The Patterns of Power books

Introduction

PatternsofPower.org aims to hold the powerful to account by commenting on the uses and abuses of power. These books provide a foundation of analysis and evidence so that comment can be fully informed.  They contain thousands of hyperlinks, within the books and to external Internet sources, to make it easier for readers to pursue different lines of investigation.

The Edition Release Notes explain the evolution of the PatternsofPower books since the first edition was published in January 2013.  Edition 4 e-books are now available to buy, as from January 2026, in three versions: a full-size Edition 4, a cut-down Summary, and a short Overview.  A paperback version of the Summary will be released shortly.

All the books are subject to copyright dated January 2026.  People are welcome to use the material as they wish if they acknowledge its source.

Which version to buy

The main difference between the versions lies in the treatment of chapters 3 to 7, which contain a catalogue of patterns of power: economic power, moral influence, legal powers, political authority, and the ungoverned use of force respectively.

The full Edition 4 e-book contains all the pattern descriptions and their sub-sections as they were at the beginning of January 2026.  It has 678 pages.  Its size may seem intimidating but, like all these books, it has internal hyperlinks that allow readers to easily bypass detail that they do not want to engage with immediately.

The Overview introduces each of these 5 chapters and lists all their patterns, offering hyperlinks to the current versions of the material – which might have been updated since Edition 4.  It is the shortest of the three versions, at 159 pages, but it requires an Internet connection for access to the pattern descriptions on this website.  It describes the concept and can act as a portal to the website for readers who usually have a good Internet connection.

The Summary has 229 pages.  In addition to the contents of the Overview, it has the segments in each of the five chapters which describe the most contentious topics.  These segments summarise the PatternsofPower.org view on these major issues and show how they need to be negotiated for every society. They contain hyperlinks to the website for supporting material.

The books contain a more detailed explanation of the difference between them near the beginning, in Chapter Structures.

Buying PDF copies from this website

The free Foxit PDF reader application works well on Windows, and Xodo (also free) is good on Android.  Both these applications have back buttons so one can return easily after having followed a hyperlink.  (An equivalent button can be customised onto the toolbar of the free Adobe Reader application.)

Kindle copies

All three versions of the books are published on Amazon’s Kindle platform at https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Hugh-Winter/author/B00MXV9OXS.  Kindle is designed to reflow the text to make it easier to read, even on a mobile phone in portrait mode, but some of the formatting therefore gets lost.  Copies are downloadable onto Kindle devices and, by installing the free Kindle application, onto any other computer, tablet or smart phone.

The paperback Summary

Only the Summary will be published in a paperback format.  Its internal cross references can only be used by leafing through the pages, as with any other book. External Internet URLs will be listed in endnotes. 

Updated material on the website

The pattern descriptions are updated from time to time on the website, which also holds archive copies of earlier material – as explained in the site’s Information Management policy. Hyperlinks from both the Overview and the Summary electronic versions of the books retrieve the latest material.