On the Concept of Power

Abstract

“Power” is the modal concept of politics; nevertheless, as a concept, it is significantly under-theorized. This may seem an unlikely proposition, given the frequency of discussions of power; however, for decades the debate revolved mainly around empirical and operational questions, while a proper conceptual definition has rarely, if ever, been thematized. The question of what power is has been implicitly reduced to the question of how power works. But the two are not the same, and in fact any hope of solving the latter presupposes a proper answer to the former.I will show how most discussions of power – across political science and philosophy, from Weber to Lukes, including Dahl and Searle amongst others – are not conceptual, even when explicitly presented as such, but rather empirical and operational. In fact, these discussions revolve mainly around factual implications and preconditions of power, while the presupposed concept does not vary much (with few exceptions, which are anyway untenable on their own merits). Commonly employed definitions can be reduced to a single form, which is tautological: “one has power if one can (=has the power to) do such and such”. This circularity is due precisely to the shared presupposition that power is just like a phenomenon or an object, to be empirically observed. To better understand the concept of power we should, instead, examine its categorial form – “power” represents not a thing, but a condition under which certain things may be done and thought – corresponding to possibility, as opposed to necessity.The best way to see this is to turn to Arendt, whose often misunderstood idea of power is the key to a proper comprehension of this basic category of politics. While the link between power and communication has been a staple of Arendtean studies, it has often been reduced to normative or aspirational understandings, which tend to obscure its deeper significance. It is rather the formal aspect of the concept of power which allows us to get right its categorical role in defining politics, including the crucial role of persuasion within it. Some implications of this way of looking at the concept – chiefly the stark distinctions necessity/freedom and society/politics for which Arendt is still notorious – seems to be very unpalatable for current social science and political theory. However, absent an adequate non-circular definition of power, this way deserves at least to be tried.