A Study On The Power-Regulating Paths In Early Modern Western Society-on The Perspective Of The Separation Of Power And The Will To Power

Since 1980s, globalization and post-industrialization has been demanding an increasing need of carrying out reforms on social governance. As power is an important factor in all kinds of social governance systems, we can not evade issues concerned with power when we discuss future social governance system. However, it is hard to talk about future before we know the past. Therefore, the study will be carried out from the perspective of the separation of power and the will to power, and will address problems such as why power must be regulated in the early modern society, how it was regulated, how well it worked and why it worked well or not.The reform of the early modern society and its governance was due to the development of city commerce, which developed and spread the modern idea of individual freedom. In this case, a social order which accepts and protects individual freedom was needed. But the dilemma was that it seemed hard to get individual freedom and social order at the same time until the power had been regulated properly. On the whole, there were two paths on regulating power in the early modern society, namely the sovereignty one and the constitutionalism one. The sovereignty path answered the question of whom the power belonged to; while the constitutionalism path answered the question of how to exercise the power.The sovereignty theory divided the power into sovereignty and jurisdiction, thus making the question of whom the power belonged to the fundamental question of how to regulate power. To realize the liberal order, popular sovereignty theory replaced the previous one and separated the roles of the owner of power and the agent. The separation demanded power to be separated from the will to power, and to be exercised according to the general will. However, the popular sovereignty theory failed to find a proper way for power to meet the demand.The constitutionalism theory attempted to put power under the control of constitution and the law and to ensure the power be exercised accordingly. Thus the constitutionalism theory also demands power be separate from the will to power. But the negative assumption the constitutionalism had towards the subject of power hindered the theory itself from reflecting the subject of power and its will to power deeply. Instead, it focused on regulating the power itself. Therefore, although there developed two ways, namely restricting power with power and limiting power with law, to regulate power and had the power restricted, the problem of the will to power still remain unsolved.Then why the two power-regulating paths fail to separate the power and the will to power? It was because that they both resulted in a institutionalism way of social and social governance construct, while the contradiction in the institutionalism social governance made it impossible to avoid the development and the effect of the will to power. The transition from institutionalism to activism is the right direction if the power is to be really separated from the will to power.