power

power, in political science and sociology, the capacity to influence, lead, dominate, or otherwise have an impact on the life and actions of others in society. The concept of power encompasses, but is not limited to, the notion of authority. Unlike authority, which implies legitimacy, power can be exercised illegitimately.

Among the most seminal modern thinkers to investigate the phenomenon of power was the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). According to Weber, “within a social relationship, power is any chance (regardless of the basis of this chance) to carry through one’s own will (even against resistance).” Weber’s broad definition encompasses various types of power, from persuasion to coercion. It also includes exercises of power grounded in a claim to legitimacy (authority, or Herrschaft) and exercises based on no such normative claim. A violent mob, for example, certainly exercises power (Macht) but not authority.

In the mid-20th century a debate emerged in the social sciences between two contrasting types of power theory: so-called elitist (or power-elite) theories and pluralistic theories. Although both approaches were based on Weber’s conception of power as the capacity to create a desired outcome within a social relationship, they differed on the question of the distribution of power—i.e., on whether power is concentrated in the hands of a few (a small minority within a society) or more widely shared among competing groups. Elitist theorists viewed power as the accumulated capital of an elite in possession of society’s critical levers, or instruments of social control. Such levers could include political appointments, mass media, large corporations, the military, and other examples of what the American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–62) called the “strategic command posts of the social structure.” Other scholars, including the American political scientist Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014), rejected this elitist conception of power as contrary to the reality characteristic of modern democracies such as the United States, asserting instead a pluralistic or democratic conception of power as being more widely shared. Although Dahl recognized that power is distributed unequally even in democracies, he claimed that it was not monopolized but contested by a multitude of groups and political actors.

The Weberian conception of power as agency, or the capacity to impose one’s will (even in the face of resistance), although broad, does not address some dimensions of power. First, it treats resistance as a counterforce that is somehow not itself a form of power. However, resistance can have a significant social impact even when it is unable to prevail. Second, the Weberian conception does not explain how power reproduces itself over time and becomes institutionalized. That oppressed populations often accept their oppression as a natural or inevitable state of affairs can itself be seen as a form of power—sometimes called mystification, or the obscuring of actual social dynamics—even though it does not express itself through the deliberate action or influence of any actor. This condition, in which the dominance of a social actor or group is seen as the natural order of things, is also called hegemony by scholars influenced by Marxism and in particular by the work of the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). And third, the Weberian focus on agency does not address how one’s will and any will opposing it may themselves be influenced by power relationships.

One of the most influential thinkers to depart from the Weberian conception of power was the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84). His work expanded the theoretical boundaries of power to include the social construction of thoughts, desires, identities, and truth, or knowledge. For Foucault, power and knowledge are closely intertwined in modern society, as the power (or disciplinary) structures that underlie knowledge (e.g., the prison, the school, the hospital, and the insane asylum) have all emerged from the modern effort to understand human nature. According to Foucault, agents (those who impose their will) do not exist prior to or independently of the power-knowledge relationships they engage in but are socially constructed by them.

In the study of international relations, power can be used as a point of comparison between states—as when one state is said to have more or less power than another—or as a classification of a state’s political status in comparison with others—as when one state is said to be a regional power, a great power, or a superpower.