Power is often imagined as the opposite of powerlessness. The more power someone has, the less powerlessness they are assumed to experience. But human life rarely works so neatly. Power and powerlessness are often intertwined, not only in those usually seen as powerless, but also in those typically seen as powerful. In fact, some striking displays of power can be understood not simply as expressions of strength, but as attempts to compensate for forms of powerlessness.
This is easier to see when power is not treated as one single thing. That is why I find it useful to distinguish, analytically, among power as ability, power as influence, and “may” power. These are not separate substances. They coexist and overlap. But separating them helps reveal something that easily disappears when power is treated as a single, undifferentiated force.
A person may have great power as influence and still lack important forms of ability. A king, for example, may be able to shape laws, command armies, or affect the lives of countless people in ways that ordinary subjects cannot. In that sense, his influence is enormous. He may also possess extensive “may” power: forms of permission tied to rank, status, and custom. He may be allowed to act in ways that others are not allowed to act. But neither of these automatically means that he has unlimited ability. He may still lack the ability to master fear, tolerate uncertainty, understand himself clearly, resist pressures from others, or control the broader forces around him.
Once this becomes visible, power starts to look less like a possession and more like a tense, unstable arrangement. A person may be able to impose their will in some situations and yet feel deeply constrained in others. They may be permitted to act with extraordinary freedom toward some people and yet remain dependent on the approval, loyalty, or cooperation of others. They may look powerful from below while feeling vulnerable from within.
This matters because visible displays of power are often interpreted too quickly. Lavishness, domination, punishment, spectacle, and excess are often treated as straightforward signs of overwhelming power. But some of these displays may be better understood as compensatory. They may be ways of shoring up a fragile position, covering over insecurity, managing dependence, or asserting control in places where control feels possible precisely because it is unavailable elsewhere.
Kings offer an especially vivid example because they are so easily imagined as embodiments of near-total or "absolute" power. It is tempting to look at court ceremony, extravagant buildings, expensive clothing, elaborate rituals, or harsh punishments and see only supremacy. Yet these same practices can also be read differently. They can be understood as ways of performing stability in a situation that is not actually stable, or of dramatizing control in response to the persistent reality of limited control.
Louis XIV is useful here not because he lacked power, but because he had so much of it in some respects and still remained constrained in others. He had immense influence. He also had forms of “may” power unavailable to ordinary people. But this did not mean that he could simply do whatever he wanted. He depended on others. He had to navigate competing interests, entrenched privileges, financial limits, institutional habits, and the constant possibility of resistance. Even when he appeared to stand above everyone else, he was still embedded in relationships he did not fully control and in a social structure that also constrained him (e.g., Encyclopedia Britannica notes that "Louis XIV remained the prisoner of France’s social structure".)
That is one reason displays of royal magnificence should not be read too simply. A palace such as Versailles can be viewed as a monument to power, but also as a response to vulnerability: an effort to organize proximity, command attention, shape perception, and manage a court whose members could not simply be treated as passive objects. Versailles was not only a symbol of grandeur; it was also a site of codified court etiquette and constant competition for royal favor. Splendor did not prove the absence of powerlessness. In some ways, it pointed to it. The need to stage power so intensely can itself reveal how insecure power really is.
The same can be said of domination more broadly. The fact that someone can humiliate another person, punish them, or exploit them does not mean that they are free in any deep or general sense. It means that they possess some power in that moment and in that relationship. But the urge to use power in such intensified ways may itself grow out of felt limits, fears, frustrations, and dependencies. Overcompensation is one of the forms this can take. A person who cannot control much may cling fiercely to what they can control. A person who feels diminished in one domain may seek heightened power in another. A person who experiences inner instability may seek outer submission from others.
This does not erase the reality of harm. To say that power can compensate for powerlessness is not to excuse cruelty, domination, or excess. It is not to say that the suffering of a king and the suffering of a starving peasant are equivalent. They are not. The forms, degrees, and consequences of powerlessness differ dramatically. But if the goal is to understand power rather than merely react to its most visible surfaces, then it helps to see that even dramatic acts of domination may be entangled with forms of incapacity, dependence, and fear.
This is one reason I resist treating “the powerful” as if they simply possess power in some pure and complete sense. What they often possess are particular forms of power in particular constellations: influence here, permission there, ability in one domain, inability in another. To collapse all of this into a single image of absolute power is to miss both the complexity of power and the ways powerlessness continues to operate inside it.
Seen this way, some of the most dramatic examples of power stop looking like proof of total control. They begin to look like signs of a deeper paradox. People often use power not only because they have it, but because they lack it. They may reach for influence because they cannot bear uncertainty. They may exercise “may” power because they cannot secure genuine respect. They may intensify spectacle because they cannot stabilize reality. What looks like power at its most excessive may sometimes be power trying to defend itself against powerlessness.