The Story of Power

The beginning of 2009, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century, is a good time to consider the nature of power, and of the powerful, because the world is being reordered in so many ways—broadly by what my colleague Fareed Zakaria calls "the rise of the rest," the emergence of powers such as India, China and Brazil, and specifically by the global recession. The cultural, political and economic consequences of the financial meltdown cannot be overestimated. Unthinking trust in unfettered markets has evaporated, and the concern appears to be more than a temporary fit of worry that will pass when things start to get better. The demise of titans on Wall Street has elevated bureaucrats and politicians in Washington and Beijing and Brussels. And there is one politician in particular whose exercise of power will affect all of us for years to come: the president-elect, whose victory in November and transition—accompanied by the virtual disappearance of President Bush—have marked a resurgence of confidence in America. A senior European diplomat recently marveled to me about the American capacity to change course with rapidity and apparent ease: the shift from Bush to Obama —from the scion of one of America's noblest families to the child of a brief marriage between a young Kansan and a Kenyan academic, who proceeded to see his son exactly once—was simply astonishing.

In the following pages, you will find NEWSWEEK's highly subjective list of the most powerful people who will figure in the era over which Obama will preside. It is arbitrary, but the choices are well considered, and each, we believe, represents a thread in the new global tapestry. Some are utterly surprising; others are not. Perhaps most important, each meets the test of power as we have just defined it: they are men and women who are either in the business of bending others to their will or seeking to rearrange reality in ways they find more congenial. They are in command, or they seek control. There is, naturally, more than a little overlap; the features are not mutually exclusive. (The reprehensible are also here—Osama bin Laden is one example—as an acknowledgment that evil can affect us, too.)

We are not undertaking this to create simply an American list, or to delineate an elite based on wealth, social class or educational credentials. The figures in this issue are global, and they are chosen on merit. Many of the names here, it is true, are well-off, move in what might be considered high circles and went to celebrated schools. But many began life in obscurity (see, for instance, the 44th president of the United States) and have risen to prominence through a combination of determination and good fortune. Part of the promise of this country in particular is that those who work hard will have the opportunity to thrive; it is, along with the proposition that all men are created equal, the promise at the heart of the national enterprise.

In Latin the word for power is imperium, which is largely evocative of the state, and we tend to think of power in political terms—that is, in terms of our relation to one another in the public sphere (power dynamics within families are usually confined to the private sphere, except when those families play political roles—see the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons). Very roughly, political power in America has moved from being the monopoly of the landed elite from the 18th-century Revolutionary era through the 19th-century Age of Jackson, when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. In the 20th century, women and, at long last, African-Americans were included in the mainstream. Now, in the 21st century, the world is turning over yet again. The political energy in the country is being harnessed by a younger and more diverse group than it has been in ages past. This does not mean the millennium is at hand, but it does mean that the face of power is changing.

The worship of power for power's sake is debilitating and disorienting. The central creation myth of the West turns on just that insight. In the Book of Genesis, the serpent is able to seduce Eve and Adam into disobeying the Lord by promising that the fruit of the forbidden tree would turn them into gods—would, in other words, make them more powerful than they were in their innocence.

It is more fashionable to speak of such grasping not as sin but as the will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche's 19th-century formulation. "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension," wrote Nietzsche, who elevated power, rather than good, to ultimate concern. "But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ('union') with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on." The moral reply is that some things are more important than power—love and freedom among them. That the security of such virtues often requires the use of force is an inescapable element of reality, but there is a distinction between the pursuit of power for domination and subjugation and the use of power to make possible the journey toward what Winston Churchill called the "broad, sunlit uplands."