IV. The Missing Variable: Power Dynamics and the Myth of Voluntary Consent
At the center of the contradictions shared by the Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment philosophers lies a conceptual absence so fundamental that its omission renders their entire political framework unstable. That absence is power dynamics. Every major contradiction—between freedom and authority, equality and hierarchy, consent and obedience—ultimately becomes intelligible once we recognize that these thinkers lacked a coherent understanding of how power operates between individuals, within institutions, and across society. Their theories speak in the language of liberty and voluntarism, yet rest upon structures of dominance they could not conceptualize. Without a theory of power, their theory of freedom collapses.
- Consent Without Power Symmetry Is Not Consent
Enlightenment political theory, and the Founders’ constitutional design, both hinge on the claim that political authority is legitimate only when based on consent. Yet neither tradition examined the conditions under which consent can be considered voluntary. Consent requires power symmetry—the ability to refuse, negotiate, or withdraw without coercion or penalty. But no such symmetry exists between citizen and state, employer and employee, debtor and creditor, or ruler and ruled. Where power is unequal, consent becomes compliance. The Founders and their philosophical predecessors repeatedly conflated these concepts. They treated submission under unequal conditions as if it were freely chosen. This foundational confusion makes their system logically incoherent: it demands political legitimacy from a form of consent that cannot exist within the structures it proposes.
- The Social Contract Ignores Coercive Context
The entire social contract tradition assumes that individuals freely choose political society. But the ability to choose presupposes the ability to reject. The citizen, unlike the contracting party in a private agreement, cannot meaningfully refuse the state. Disobedience invites punishment. Exit is impractical or existentially impossible. Survival depends on participation in the very system one is supposedly “choosing.” Social contract theory thus imagines voluntarism while presupposing unavoidable dependency. The theorists mistook forced conditions of existence for freely chosen obligations, because they did not analyze power structures. Without the concept of structural coercion, they mislabeled necessity as agreement.
- Equality in Theory, Hierarchy in Structure
The Enlightenment celebrated universal human equality, but never confronted the material and institutional power dynamics that make such equality impossible. Equality was conceived abstractly—moral or metaphysical equality—while concrete relations of power were left intact. Property concentrated in private hands, patriarchal authority in households, colonial domination overseas, class hierarchy in society, and state coercion everywhere—all remained unquestioned. The result is a contradiction at the heart of liberal equality: formal equality paired with structural inequality. Without addressing power, the Enlightenment could claim that all are equal while constructing systems that predictably reproduce domination. The Founders inherited and entrenched this contradiction.
- Freedom Defined Without Understanding Structural Constraint
Freedom in Enlightenment thought is framed as the ability to act according to one’s will while obeying the law. But this formulation treats constraint as neutral and ignores the layers of coercion—economic, social, institutional—that shape will itself. Without analyzing how power shapes behavior, incentives, and possibilities, Enlightenment thinkers mistook restricted choice for freedom. A poor man has the “freedom” to starve rather than work; a citizen has the “freedom” to obey laws they never consented to; a population has the “freedom” to follow institutions designed to contain their political power. Because the Enlightenment had no vocabulary for structural coercion, it interpreted constrained behavior as autonomous action. Freedom became compatible with dependence, and autonomy became compatible with obedience.
- Liberal Institutions as Neutral Mechanisms—But Neutrality Assumed Powerlessness
The Founders adopted Montesquieu’s concept of institutional checks and balances to prevent tyranny, but they assumed institutions could act neutrally, as if power could be boxed into compartments. They failed to understand that institutions generate and magnify power, rather than merely distribute it. Courts, legislatures, executives, and police forces do not counterbalance power—they produce it. The Founders treated institutions as if they float above social forces, immune to the dynamics of hierarchy and domination. Without a theory of institutional power, they believed that arranging the machinery of government could neutralize coercion, when in practice it entrenches it.
- Why the Enlightenment Could Not See Power
The absence of power dynamics in Enlightenment thought is not accidental; it is structural. The very thinkers who theorized freedom were themselves situated within immense structures of privilege—economic, racial, patriarchal, and imperial. They could critique the monarchy yet treat their own social power as natural. They could question arbitrary rule yet overlook the coercion embedded in daily life. They could imagine a world of rational equals while benefiting from the material conditions that ensured inequality. Power hides itself most effectively from those who wield it. Because they assumed their own dominance was normal, they could not perceive the coercive foundations of their political order.
- Power Dynamics as the Key to All Other Contradictions
Once the concept of power dynamics is restored to the center of political theory, the contradictions of Enlightenment liberalism become predictable rather than perplexing:
Consent fails because power is unequal.
Equality fails because hierarchy persists beneath formal declarations.
Freedom fails because structures of constraint shape and limit all choices.
Representation fails because political elites wield far more power than those they represent.
The rule of law fails because laws are instruments of power, not neutral guarantees of liberty.
Checks and balances fail because institutions are themselves sites of power accumulation.
The social contract fails because no contract can be voluntary under compulsory authority.
The liberal project was built on the assumption that freedom could be designed without analyzing power. It cannot. A theory of liberty without a theory of power is incomplete at best and self-defeating at worst.
This completes Section IV, the conceptual heart of the essay.
If you’d like, I can now proceed to Section V: The Conclusion, which will tie together all prior sections and articulate the overarching thesis with full force.