Two Kinds of Power

Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control by Patrick Wilson addresses one of the most enduring challenges of intellectual life: how to navigate, organize, and master the overwhelming abundance of written material that surrounds us. From libraries and archives to offices and attics, the world is saturated with documents of every kind—some of enduring cultural and intellectual value, others ephemeral records of daily life. Wilson explores what it means to exercise “bibliographical control” over this mass: the ability to discover, organize, and access what is valuable amid the trivial, and to understand how writings serve as both the record of human activity and the medium of knowledge transmission. He treats bibliographical control not simply as a technical problem but as a form of power—power over knowledge itself, and therefore power over action, culture, and memory.

Far from offering a manual of techniques, Wilson develops a searching theoretical analysis of the concepts underlying bibliographical practice. He examines the notions of organization and control, relevance and subject, and the ways in which lists, catalogs, bibliographies, and information-retrieval systems serve—or fail to serve—human purposes. Drawing a distinction between organizing things and exercising control over them, Wilson highlights the roles of people, institutions, and technologies in shaping bibliographical power. His reflections anticipate debates about information overload, digital retrieval, and knowledge management, while remaining grounded in the philosophical and historical traditions of librarianship and bibliography. Two Kinds of Power remains a foundational meditation on how societies make sense of the vast universe of writings, a work that combines conceptual rigor with practical urgency, and that continues to resonate wherever questions of information, organization, and access are at stake.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.