The title of Moises Naim’s newest book is an apt summary of its basic thesis. The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What it Used to Be is about exactly that: how the large institutions and bureaucracies that have controlled territory, ideology and wealth for the last several hundred years have been compelled to cede this control to numerous smaller players. Although the book reviews a number of definitions of power, its consistent focus is on how institutional power in the modern period came to be defined in terms of size and scope. In modern times, the bigger you are, the more powerful you are. When Naim says that power is decaying - the book’s battle cry - he means that our mainstream definition of power as bigness no longer holds true. Much of the book is spent detailing how “power got big,” as Naim puts it, and the ways in which power as bigness has been challenged. We readers learn how this challenge has manifested itself in different institutions and spheres of activity. These include not only governments, militaries and private corporations, but also religious institutions, unions, philanthropic organizations and the professional media. While this approach admittedly can get a little tedious, its great virtue is in demonstrating how singularly unified our ideas about power have become. Regardless of the institution, it seems, we think that to be powerful is to be bigger than everyone else. We also learn how comprehensively the power of large institutions - regardless of their function - is being challenged