Partners and Patients: A Revised Grammar of Social Power

Abstract

This brief response concerns Arash Abizadeh’s recently proposed four-place ‘grammar’ of agential social power: that the social power of an agent, V, with respect to outcome type O consists in V’s capacity to effect outcomes of type O ‘with the assistance of agents X, despite the resistance of agents Y’. Among other problems, this grammar implies that all agential power is social power. I propose, in place of Abizadeh’s grammar, that V’s social power with respect to O consists in V’s capacity to effect O with the assistance of X, thereby affecting patients Y. Among other things, this grammar goes further than Abizadeh’s in rejecting the tradition, owing to Max Weber, that holds that all social power is power to overcome resistance. Talk of overcoming resistance drops out of the definition of social power completely.