Robert Moses never held elected office and reshaped New York City more profoundly than anyone who did. Robert Caro spent eleven years trying to understand how. What he found was a portrait of power so precise it reads less like biography than like a warning.

Robert Moses understood something about public life that most politicians never grasp: that physical permanence is the most durable form of power. An elected official can be voted out; a coalition can collapse; a policy can be reversed. But a highway, once built, stays. A bridge, once opened, becomes load-bearing in ways that go far beyond its engineering. Moses spent fifty years embedding his authority in concrete and steel, and by the time anyone understood what he had done, undoing it was unthinkable. "As long as you're on the side of the parks," he said, "you're on the side of the angels." The parks were a tactic. The roads were the point.

Caro's biography — eleven years in the researching, 1,200 pages in the telling — is one of the great acts of sustained attention in American letters. What makes it more than an exposé of political corruption is the quality of understanding Caro brings to his subject. He does not approach Moses as a villain whose villainy needs documenting. He approaches him as a problem to be understood: how does a man with no elected mandate accumulate more power than any governor or mayor who served alongside him, and hold it for five decades? The answer, Caro shows, is a masterclass in the manipulation of systems — of financing mechanisms, of political alliances, of public sentiment managed through strategic generosity toward parks and beaches while the real business of highway construction proceeded beneath the level of public attention.

The empathy argument enters here, but inverted. Moses is one of the most instructive figures precisely because he represents the complete substitution of systemic intelligence for human understanding. He could read power structures with extraordinary precision. He could not — or would not — read people. The communities displaced by his highways were not, to him, communities. They were obstacles, or they were statistics, or they were simply not visible in the framework through which he understood the city. His indifference to the working-class and minority neighbourhoods bulldozed for the Cross Bronx Expressway was not cruelty in any personal sense. It was something more chilling: a total absence of the imaginative capacity to enter another person's experience and let it matter.

Caro raises the question without fully resolving it: was this indifference a function of power, or a precondition for it? Did Moses become incapable of empathy as his authority grew, or did the incapacity come first — a constitutive feature of the kind of ambition that accumulates power at this scale? The book's implicit answer is that the two are inseparable. The same quality of mind that allowed Moses to see the city as a system to be reorganised according to his vision made it impossible for him to see it as a place where particular people lived particular lives that his projects would destroy.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) gives this argument a mythic register — Daniel Plainview is Moses transposed into the California oil fields, a man of extraordinary systemic intelligence and virtually no human feeling, for whom other people exist as instruments or obstacles and nothing else.

But the more pointed contrast is with Upton Sinclair, whose novel Oil! loosely inspired the film. Sinclair was everything Moses was not: driven by empathy, by social conscience, by a genuine capacity to feel the conditions of people unlike himself. He was also a catastrophic failure as a political operator. He ran for governor of California in 1934 on a platform of radical economic reform and lost, in part because he had no instinct for the manipulation of power that Moses had in abundance. The juxtaposition is uncomfortable and clarifying: the capacity for empathy and the capacity for political effectiveness may at certain levels actively work against each other.