power of politics essay

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Power in world politics.

• Stefano Guzzini Stefano Guzzini Uppsala University, PUC-Rio de Janeiro, Danish Institute for International Studies
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.118
• Published online: 20 April 2022

The concept of power derives its meanings and theoretical roles from the theories in which it is embedded. Hence, there is no one concept of power, no single understanding of power, even if these understandings stand in relation to each other. Besides the usual theoretical traditions common to the discipline of international relations and the social sciences, from rationalist to constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, there is, however, also a specificity of power being a concept used in both political theory and political practice. A critical survey of these approaches needs to cast a net wide to see both the differences and the links across these theoretical divides. Realist understandings of power are heavily impressed by political theory, especially when defining the ontology of “the political.” They are also characterized by their attempt, so far not successful, to translate practical maxims of power into a scientific theory. Liberal and structural power approaches use power as a central factor for understanding outcomes and hierarchies while generally neglecting any reference to political theory and often overloading the mere concept of power as if it were already a full-fledged theory. Finally, power has also been understood in the constitutive but often tacit processes of social recognition and identity formation, of technologies of government, and of the performativity of power categories when the latter interact with the social world, that is, the power politics that characterize the processes in which agents “make” the social world. Relating back to political practice and theory, these approaches risk repeating a realist fallacy. Whereas it is arguably correct to see power always connected to politics, not all politics is always connected or reducible to power. Seeing power not only as coercive but also productive should neither invite one to reduce all politics to it nor to turn power into the meta-physical prime mover of all things political.

• relational power
• structural power
• political realism
• constructivism
• post-structuralism
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Michel Foucault
• Steven Lukes

Introduction: Which Power?

For the battle-proof reader of analyses in the discipline of international relations (IR), “power in world politics” may immediately evoke proclamations of what power really is and where it lies, who has it and who endures it. It may also connect to a specific self-understanding of the field, which thinks of itself as being deserted by possible utopias and reform, forever caught in a world inevitably characterized by power politics, a tragedy not manageable by the faint-hearted and which the world can only ignore at its peril.

For its crucial place in the observation and practice of world politics, it comes as no surprise that there is no “usual” definition of power . But there is more to power’s multiple meanings than the different theories that may reframe it or the different practical understandings of power negotiated in international diplomacy. Its multiple meanings result from the specific role power has in discourses where it connects many different phenomena in various domains. It stands in for resources or capabilities, status, and rank, cause and its effect (influence), for rule, authority, and legitimacy, if not government, then again for individual dispositions and potentials, autonomy and freedom, agency and subjectivity, as well as for impersonal biases (e.g., the power of markets or symbols) or, as bizarre as it might sound at first, for symbolic media of communication. And this is not an exhaustive list.

As this short list shows, power informs not only the language of practitioners and explanatory theories but also of political theory; indeed, it is systematically intertwined with our understanding of politics. For power has become closely connected to the definition of the public domain ( res publica ) in which government is to be exercised.

Moreover, this interrelation of power and politics has become self-conscious in present-day world politics. The last decades of the 20th century have witnessed a double movement in the practitioners’ understanding of power. On the one hand, the contemporary agenda of international politics has exploded. For major diplomatic corps, it now includes virtually everything from monetary to environmental relations, from human rights to cyberspace. With this multiplication of international political domains, there is more “governance,” which means more international “power,” because actors have been able to consciously order and influence events that were not previously part of their portfolio. On the other hand, however, practitioners have been anxious for quite some time because power and actual control seems to be slipping away from them. Power is ever more “abstract, intangible, elusive” ( Kissinger, 1969 , p. 61, 1979 , p. 67). It has “evaporated” ( Strange, 1996 , p. 189). Indeed, the ease with which public debates have seized on topics like the structural forces of globalization, the dilemmas of an incalculable “risk society,” or the awe, if not sense of powerlessness, when confronted with the planetary range of governance problems induced by climate change, testify to the increasing concern that exactly when the world’s expanding agenda would need it most, actual power eludes leaders. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, the expansion of governance is accompanied by a sense of lost control. 1

Hence, “power in world politics” cannot be confined to an unequivocal encyclopedia article. Instead, the conceptualizations of power in their respective domains become central (for a more detailed justification, see Guzzini, 2013b ). Consequently, this article will make no further definitional effort to find a generally acceptable view of power (as did, e.g., Dahl, 1968 ). Although the following is informed by such undertakings when avoiding definitional fallacies, such attempts are, as a general strategy, less appropriate for an encyclopedia and probably not possible for such a contested term like power , as previous concept analyses have shown (as, e.g., Baldwin, 2002 ; Barnett & Duvall, 2005 ; Berenskoetter, 2007 ; Guzzini, 1993 , 2016 ). The interest here is not reducing the analysis of power to a single definitional core; rather, it is exploring the variety of usages and how they relate to each other.

The first section, “ Realist Power Analysis ,” looks at realist understandings of power that are heavily stamped by political theory, in particular when defining the particular ontology of “the political.” The second section, “ Power as Influence ,” then follows liberal and structural power approaches that use power as a central factor for understanding outcomes and hierarchies while generally neglecting any reference to political theory. Finally, the third section, “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes ,” looks at attempts to understand how power is understood in the constitutive but often tacit processes of social recognition and identity formation, of technologies of government, and of the performativity of power categories when the latter interact with the social world, that is, the power politics that characterize the processes in which agents “make” the social world.

Realist Power Analysis: The Distinctive Nature of World Politics and Its Explanation

Knowledge of world affairs was initially tied to the group practicing it. Actors observed themselves and distilled maxims of action from historical experience. While historians, sociologists, and macroeconomists look at their fields with an external expertise, the knowledge of international politics stems from the way diplomats and generals came to share practical lessons of the past (and this may also apply to the early days of law and management studies). Hence, the first way to think about power in world affairs is by following the meaning and purpose of power in the language of international practitioners.

And since it is fair to say that realism is the translation of that language into a codified system of practical maxims ( Guzzini, 1998 , 2013a ), analyzing classical realism provides such a bridge. For (many) classical realists, power is constitutive of politics—world politics in particular. It is part of a theory of domination. It is, moreover, related to the idea of government, not understood in its steering capacity, but in what constitutes political order. Finally, through the idea of the reason of state, power is related to the normative ideal of an ethics of responsibility as included in the “art of government.”

It is only in the disciplinary move where realism was to become a school of thought in the establishment of IR as a social science that the analysis of political order was translated into a rational theory of the maximization of power, or, put differently, where a theory of domination was subsumed under an explanatory theory of action. In this move, the purpose and understanding of power is narrowed and as this section will show, fraught with internal tensions.

The Nature of Power and the Definition of World Politics

A central tenet of classical realism is to look at the constitution of political order. That order is not defined in the Aristotelian sense of a polity organized around a common purpose, the common good, but in terms of the necessity of domination. This necessity of domination, in turn, explains why government has to be understood in a Machiavellian manner, that is, interested in the management of power. Indeed, 18th-century Europe experienced an increasing reduction of the meaning of politics to Machtkunst (approximately, the art/craft of power/governing) so typical of realism ( Sellin, 1978 ).

If order is understood mainly through the art of domination, then it becomes easier to understand why for Max Weber, in many regards the prototypical political (not IR) realist, physical violence and its control are, in turn, connected to the idea of politics and power. The threat or actual use of violence is the characteristic that sets politics aside from economics, law, or other spheres of social relations ( Weber, 1921–1922/1980 , pp. 531, 539). For realists, politics has specific tasks that can ultimately be resolved only through physical violence ( Weber, 1919/1988a , p. 557). Therefore, behind power, understood as the specific means of politics, stands the possibility of physical violence ( Weber, 1919/1988b , p. 550). A polity is based on domination, which is possible through the control of physical violence, which, in turn, constitutes, not the only means, but the politically characteristic and ultimate, means of power (for a detailed discussion, see Guzzini, 2017a ).

Classical realists stood squarely in this tradition but, as Hans Morgenthau and Raymond Aron respectively show, took different cues from it. Morgenthau added a Nietzschean twist. Just as for Weber, politics is struggle ( Weber, 1918/1988a , p. 329), but it is derived from human nature: The lust for power ( Morgenthau, 1946 , p. 9) or the drive to dominate ( Morgenthau, 1948 , p. 17), which is common to all humans. This adds an ontological status to power as being one of the fundamental drives of humans. This also explains why, for Morgenthau, whatever the final goal, power is always the immediate one ( Morgenthau, 1948 , p. 13), that is, the inevitable means. From there, Morgenthau builds an ultimately utilitarian theory of international relations that understands action in terms of the maximization of power and a foreign policy strategy of gauging power in an ethics of responsibility. Just as for Weber (for this argument, see Wolin, 1981 ), Morgenthau’s theory is ultimately guided by his political theory and ontology. In this, power constitutes the links among this political ontology, his explanatory theory, and a foreign policy doctrine (for a detailed account and critique, see Guzzini, 2020 ).

Also, Aron derives from Weber, but he does not follow Nietzsche in the way Morgenthau does, nor in the way Weber occasionally did himself when he fused national value systems with a view of an existential struggle, his eternal combat of gods ( Weber, 1919/1988b , p. 604f.). Aron is highly critical of such a position ( Aron, 1967 , p. 650). He starts from the idea that the international system has no world government comparable to the Weberian modern state, and, without a legitimate monopoly of the means of violence, it is in a “state of nature.” He is clear that this state of nature is not to be confused with a state of “war of all against all.” It refers to a sometimes highly conventionalized realm that is not part of a biological but a human order ( Aron, 1966 , pp. 482–483). Indeed, the parallel existence of a civil society (with a government) and an external sphere of multiplicity is something that has always existed and defines the backdrop against which politics is to be understood. Although without a Nietzschean touch, here, too, the management of violence and power becomes the constitutive principle of world politics as power politics, in which collective violence is not antithetical but fundamental to it. The best one can aspire to is a politics of the “art of the possible,” connected to this very particular responsibility that falls on political leaders to use the reason of state correctly.

Power in Realist Explanations

When moving from political to explanatory theory, power turns from being an ontology of order and politics to being an explanatory variable. Given its central place in realism’s political theory, it is perhaps normal that it would also acquire a central place in its explanatory theory. The drive for domination is translated into a utilitarian theory of power, security, or rank maximization. Power as part of a “vertical” theory of domination, as in realist, elite theories (e.g., Robert Michels or Vilfredo Pareto), becomes subsumed under a “horizontal” theory of action and its effects.

Such a move affects the underlying understanding of power. Power is understood either as capabilities/resources or, indeed, as their effects (influence). Resourceful actors (regular winners) are poles of power, and the configuration of those poles gives the main characteristic of the international order, namely its polarity. The government of world order is hence but the result of these two steps of the argument. This leads to two typical theoretical applications. Starting from the micro level of analysis, actors are seen as maximizing relative power or rank with the effect that this competitive behavior ends up in an always precarious balance of power. Starting from the macro level, the given polarity of the balance of power provides systemic constraints for internal balancing (arms race) and external balancing (alliances) that actors may ignore only at their peril.

This translation into a utilitarian theory of action, however, produces a series of conceptual problems. For being able to empirically identify a “maximization” of power or any “balance” of power, there must be a measure of power that indicates what is more or less, what is maximized. In other words, it requires a concept of power akin to the concept of money in economic theory, as also argued by John Mearsheimer (2001 , p. 12). In this analogy, the striving for utility maximization expressed and measured in terms of money parallels the national interest (i.e., security) expressed in terms of (relative) power. And yet, this central assumption has been challenged both by early realist critiques and institutionalist approaches.

Raymond Aron opposed this aggregated concept of power and the underlying power–money analogy ( Aron, 1962/1984 , pp. 99–102). Utilitarian economics trades on the possibility of integrating different preferences within one utility function. This is made possible by the historical evolution toward monetarized economies where money would fulfill the function of a shared standard of value. But in world politics, power does not play the same role. There is no equivalent in actual politics (and not just in theory) to money; power does not “buy” in the same way; it is not the currency of world politics. Even supposedly ultimate power resources like weapons of mass destruction might not necessarily be of great help in buying another state’s change in its monetary policies. More power resources do not necessarily translate into more purchasing power ( Baldwin, 1971 ). Without a precise measure, however, it is not clear when power has been maximized or when it is balanced, and whether this was intended in the first place ( Wolfers, 1962 , p. 106). Realist theories based on power are indeterminate, as Aron insisted.

In response, realists could insist that diplomats have repeatedly been able to find a measure of power, and hence the difference is just one of degree, not of kind (see the answer to Aron by Waltz, 1990 ). Yet, even if actors could agree on some approximations for carrying out exchanges or establishing power rankings, this is a social convention that by definition can be challenged and exists only to the extent that it is agreed upon, as acknowledged by Morgenthau (1948 , pp. 151–152) himself. Power resources do not come with a standardized price tag, and no type of resource is generally convertible (“fungible”). And if power is not providing a standard of value, then neither analysts nor actors know when and how some action is maximizing power nor how these maximizations “add up” to polarity. If one cannot reduce world politics to solely one of its domains (war and physical violence), and if one cannot add up resources into one pole, then the assessment of polarity is no longer clear—and with this the assessment of the type of international order and its causal effects. The measure of power is internal to a diplomatic convention whose stability is not granted; a point that later power analysis has developed (see “ Power as Convention: Performative and Reflexive Power Analysis ”).

It is here where the mix of the normative and explanatory stance of realism pulls the concept of power in opposite directions. The insistence on the almost impossible measurement of power, so important to realists from Morgenthau to Wohlforth (2003) , is crucial for realist practice. It instils the realist maxim of a posture of prudence in the diplomats, reminding them that they “cannot and should not be sure.” Yet, this indeterminacy makes the explanatory theory unfalsifiable; there is always one way to twist power indicators and understandings to make the story fit. In this way, using the central role of power to translate an ontology of order into a utilitarian explanatory theory led to problems for classical realism at both the micro and macro levels of analysis in terms of rank maximization and polarity analysis. At the same time, it provided the backdrop against which new conceptualizations developed.

Power as Influence: Relational and Structural Power in World Politics

International relations (IR) proceeded in its conceptualizations of power mainly with the purpose of fine-tuning the role of power in explanatory theories; political theory fell by the wayside. So institutionalists were aware of the indeterminacy, as well as at times the tautology, of a concept of power that IR scholars used as both a capacity and its effects. One of the possible remedies consisted in qualifying the very idea of a capacity were it to retain a distinctive causal effect. Another was to open up the black box of the translation process from power as control over resources to power as control over outcomes.

This focus on dyadic interaction reduces the initial purpose of understanding domination to understanding influence in different outcomes, and then to its aggregation. A theory of domination was not just subsumed under a theory of action; it seemed to get lost altogether. A series of scholars tried to counter this tendency. They identified a problem in the explanatory attempts to relate power only to the level of interaction. Instead, they conceived of power in “structural” terms to reintegrate more vertical components of domination into the analysis of power. Whereas the more institutionalist answer uses a relational understanding of power to qualify capacities as actual influence over outcomes, the structuralist answer was to include more non-agential or non-intentional factors into the analysis of outcomes to recuperate a sense of in-built hierarchical relations. More problematically, however, both approaches do more than just widen the analysis of power relations; they also tend to import this widening into the concept of power itself, as if a reconceptualization alone were sufficient for a comprehensive analysis of power.

Relational Power and Liberal Institutionalism

Power is not in a resource; it is in a relation. This stance was forcefully exposed by Robert Dahl (1957 , pp. 202–203) in political theory and by David Baldwin (1989 , 2016) within IR. Such an innocuous-looking statement is very consequential. In its behavioralist twist, such a relational approach tends to focus on actual influence understood as the causal effect of one actor’s behavior on another’s behavior. And it tends to look for the conditions that make this influence possible in the first place.

Both Dahl and Baldwin treat power and influence, capacities and their effects, interchangeably. That may sound odd, because most Western languages use two different words that capture different, if related, ideas. And yet, it is quite logical if one thinks about power as a central concept in (linear) causal explanations, as much of IR does. IR is interested in outcomes. If power were just in resources—latent, potential, and hence potentially “powerless” in affecting outcomes—then, so the story goes, why should one care about power in the first place? Scholars and practitioners wish to understand the actualized capacity to affect outcomes, that is, being able to impose one’s will or interests as the Weberian tradition has it. Indeed, for Dahl that understanding is the main way to understand “who governs” in an empirically controllable manner ( Dahl, 1961/2005 ). Government is constituted by the actual steering effects of elites where certain interests prevail. Dahl could relate power as influence on behavior to the wider understanding of the domestic political order. Influence in a behavioralist theory of action was aggregated to an analysis of government that discloses whether its elite is unified or multiple. Translated into IR, however, the absence of a world government means that IR scholars were left with the theory of action. When thinking world political order, influence is all there is.

Therefore, much of the analysis came to focus on the conditions that make such influence possible and the specific situational context which constitutes that certain resources come to constitute capabilities to affect outcomes. Understanding the relation crucially comes before the analysis of power therein. Bachrach and Baratz (1970 , pp. 20–21) provide a telling example to show the difference a relational approach makes. Let us assume a soldier returns to his camp. The guard asks him to stop or she will shoot. The soldier stops. Hence, the guard exercised power as influence. And yet it is not clear how. It could have been simply through the threat of using her arms. But it could also be because the soldier followed the rule of obeying an order, independently of the arms and the threat. Without a close analysis of the relation, indeed the individual motives, one would not know the kind of power relation this represents. But let us further assume that the soldier does not stop. The guard shoots. Now, it is ambivalent whether this shows an exercise of power. On the one hand, one could say that she succeeded in stopping the soldier from coming too close to the camp. On the other hand, the threat was clearly not successful. As Waltz (1967/1969 , p. 309) once noted, the most powerful police force is one that does not need to shoot to get its way in the first place. The exercise of power may paradoxically show the powerlessness of its alleged holder. And one can twist the example even further. Suppose the soldier had decided to take his life, and, by advancing, forced the guard to do it on his behalf. In this case, it was the returning soldier who got the guard to do something. Power was on his side in this asymmetrical relation. As the example shows, knowing resources is insufficient to explain the direction in which power is exercised; one needs to know the motives and values of the actors, as well as the general normative system involved. Indeed, once one knows them, the power relation could turn out to be reversed.

In IR, there have been three prominent ways to deal with this relational aspect. David Baldwin almost single-handedly introduced Dahl’s approach into IR. In the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, he became increasingly tired of analyses in terms of “conversion failures” or what he also called the “paradox of unrealized power” ( Baldwin, 1979 , p. 163), where the allegedly more powerful actor lost. If power means influence, it cannot fail. If it does, it means that power was either wrongly assessed or, more fundamentally, wrongly understood ( Baldwin, 1985 , p. 23).

Baldwin was most interested in qualifying the specific context in a relational approach. He shared Aron’s critique of what he called the lacking fungibility of power, in which power simply does not have the same standard of value function as money does in real economies ( Baldwin, 1979 , pp. 193–194, 1993 , pp. 21–22). As a result, he insisted that a relational approach to power requires the prior establishment of the specific “policy-contingency framework” within which power relations are to be understood: the scope (the objectives of an attempt to gain influence; influence over which issue), the domain (the target of the influence attempt), its weight (the quantity of resources), and the cost (opportunity costs of forgoing a relation) must be made explicit. Resources consequential in one policy contingency framework are not necessarily so in another. Scholars who do not see this multidimensionality and persist in the “notion of a single overall international power structure unrelated to any particular issue-area” are using an analysis that “is based on a concept of power that is virtually meaningless” ( Baldwin, 1979 , p. 193).

A second approach worked by checking the translation between the two classical power concepts in this interactionist tradition, namely control over resources and control over outcomes. Whereas Baldwin packaged much into situational analysis to uphold causal effects of behavior/policy instruments, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1977) downgraded a direct link between resources and outcomes that is hampered by bargaining processes and other effects during the interaction. They did, however, also qualify this process for a better assessment of what counts as a power resource in the first place. They expressed the relational component of power in terms of asymmetric interdependence. In this way, power as influence over outcomes is connected, but not reducible, to the resources possessed by one actor, yet valued by the other, and/or by resources of A that can affect the interests of B. Moreover, not just any effect is significant. In their distinction between sensitivity interdependence and vulnerability interdependence, they gave a more long-term twist to it because the mere capacity to affect B (sensitivity) is only ephemeral if B can find alternatives. Only if such alternatives cannot be found (vulnerability, understood in terms of the elasticity of substitution) is the relation asymmetric in a more significant sense. This way of defining power keeps the link to resources but denies a direct relation from resources to outcomes and qualifies what makes them constitutive by specifying the particular dyadic interaction.

Finally, Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power ( Nye, 1990 , 2007 , 2011 ) adds yet another aspect to the liberal analysis of these power relations. His emphasis on softer resources that can be influential depending on the context is not the original part; indeed, Baldwin’s power analysis was very much driven by his attempt to show that economic sanctions, and in particular positive sanctions (carrots, not sticks), can be influential. Rather, what specifically characterizes soft power is the focus on the mechanisms via which actors can have effects. In a way akin to structural power approaches (see “ Structural Power and Dependency ”), as well as classical realist definitions, the analysis of power starts from the receiving side: soft power lies in the capacity of “attraction” of an actor, which means that its analysis starts from those attracted.

In all three approaches, the epistemic interest consists in revalorizing foreign policy instruments in which military resources or coercive mechanisms are not necessarily the most influential; indeed, no resource has such general capacity. Baldwin opens up for positive sanctions and issue-area-specific resources. Keohane and Nye invite policies that avoid long-term vulnerabilities in interdependent relations or, even better, tie all countries into mutual vulnerabilities to moderate their behavior. And Nye’s soft power focuses on foreign policies that would make countries more attractive and, hence often get their way without much further ado. These approaches respond to a vision of an international order fragmented into different issue areas or international regimes.

The innumerable policy-contingency frameworks become confusing however: They make analysts lose sight of the forest for all the trees. With power as influence having subsumed domination under a theory of action, international order and hierarchy got lost. To see the whole forest, Keohane and Nye (1987) envisaged developing a generalized theory of linkages. And yet, precisely because of the lacking fungibility that makes power logics not reducible to each other across regimes, such a theory of linkages is not possible within this theoretical framework. If it were, the fragmentation could be subsumed under a meta-regime that effectively substitutes for a linkage theory.

This leaves the institutionalist approaches open to two further developments intrinsic to a relational approach. First, taking fungibility seriously excludes a single international power structure, as Baldwin pointed out, and, hence severs the link between power and international order. Just as in Dahl, the international order appears pluralistic. But the agent and interaction centeredness of such an approach does not persuade those for whom the absence of intended agential or interaction effects does not yet imply an absence of power or domination. For them, the relational approach needs to be complemented, if not superseded, by a more structural approach. Second, as Bachrach and Baratz’s (1970) illustration shows and as soft power further develops, the concept of power looks different if its understanding starts from the position of the alleged power holder or the recipient/subaltern. Add to this that interests or values, present in a relation, cannot be understood individually because norms or conventions, indeed meanings, are not private but intersubjective, and one ends up with a relational approach that connects power to shared understandings and norms. No longer agent centered, power analysis experiences a turn to material and ideational structures of power.

Structural Power and Dependency

In social and political theory, Steven Lukes’s seminal approach distinguishes three dimensions of power: a direct behavioralist one (Dahl), an indirect one about the many issues excluded from the actual bargaining (Bachrach & Baratz), and a third dimension where it is the “supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have” ( Lukes, 1974 , p. 27). Here, the absence of conflict does not necessarily indicate the absence of a power relation, but possibly its most insidious form. Lukes derives this approach from Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony. Domination is not simply imposed from above but must be won through the subordinated groups’ consent to the cultural domination they believe will serve their own interests. It works through a naturalized “common sense.” At the same time, Lukes is not merely interested in the origins of domination in the common sense shared by the subordinate. Rather, as a philosopher of liberal democracy, he sees the purpose of power analysis as being connected to what this tells us about individual autonomy or actual freedom ( Lukes, 1977 ) or, in a more structural fashion, how structures “shape fields of possibility” for agents, as Hayward (2000 , p. 9) puts it. The more material component of this structural analysis has inspired the approaches in international political economy (IPE) taken up in this subsection; the intersubjective mobilization bias and endogenization of identity and interest formation will be the subject in the final major section “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes: Social Recognition, Technologies of Government, and Performativity ”.

In IR, there have been several attempts to understand power beyond dyadic relations and bargaining by reaching out to a structural level of power (for the following, see Guzzini, 1993 ). Some of them are still very much in line with Bachrach and Baratz’s approach of seeing power not only in direct confrontation but also in indirect agenda setting, yet applied here more fundamentally to the rules of the game. Thus Stephen Krasner’s use of “meta-power” in his Structural Conflict refers to developing countries’ use of institutions and regimes not just as a lever against powerful states but also as a way to affect the rules of global liberalism. “Relational power refers to the ability to change outcomes or affect the behavior of others within a given regime. Meta-power refers to the ability to change the rules of the game” ( Krasner, 1985 , p. 14).

Susan Strange’s take on power overlaps to some extent but goes further. She uses structural power to refer to the increasing diffusion of international power, in both its effects and its origins, due to the increasing transnationalization of non-territorially linked networks. Structural power is, on the one hand, a concept similar to Krasner’s intentional meta-power: The ability to shape the structures of security, finance, production and knowledge ( Strange, 1985 , p. 15). Here, power is structural because it has an indirect diffusion via structures, that is, because of its diffused effects. On the other hand, it is structural because it refers to the increasingly diffused sources and agents that contribute to the functioning of the global political economy ( Strange, 1988 ). Taken together, the provision of global functions appears as the result of an interplay of deliberate and unintended effects of decisions and nondecisions made by governments and other actors. The international system appears as if run by a “transnational empire” whose exact center is difficult to locate because it is not tied to a specific territory, but whose main base is with actors in the United States ( Strange, 1989 ). A more vertical theory of domination reappears in this specific asymmetry: Even though actors in the United States might not always intend or be able to control the effects of their actions, the international structures are set up in a way that decisions in some countries are systematically tied to, as well as can fundamentally affect, actors in the same and other countries. This becomes visible when looking at power relations not from the standpoint of the power holder and intended action or intended effects, rather from the receiving side, where neither matters primarily. Whereas Krasner focused on the hidden power of the weak, Strange emphasizes the tacit power of the strong.

Lukes’s focus on autonomy is echoed in the emphasis on questions of in/dependence by dependency and Gramscian scholars. For Stephen Gill and David Law, structural power refers to “material and normative aspects, such that patterns of incentives and constraints are systematically created” ( Gill & Law, 1988 , p. 73). This clearly defines a form of impersonal power, where the impersonal material setting is nearly synonymous with the functioning of markets, and the normative setting corresponds to a form of Gramsci’s historic bloc ( Cox, 1981 , 1983 ). As a result, contemporary world politics is seen as a Pax Americana in which the analysis of transnational elites plays a major role for understanding domination ( Van der Pijl, 1998 ). The view from the periphery is central for dependency scholars. Autonomy in international relations is often translated in terms of sovereignty, yet another power-related concept. Dependency theories stem from the awareness that formal sovereignty did not bring much control for many countries in the Global South of their political processes ( O’Donnell, 1973 ) and their class formation and “associated-dependent” ( Cardoso & Faletto, 1979 ) or “crippled” economic structures ( Senghaas, 1982 ), where the structural effects of global capitalism rules through the workings of states and firms ( Dos Santos, 1970 ).

It is not by coincidence that most of these approaches are from what came to be called IPE in the late 1970s. They attribute power to nonstate actors and, indeed, to structures like global capitalism. By doing so, they politicize economic relations whose effects are not God-given or natural but the outcome of political struggles—struggles whose domination effects are left unseen in bargaining power approaches ( Caporaso, 1978 ). In this way, IPE is not just about international economic relations; its focus on structural features of domination redefines the realm of world politics itself.

Yet, while these approaches undoubtedly enrich power analysis by including indirect institutional, non-intentional, and impersonal practices and processes, they also risk overloading the single concept of power in the analysis when trying to keep power as the main explanatory variable ( Guzzini, 1993 ). William Riker distinguished between power concepts informed either by necessary and sufficient or by recipe-like (manipulative) kinds of causality ( Riker, 1964 , pp. 346–348), or, put differently, power concepts driven by analyzing either outcomes or agency. Baldwin, following a manipulative idea of power, needed to heavily qualify the situational context to keep the causal link between certain policy instruments and their effect, that is, power as influence, with the problem that such approaches tend to ignore non-manipulative factors in the analysis of power and domination. Structural power concepts include them, but then they tend toward a necessary and sufficient explanation in which all that affects the asymmetrical outcome is not just related to power but is included in the concept of power itself, as if the whole analysis of power were to be done by the factor/variable of power.

This raises a series of broader concerns for understanding power. First, it is clear that power needs to be disentangled from the potential tautology of being both resources and their effects. Indeed, it is better thought neither as a resource nor as an event (influence) but as a disposition, that is, a capacity to effect ( Morriss, 1987/2002 ) that does not need to be realized to exist. Second, it seems that reducing political theory to explanatory theory played a bad trick: The phenomenon of power in its many ramifications gets shoehorned into power as a central explanatory variable that is becoming the wider and more encompassing the more the analysis wishes to take the seemingly endless list of factors into account to understand political order. That invites a strategy of decoupling the analysis of power relations and the concept of power: More factors than power may enter the analysis of power relations ( Guzzini, 1993 ). But it could also imply something more fundamental, namely, that power is not to be used as a causal explanatory variable at all. In this context, Peter Morriss writes that power statements “ summarise observations; they do not explain them” ( Morriss, 1987/2002 , p. 44, emphasis in the original). Put differently, if it were to be used in explanations, the underlying vision of causality would have to be altered; a more dispositional understanding of causation in the social world would allow power a place in explanatory theories that would turn multifinal or indeterminate ( Guzzini, 2017b ) and which would be applicable to both agential and structural effects. Also here, the concept/factor of power would not exhaust all there is to say about power relations.

The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes: Social Recognition, Technologies of Government, and Performativity

So far, power has been understood either as an agency concept that focuses on agent dispositions, or as asymmetrical effects of action in social relations, or as dispositions of structures, which systematically mobilize biases, dis/empower agents materially, authorize their acts, and make certain actions un/thinkable in the first place. The rise of constructivism and post-structuralism and the establishment of international political sociology (IPS) pushes power analysis to take these relational and constitutive processes a step further. What distinguishes these approaches to power in IR is the different underlying process ontology and a social relationism that “presumes a non-essentialist view of social reality” ( Bially Mattern, 2008 , p. 696). A relational ontology takes its starting point not from units as fixed items that then interact, but from the relations through which their actual properties are continuously constituted (for IR, see Guillaume, 2007 ; Jackson & Nexon, 1999 ; Qin, 2018 ). The analysis focuses on the profoundly political processes that constitute subjects, their identities, as well as material and intersubjective contexts, that is, “how the world is made up,” in which power appears as an emergent property of such relations and processes ( Berenskoetter, 2007 , p. 15). This ontological shift characterizes three different research agendas in contemporary power analysis.

A first research line reframes the understanding of power in a more sociological analysis through a theory of action that is no longer utilitarian but based on the fundamental role of social recognition. The analysis of power is based on a certain vision of human nature, in that humans are viewed as profoundly social, their very identity constituted through the multiple spheres of recognition in which they live. This means, however, that power does not come out of a given drive that finds its expression in asymmetrical social interaction but resides in the constitutive processes that make up the identity of international actors and “govern” the practices that define membership and status in international society.

Second, the Foucauldian lineage of power analysis connects power analysis back to political theory. There, rather than seeing in the evaporation of agency control a sign of diminishing power, it looks at the mechanisms that keep the order together, or the “technologies of government,” where government is to be understood as all that which provides political order.

Finally, a third research line, often informed by the previous two, deals with the understanding of power when connected to the idea of the construction of social reality. There, power analysis is tied to the study of performativity, that is, the way discursive practices help create the subject they presuppose, as is prominent, for instance, in feminist theories and in the study of reflexivity, that is, the interaction between our knowledge and the social world. Perhaps unexpectedly, it is this line that connects power analysis back to the world of diplomatic and other international practice because it looks at the social conventions that establish proxies for power and the power of those conventions in world politics.

Having connected explanatory theories with both political theory and practice, this can be seen as a return to the initial realist concern with the nature of politics and order. It surely improves on the links between the three domains. But it risks repeating a realist fallacy. Whereas it is arguably correct to see power always connected to politics, not all politics is always connected or reducible to power. Seeing power not only as coercive but also productive should neither invite one to reduce all politics to it nor to turn power into the metaphysical prime mover of all things political.

The Power Politics of Recognition and Identity

As mentioned, IPS is a second answer to the attempt to theorize domination not reducible to a theory of action. In this tradition, power in world politics is not about steering capacity and agent influence. It is about the informal and often tacit ways in which order and hierarchy (stratification) is produced. Rather than seeing in soft and normative power simply mechanisms of institutionalization and socialization, it sees in them identity-constituting processes that end up constituting the borders of international society and its authorized members.

In a first research agenda in IPS, power is framed not within a utilitarian theory of action but in a social theory of recognition ( Pizzorno, 2007 , 2008 ). Using recognition for theorizing action and society can be derived from a series of sociological traditions, such as from Mead (1934) and Schutz (1964) to Berger and Luckmann (1966) , from Ricoeur (2004) , or from different post-Hegelian traditions ( Honneth, 1992 , 2010 ; Taylor, 1989 , 1992 ) and has informed IR scholars ever since the sociological turn (e.g., Ringmar, 1996 , 2002 ). There are two social theories of recognition that have been prominent in the rethinking of power relations in IR: Bourdieu’s field theory and Goffman’s symbolic interactionism, in particular his approach to stigma.

Bourdieu’s is still primarily a theory of domination organized around three fundamental concepts: habitus, practice, and field, which constitute each other (for a succinct presentation, see Guzzini, 2000 , pp. 164–169; Leander, 2008 ). Bourdieu’s concept of capital is the closest to the concept of power, sometimes used interchangeably. But it is only one element in the more general theory and analysis of domination (for a more detailed analysis, see Bigo, 2011 ; Guzzini, 2013c ). For the present purpose, it is important to stress Bourdieu’s relational understanding of power that is closely tied to phenomena of recognition. Hierarchies in fields are constituted by the distribution of capitals that are specifically relevant to the field. As previous relational approaches to power, Bourdieu’s theory of capital is relational in that it is never only in the material or ideational resource itself, but in the cognition and recognition it encounters in agents sharing the field and constantly negotiating their status within the field. Yet Bourdieu adds a further intersubjective component because his relational analysis of power insists on the complicity, or as he sometimes prefers to call it, the connivance, that exists between the dominating and the dominated. For this, he mobilizes a theory of symbolic action and symbolic power. Symbolic capital is the form that any capital will take if it is recognized in a strong sense, that is, perceived through those very conceptual categories that are, however, themselves informed by the distribution of capitals in the field ( Bourdieu, 1994 , pp. 117, 161). “Doxic subordination” is hence the effect of this symbolic violence, a subordination that is neither the result of coercion or asymmetrical interdependence nor of conscious consent, let alone a social contract, but of a mis(re)cognition ( méconnaissance ). It is a symbolic, and hence most effective, form of power. It is based on the unconscious adjustment of subjective structures (categories of perception) to objective structures. And so, according to Bourdieu, the analysis of “doxic acceptance” is the “true fundament of a realist theory of domination and politics” ( Bourdieu with Wacquant, 1992 , p. 143, my translation).

The initial usage of Bourdieu in IR had applied such misrecognition to the field of world politics itself, indeed to its very constitutive practices as applied by its realist elite. From early on, Richard Ashley tied the understanding of power to a social theory based on how relations and recognition constitute agency ( Ashley, 1984 , p. 259). Ashley tried to understand the specificity of international governance by using Bourdieu’s phrase of the “conductorless orchestration of collective action and improvisations” ( Ashley, 1989 , p. 255). He argued that, despite realist claims to the contrary, there is an international community under anarchy—and that it exists in the very realists who deny its existence ( Ashley, 1987 ). This community is all the more powerful in the international system as its theoretical self-description conceals its very existence by informing the common sense, shared in particular among practitioners: the power of the common sense.

In IR, a Bourdieusian analysis of how such recognition and misrecognition empowers certain agents has been applied to the study of international elites and the constitution of certain (expert) fields (e.g., Bigo, 1996 ). Anna Leander has shown how, in the military field, commercial actors are not just empowered in a trivial sense by having become more prominent, but how misrecognition has endowed them with epistemic power ( Leander, 2005 , pp. 811–812)—Bourdieu calls it épistémocratique ( Bourdieu, 2000 , p. 100)—that locks the field (temporarily) into a new doxa ( Leander, 2011 ). This doxa authorizing arguments and turning symbolic the capital of commercial agents provides, in turn, a vision and division of the worlds that “categorically” preempts ways to press for the accountability of commercial security forces ( Leander, 2010 ). Similar Bourdieu-inspired power analyses have focused on the “doxic battles” ( Berling, 2012 ; Senn & Elhardt, 2013 ) or the “never-ending struggle for recognition as competent in a given practice” ( Adler-Nissen & Pouliot, 2014 , p. 894). Such struggles are always embedded in the logic of practice that constitutes the field: Actors try to win a game whose rules they accept by playing it. Sending (2015) combines these approaches by showing how authority is not given to an actor but is the outcome of a continuous competition for recognition. The constituted authority defines, in turn, what is to be governed, how, and why. Consequently, power phenomena enter this type of analysis twice: Hierarchies within fields are a power phenomenon in themselves while being constituted by the power politics in the practices of recognition.

Bourdieu’s (1989) analysis of symbolic power is closely connected to his concern with the power of classifications (the visions and divisions of the world). Classifications literally make up the social world by organizing the social space, and hence its hierarchy, and by interacting with agent identity and their body ( Bourdieu, 1980 , pp. 117–134). In the analysis of world politics, this has been picked up mainly through Goffman’s (1963) analysis of stigmatization. Ayşe Zarakol (2011 , 2014 ) shows how Turkey’s, Japan’s, and Russia’s integration into the norms of (initially European) international society interacts with their state identity. Stigmatization is a process constitutive of international society, its hierarchy, and its inclusions or exclusions. At the same time, any state recognized as not yet normal or inferior in international society will experience ontological insecurity in the state’s self-understandings. Consequently, all action is necessarily informed by stigma-coping mechanisms, defiantly accepting, negotiating, or rejecting the stigma, but never being able to avoid it (see also Adler-Nissen, 2014 ).

Power practices understood through their interaction with identity processes are also fundamental for Janice Bially Mattern’s concept of “representational force” ( Bially Mattern, 2001 , 2005a , 2005b ). If identity is crucial for interest formation, then it is only a small step to analyzing how diplomatic practices, intended or not, can end up blackmailing actors by taking profit from contradictions in another actor’s self-understandings or between its action and self-representation.

The social ontology of this approach where the other is part of the self, and where action is driven by the need for recognition, thus gives rise to different practices and processes of domination.

Technologies of Government

Foucault reached the analysis of power in IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Ashley & Walker, 1990 ; DuBois, 1991 ; Keeley, 1990 ; Manzo, 1992 ). Foucault’s political theory revises Weber, and his empirical analysis translates Goffmanian sensibilities into a study of discourses and performativity, where discursive practices help create the subject they presuppose. The Weberian lineage is most visible in Foucault’s political theory, which can be seen as a new take on Weber’s stählernes Gehäuse ( Weber, 1904–1920/2016 , p. 171), initially translated as “Iron Cage,” where the development of (Western) capitalism and rationalism created a new modern subject, both emancipated and curtailed. It is the answer to a conservative paradox in modernity: How can the emancipation and empowerment of the citizen lead to more order and control in modern societies?

Here, Foucault develops a dual analysis of modern government. On the one hand, it analyzes the interaction between “regimes of truth” and order, that is, the way government is increasingly a set of practices based on knowledge to administer public and private life, using general “stat(e)”istics and offering services on their base. On the other hand, in a more Goffmanian vein, it looks at the way these regimes of truth, be it in medicine, psychology, education, penal law, and so forth, establish the “normal” and “deviant,” classifications that interact with the subjects who implicitly control themselves by “identifying” with the expectations implied in such classifications. Government consists in constituting the subject through which, in turn, it achieves order (e.g., Foucault, 1975 , p. 223ff.). A branch of postcolonial studies took its inspiration from Foucault to understand how imperial knowledge, for instance in the form of “Orientalism,” constituted the colonial “other” as a “lamentably alien” subject in the first place, making it governable, legitimating its governance, within which the subaltern participates in its own subjugation ( Said, 1979/2003 , respectively at pp. 94, 97, 207 (quote), 325).

It is not fortuitous that Foucault’s analysis of power comes in terms of “government,” which is also a semantic component of the French pouvoir (and not puissance ). Its focus is on the changing mechanisms and technologies in the provision of political order. It shares this focus on order with classical realists but takes a completely different approach. It does not base its analysis in the human lust for power or the inevitable clash of wills, all given before the analysis. The ubiquity of power is not to be found in the struggle for resources that define human relations, but in the impersonal processes that constitute the subjects and their relations in the first place ( Brown & Scott, 2014 ).

Such an approach to government makes the study of world governance its most obvious field in IR. And yet, such study has been mainly conducted in a Weberian way within neoliberal institutionalism (for a comprehensive reconstruction, see Zürn, 2018 ). This school tends to think governance mainly in terms of agency (who governs?), scope (what?), and normative content (for what?), raising issues of the various networks of actions, their steering capacity, and their legitimacy and contestation. Foucauldian approaches see governance constituted by its mechanisms (how?) (for a discussion of these four problematiques of governance, see Guzzini, 2012 ), be they the political economy of populations, the constitution of insurance and risk management ( Lobo-Guerrero, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ), or, indeed, the governmentality constituted by the increasing globalization of the fields of practice within which subjects subject themselves to varied “techniques of the self” ( Bayart, 2004 ). It is through the analysis of those rationalities of government that one can understand agency and scope in the first place.

Such a focus on modes and mechanisms problematizes governance differently. First, it does not assume a public realm (the states), markets, and civil society as something given prior to analysis, but studies how liberal rationalities of order have diffused and enmeshed all of them, producing hybrid authority (for a more IPE-inspired analysis, see Graz, 2019 ). Firms have to comply with corporate social responsibility and the state apparatus to become efficient in terms of new public management. By inventing new indices of productivity, such neoliberal practices constitute the public realm as a firm-like actor in the first place. And order is achieved through ever-new standards and accounting devices that work through their very acceptance by, for example, governments that need to be rendered “accountable” in such a way ( Fougner, 2008 ; Löwenheim, 2008 ).

For the same reason, Foucauldian analysis of nongovernmental organizations insists that, rather than seeing in this global civil society an anti-power or new power, “it is it is an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government” ( Neumann & Sending, 2010 , pp. 5, 17, 115; emphasis in the original). Rather than comparing the relative power for the assessment of rank and hierarchy, an analysis of governmentality concentrates on the new mechanisms through which (self-)regulated behavior, and hence order, is achieved. And here, nongovernmental organizations are not necessarily a barrier to government located out there with some hegemonic actors; they are themselves, perhaps unwittingly, part of it ( Hynek, 2008 ; Lipschutz, 2005 ; in a less Foucauldian vein, see Bartelson, 2006 ).

Power as Convention: Performative and Reflexive Power Analysis

IPS reconnects not only with the political theory of the nature of order and government but also with the practical concern of its use in world politics. Classical realists plead for prudence in the always indeterminate assessment of power to deal with “the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness” ( Kissinger, 1957 , p. 206). Akin to previous traditions in peace research, IPS scholars invite practitioners to reflect and potentially counter the discourses and often self-fulfilling processes that constitute and perpetuate social facts. It does not recoil, as classical realists did, from drawing out the implications of the conventional nature of international politics. Confronted with the missing fungibility of resources and the unavailable objective measure of power, Hedley Bull merely declared that an “overall” concept of power used for comparisons is “one we cannot do without” ( Bull, 1977 , p. 114) and pursued the analysis. IPS was to follow up on who “we” is.

For while there is no objective measure of power, there are social conventions to measure power. The understanding of power is not established by the observer, but by the actor. It becomes a social convention. Diplomats must first agree on what counts before they can start counting ( Guzzini, 1998 , p. 231). And those conventions are, hence the effect of negotiations within the diplomatic field and its processes of recognition and, in turn, constitute technologies of government themselves. Understandings of power inform practices and vice versa. Discourses of power are both performative in that they intervene in the social world and reflexive in that such practices re-affect those discourses.

This practical component of power has evolved with political discourse, at least in Western traditions. There are two prominent reasons why practitioners cannot do without an overall concept of power, namely the link of power to responsibility and the conventions of hierarchy that tie rank or status to power.

In our political discourse, the notion of power is attached to the idea of the “art of the possible,” identifying agency and attributing responsibility ( Connolly, 1974 , chap. 3). If there were no power, nothing could be done, and no one could be blamed for it. Therefore, re-conceptualizations of power, both among observers and practitioners, often have the purpose of widening what falls into the realm of power in order to attribute agency and responsibility. Things were not inevitable; not doing anything about it requires public justification. Here the ontological stance of the entire section meets a purpose of power analysis. An ontology that focuses on the constitution of things historicizes and denaturalizes issues ( Hacking, 1999 , pp. 6–7). And in showing how the present was not inevitable, it drags into the open the domination that goes into, as well as the modes of legitimation that follow, social facts. For instance, attributing power to the social fact of gender and the dispositions sedimented in gender scripts denaturalizes their role in the existing sexual stratification and in its reproduction. In short, in at least Western political discourse, attributing power politicizes issues ( Guzzini, 2000 , 2005 ; for an early statement, see Frei, 1969 ).

A second reason why diplomats cannot do without the overall concept of power is the established convention of organizing international society according to different strata, where “great powers” have special responsibilities but also privileges, the most important being “exemptionalism” and impunity. Here, rules, which apply to all others, may apply to them only at their discretion. To establish this special status, proxies of power are agreed to. As in Bourdieu’s field of power, where the conversion rates between different forms of capital are (socially) established ( Bourdieu, 1994 , p. 56), the overall hierarchy is the result of an ongoing fight to establish the rates of convertibility and hence hierarchy of capitals and social groups. It is the struggle for the “dominating principle of domination” ( Bourdieu, 1994 , p. 34).

This interaction between our conventions of what counts as power and political practice, be it rank or behavior, works both ways. Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power was meant not only to describe international relations but also to influence them. If all actors agreed on this understanding of power for attributing rank, then political competition would be about movies and universities, not military bases and economic exploitation. The understanding of power, if shared, changes social reality, here the very nature of world politics. In reverse, countries who wish to influence the conventions can also do this through their acts and their recognition. This is only logical for an actor trying to foster a convention for proxies of power that fit its profile. When Russia privileges hard power and its exercise, downplaying economic welfare or human rights and inciting behavior that strengthens this understanding, it influences the conventions to its benefit. The more others react in kind, the better. One of the reasons Russia is so keen on its “sphere of influence” is that such a sphere allows it to do things that otherwise would be forbidden. And it makes Russia equal to others that claim such a sphere (for instance, the Western Hemisphere for the United States). And precisely because international society knows that impunity is a proxy for rank, it applies economic sanctions and other measures. They are symbolic means in that they are not meant to return matters to the status quo. Yet they are very important ones, expressing a refusal to accept someone as a member of that limited club that has discretion in applying social rules. Obviously, such discretion and acceptance of impunity as a proxy for rank can only thrive when it is shared as a “gentlemen’s agreement” within the club, as during colonial times.

Even if careful scholarly discussion can discard some conceptualizations of power, there is no one root concept that one can unravel simply by digging deeper. Concepts derive their meanings from the theories in which they are embedded, like words in a language, and meet there the meta-theoretical or normative divides that plague and enrich our theorizing. Power is particularly complicated because it is a concept deemed important not only across different explanatory theories, with their underlying and conflicting ontologies, but also across different domains from philosophy to the lifeworld of the practitioner. It is perhaps not surprising that the realist tradition, in IR and elsewhere, has focused on power as a privileged way to link these three domains. This may indeed be one of its defining characteristics.

Initially, realist writings combined the domains of political theory, centered on the understanding of order in the polity, with the domain of explanatory theory by assuming that, in the absence of a genuine world polity, the analysis of capabilities and influence was all there could be and a political practice based on power and prudence. Yet having reduced much of power analysis to the disciplinary expectations of a U.S. social science, in particular political theory fell by the wayside. Liberal and structural scholars exposed the weaknesses in realist power analysis, from the fungibility assumption to the double link between agent resources to influence, and from there to a balance of power, which subsumed domination under action. They redefined the causal (or not) role for power, be it at the agent or the structural level. Finally, with the post-structuralist and constructivist turn, the analysis of power returns to the links between the three domains of ontology, understanding/explanation, and practice through the analysis of the power in the processes that constitute social facts and hierarchical subject positions.

Yet, what all these approaches risk is falling into the trap of a realist fallacy. It may well be that power is intrinsically connected to politics and the political, but not all politics can be reduced to power. Like geopolitical thinkers before (for a critique, see Aron, 1976 ), Foucault has reversed Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is but the prolongation of politics by other means, with the effect of making war the default position of the political. 2 But this can hardly account for all conceptions (and some would add for the reality) of politics. Hannah Arendt, for instance, a thinker close to the realist tradition for not propping her theory up by a banister or for having any post-totalitarian illusion about human nature ( Isaac, 1992 ; Kalyvas, 2008 ; Strong, 2012 ), strongly criticized the tendency “to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion.” And while “power is indeed of the essence of all government,” she redefined power to make it the “opposite” of violence, namely the “human ability to act in concert” ( Arendt, 1969 , respectively at pp. 44, 51, 56, 44). Her take on politics offers a way to include solidarity into our understanding of politics ( Allen, 1998 , pp. 35–37, 2002 , p. 143). She unties the link between power and violence in the realist tradition, whether classical or Foucauldian, and hence the reduction of politics to the means or technologies of control. And, as any reflexive analysis immediately realizes, this geopolitical or Foucauldian reversal of Clausewitz is a self-fulfilling prophecy by producing what its discourses presuppose (see the analysis of “ontogenetic war” in Bartelson, 2018 ) and hence hardly prudent advice for political practice.

This fallacy is but an expression of the temptation that emanates from power for the understanding of world politics. It is the temptation of a shortcut, where the concept of power is conflated with the analysis of all power phenomena, from symbolic violence to dependency, and where the ontology of power encompasses all there is to the nature of politics. In doing so, power is either taken not seriously enough or too much so. Realist explanations in IR have not taken power seriously enough by having one of its most reductionist understandings, as witnessed by the many critiques and developments discussed in this article. At the same time, the political realist tradition has played a bad trick in that it tacitly smuggles into international theory the thinking of politics only in terms of struggle and domination. Power analysis in world politics needs to both apprehend power in its comprehensive nature for its analysis and qualify the role of power in its understanding of politics.

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1. Others would turn the argument around and claim that this diffusion is a new mechanism that constitutes the present form of governance, a rule without steering. See the section “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes .”

2. Given Foucault’s own critique of the reduction to command and obedience (as in the Weberian realist tradition) and his nominalist understanding of power ( Foucault, 1976 , pp. 113, 123), the reversal of Clausewitz is not uncritical and surely less so than in some later followers.

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Political Culture — Power, Legitimacy & Authority: Key Concepts in Understanding Politics

Power, Legitimacy & Authority: Key Concepts in Understanding Politics

• Categories: Political Culture Political Participation

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Published: May 17, 2022

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Table of contents

Introduction, bibliography.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character give him power. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned'? Get original essay - Abraham Lincoln

State of nature

Government formation, political issues, personal loyalty, my changing perspective.

• Beethnam, D., 2001. Political Legitmacy. pp. 107-116.
• Farell, L. O., 2019. Thomas Hobbs on the State on Nature , s.l.: s.n.
• Fieser, J. & Dowden, B., 1995. Internet enclyopedia of philophy; a Peer academic resorce. [Online]
• Available at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/
• [Accessed 2019 2019].
• Jacob Weisberg , 2008. Loyalty; It’s the most overrated virtue in politics.. [Online]
• Available at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/11/loyalty-is-the-most-overrated-virtue-in-politics.html
• Miller, D., 2003. Political Philosophy; A short intorduction. oxford : oxford press .
• Politics, 2002. Andrew heywood. 2nd ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan.
• Robinson, N., 2019. Justifying power: the legitimation of authority, s.l.: s.n.

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Power and Politics Relations Essay

Introduction, power and politics, conclusions.

In the world of the permanently developing international relations and competition in all the possible markets, it is of crucial importance for an organization to be able to control and supervise its growth and influence increase. Scholars argue that for this purpose an organization should have the considerable power and the ability to implement this power in practice, i. e. to conduct the reasonable organizational politics (Robbins & Judge, 2009, p. 179). At the same time, power and politics are directly related to the notions of the organizational leadership and management. To put it simply, the leadership is the major organizational power, while management is a toll of politics, i. e. leader’s ability to convince his/her employees in the rightness of the developmental direction chosen. The examples of such organizations as NASA and CIA illustrate these considerations rather vividly.

General Notions

First, it is necessary to consider the basic definitions. Thus, power, according to Resistance, Empowerment, Ethics (2009), is “the concept that encompasses the mechanisms, processes, and dispositions that try, not always successfully, to ensure that people act according to the rules of the game”. Drawing from this, power is associated with leadership as it is the task for the leader to exercise the power and lead an organization in a necessary direction of development. Further on, the leader should have the tools to influence the organization and be able to practically use its power. The process of implementation of power of the organization, and more specifically the instruments of this process, is called the politics of an organization. The relation of the concepts of power and politics to the purely internal organizational concepts of leadership and management is also obvious (McGinnis, 2009).

Organizational Management and Leadership

The concepts of the organizational management and leadership, in their turn, can be viewed as the two sides of a single phenomenon. Petrock (2009) views management and leadership as different stages of the single process of directing the organization’s development and identifies 18 principles of the successful management and putting the organizational leadership in accordance with the power and politics ideas. These principles include the need to set clear and measurable goals, demonstrate encouragement to the employees, establish the success assessment scale, and face the consequences of the management and leadership decisions (Petrock, 2009).

The example of NASA illustrates what the poor organizational management resulting from the lack of conformity between the organizational power and politics can lead to. The 1986 Shuttle Challenger accident that took lives of the seven crew member ended up the long chain of NASA management problems. The latter included the great number of contractors for the Challenger project and the hard pressure over NASA to cope with all construction works in time and within the limits of the given project budget (ACW, 2009). As a result, low quality equipment was produced for challenger, which led to the tragic shuttle explosion. If considered from organizational power and politics perspective, this case presents the example of the lack of organizational power and inability of NASA to carry out politics aimed at meeting the safety requirements rather than contractors’ financial demands. Possibly, NASA lacked the strong leadership in the situation and its organizational management was insufficient to keep track of achieving the goal of Challenger flight. The principles of power and politics were ignored by NASA in the case and this led to the failure of the whole project.

The example of the CIA organizational management and exercising its power through the strong and consistent politics illustrates how successful leadership results in the proper power and politics balance in an organization. The 1962 struggle between CIA and USAF over the leadership in Cuba missile systems over flight ended up by CIA carrying the project out (ACW, 2009). All the disputes with USAF were solved shortly by the CIA leadership and organizational management’s firm position in the issue. Therefore, CIA power was properly exercised through the respective politics of non-compromising. The power and politics thus manifested themselves as the basic principles of organizational management and leadership. In the CIA case, the full compliance to the above mentioned principles of management/leadership can be seen. The CIA set the goal and the ways of its achievement. USAF was an obstacle for the goal achievement process, so the CIA had to implement its power and to eliminate the obstacle through its politics. Finally, the solution of Cuba missile crisis by CIA was the result of the fully coordinated organizational management and leadership.

To conclude, it is obvious that to reach its goals and develop an organization should have the properly structured management and leadership conforming to the organizational power and politics characteristics. Power and politics are related to the management and leadership as the equally important aspects of the organizational development. The example of NASA and CIA illustrate the outcomes of the situations of conformity and non-conformity or power and politics to the organizational management and leadership characteristics.

ACW. (2009). Leveraging Power and Politics. Web.

McGinnis, P. (2009). Power and Politics in an Organization. Web.

Petrock, F. (2009). Changing Organizational Climate: A Six Pack of Leadership Practices. Web.

Resistance, empowerment, ethics. (2009). Managing power and politics in organizations. Web.

Robbins, S. & Judge, T. (2009). Organizational behavior (13th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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1.2: The Nature of Political Power

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“There’s not enough understanding of the realities of power. In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.”

–Journalist Robert Caro (1)

All definitions of politics include the struggle over resources, rights, or privileges. Lasswell called this struggle 'who gets what', which ties into power. At the most basic level, power is the ability to prevail in struggles over resources, rights, or privileges. Generally, power is not evenly distributed in a polity. Some members of a polity are more likely to succeed in their struggle than are others. When some actors have a historical track record of prevailing in political struggles, it can warp the very system itself in ways that allow those actors to continue to prevail.

The First Dimension of Power: Formal Decision Making

Early 20th Century political and social theorists focused on the results of formal decision-making , which we will call the first dimension of power . In the 1961 book Who Governs , political theorist Robert Dahl argued that local elites from a variety of interests compete with each other for decision-making power and that these elites often compromise to reach a result. His focus was on outcomes: which decision was eventually reached on each issue?

In an earlier journal article, Dahl argued that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that he would not otherwise do.” (2) This definition would also apply if A could prevent B from doing something that B wanted to do. For example, Congress (A) might get the president (B) to refrain from vetoing a bill that the president (B) disliked if it appeared very likely that Congress (A) would override the president’s (B) veto. The advantage of the first dimension of power is that it focuses on observable outcomes, making it easier for political scientists to analyze a given situation. But this advantage is also a disadvantage, for it compels us to focus on the obvious at the expense of more subtle manifestations of power.

The Second Dimension of Power: Mobilization of Bias

The second dimension of power is also often called the mobilization of bias . In 1962, political scientists Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz wrote their “Two Faces of Power” essay, which indicated that power is exercised in ways other than that described by Dahl. They argue that before we can look at the results of formal decision-making, we need to look at the mobilization of bias existing in the political system being analyzed. In other words, we should look at “the dominant values, the myths, and the established political procedures and rules of the game” as well as look at “which persons or groups . . . gain from the existing bias and which . . . are handicapped by it.” (3)

For example, Bachrach and Baratz describe that A can obviously force B to do something, but “power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A. To the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all practical purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in their resolution be seriously detrimental to A’s set of preferences.” (4)

Mobilization of bias occurs in a myriad of different ways. Powerful participants can set the agenda of what is considered an “important” political issue, or they can structure political institutions in ways that preserve their own interests or power, or they can arrange procedural rules to make it difficult for others to challenge the system. Ensuring that a decision is not reached means that A can prevent B from obtaining what B wants through no apparent act at all. If A can stack the rules of the political game so that B’s issues never get addressed, then A has won without ever having to make a decision openly.

The Third Dimension of Power: Preference Shaping

Political and social theorist Steven Lukes put forward a third dimension of power, also referred to as preference shaping . In his Power: A Radical View ( 1974), Lukes acknowledges that Bachrach and Baratz contributed immensely to our understanding of power. However, Lukes argues that both of the first two dimensions of power are based on the assumption of conflict, where A and B have different preferences on key issues. In the first dimension of power, A’s preferences win over B’s preferences in a formal decision-making setting—a city council vote, an executive decision, or a court ruling. In the second dimension, the rules of the game are arranged in such a way that A’s preferences either get preferential treatment in the decision-making process or B’s preferences never get heard in the first place.

But what if B has real interests and preferences that differ from A’s, but B is not even conscious of his own interests because of A’s power? This may occur because B has internalized A’s values as his own. Perhaps A controls the media to such an extent that B assumes that what is good for A is also good for B. Maybe A has so structured the educational system that B cannot conceive of the world being any different than the status quo , with A on top and B on the bottom of the class structure. Maybe B has been powerless for so long, that B has internalized the idea that she doesn’t deserve to get what she wants.

Analyzing an Issue Using the Three Dimensions of Power

The three dimensions of power can be visible on any number of political issues. For example, let’s say a bill comes before the U.S. Senate to tax very large estates (over $10 million) upon the owner’s death. A vote is held, and the bill is defeated with 44 senators supporting it and 56 senators opposing it. The first dimension of power is easy to see since the vote resulted in a clear decision: one side beat the other.

The second dimension of power is visible as well. The Senate has a set of rules and procedures that are stacked against this kind of bill . Because of the filibuster, the bill really needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, so the losers are even further from victory than the vote tally indicates. In addition, because Senators are predominantly white, white interests get privileged. And since whites are more likely to have large estates to pass to their children, a bill taxing those estates has an uphill road in the Senate.

What about the third dimension of power? Have preferences been shaped by elites? It’s clear that if one compares political debates from the early part of the twentieth century to that of today, you can see that wealthy interests have been able to get inordinate numbers of the middle class and poor people to stand up against the estate tax, because their perception has been shaped to believe it is a “death tax” that might affect them. An erroneous belief because most people are light years away from leaving assets anywhere close to $10 million to their heirs. It is also intentionally cultivated by elites and gives senators cover to vote against increasing the estate tax. (5)

A Guide to Spotting the Three Dimensions of Power

When examining any political struggle, use this guide to see if you can spot the three dimensions of power in action:

First Dimension of Power —Look for situations where people who have authority to directly impact the course of an issue have a say in making key decisions. Often, this takes the form of an actual legislative vote, executive command or veto, or court ruling, but other actions might fit into the first dimension as well. Also, look for nondecisions—decisions to not decide an issue, which typically benefits one side more than another.

Second Dimension of Power —Look for biases in the rules of the game and for procedures that favor one side over another. Do the rules of politics affect the struggle such that one side has higher hurdles to overcome? Look for people or groups whose stories are told by others, for those stories tend to be self-serving. Look for situations where one actor gets to tell the story of another actor.

Third Dimension of Power —Look for people who have had the wool pulled over their eyes, who are apparently acting against their own interests, or who take on the viewpoint of others. Look for people who possess resources and access to media or educational tools with which to manipulate attitudes and opinions. Are they able to use those resources or that access to shape the political preferences of other actors in the polity?

As you consider the three dimensions of power, keep in mind that they become progressively more difficult to detect. The first dimension of power is more visible and more common than the second, which is more visible and more common than the third.

1. Quoted in Chris McGreal, “Robert Caro: A Life with LBJ and the Pursuit of Power,” The Guardian . June 9, 2012.

2. Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, 1957. 201-15; quoted in Patrick Bernhagen, “Power: Making Sense of an Elusive Concept,” an unpublished manuscript. March 2002.

3. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review . 56 (4): 1962, pp. 947-952.

4. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review . 56 (4): 1962, pp. 947-952.

5. The “death tax” language is apparently the creation of the National Federation of Independent Business and Republican messaging consultant Frank Luntz. See Mark Abadi, “Republicans Say ‘Death Tax’ While Democrats Say ‘Estate Tax’—and There’s a Fascinating Reason Why,” BusinessInsider.com . October 9, 2017.

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Politics and Resistance As Power

• First Online: 13 September 2018

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Part of the book series: The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy ((PSTCD))

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This chapter seeks to reconceptualise our understanding of resistance in radical politics through the notion of power. Rejecting a romanticised view of resistance in radical politics, the author argues that resistant practices cannot operate outside of the network of power relations since they form a structural part of it. Through a critical juxtaposition of Michel Foucault’s and Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of politics and power, the author problematises the conventional understanding of power as something that is necessarily repressive and negative. Using Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct, the chapter further elucidates the circularity of power between extra-institutional resistance and institutional politics. It concludes that ruling and governing is an inescapable component of radicalising democracy against neoliberal governmentality.

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More recently, notable overtures have been made in the sociological study of social movements with calls to pay greater attention to the relationship between social movements and political parties (see, e.g., Goldstone 2003 ; Kriesi 2015 ). I will address this more concrete aspect of the relationship between resistance and institutional politics in Chap. 6 .

The debate on the relationship between vertical and horizontal forms of radical politics can also be framed in terms of the opposition between the politics of hegemony on one side and horizontal multitude on the other. Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis ( 2014 ) see the first camp as represented by political theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, and the latter by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Richard Day, John Holloway, Saul Newman, and Manuel Castels.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition . Republished. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Toplišek, A. (2019). Politics and Resistance As Power. In: Liberal Democracy in Crisis. The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97937-3_5

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Introductory essay

Written by the educators who created Cyber-Influence and Power, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in their field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around. Rebecca MacKinnon

Over the past 20 years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have transformed the globe, facilitating the international economic, political, and cultural connections and exchanges that are at the heart of contemporary globalization processes. The term ICT is broad in scope, encompassing both the technological infrastructure and products that facilitate the collection, storage, manipulation, and distribution of information in a variety of formats.

While there are many definitions of globalization, most would agree that the term refers to a variety of complex social processes that facilitate worldwide economic, cultural, and political connections and exchanges. The kinds of global connections ICTs give rise to mark a dramatic departure from the face-to-face, time and place dependent interactions that characterized communication throughout most of human history. ICTs have extended human interaction and increased our interconnectedness, making it possible for geographically dispersed people not only to share information at an ever-faster rate but also to organize and to take action in response to events occurring in places far from where they are physically situated.

While these complex webs of connections can facilitate positive collective action, they can also put us at risk. As TED speaker Ian Goldin observes, the complexity of our global connections creates a built-in fragility: What happens in one part of the world can very quickly affect everyone, everywhere.

The proliferation of ICTs and the new webs of social connections they engender have had profound political implications for governments, citizens, and non-state actors alike. Each of the TEDTalks featured in this course explore some of these implications, highlighting the connections and tensions between technology and politics. Some speakers focus primarily on how anti-authoritarian protesters use technology to convene and organize supporters, while others expose how authoritarian governments use technology to manipulate and control individuals and groups. When viewed together as a unit, the contrasting voices reveal that technology is a contested site through which political power is both exercised and resisted.

Technology as liberator

The liberating potential of technology is a powerful theme taken up by several TED speakers in Cyber-Influence and Power . Journalist and Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon, for example, begins her talk by playing the famous Orwell-inspired Apple advertisement from 1984. Apple created the ad to introduce Macintosh computers, but MacKinnon describes Apple's underlying narrative as follows: "technology created by innovative companies will set us all free." While MacKinnon examines this narrative with a critical eye, other TED speakers focus on the ways that ICTs can and do function positively as tools of social change, enabling citizens to challenge oppressive governments.

In a 2011 CNN interview, Egyptian protest leader, Google executive, and TED speaker Wael Ghonim claimed "if you want to free a society, just give them internet access. The young crowds are going to all go out and see and hear the unbiased media, see the truth about other nations and their own nation, and they are going to be able to communicate and collaborate together." (i). In this framework, the opportunities for global information sharing, borderless communication, and collaboration that ICTs make possible encourage the spread of democracy. As Ghonim argues, when citizens go online, they are likely to discover that their particular government's perspective is only one among many. Activists like Ghonim maintain that exposure to this online free exchange of ideas will make people less likely to accept government propaganda and more likely to challenge oppressive regimes.

A case in point is the controversy that erupted around Khaled Said, a young Egyptian man who died after being arrested by Egyptian police. The police claimed that Said suffocated when he attempted to swallow a bag of hashish; witnesses, however, reported that he was beaten to death by the police. Stories about the beating and photos of Said's disfigured body circulated widely in online communities, and Ghonim's Facebook group, titled "We are all Khaled Said," is widely credited with bringing attention to Said's death and fomenting the discontent that ultimately erupted in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, or what Ghonim refers to as "revolution 2.0."

Ghonim's Facebook group also illustrates how ICTs enable citizens to produce and broadcast information themselves. Many people already take for granted the ability to capture images and video via handheld devices and then upload that footage to platforms like YouTube. As TED speaker Clay Shirky points out, our ability to produce and widely distribute information constitutes a revolutionary change in media production and consumption patterns. The production of media has typically been very expensive and thus out of reach for most individuals; the average person was therefore primarily a consumer of media, reading books, listening to the radio, watching TV, going to movies, etc. Very few could independently publish their own books or create and distribute their own radio programs, television shows, or movies. ICTs have disrupted this configuration, putting media production in the hands of individual amateurs on a budget — or what Shirky refers to as members of "the former audience" — alongside the professionals backed by multi-billion dollar corporations. This "democratization of media" allows individuals to create massive amounts of information in a variety of formats and to distribute it almost instantly to a potentially global audience.

Shirky is especially interested in the Internet as "the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversations at the same time." This shift has important political implications. For example, in 2008 many Obama followers used Obama's own social networking site to express their unhappiness when the presidential candidate changed his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The outcry of his supporters did not force Obama to revert to his original position, but it did help him realize that he needed to address his supporters directly, acknowledging their disagreement on the issue and explaining his position. Shirky observes that this scenario was also notable because the Obama organization realized that "their role was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters." This tension between the use of technology in the service of the democratic impulse to convene citizens vs. the authoritarian impulse to control them runs throughout many of the TEDTalks in Cyber-Influence and Power.

A number of TED speakers explicitly examine the ways that ICTs give individual citizens the ability to document governmental abuses they witness and to upload this information to the Internet for a global audience. Thus, ICTs can empower citizens by giving them tools that can help keep their governments accountable. The former head of Al Jazeera and TED speaker Wadah Khanfar provides some very clear examples of the political power of technology in the hands of citizens. He describes how the revolution in Tunisia was delivered to the world via cell phones, cameras, and social media outlets, with the mainstream media relying on "citizen reporters" for details.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown's TEDTalk also highlights some of the ways citizens have used ICTs to keep their governments accountable. For example, Brown recounts how citizens in Zimbabwe used the cameras on their phones at polling places in order to discourage the Mugabe regime from engaging in electoral fraud. Similarly, Clay Shirky begins his TEDTalk with a discussion of how cameras on phones were used to combat voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election in the U.S. ICTs allowed citizens to be protectors of the democratic process, casting their individual votes but also, as Shirky observes, helping to "ensure the sanctity of the vote overall."

Technology as oppressor

While smart phones and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have arguably facilitated the overthrow of dictatorships in places like Tunisia and Egypt, lending credence to Gordon Brown's vision of technology as an engine of liberalism and pluralism, not everyone shares this view. As TED speaker and former religious extremist Maajid Nawaz points out, there is nothing inherently liberating about ICTs, given that they frequently are deployed to great effect by extremist organizations seeking social changes that are often inconsistent with democracy and human rights. Where once individual extremists might have felt isolated and alone, disconnected from like-minded people and thus unable to act in concert with others to pursue their agendas, ICTs allow them to connect with other extremists and to form communities around their ideas, narratives, and symbols.

Ian Goldin shares this concern, warning listeners about what he calls the "two Achilles heels of globalization": growing inequality and the fragility that is inherent in a complex integrated system. He points out that those who do not experience the benefits of globalization, who feel like they've been left out in one way or another, can potentially become incredibly dangerous. In a world where what happens in one place very quickly affects everyone else — and where technologies are getting ever smaller and more powerful — a single angry individual with access to technological resources has the potential to do more damage than ever before. The question becomes then, how do we manage the systemic risk inherent in today's technology-infused globalized world? According to Goldin, our current governance structures are "fossilized" and ill-equipped to deal with these issues.

Other critics of the notion that ICTs are inherently liberating point out that ICTs have been leveraged effectively by oppressive governments to solidify their own power and to manipulate, spy upon, and censor their citizens. Journalist and TED speaker Evgeny Morozov expresses scepticism about what he calls "iPod liberalism," or the belief that technology will necessarily lead to the fall of dictatorships and the emergence of democratic governments. Morozov uses the term "spinternet" to describe authoritarian governments' use of the Internet to provide their own "spin" on issues and events. Russia, China, and Iran, he argues, have all trained and paid bloggers to promote their ideological agendas in the online environment and/or or to attack people writing posts the government doesn't like in an effort to discredit them as spies or criminals who should not be trusted.

Morozov also points out that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are tools not only of revolutionaries but also of authoritarian governments who use them to gather open-source intelligence. "In the past," Morozov maintains, "it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. KGB...used to torture in order to get this data." Instead of focusing primarily on bringing Internet access and devices to the people in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, Morozov argues that we need to abandon our cyber-utopian assumptions and do more to actually empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs and other members of society, making sure that the "spinternet" does not prevent their voices from being heard.

The ICT Empowered Individual vs. The Nation State

In her TEDTalk "Let's Take Back the Internet," Rebecca MacKinnon argues that "the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and…the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us." It is clearly not a given, however, that governments, organizations, and individuals will use technology benevolently. Part of the responsibility of citizenship in the globalized information age then is to work to ensure that both governments and technologies "serve the world's peoples." However, there is considerable disagreement about what that might look like.

WikiLeaks spokesperson and TED speaker Julian Assange, for example, argues that government secrecy is inconsistent with democratic values and is ultimately about deceiving and manipulating rather than serving the world's people. Others maintain that governments need to be able to keep secrets about some topics in order to protect their citizens or to act effectively in response to crises, oppressive regimes, terrorist organizations, etc. While some view Assange's use of technology as a way to hold governments accountable and to increase transparency, others see this use of technology as a criminal act with the potential to both undermine stable democracies and put innocent lives in danger.

ICTs and global citizenship

While there are no easy answers to the global political questions raised by the proliferation of ICTs, there are relatively new approaches to the questions that look promising, including the emergence of individuals who see themselves as global citizens — people who participate in a global civil society that transcends national boundaries. Technology facilitates global citizens' ability to learn about global issues, to connect with others who care about similar issues, and to organize and act meaningfully in response. However, global citizens are also aware that technology in and of itself is no panacea, and that it can be used to manipulate and oppress.

Global citizens fight against oppressive uses of technology, often with technology. Technology helps them not only to participate in global conversations that affect us all but also to amplify the voices of those who have been marginalized or altogether missing from such conversations. Moreover, global citizens are those who are willing to grapple with large and complex issues that are truly global in scope and who attempt to chart a course forward that benefits all people, regardless of their locations around the globe.

Gordon Brown implicitly alludes to the importance of global citizenship when he states that we need a global ethic of fairness and responsibility to inform global problem-solving. Human rights, disease, development, security, terrorism, climate change, and poverty are among the issues that cannot be addressed successfully by any one nation alone. Individual actors (nation states, NGOs, etc.) can help, but a collective of actors, both state and non-state, is required. Brown suggests that we must combine the power of a global ethic with the power to communicate and organize globally in order for us to address effectively the world's most pressing issues.

Individuals and groups today are able to exert influence that is disproportionate to their numbers and the size of their arsenals through their use of "soft power" techniques, as TED speakers Joseph Nye and Shashi Tharoor observe. This is consistent with Maajid Nawaz's discussion of the power of symbols and narratives. Small groups can develop powerful narratives that help shape the views and actions of people around the world. While governments are far more accustomed to exerting power through military force, they might achieve their interests more effectively by implementing soft power strategies designed to convince others that they want the same things. According to Nye, replacing a "zero-sum" approach (you must lose in order for me to win) with a "positive-sum" one (we can both win) creates opportunities for collaboration, which is necessary if we are to begin to deal with problems that are global in scope.

Let's get started

Collectively, the TEDTalks in this course explore how ICTs are used by and against governments, citizens, activists, revolutionaries, extremists, and other political actors in efforts both to preserve and disrupt the status quo. They highlight the ways that ICTs have opened up new forms of communication and activism as well as how the much-hailed revolutionary power of ICTs can and has been co-opted by oppressive regimes to reassert their control.

By listening to the contrasting voices of this diverse group of TED speakers, which includes activists, journalists, professors, politicians, and a former member of an extremist organization, we can begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technology can be used both to facilitate and contest a wide variety of political movements. Global citizens who champion democracy would do well to explore these intersections among politics and technology, as understanding these connections is a necessary first step toward MacKinnon's laudable goal of building a world in which "government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around."

Let's begin our exploration of the intersections among politics and technology in today's globalized world with a TEDTalk from Ian Goldin, the first Director of the 21st Century School, Oxford University's think tank/research center. Goldin's talk will set the stage for us, exploring the integrated, complex, and technology rich global landscape upon which the political struggles for power examined by other TED speakers play out.

Navigating our global future

i. "Welcome to Revolution 2.0, Ghonim Says," CNN, February 9, 2011. http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/02/09/wael.ghonim.interview.cnn .

Relevant talks

Gordon Brown

Wiring a web for global good.

Clay Shirky

How social media can make history.

Wael Ghonim

Inside the egyptian revolution.

Wadah Khanfar

A historic moment in the arab world.

Evgeny Morozov

How the net aids dictatorships.

Maajid Nawaz

A global culture to fight extremism.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Let's take back the internet.

Julian Assange

Why the world needs wikileaks.

Global power shifts

Shashi Tharoor

Why nations should pursue soft power.

Your Article Library

Power of politics: meaning, types and sources of power.

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Power of Politics: Meaning, Types and Sources of Power!

The focal point of the study of political institutions is power and its uses. Although we think of the concept of power as being associated particularly with politics or so as to say political science, but it is, in fact, exists in all types of social relationships. For Foucault (1969), ‘power relationships are present in all aspects of society.

They go right down into the depths of society…. They are not localized in the relations between the state, and its citizens, or on the frontiers between classes’. All social actions involve power relationships whether it may be between employer and employee or between husband and wife (in patriarchal society). Thus, it is of fundamental importance for the sociology to study in its manifold ramifications.

Sociologists are concerned with social interactions among individuals and groups and more specifically, how individuals and groups achieve their ends as against those of others. In their study they take note of power as an important element that influences social behaviour. Sociologists are today concerned to analyse the diverse nature of power and that complexities it creates in human relationships, especially between state and society.

In the very simple language, power is the ability to get one’s way—even if it is based on bluff. It is the ability to exercise one’s will over others or, in other words, power is the ability of individuals or groups to make their own interests or concerns count, even when others resist.

It sometimes involves the direct use of force. Force is the actual or threatened use of coercion to impose one’s will on others. When a father slaps the child to prohibit certain acts, he is applying force. Some scholars have defined it that it necessarily involves overcoming another’s will.

To summarize, it may be said that ‘power is the ability of groups or individuals to assert themselves—sometimes, but not always—in opposition to the desires of others’. Many decisions are made without opposition because of the great power decision-makers wield.

According to Max Weber (1947), power is ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests’.

He further writes, positions of power can ’emerge from social relations in drawing room as well as in the market, from the rostrum of lecture hall as well as the command post of a regiment, from an erotic or charitable relationship as well as from scholarly discussion or athletics’. It plays a part in family (husband and wife) and school (teacher and the taught) relationship also.

Thus, for Weber, power is the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action. Alvin Genldner (1970) noted that power is, among other things, the ability to enforce one’s moral claims. The powerful can thus conventionalize their moral defaults.

Celebrated sociologist Anthony Giddens (1997) sees, ‘power as the ability to make a difference, to change things from what they would otherwise have been, as he puts it “transformative” capacity’. Power can be defined by saying that ‘A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests’. According to Steven Lukes (2005), power has three dimensions or faces: (1) decision-making, (2) non-decision-making, and (3) shaping desires.

For some social theorists, especially those linked to postmodernism, the very notion of large-scale macro structures of power has come under serious attack. For example, Foucault’s conception of power demands that we should approach it in a micro way, seeing power in all social relationships, and working in specific ways in all kinds of particular institutional settings—whether the prison or the clinic.

For Foucault, we must explore the intimate relationship between power and knowledge. Through his case studies of madness, medicine, prisons and sexuality, Foucault has highlighted the organization of knowledge and power. He argued that a new type of power, i.e., disciplinary power, has evolved during the 19th century.

It is concerned with the regulation, surveillance and government. Disciplinary power is exercised in prison, schools and places of work. Disciplinary power operates at the expense of individual freedom and choice. In his opinion, notions like ‘ruling class domination’ simply obscure the micro-realities of power.

Foucault’s ideas fit very well with the shift towards diverse non-economic political struggles such as feminists demonstrations about ‘control of bodies’. How far such conceptions of power/knowledge are useful as against the well-established approaches to power, such as Marxism, is a matter for debate among sociologists.

Types of Power :

Max Weber (1958) believed that there are three (not one) independent and equally important orders of power as under.

Economic power :

For Marx, economic power is the basis of all power, including political power. It is based upon an objective relationship to the modes of production, a group’s condition in the labour market, and its chances. Economic power refers to the measurement of the ability to control events by virtue of material advantage.

Social power :

It is based upon informal community opinion, family position, honour, prestige and patterns of consumption and lifestyles. Weber placed special emphasis on the importance of social power, which often takes priority over economic interests. Contemporary sociologists have also given importance to social status so much so that they sometimes seem to have underestimated the importance of political power.

Political power :

It is based upon the relationships to the legal structure, party affiliation and extensive bureaucracy. Political power is institutionalized in the form of large-scale government bureaucracies. One of the persistent ideas has been that they are controlled by elites, that is, small, select, privileged groups.

Political power concerns the activities of the states which is not confined to national boundaries. The networks of political power can stretch across countries and across the globe. Political power involves the power to tax and power to distribute resources to the citizens.

Besides, Weber’s types of power, there are a few other types also which are as under:

Knowledge power:

To Foucault (1969), power is intimately linked with knowledge. Power and knowledge produce one another. He saw knowledge as a means of ‘keeping tabs’ on people and controlling them.

Military power :

It involves the use of physical coercion. Warfare has always played a major role in politics. Modem mass military systems developed into bureaucratic organiza­tions and significantly changed the nature of organizing and fighting wars. According to Weber, few groups in society base their power purely on force or military might.

Ideological power :

It involves power over ideas and beliefs, for example, are communism, fascism and some varieties of nationalism. These types of ideologies are frequently oppositional to dominant institutions and play an important role in the organi­zation of devotees into sects and parties. According to Michael Mann (1986), there are two types of power, viz., distributional and collective.

Distributional power :

It is a power over others. It is the ability of individuals to get others to help them pursue their own goals. It is held by individuals.

Collective power :

It is exercised by social groups. It may be exercised by one social group over another.

Sources of Power :

There are three basic sources of power: force, influence and authority.

These are explained below:

As defined earlier, force is the actual (physical force) or threatened (latent force) use of coercion to impose one’s will on others. When leaders imprison or even execute political dissidents, they thus apply force. Often, however, sheer force accomplishes little. Although people can be physically restrained, they cannot be made to perform complicated tasks by force alone.

Influence :

It refers to the exercise of power through the process of persuasion. It is the ability to affect the decisions and actions of others. A citizen may change his or her position after listening a stirring speech at a rally by a political leader. This is an example of influence that how the efforts to persuade people can help in changing one’s opinion.

Authority :

It refers to power that has been institutionalized and is recognized by the people over whom it is exercised (Schaefer and Lamm, 1992). It is estab­lished to make decisions and order the actions of others. It is a form of legitimate power. Legitimacy means that those subject to a government’s authority consent to it (Giddens, 1997).

The people give to the ruler the authority to rule, and they obey willingly without the threat of force. We tend to obey the orders of police officer because we accept their right to have power over us in certain situations. Legitimate power is accepted as being rightfully exercised (for example, power of the king). Thus, sociologists distinguish power from authority.

Authority is an agreed-upon legitimate relationship of domination and subjugation. For example, when a decision is made through legitimate, recognized channels of government, the carrying out of that decision falls within the realm of authority. In brief, power is decision-making and authority is the right to make decisions, that is, legit­imate power.

Thus, there is a difference between authority and influence:

(1) Authority is an official right to make and enforce decisions, whereas influence is the ability to affect the actions of others apart from authority to do so;

(2) Authority stems from rank, whereas influence rests largely upon personal attributes; and

(3) Authority is based upon the status one holds, whereas influence is based upon the esteem one receives.

An admired institutional officer can have both authority and influence, whereas an unpopular officer has authority but little influence.

Types of Authority:

Max Weber (1922) has identified three t5T3es of authority as described below:

Traditional Authority:

It is the legitimate power conferred by custom, tradition or accepted practice. Traditional authority is ‘hallowed with time’, like that of a king, an established dynasty or a religious leader. It is based on an uncodified collective sense that it is proper and longstanding and should therefore be accepted as legitimate.

In patriarchal societies, the authority of husbands over wives or of father over his children is obeyed because it is the accepted practice. Similarly, a king or queen is accepted as ruler of a nation simply by virtue of inheriting the crown. For the traditional leader, authority rests in custom or tradition (inherited positions), and not in personal characteristics.

Legal—Rational Authority:

It is established in law or written regulations (formally enacted norms) that determine how the society will be governed. This is the form of authority found in workplaces, government, schools, colleges and most major social institutions.

Leaders derive their legal authority from the written rules and regulations of political systems. It is this type of authority that characterizes modem bureaucratic organizations. Rational authority rests in the leader’s legal right rather than in family or personal characteristics.

Charismatic Authority:

Weber also observed that power can be legitimized by the charisma of an individual. Charisma is ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary man and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’ (Weber, 1922).

Charisma is, therefore, unusual spontaneous and creative of new movements and new structures. The term ‘charismatic authority’ refers to the power made legitimate by the exceptional personal characteristics of the leader, such as heroism, mysticism, revelations, or magic.

Charisma allows a person to lead or inspire without relying on set rules or traditions. Charismatic authority is generated by the personality and the myths that surround the individual, like that of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Hitler and Pandit Nehru.

A charismatic leader attracts followers because they judge him or her to be particular wise or capable. It may be pertinent to mention that the charismatic authority is socially bestowed and may be withdrawn when the leader is no longer regarded as extraordinary.

Weber used traditional, legal—rational and charismatic authority as ideal types and as such are usually not found in their pure form in any given situation. In reality, particular leaders and political systems combine elements of two or more of these forms.

To Weber’s three major types of authority, some contemporary scholars have added a fourth type, professional authority (authority based on expertise). The authority of physicians or atomic scien­tists, botanists, etc., is the example of this fourth type of authority.

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When we talk about power in everyday life, we assume everyone has the same understanding of the word. But in politics, the term ‘power’ can be highly ambiguous, both in terms of definition and the ability to accurately measure the power of states or individuals. In this article, we will discuss what we mean by power in politics. 

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When we talk about power in everyday life, we assume everyone has the same understanding of the word. But in politics, the term ‘power’ can be highly ambiguous, both in terms of definition and the ability to accurately measure the power of states or individuals. In this article, we will discuss what we mean by power in politics.

Political power definition

Before a political power definition, we first need to define ‘power’ as a concept.

The ability to make a state or person act or think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted or thought otherwise and shape the course of events.

Political power is composed of three components:

Authority: The ability to exercise power through decision making, giving orders, or the ability of others to comply with demands

Legitimacy : When citizens recognise a leader's right to exercise power over them (when citizens recognise state authority)

Sovereignty: Refers to the highest level of power that cannot be overruled (when a state government/individual has legitimacy and authority)

Today, 195 countries in the world have state sovereignty . There is no higher power in the international system than state sovereignty , meaning there are 195 states that possess political power. The extent of each state's political power differs based on the three concepts of powe r and the three dimensions of power .

Power in politics and governance

The three concepts and dimensions of power are separate but closely related mechanisms which operate alongside each other in the international system. Together these mechanisms affect the balance of power in politics and governance.

Three Concepts of Power

Power in terms of capabilities/attributes - What the state possesses and how it can use them on the international stage. For example, the population and geographical size of a state, its military capabilities, its natural resources, its economic wealth, the efficiency of its government, leadership, infrastructure, etc. Pretty much anything a state can use to exert influence. Keep in mind that capabilities only determine how much potential power a state has rather than actual power. This is because different capabilities matter to different extents in different contexts.

Power in terms of relations - The capabilities of a state can only be measured in relation to another state. For example, China has regional dominance because its capabilities are greater than that of other East Asian states. However, when comparing China to the United States and Russia, China has fewer or more equal levels of capabilities. Here power is measured in terms of influence in a relationship, where power can be observed as the effect the action of one state has on another.

The two types of relational power

• Deterrence : Used to stop one or more states from doing what they would have otherwise done
• Compliance : Used to force one or more states into doing what they would have otherwise not done

Power in terms of structure - Structural power is best described as the ability to decide how international relations are conducted, and the frameworks in which they are conducted, such as finance, security and economics. Currently, the United States dominates in most fields.

All three concepts of power operate simultaneously, and all help determine different outcomes of power used in politics based on context. In some contexts, military strength might be more important in determining success; in others, it may be knowledge of the state.

Three Dimensions of Power

Steven Lukes most influentially theorised the three dimensions of power in his book Power, A Radical View. Luke's interpretations are summarised below:

• One-Dimensional View - This dimension is referred to as the pluralist view or decision-making, and believes that a state's political power can be determined in an observable conflict in global politics. When these conflicts occur, we can observe which state's suggestions most regularly triumph over others and if they result in a change of behaviour of other involved states. The state with the most 'wins' in decision-making is considered the most influential and powerful. It's important to remember that states often suggest solutions that further their interests, so when their suggestions are adopted during conflicts, they secure more power.

Two-Dimensional View - This view is a criticism of the one-dimensional view. Its advocates argue that the pluralist view doesn't account for the ability to set the agenda. This dimension is referred to as non-decision-making power and accounts for the covert exercise of power. There is power in choosing what is discussed on the international stage; if a conflict isn't brought to light, no decisions can be made about it, allowing states to do as they wish covertly regarding matters they don't want to publicise. They avoid the development of ideas and policies which are harmful to them, whilst highlighting more favourable events on the international stage. This dimension embraces covert coercion and manipulation. Only the most powerful or 'elite' states can use the power of non-decision making, creating a biased precedent in dealing with international political matters.

Three-Dimensional View - Lukes advocates this view, known as ideological power. He regards the first two dimensions of power as too intensely focused on observable conflicts (overt and covert) and points out that states still exercise power in the absence of conflict. Lukes, suggests a third dimension of power that must be considered - the ability to construct preferences and perceptions of individuals and states. This dimension of power cannot be observed as it is an invisible conflict - the conflict between the interests of the more powerful and the less powerful, and the ability of more powerful states to distort the ideologies of other states to the point where they are unaware of what is actually in their best interest. This is a form of coerciv e power in politics.

Coercive power in politics

The second and third dimensions of power incorporate the concept of coercive power in politics. Steven Lukes defines coercion in political power as;

Existing where A secures B's compliance by the threat of deprivation where there is a conflict over values or course of action between A and B. 4

To fully grasp the concept of coercive power, we must look at hard power.

Hard Power: The capability of a state to influence the actions of one or more states through threats and rewards, such as physical attacks or economic boycotting.

Nazi Germany is an excellent example of coercive power in politics. Although the Nazi party seized power and authority legitimately and legally, their power politics consisted mainly of coercion and force. Media was heavily censored and Nazi propaganda was spread to influence ideologies (third dimension of power). Hard power was used through the establishment of a secret police force that aimed to weed out 'enemies of the state' and potential traitors who spoke or acted against the Nazi regime. People who did not submit were publicly humiliated, tortured, and even sent to concentration camps. The Nazi regime carried out similar coercive power exertions in their international endeavours by invading and controlling neighbouring nations such as Poland and Austria with similar methods.

Importance of power in politics

Grasping the importance of power in politics is essential for a well-rounded understanding of world politics and international relations. The use of power on the international stage not only affects people directly but can also alter the balance of power and the structure of the international system itself. Political power is essentially the way states interact with one another. If the use of power in its many forms is not calculated, the results could be unpredictable, leading to an unstable political environment. This is why the balance of power in international relations is important. If one state has too much power and unrivalled influence, it could threaten the sovereignty of other states.

Globalisation has resulted in a deeply interconnected political community. Weapons of mass destruction have drastically increased the detrimental aftermath of war, and economies are deeply interdependent, meaning that a negative occurrence in national economies could result in a domino effect of worldwide economic consequences. This was demonstrated in the 2008 Financial crisis, in which an economic crash in the United States caused a global recession.

Example of Power in Politics

While there are countless examples of power in politics, the United States' involvement in the Vietnam war is a classic example of power politics in action.

The U.S became involved in the Vietnam war in 1965 as an ally of the Southern Vietnamese government. Their primary goal was to prevent the spread of communism . The Northern Vietnamese Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, aimed to unify and establish an independent communist Vietnam. U.S power in terms of capability (weaponry) were much more advanced than that of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong - a northern Guerrilla force. The same could be said of their relational power, with the U.S being recognised as a military and economic superpower since the 1950s.

Despite this, North Vietnamese forces prevailed and eventually won the war. Structural power outweighed the importance of power in terms of capability and relations. The Vietcong had structural knowledge and information about Vietnam and used it to pick and choose their battles against the Americans. By being tactical and calculated with the use of their structural power, they gained power.

The U.S cause of stopping the spread of communism was not internalised by enough of the Vietnamese public who were not in tune with the main political conflict in 1960s American culture - the Cold War between the capitalist U.S and the Communist Soviet Union. As the war progressed, millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed for a cause that Vietnamese civilians could not personally internalise. Ho Chi Minh used familiar culture and nationalist pride to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese and keep morale high for North Vietnamese efforts.

Power in Politics - Key takeaways

• Power is the ability to make a state or person act/think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted/thought otherwise, and shape the course of events.
• There are three concepts of power - capability, relational and structural.
• There are three dimensions of power theorised by Lukes - decision making, non-decision making and ideological.
• Coercive power is primarily a form of hard power, but can be used in line with soft power influences.
• Power in politics has a direct effect on everyday people, and if political power is not used cautiously, the results could be unpredictable, leading to an unstable political environment.
• Fig. 1 - Steven Lukes (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steven_Lukes.jpg) by KorayLoker (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:KorayLoker&action=edit&redlink=1) licensed by CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
• Fig. 2 - Reich Nazi Germany Veterans Picture postcard (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ludwig_HOHLWEIN_Reichs_Parteitag-N%C3%BCrnberg_1936_Hitler_Ansichtskarte_Propaganda_Drittes_Reich_Nazi_Germany_Veterans_Picture_postcard_Public_Domain_No_known_copyright_627900-000016.jpg) by Ludwig Hohlwein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Hohlwein) licensed by CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
• Lukes, S. (2021). Power: A radical view. Bloomsbury Publishing

Frequently Asked Questions about Power in Politics

--> what are the three dimensions of power in politics.

• Decision making. 
• Non-decision making
• Ideological 

--> What is the importance of power in politics?

It holds great importance as those in power can create rules and regulations which affect people directly and can also alter the balance of power, as well as the structure of the international system itself.

--> What are the types of power in politics?

power in terms of capability, relational power and structural power

--> What is power in politics?

We can define power as the ability to make a state or person act/think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted/thought otherwise, and shape the course of events.

Test your knowledge with multiple choice flashcards

Foucault briefly joined the French Communist Party, but left due to ideological differences. (T/F)

Which of these academic subjects did Foucault NOT pursue? 

Which of the following is NOT a work of Michael Foucault?

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What is power in politics?

The ability to make a state or person act/think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted/thought otherwise, and shape the course of events.

What are the four components of Political power?

Power, authority, legitimacy and sovereignty 

Name the three concepts of power.

- Power in terms of capabilities 

- Relational power

- Structural power

What are the three dimensions of power in politics?

• Decision-making
• Ideological

How did Michel Foucault further subdivided empirical power?

Michel Foucault further subdivided empirical power into “sovereign power”, “disciplinary power” and “biopower”

Why is Michel Foucault usually associated with postmodernism?

Because his methods of enquiry  question the scientific certainties characteristic of modernity that emerged from the  Enlightenment.

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Sample essay on Politics as Power

Finally, we come to the broadest definition of politics. Adrian Leftwich insists that political science should adopt a process definition of politics rather than focus on institutions of government. He says, “Politics is not a separate realm of public life and activity.

On the contrary, politics comprise all the activities of cooperation and conflict, within and between societies, whereby; human species goes about organising the use, production and distribution of human, natural and other resources in the course of production and reproduction of its biological and social life”.

Rather than confining politics to a particular sphere like the state, the government or the public domain this view understands politics as an aspect of all social relations and social activities. Leftwich further says, “……………………….. Politic is at the heart of all collective social activity, formal and informal, public an< private, in all human groups, institutions and societies”. Politics, in this view takes place at every level of social interaction; from the domestic sphere the global stage.

What distinguishes politics from all other forms of social behavior is the existence of power. Power is the ability to achieve a desired result, through whatever means. Politics is in essence power. Harold Lass well’s book “Politics Who Gets What, When, How?” presents such a view of politics. Hence politic is about disagreement and conflicts over scarce resources. Power is the mean through which this struggle is conducted.

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Marxists and feminists also advocate such a view of power. Karl Marx, the founder of the ideology of communism, located the roots of political power in the class structure of society. However, politics is not only about oppression and domination, it is also a means through which exploitation and injustice can be challenged.

Feminists hold a similar view, but on a different basis from the Marxists. They oppose the exclusion of the family and domestic responsibilities from the domain of politics. Modern feminists have attacked the public/private divide and proclaim that “the personal is political”. They believe that what goes on in the domestic and personal life is political simply because there is exercise of power in these spheres of life too.

Kate Millet, hence, defined politics as “power structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another”. Such a notion of politics has helped to bring to light a new dimension of women’s position in family and society.

The four conceptions of politics and political science present a fair view of what a student, stepping into this discipline for the first time, is going to study in future. While it cautions us about serious disagreements among scholars on the definition of the subject, it also exposes us to a broader view of its meaning, nature and scope.

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Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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The power of politics: Why leaders need to learn the art of influence

2006, Leadership in Action

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Good Power And Politics Essay Example

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Power , Politics , Religion , People , Government , Authority , Good Samaritan , Management

Published: 02/20/2023

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Introduction Politics and power are useful in daily lives. However, power is whereby one can influence individuals without coercing them to do something notable. Politics involve all the activities related to governance in a particular area or a country. Often, religion does not mix with politics because religious leaders tend to uphold their values. Based on the parable of Good Samaritan, one would see the manifestation of authority on how the Samaritan, seen as a man of lower social class, saved a man who was dying while the priest and Levite did not find an urge to help. Power strongly relates to religion while politics involve earthly leadership. According to Bergoglio, one should be concerned only with God-given powers. However, many people mistake power with coercion of people. Pope does not entertain participation of religious leaders such as priests and fathers in political activities. However, other scholars argue that democracy should take shape in any country hence religious leaders would contribute to such developments. Bergoglio acknowledges humility in exercising power because one may not be sure when he or she will be coming down. According to the Pope, Religious leaders have the mandate to preach values rather than exercising political acts that may not be of use to them and their followers. They should uphold the dignity of Godly powers other than human ones (Bergoglio & Skorka, 2013, p. 139). Furthermore, based on the story of Good Samaritan, the priest did not help the man who had been beaten up by robbers. The priest was a man of higher authority, but surprisingly, he did not help the wounded man. Also, the Levite who passed without helping was the one likely to have offered his helping hand. The Good Samaritan exercised authority that has set an example for people who read the story. However, he was ‘unlikely helper’ based on his lower social class as compared to the Levite and the priest. Examples of people seen as unlikely helpers in the community include people with disabilities. Individuals should take up responsibility and help the unfortunate ones in the society. The three had been walking in separate instances when they saw a man in the ditch. Only one went to help that person to safety while others walked away. The Good Samaritan’s story is impressive and urges human beings to exercise their authority in making the society a better place. One may be seen as a feeble creature who may not help those in need, but after giving his best, he would outshine those perceived to be rich (Piliavin & Piliavin, 1973, p.120). Moreover, the fact that many people show-off their powers expresses high levels of pride that goes against God’s teachings. The fact that the story of the man in the ditch was set in the dark; without the knowledge of the participants shows the right manner of exercising powers. I find it quite compelling to exercise power or authority in secret other than showing off. One who does it in secret without caring about public opinion shows that his or hers urge to help emanates from the heart. In today’s world, people dismiss others because of their situation and class. For instance, someone with a disability may be rejected because of his or her situation but at the end makes a good leader based on particular values. In conclusion, the Pope differentiates between power and politics. He cites power to originate from God while politics is related to earthly values. However, religious personnel may contribute to the leadership of a country without being partisan. Religion should not mix with politics, except in particular circumstances. The Good Samaritan shows that a person perceived to be of lower tier can exercise power by helping others. Humility should also be on the forefront when exercising powers and authority.  

Bergoglio, J. M., & Skorka, A. (2013). On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-first Century (pp. 139-140). Image. Piliavin, J. A., & Piliavin, I. M. (1973). The good Samaritan: Why does he help. (pp. 120-122) Unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin.

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Unpacking Politics: Understanding the Nature of Power

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