An informal, rather scrappy book whose ""power"" rubric is rather factitious. It has fewer pretensions than A.A. Berle's Three Faces of Power (1968), the same token emphasis on ""the importance of human qualities,"" and some oh-so-wicked allusions to Machiavelli. Unlike Berle, Crozier digs into case studies. But faithful Economist readers will be disappointed to find that Crozier's ten-year experience as editor of its ""confidential"" Foreign Report allows us so few insights of any novelty or profundity. Instead a rhetoric more typical of Encounter at its crassest ""open-society"" propaganda level suffuses the chapters on China's ""Hundred Flowers"" episode, the Soviet secret police, and terrorism as the chief mode of revolutionary war... while the brighter, chattier reviews of executive powers exerted in Suez, the Dominican Republic, Rhodesia, Franco's Spain etc. are too often superficial (the French Communist Party explained in terms of securing its new image, the Spanish inflation attributed to Falangist enterprise and trade unionism). The book concludes with a sketch of a professional etite to replace semi-parliamentary government and a new UN excluding ""predatory states"" -- to be taken as a symptom rather than a program. Crozier is also the author of Franco (1968).