Toward a General Theory of Human Action

This paper proposes a general theory of social power built around the concept of compelling force. Compelling force is a directional force whose intent is to shape human will, action, or material reality in accordance with the will of an initiating actor or actors, but whose effect is simply a directional force that shapes human will, action, or material reality. The paper argues that existing traditions in social theory have each captured important parts of this process—economic power, legitimate authority, coercion, cultural hegemony, institutional incentives, and power-knowledge—but have usually treated them in isolation. In response, this paper integrates these traditions into a single model. The framework distinguishes between direct compelling force, which acts immediately on matter or bodies, and social compelling force, which acts on other actors and thereby shapes matter indirectly. It further argues that power is best understood as stored, organized, or repeatable compelling force distributed across five main reservoirs: economic, political-legal, coercive, social, and informational. The effectiveness of any such force depends on the valuation structure of the receiving actor, whose internal motivational system is modeled as an aggregate of weighted sub-wills. The paper develops a recursive account of will, purpose, transmission, and drift, showing why purposes are never perfectly preserved through chains of social action. It also argues that human society can be modeled analogously to the human mind: just as a person’s direction emerges from the relative weighting of internal sub-wills, a society’s direction emerges from the relative weight of persons, groups, institutions, and the compelling forces they command. A formal representation is then introduced to show how the theory can be expressed in vectors, matrices, state updates, and outcome functions without claiming perfect predictability. The result is a synthetic framework for analyzing power, institutions, money, coordination, and the deformation of purposes over time.