The Power Theory of Takada Yasuma

Abstract

1. The sociological, economic, and political theories of Takada Yasuma (1883-1972) are organized around an integrative focus and thus constitute a synthesis. While Takada was all-round social scientist, the synthesis is clearly centered on sociology and the integrative focus is his power theory.
2. Takada's power concept started from the idea of “the desire for force” in his early works such as The Division of Labor (1913) and Essays on Social Class (1922, but substantially writen around 1910 in most essays). He noted that the origin of this idea came from works of Ward, Ribot, McDougall and Simmel. However, the concept of “(social) force” is not neccessarily identical with that of “power” which designates the possibility of control over others.Thus his power concept per se was established in Social Class and the Third View of History (1925), whereas his systematic formulation of power theory was produced in the later stage, that is, in Power (1940).
3. The substance of Takada's power theory consists of a system of propositions : the law of correlation and transfer of different power elements, the law of accereration in the growth of power, the antagonistic relation between “official” and “wild” power, the law of levelling in the distribution of power, the law of cyclical change between centralization and decentralization of power, and so on. These propositions were not the aggregate of mere empirical generalizations, but were derived from the combination of his basic assumptions such as the desire for force, population increase, the trend of Vergesellschaf tung, etc.
4. The application of his power theory to the price determination and other parts of econcmics, known as “the economics of power theory”, was formulated in The New Lecture on Economics (5 Vols., 1929-1932). Observing the wide spread of unemployment at that time (the Great Depression of the world) he argued that the Walrasian system of general equilibrium equations does not explain this phenomenon. Unemployment, he insisted, can be explained when we see that the price of labor (wages) is not determined in terms of endogeneous variables in the equation system, but is determined from “outside.” That is to say that it is, apart from the equation system, determined by the combination of marginal productivity of labor on the demand side and power elements of workers and their organizations on the supply side.
5. Takada's power theory was formulated under the background of the development of sociological theories up to 1920s, especially Tarde, Wieser, and Max Weber. When he came to know, later, the new development of power theory of 1950s and 60s such as Lasswell, Parsons, Homans, BI-au and so on, he was too old to absorb them. But it must be emphasized that Takada's theory is not entirely heterogeneous with these recent development.
6. Takada's economics of power theory was not accepted by the main stream of economic theory. As the results of severe disputes with Nakayama, Kimura, and others he himself at last cut his power theory from the main body of his principles of economics after Treatise of Economics (1938). However, it seems that his idea of power theory is highly suggestive for the possible explanation of, for example, contemporary inflationary process based on the expansion revolution of the expectations of people as organized masses. Most of the economists have a strict tendency to distinguish the economic factors from the non-economic, and thus rejected Takada's hypothesis ; most of the sociologists other than Takada lacked sufficient interests and knowledges on economic analysis. So Takada could not get supporters and failed. But as an economic sociology we would have to reevaluate it as really an original and useful explanatory hypothesis concerning our contemporary economy.