The institutional anchoring and practicability of such substitutes renders exact calculations unnecessary, and even makes any attempt to do so problematic. The result of this is that if science were to produce a way of measuring power, it would alter social reality; that is to say, it would destroy the substitutes and reveal them as false assumptions.

QUESTION: What would it mean for social power to be measured? The author suggests the substitutes that power depends on are themselves part of the reality that measurement would collapse.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 600