Science & Tech Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell’s analogy is a provocation disguised as a clarification: if physics organizes chaos by tracking energy, social science should stop pretending it can be value-neutral bookkeeping and admit its prime mover is power. He’s not merely swapping one key term for another; he’s trying to harden a soft field. “Power” here functions like a unifying variable, a way to compare wildly different phenomena - parliaments, churches, markets, propaganda, armies - without collapsing them into moral drama or personality gossip.

The intent is partly methodological, partly political. Russell wants social analysis to become legible in the way science is legible: you can’t predict outcomes if you refuse to name the force doing the work. The subtext is a critique of liberal self-image. Societies like to tell stories about consent, progress, tradition, rational debate. Russell’s line implies those stories often launder power, making domination look like natural order or collective will. Calling power “fundamental” punctures the comforting belief that institutions primarily run on ideals.

Context matters: Russell wrote in a century where mass propaganda, total war, and bureaucratic states made power newly scalable. Energy in physics isn’t good or evil; it’s convertible, measurable, and always conserved in some form. Russell’s sly move is to treat power similarly - not as a vice reserved for villains, but as a persistent currency that shifts shape: coercion into influence, wealth into media, expertise into authority. It’s a cool, almost clinical framing with a moral edge: if you want to resist power, you first have to see it.