltner and his collaborators put participants from a variety of income brackets to the test; in others, they “primed” subjects to feel less powerful or more powerful by asking them to think about people more or less powerful than themselves, or to think about times when they felt strong or weak. The results all stacked the same way. People who felt powerful were less likely to be empathetic; wealthy subjects were more likely to cheat in games involving small cash stakes and to dip their fists into a jar of sweets marked for the use of visiting children. When watching a video about childhood cancer they displayed fewer physiological signs of empathy.

Similar results occurred even when the privilege under observation had no meaning beyond the experiment room. Rigged games of Monopoly were set up in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit. In another study, volunteers were divided into bosses and workers and set to work on an administrative task. When a plate of biscuits was brought into the room, the managers reached for twice as many as the managed. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said Lord Acton in 1887. Here was the evidence, lab-tested, that it also awakened the Cookie Monster within.

A cton’s pronouncement on power was a response to a specific 19th-century event – the Vatican’s decision, in 1870, to adopt the doctrine of papal infallibility. When 20th-century social scientists began studying the moral conduct of powerful people, they did it in reaction to the absolutism of their own age. In 1956 the sociologist C. Wright Mills published “The Power Elite”, an account of American society that shocked a generation: partly because it suggested the country was controlled by self-sustaining cliques of military, political and corporate men; partly because Mills modelled his work on an earlier study of the social and political hierarchies of Nazi Germany. Three years later, Pitirim Sorokin, founder of Harvard’s sociology department and a refugee from Lenin’s Russia, published “Power and Morality”, which proposed that the individuals described by Mills were not just self-interested, but sick. “Taken as a whole,” he wrote, “the ruling groups are more talented intellectually and more deranged mentally than the ruled population.”

Sorokin’s pathological language may seem intemperate, but the idea of power as a disease or disorder was infectious. In 1959, Eugene Jennings, the founder of business psychology and nobody’s idea of a dangerous radical, quizzed 162 American executives about their ethical lives. While in the office, he discovered, most professed that they treated colleagues with suspicion, regarded friendship as a weakness and allowed self-interest to govern their behaviour. At the weekends, however, they were Mr Nice Guys who played with their children and invited their neighbours over for barbecues. “Typical executive possesses Jekyll-Hyde Strain”, said the headlines. The implication was that these men were born with it: that unethical behaviour was a trait of the powerful, not a side-effect of being in charge.

A study conducted at the beginning of the 1970s, however, rewrote that assumption, and popularised a new idea – that the moral character of an individual mattered less than that of the social environment. The Stanford Prison Experiment made the reputation of its creator, Philip Zimbardo – one that is elevated but ambiguous, as befits a man who begins lectures by performing air-guitar to Santana’s “Evil Ways”, and was played by Billy Crudup in the movie of his life. In 1971, Zimbardo created a jail-like environment in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. For a period of two weeks, a group of 24 male students was divided into prisoners and guards, and given uniforms and props that reinforced those roles. Over a CCTV link, Zimbardo watched as the guards became nastier and the prisoners more submissive. The characters of the participants seemed barely relevant. The situation had made this happen – and, after six days, it had got brutally out of hand. By the end, Zimbardo had harvested videotape imagery of hooded captives and club-waving guards that captured the troubled American 1970s as effectively as Nixon’s goodbye from the White House lawn or the crowbarred Watergate filing cabinets now on display in the Smithsonian.

The methodology of the Stanford Prison Experiment was so questionable that many psychologists do not regard it as a true experiment. But the issues it raised are now being studied in more carefully controlled conditions by a new generation of academics which includes Keltner, and whose work tends to support his view that the powerful behave worse than the powerless. In 2015 a project at Iowa State University watched its boss figures bearing false witness against their fellow participants in exchange for tiny bribes. (It was published under the glorious title, “Throwing You Under the Bus: High Power People Knowingly Harm Others When Offered Small Incentives”.) This year, two Berkeley psychologists shared the results of an experiment that examined the collaborative skills of powerful individuals. When asked to work together, leaders proved less efficient, creative and productive than the people beneath them, partly because they spent too much time squabbling about who should be in charge. The more positive effects of wielding power have also been studied – it reduces stress levels and sensitivity to pain – but this research has yet to generate headlines as eye-catching as “Science Proves Rich People are Jerks”.

Not everyone likes these conclusions. “We got a lot of pushback when we said that poorer people in the US share more of their wealth and are more compassionate,” says Keltner. “I had hate mail like you wouldn’t believe.” He was, said one writer, “a Berkeley communist”. Didn’t he know that the world only progressed through the efforts of superior people? “To put it in strong terms,” Keltner says, “there are a lot of people who are committed to the idea that the powerless are mentally deficient.” His response has come in the form of “The Power Paradox”, a handbook for those seeking to mitigate the negative effects of power. He also lectures, telling companies and government departments that too much power is bad for individuals, bad for society, bad for commerce. They’re not always pleased to hear it. “When you meet a group of venture capitalists and start telling them how inequality is damaging our nervous systems,” he says, “it’s like walking into a room full of atheists and talking to them about intelligent design. They prickle.”

P rickly venture capitalists , however, are not the only ones to express unease, and not every critique has been written in green ink. When Keltner and his colleagues published an influential paper on the subject in 2010, three European academics, Martin Korndörfer, Stefan Schmukle and Boris Egloff, wondered if it would be possible to reproduce the findings of small lab-based experiments using much larger sets of data from surveys carried out by the German state. The idea was to see whether this information, which documented what people said they did in everyday life, would offer the same picture of human behaviour as results produced in the lab. “We simply wanted to replicate their results,” says Boris Egloff, “which seemed very plausible to us and fine in every possible sense.” The crunched numbers, however, declined to fit the expected patterns. Taken cumulatively, they suggested the opposite. Privileged individuals, the data suggested, were proportionally more generous to charity than their poorer fellow citizens; more likely to volunteer; more likely to help a traveller struggling with a suitcase or to look after a neighbour’s cat.

Egloff and his colleagues wrote up their findings and sent them to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , which had also published Keltner’s work. “We thought,” says Egloff, “naive as we were, that this might be interesting for the scientific community.” The paper was rejected. They extended their analysis to data from America and other countries, and felt confident that they had identified several more pieces that didn’t fit the jigsaw being assembled by their American peers. They argued that psychology’s consensus view on social status and ethical behaviour did not exist in other disciplines, and concluded with a quiet plea for more research in this area. Their paper was rejected again. Last July, it eventually found a home in a peer-reviewed online journal.

Egloff has been doing research since 1993 and is used to the bloody process of peer review. But he was shocked by the hostility towards his work. “I am not on a crusade,” he says. “I am not rich. My family is not rich. My friends are not rich. We never received any money from any party for doing this research. Personally I would have loved the results of the Berkeley group to be true. That would be nice and would provide a better fit to my personal and political beliefs and my worldview. However, as a scientist…” The experience of going against this particular intellectual grain was so painful that Egloff vows never to study the topic of privilege and ethics again.

Who, then, is right? Are powerful people nicer or nastier than powerless ones? How can we explain the disparate answers yielded by these two sets of data?

It may be that rich people are better at disguising their true nature than poor people. If being generous in public brings rewards, then rich people might be more inclined to help old ladies across roads. Selfish driving is consistent with this idea: the anonymity of the road means that aggressive petrolheads need not worry about damaging their reputations. And Keltner points out that the data come from people’s accounts of their own charitable giving, and not from watching them in the act. “We know from other studies that the wealthy are more likely to lie and exaggerate about ethical matters,” he says. “Survey self-report data in economics and face-to-face data in psychology capture different processes. What I say I do in society versus how I behave with actual people.”

But it is also possible that the problem lies not with the survey data but with the psychological experiments. Over the past year, this possibility has become the subject of bitter debate. In August 2015, the journal Science reported that a group of 270 academics, led by Brian Nosek, a respected professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, had attempted to reproduce the results of 100 psychological studies. Ninety-seven of the original studies had produced statistically significant results. Only 36 of the replications did the same. Those numbers threatened to undermine the entire discipline of experimental psychology, for if a result cannot be replicated then it must be in doubt. In March 2016 a panel of luminaries claimed to have detected serious shortcomings in the methodology of Nosek’s paper. The inquiry was led by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard professor with a history of hostility to the replicators. (“Psychology’s replication police prove to be shameless little bullies,” he tweeted in 2014, defending another researcher whose work was questioned.) When a journalist from Wired magazine asked Gilbert if his defensiveness might have influenced his conclusions, he hung up on them. Psychology’s “Replication Crisis” might not yet be over.

In September 2015, five social psychologists and a sociologist published a paper in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences that suggested why psychology might show privileged people in a bad light. Left-wing opinion, contended Jonathan Haidt and his co-authors, was over-represented in psychology faculties. This, they suspected, might be distorting experimental findings – as well as making campus life difficult for researchers with socially conservative views. “The field of social psychology is at risk of becoming a cohesive moral community,” they warned. “Might a shared moral-historical narrative in a politically homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We think so.” So does Boris Egloff. “It was a great and timely paper,” he says. “I congratulate them on their courage.” But it came too late for him. “We spoilt the good guys’ party,” he says.

A few weeks after first talking to Keltner, I have lunch with him in London. He is visiting the city to promote his book. He likes talking to British people about power. It was in Britain that he first became interested in the subject, when, at the age of 15, he was transported from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to a suburb of Nottingham, where he stuck out like a sore Californian thumb and attracted the attention of “Clockwork Orange-type bullies”. The British class system, he thinks, has ensured that citizens of the United Kingdom are sensitive to the workings of power; unlike Americans, they don’t overestimate the meritocratic nature of their society.

Keltner points out that plenty of his experiments have been replicated, and is comfortable defending himself against those who are sceptical of his message. “Look,” he begins, imagining a roomful of hostile faces. “Here is what power does to just about every human being. It’s going to make you not pay attention to people as well as you used to pay attention to them. You may find yourself swearing at a colleague or telling them that their work is horseshit. You will be a little less careful in the language you use. You will be a little less thoughtful about how things look from their perspective. So just practise a little gratitude. Listen empathetically. It shouldn’t be that difficult.” Keltner smiles a lot, and is persuasive. I can picture him giving this speech to Marie Antoinette.

We finish our lunchtime fish and chips in a Sherlock Holmes-themed pub near Trafalgar Square. The day is bright and warm, and Keltner intends to spend the afternoon walking in Hyde Park. Minutes after we have gone our separate ways, something happens that makes me want to run back down the street to find him. I am waiting at a pedestrian crossing, and just as the lights are changing from amber to red, a car bowls through. It is a black Mercedes. ■

​Illustrations Bill Butcher

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Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

What's the meaning of the phrase 'power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely'.

The proverbial saying ‘power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely’ conveys the opinion that, as a person’s power increases, their moral sense diminishes.

Origin – the short version

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is the best known quotation of the 19th century British politician Lord Acton. He borrowed the idea from several other writers who had previously expressed the same thought in different words.

Origin – the full story

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” arose as part of a quotation by the expansively named and impressively hirsute John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

The text is a favourite of collectors of quotations and is always included in anthologies. If you are looking for the exact “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” wording, then Acton is your man.

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it”

Acton is likely to have taken his lead from the writings of the French republican poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine. An English translation of Lamartine’s essay France and England: a Vision of the Future was published in London in 1848 and included this:

It is not only the slave or serf who is ameliorated in becoming free. The master himself did not gain less in every point of view, for absolute power corrupts the best natures.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is one of the proverbial sayings that seems to be proved correct by experience of people’s actual behaviour.

See also: the List of Proverbs .

Related phrases and meanings

Browse more phrases, about the author, gary martin.

Phrases & Meanings

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Meaning of “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, origin of “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, examples in literature, examples #1.

Once in jungle a rat was very frightened by a cat Somehow it escaped from the attack, There the rat met a Saint and prayed To be a large cat, So, it was turned into a cat And it began to kill rats, But dogs often used to chase it, Being unhappy it prayed to be a mighty dog, So it was then turned into a big dog And it began to torture the cats, But tigers began to chase it So, again it prayed to be a tiger, Finally the Saint turned it into a tiger, This tiger began to feel very mighty That made it so proud of power, Ill thoughts entered its brain heavily It planned to attack and kill the Saint; Some evidences made the Saint understand Instantly he turned it into the pre-rat.

Muzahidul Reza, an English poet from Bangladesh, wrote serious and political poems and made a name in the South Asian English literature. Muzahidul Reza has beautifully woven the concept of power around the tale of a rate that meets a saint. The saint fulfills his desire of becoming something more significant. The saint sees that he is abusing the power of being a big animal than before instead of using it for helping other creatures. It dawns upon him that power corrupts any creature. Therefore, the title of the poem is apt that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Examples #2

“The truth drops like a bomb The truth drops like a bomb The battle is on The hate runs deep, but our hopes cut deeper Now we walk through the valley in the shadow of the reaper Money talks, and it’s speaking in tongues They put a price on our soul like they had already won Now open wide, I see their jaws locked tight Silent in the moment like prey in the floodlights The signal is static, baptised in fire Now we see how they talk with a mouth full of barbed wire Absolute power, absolute power, absolute power Absolute power corrupts absolutely Absolute power, absolute power, absolute power Absolute power corrupts The truth drops like a bomb The truth drops like a bomb The battle is on The truth drops like a… Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This is the last part of the lyric “Absolute Power” sung by Parkway Drive. In these lines, the singer shows that there is always a battle between hope ad love. However, the true battle for the game of power. Therefore, the singer realizes that “absolute power” corrupts and makes people behave immorally.

Examples #3

“Laurence Connaught was an honest man and an idealist, I think. But what would happen to any man when he became God? Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you? They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend . But I killed him in cold blood, knowing what I did, because he could not be trusted with the secret that could make him king of the world.”

These two paragraphs have been taken from the short story ‘Pythias,’ written by Frederik Pohl. In a Poe-like style , the writer unravels the hidden mystery of the murder of a character , Laurence Connaught by Dick whom he saves shortly before his death. Dick is telling the audiences that Connaught has literally become God as he knows everything about him. It means that Connaught has power over him for which he has to kill him. He uses the saying in the second paragraph and attributes it to ‘they,’ which means that the character does not know the origin of the saying but knows its nature.

Examples in Sentences as Literary Devices

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What did Acton mean by saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton said that

"[p]ower tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

What did he mean by this? How might power compel evil or restrict free will?

• political-philosophy
• good-and-evil

• 1 A child cries for candy. The more powerful the child, the less likely a healthy diet. The all powerful child eats nothing but candy never understanding the reason for the fatal stomach ache and untimely death. –  Ronnie Royston Commented Apr 2, 2015 at 2:01
• power to do what one wants / power to act correctly ( Leibniz, New Essays , in a discussion regarding freedom) –  user37859 Commented May 23, 2020 at 7:00
• Also, Bossuet, On Death –  user37859 Commented May 23, 2020 at 7:00
• If you perform a rough calculation of the current leaders of counties labeled as 'illiberal', that is primarily one-person controlled in all government and public aspects, and look into how those people came into power, what you will find is that many started out as real champions of democracy. Apparently once they realized what was in their power to control they became and still remain essentially dictators. Examples include: Erdogan, Orban, Presidents of Peru, Myanmar, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, etc. etc. Living examples of how power corrupts. Oh yes, add Donald Trump. CMS –  user37981 Commented May 23, 2020 at 14:13

2 Answers 2

NOTE: This answer was given to a previous incarnation of this question. The block quotes I am responding to come from this incarnation. If I have the time I will modify my answer to respond more directly to this version of the question.

When a person is placed in a position of absolute power, is it necessarily true that this power will condemn that person to commit evil acts?

No, it isn't necessarily true, and that isn't a part of the claim Acton is making. Note the use of the word "tends". Many people have defended the possibility of a benevolent dictator. Plato's Republic advances an oligarchy of "Philosopher Kings", which he thought would produce the best society.

In effect, does power restrict free will?

I don't think there is any very interesting connection between these two concepts, if anything it seems to be the opposite. Someone with absolute (unchallengeable) power would be faced with no external compulsions and so (assuming the possibility of free will) would have the best chance at freely acting.

NOTE: The following is a bit of an aside that is only indirectly relevant, but which you may, nevertheless, find interesting.

There is, however, an interesting claim that Socrates makes in Plato's Gorgias :

I say, Polus, that both orators and tyrants have the least power in their cities, as I was saying just now. For they do just about nothing they want to, though they certainly do whatever they see most fit to do. (Gorgias, 466e)

This weird claim has to do with Socrates' denial of akrasia , or weakness of will, where you act against what you believe to be best. Essentially, the claim he makes here is tyrants who commit evil are, in fact, slaves to their stupidity (to put it rather crudely). For, Socrates contends, they are making mistakes in measurement and wrongly considering the evil act to be the best.

This is, in fact, a bit of a caricature of the view, at least it doesn't explain it fully. I just thought it was interesting in connection with your question and presents a view on which "doing whatever you see fit" is not to have great power. It is also a view on which someone with the ability to do whatever they see fit actually does very little that they want to do.

Sadly the quote isn't actually correct.

It has gained in popularity due to its appeal, but is entirely misleading. It is fair to say that power for the most part adds choice. The choices we make, given greater freedoms, are reflected in large by our individual characters and circumstances at the time of that choice. Part of the reason the addage often appears to have a measure of truth is that the more self-centered and ambitious individual is more drawn to power than most, and more likely to sacrifice ethics as a means of getting it.

There is a wide and sadly often justified stereotype of the wealthy having little ethical value and little concern for others. Such an individual gaining greater power is certainly no more likely to use it for the benefit of others.

That said, someone with strong ethical values and concern for others, given greater power, is certainly not doomed to corruption and may achieve greater good. It must always be considered that circumstance and behavioural patterns that affect those circumstances can warp statistics, often leading to false positives by individuals that don't dig deeply enough into the reasoning behind them.

Even where you might try to add alternative interpretation and attribute decisions to stupidity, the same spread of stupidity exists across the powerful and the weak. Dennis's summary of a caricature is a fair one. The quote isn't accurate. The quote isn't a rule. It is merely a whimiscal portrayal of stereotype.

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What Does Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely Mean?

Home » Phrase and Idiom Dictionary » What Does Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely Mean?

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely Meaning

Definition: Having power corrupts a man, or lessens his morality, and the more power a man has, the more corrupted he will become.

This idiom means that those in power often do not have the people’s best interests in mind. They are primarily focused on their own benefits, and they may abuse their position of power to help themselves. If you follow the thread that absolute power corrupts absolutely, you can believe that monarchs—those with the most authority—have the least amount of morals. Kinder souls would be found among poorer, less influential people.

Naturally this is not always the case, as there are many examples of kind and good leaders. Of those who are corrupted, it is it is hard to distinguish whether the power corrupted the man or the men who were drawn to power were already corrupted.

Origin of Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

William Pitt the Elder, the British Prime Minister at the time, said in a speech in the House of Lords in 1770:

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.”

This idea was later expressed in an essay by Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine in 1848 as (translated from French):

“It is not only the slave or serf who is ameliorated in becoming free… the master himself did not gain less in every point of view,… for absolute power corrupts the best natures.”

John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton coined the most current incarnation of the phrase, writing, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Example of Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

“People always say absolute power corrupts absolutely… I’m not surprised he spent our tax money on personal interests.”

More Examples

• “Absolute power, they say, corrupts absolutely. Brussels, the seat of power of the European Union, is learning that lesson the hard way… Unelected Brussels bureaucrats, drunk on centralized power and the ability to impose a globalist agenda on their subjects, went too far.” – The Washington Times
• “‘Start with Lord Acton and the famous axiom that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ said Wayne Flynt, a retired professor of history at Auburn University. ‘Alabama has had a seamless transition from Democratic one-party rule and synonymous corruption to Republican one-party rule and synonymous corruption.'” – The New York Times

As a person’s power increases, their sense of morality decreases.

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Perversion of ideals, disregard for the needs and rights of others, erosion of moral principles.

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