Kicking for Kicks: On The 48 Laws of Power (1998) by Robert Greene

Cover of the paperback edition 

(Profile Books, 2000) 

 

 

I. 

 

Until last night [1], I had never heard of Robert Greene - the American author who has written bestselling books on power and seduction whilst, ironically, understanding nothing of either concept in anything other than a conventional and old-fashioned manner that appeals to the type of reader who is naively looking to take back control.  

 

His most famous work is The 48 Laws of Power (1998), which has sold over 1.2 million copies in the US alone and been translated into 24 languages. 

 

It's very popular, apparently, with Hollywood celebrities, prison inmates, and business leaders who share an equally simplistic view of the world as the author and don't really care about formulating a philosophically sophisticated and radical model of power as it operates today. 

 

It will also appeal to the kind of idiot who asserts that what Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 was true then, is true now, and will always be forever true as power and human nature are unchanging, essential realities.    

 

Foucault will be spinning in his grave and Baudrillard laughing his head off in a virtual heaven ... 

 

 

II.  

 

What do I mean by this?  

 

I mean that Greene’s cratology is based on an archaic, 17th-century model that conceives of power as a kind of commodity - some sort of magical force - that sovereign individuals can capture, hoard, and wield over others. 

 

Between them, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard blow this metaphysical fallacy apart and render it obsolete. Each argues that it's delusional to assume a subject or player who stands outside the matrix of power and somehow manipulates it.  

 

For Foucault, power is fundamentally relational and discursive - not a thing in itself. He demonstrates how it is never possessed; it is exercised. Operating through institutions, modern power is woven into the very fabric of society and produces subjects - shaping their bodies, behaviours, and pleasures. 

 

Greene's master strategist - whether they choose to conceal intentions or court attention - is manipulating nothing; they are just as much a function born of the system of neoliberal capitalism as everyone else. Just as we are spoken by language, so are we played by the game.   

 

Baudrillard, meanwhile, goes even further than this - instructing us not only to forget Hobbes, but forget Foucault as well ...

 

For Baudrillard, power is not merely decentralised, it has been dissolved into hyperreality. The 21st century is not the same as the 17th century or even the 19th and early-mid 20th century. We have entered the era of simulacra and simulation in which signs, symbols, and media representations have replaced physical reality and power in the traditional sense - just like sex - no longer exists. 

 

In sum: the laws of power - much like the hypervisible signs of sex in a pornified culture - exist purely to disguise the fact that both power and sex have disappeared even as anchorage points. 

 

That's doubtless why Greene - who is not a fool - attempts to offer no definition of power in his work; he knows he'd be attempting to describe an absence or void - that the laws possess no signified to refer back to and are essentially themselves empty of meaning. In a very literal sense, Greene's book is nonsense - and a form of nostalgia.           

 

In other words, his 48 laws - which are really just historical observations mixed with anecdote - simulate a lost world where individual actions still have deterministic weight and value. In reality, the systems of global finance, algorithms, and media networks are so vast and chaotic that no individual player can direct or understand them. 

 

The person who boasts of being empowered is really just a roleplaying fantasist in a virtual environment. And, arguably, AI simply serves to sustain them in this fantasy.  

 

 

III. 

 

Now, some of you will be thinking that if Foucault and/or Baudrillard are right, then why do so many people rave about The 48 Laws of Power and why is Greene hailed as this great guru? 

 

I could simply say it's because the majority of people are unintelligent - and yes, that includes the famous artists and public personalities known to have read, referenced, or been influenced by the book [2] - but I'll resist the urge to do so and suggest, rather, that it's because Greene offers a comforting, regressive fantasy in a world that is increasingly complex. 

 

He informs his readers that the world isn't an anonymous, inhuman network, but a competitive arena - part royal court, part corporate boardroom - in which, if you follow his 48 rules, you too can be a winner ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This post was inspired - if that's the right word - by a talk at Christian Michel's 6/20 Club by Dr Jennifer Davis Taylor (6 October 2026) on Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power (1998). Neither a straight reading of the text nor a critical review as such, the talk was a kind of strategic interpretation in relation to Dr Taylor's experiments with AI and her prolonged battles with the IRS. 

 

[2] Such figures include: hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, who has frequently referenced and praised the book's strategic principles; music producer and fashion designer Kanye West, who has cited the book as a major influence on how he views fame, power, and industry dynamics; and the American rapper 50 Cent, who loved The 48 Laws of Power so much that he collaborated directly with Robert Greene to write The 50th Law (2009).

 

 

Musical bonus: nothing to do with the book, but whenever I hear the number 48 I always think of this song by The Clash (taken from their eponymous debut album (CBS, 1977): '48 Hours' and was humming it most of the train journey home after the 6/20. 

 

 

Earth Calling the Sophia Space Agency - An Alternative View by Jennifer Davis Taylor

Jennifer Davis Taylor and Melpomeni Kermanidou 

(Project Leader of the Sophia Space Agency)

 

 

Never let it be said that Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage alternative perspectives ... 

 

Here's a thoughtful response submitted by Jennifer Davis Taylor - an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who was present at the Sophia Space Agency audio event at Kings Place that I wrote about in a recent post: click here. 

She writes:  

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

Like you, I attended the launch of Melpomeni Kermanidou's debut album released under the name of the Sophia Space Agency, but I noticed entirely different things about both the staging and the spatial audio playback.

      

For me, the theatre space was defined by its intimacy - just right for twenty or thirty people. We weren't overcrowded. I liked the proportions of the room and the ratio of space to people because I didn't feel unnerved by the energy around me. The stage was bathed in blue light. The three empty chairs, with ferns interspersed between them, gave me a sense of anticipation. The eye masks we were handed at the door heightened this feeling for me. It felt as if there might be a party game, with some slight unpredictability that would enhance the fun. 

      

What initially strikes me about your post, Stephen, is that you understood the event as a scene before experiencing it as a playback. That feels right. Meni's white dress and boots were not incidental decoration; they communicated that the event was a kind of carnivalesque space - theatrical and operating slightly outside the normal rules of social interaction. Her appearance gave us permission to expect the unexpected. She appeared to have dressed not only for the event but for the imaginative space the work itself asked us to enter: retro-futuristic, feminine, controlled, luminous, slightly alien. Because she appeared after the playback, her appearance also felt like a validation of our varied internal imaginative responses to the experimental soundscape. 

      

The contrast of her appearance with the two men on stage may well have been a failure of individual sartorial taste. However, accidental as it may have been, I also found it to be an effective foil. Meni was easily able to hold the visual and conceptual field of the event almost by herself. At the same time, the men's presentation demonstrated an asymmetry of cultural permission. Male authority is often allowed to arrive uncomposed, rumpled, ordinary, even careless. Female artistry in dress, because it is more expected, also has a kind of privilege in public. Women are allowed to carry atmosphere, beauty, and coherence, even though they are also often expected to enact that symbolic labour. 

      

That imbalance became part of the performance, whether anyone intended it or not. The stage picture quietly exposed who is permitted to appear as an expert without adornment, who needs to dress up to be received as one, and what that dressing up costs. Meni's costume was beautiful. However, it also leaned into her identity as a performance artist rather than only as a musical innovator. I was reminded of Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, whose technological inventions anticipated later developments in wireless communications. Even today, that far more significant contribution remains overshadowed by her glamorous persona. In this case, had Meni not performed sartorially, she might not have carried the evening so successfully. Could she have appeared in rumpled clothes and smeared makeup? Would that have drawn more attention to her genius? I suspect not. 

 

Further to this, I was also interested in your argument about spatial audio producing a kind of cathedral effect: immersive, beautiful, technically pristine, but finally perhaps too complete. That seems to me the strongest critical idea in the post. The problem is not that the music is beautiful, or even that it is overwhelming. The problem is what happens when a work leaves no remainder - no gap, no exterior, no accidental birdsong, no human roughness through which the listener can breathe. 

      

While I was experiencing it, however, I wasn't disturbed by the rules of the space or by the idealistic premise. Perhaps this was because the experience was finite for me. I didn't worry about its implications as a large collective movement or as a mass vehicle for a set of values. The producers admitted that this style of music does not lend itself easily to mass consumption. The technological setup for enjoying it is prohibitive and inconvenient. Therefore, I could contemplate beauty and accept transcendence as a gift that Ms Kermanidou and Martyn Ware were trying to offer, without feeling that I had to buy into their idealism wholesale. 

      

More troubling, for me, was the clash between the themes of the work - planetary destruction - and the medium itself, which relies on cyberstorage and power centres that may also be environmentally harmful. Even though I was struck by that potential irony, I also saw how the music fulfilled some classic roles of art: to be of its time, to generate new forms, and to make visible the contradictions of the present.       

 

It was a rich and enjoyable experience that gave me a lot to think about. I learned a lot. I took away questions that will help me to be a better thinker and artist.

 

 

Notes

 

Jennifer Davis Taylor appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

 

As stated, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who holds a PhD from The Warburg Institute (University of London) and specializes in seventeenth-century French art and literature, women's studies, and material culture. 

      

Her forthcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault (Peter Lang), reframes Perrault not merely as a fairy tale author but as a theorist of design whose collaborative studio practice staged radical allegories of female agency.

 

Readers are encouraged to visit the website: jenniferdavistaylor.com for further information.