Introduction: Power is the Central Concept of the Social ...

Introduction: Power is the Central Concept of the Social Sciences

Introduction

The concept of power is absolutely central to any understanding of society. The ubiquity of the concept can be seen by a comparative Google search. The score for `social power' is 376 million hits, for `political power' 194 million which compares with 334 million for `society', 253 million for `politics', 52 million for `sociology', `social class' at 280 million and `political class' at 111 million. Of course, such measures are crude but the fact that the combined 470 million social and political power hits outstrip any of the other categories, including the combined hits for `social' and `political class', indicates the absolute centrality of the concept. However, despite this ubiquity it is arguably one of the most difficult concepts to make sense of within the social sciences. Nonetheless, it has been a core concept for as long as there has been speculation about the nature of social order (Wolin 1960).

The Ancient Athenians distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate power in terms of a contrast between power that accorded to the dictates of law (nomos) and power which exalted the glorification of a specific individual (hubris). In the work of Aristotle, arguably the world's first empirical political scientist, this became refined in terms of a sixfold classification of governments according to whose interests are served. Monarchy is the government of the many in the interests of all, Aristocracy by the few in the interests of all, Constitutional government is by the majority in the interests of all, while the corrupt illegitimate versions of this are Tyranny, Oligarchy and Democracy, in which the one, the few or the majority each govern in their own interests, disregarding the interests of the whole.

In Machiavelli's The Prince we find images of power as domination and control, which work in subtle ways; the successful Prince manages society through the manipulation

of flows and movements of power. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power becomes subsumed under the dominant discourse of practical success and failure. Power is exercised over others and society constituted through the domination of the weak by the strong. If Niccol? Machiavelli offers one influential modern template for thinking about power, Thomas Hobbes offers another.

In Hobbes (1968), power flows from society to the individual. The political actor creates society as an architectonic product, which gives individuals a capacity for action. The ultimate backing for power is violence and coercion over which the Sovereign holds a monopoly. As represented in the frontispiece of the Leviathan, society is the sum of individuals who carry and constitute power. If Hobbes' discourse was closely tied to the legitimacy of sovereign power as a presupposition of a commonwealth, by the late nineteenth century the terms of power's address were changing radically.

For Nietzsche (1968), power is a capacity to define reality. If you can define the real and the moral, you create the conditions of legitimacy. The terms of trade of legitimacy have changed markedly: what is at issue now, of course, is not normative legitimacy, as in Aristotle, but legitimacy as a sociological fact of domination and, as it had been in Machiavelli, the fate of mankind. What sometimes may appear as an escape from power and domination is really the replacement of cruder forms of domination by more sophisticated and thus less visible forms. In Weber (1978) the English term `power' covers both Herrschaft and Macht, which correspond to authority and coercion respectively; thus, power can either be legitimate or based upon the threat of violence.

The intricacies of legitimate versus illegitimate power; of coercion versus authority; of collective systemic versus individual agent specific power; of constitutive power versus power from which there is escape, and of power as autonomy versus constraint, are all aspects

of power's many faces which have shaped contemporary perceptions of power in the social sciences. Tangled up with these central perceptions of power's empirical character are a great many normative issues, often encoded in different forms of address of the same topic. For instance, political philosophy or political theory were both more inclined to engage with power in normative terms, with what should be done, while political science and political sociology were more inclined to engage with power in empirical terms, looking at what is done rather than what should be done. Yet, for all this institutional separation, there has been a tendency for normative issues to intrude, except for the most self-consciously ascetically empiricist of practitioners. This is especially the case in more recent debates in which the threads of genealogy, that we have briefly sketched, have tended to wend their way into empirical analysis.

After World War II, the consensual view of power, as a capacity for action, as `power to', came to the fore through the work of Hannah Arendt (1970), Talcott Parsons (1964), and Barry Barnes (1988). For these thinkers, power constitutes the opposite of coercion and violence, and is thus a prerequisite for agency. The Hobbesian view of power, as domination exercised by individuals, is reformulated by many including by Robert Dahl (1957; 1961; 2006), Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962; 1963; 1970), and Steven Lukes (1974; 1977; 1986; 2005). Foucault (1977) emerges as the prime rejuvenator of the Machiavellian and Nietzschean view of power as a systemic phenomenon which is constitutive of social reality. Following this, Stewart Clegg (1989), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), and Mitchell Dean (1999) constitute contemporary refiners of these positions. The attempt to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate power has been central for many political theorists both in continental theory, such as Habermas (1984) and in the analytic traditions associated with British theorists such as Peter Morris (1987; 2002) and Brian Barry (1989). The link between power and interests as a criterion distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate power,

as in Aristotle, remains central for Lukes' analysis (1974; 2005). In addition, there are a number of attempts at synthesis such as rational choice theory, where Keith Dowding (1996) has merged the idea of power as agency-based and systemic phenomenon, as have Giddens (1984) and Haugaard (1997; 2002) in their respective accounts.

While the plethora of accounts of power is complex the complexity is one of requisite variety. What emerges is that `power' is not a single entity. It represents a cluster of concepts. Power as domination, which is linked to (the capacity for) violent agency, is the dominant perception of power in everyday speech and, quite likely, would represent the majority of the combined 470 million Google hits for `social' and `political power', if we were to examine them. However, if we look to the academic social science literature, increasingly the conception of power as essentially grounded in coercion represents a minority view. One of the characteristics of the development of the literature over the last thirty years has been a move away from this `common sense' view to more systemic, less agent specific, perceptions of power that see it as more generally constitutive of reality. Such a move is coupled with a more inclusive perception of the concept, whereby the idea that there is a single thing-in-theworld corresponding to power, as some kind of essence, has fallen out of favour.

The fact that few claim that their view of power constitutes `The Concept of Power' is a healthy development, which heralds the abandonment of the search for the holy grail of the essence of power. At the height of the Seventies power debate, when a singular perception of power was de rigueur, Lukes (1974) shifted the debate by arguing that power is an `essentially contested' concept. Essential contestation refers to matters that cannot be settled empirically. In Lukes, for instance, liberal, reformist and radical accounts of power are differentiated. Each differs precisely in what their value-commitments will admit as evidence and data, as a result of definitional inclusion and exclusion. Concepts become essentially

contested because normative evaluations are smuggled into what appear to be empirical statements. For instance, if we term a set of political institutions as `legitimate', the latter is `an essentially contested' concept because this is not simply an empirical statement. It is an implicitly normatively evaluative statement, endorsing certain political arrangements. Thus, while the concept of legitimacy is doing ostensibly empirical work ? identifying institutions acceded to be legitimate ? it is simultaneously endorsing evaluative presuppositions. With regard to power, this works in reverse, whereby power constitutes `domination', which we normatively condemn. Thus, from this perspective, whether or not any interaction is deemed as entailing power implies a tacit negative normative evaluation. However, as our brief account of power's genealogy implies, not all evaluations of power are implicitly normatively negative in this way. Thus, while the idea of power as `an essentially contested' concept captures some aspects of the power debate, it does not describe them all.

While to speak of power as essentially contested captures a part of the debate, where different theorists seem to be wilfully not grasping the points that other theorists make, because of their more or less implicit normative assumptions, perhaps a more accurate model would come from the application of Wittgenstein's description of `family resemblance' concepts (Wittgenstein 1967). Family resemblance concepts do not share a single essence. Rather, they embody a cluster of concepts with overlapping characteristics. Just as in an extended family, there may be similarities which make each member recognizable as a member, yet there is not a single set of characteristics which all the family have in common ? John resembles his father through his complexion and his mother by his posture, while Mary resembles great Aunt Beth, etc. Wittgenstein used as an example of family resemblance concepts the word `game'. If we examine cards, football and chess, it might appear that the essence of the word `game' lies in winning and losing. However, if we observe a solitary child playing a game of ball, there is no winning or losing (Wittgenstein 1967: 32). Solitaire

is a game but there are no competitors. Thus, applying these views, when we examine power in the writings of Lukes and Dahl, it may appear that domination defines the essence of power, while if we read Arendt and Parsons, it would appear to be legitimacy, and so on.

For Wittgenstein, concepts premised on family resemblances are not considered particularly problematic with regard to usage; they are not so much muddled concepts as much as they simply defy singular essentialist definitions. As a family resemblance concept, `power' covers a cluster of social phenomena central to the constitution of social order. As with most family resemblance concepts meaning is defined by localised language games, which are a set of relations between different concepts. These family relations will be exhibited in the practice of both lay and professional theorists. In lay terms, in certain empirical settings, certain actors will think of and do power in ways that are more or less coherent. What is considered as coherent, will of course, already be an effect of the domination of certain empirically modulated ways of doing things. Think of the US policy of extraordinary rendition, which allows the exercise of certain powers of violence and torture on the body of `suspects' that would not be normatively appropriate in other countries. The policy trades off the different ways of thinking about and doing power in countries such as Poland and Egypt from the US. Theoretically, the same differentiation in practices also occurs. Some language games that have developed around power as a theoretical practice will cohere around certain dominant ordering conceptions. For instance, if a given theorist, such as Arendt (1958 and 1970), is primarily interested in clusters of concepts, such as `authority', `legitimacy' and `citizenship', which she defines in opposition to `totalitarianism' and `violence', then her concept of `power' is defined relative to these other concepts. Just as within large-scale languages, such as English and Spanish, words are defined relative to each other through difference and similarity. Just as there can never be exact translation between languages, so too, a local language game creates differences of usage which are not exact

equivalents of each other. Thus, the concept of `power' in the anthropological/sociological literature on the different types of capital outlined by Jenkins in (Chapter 8) is different from Cerny's international relations usage in chapter 21 or Dean's genealogical account in chapter 10. Some usages will be closer than others, for instance Dean and Clegg, are relatively close, while both are far from that used by Dowding in his rational choice language game.

No one of these usages is right or wrong. These concepts are conceptual tools, each of which enables the author in question to make sense of certain aspects of social life, presumably those aspects that most interests them and which they think most important, most powerful. If their usage brings clarity to the perspective the `conceptual tool' is being used well; if the contrary, then their usage is poorly developed. Of course, it can be argued that when local usage is so singular as to make a specific usage appear `forced', relative to everyday usage, this is less than desirable. That point accepted it is still better to think of power as plural, as shaped by local context, as a tool which enables us to make sense of the social world rather than embodying a singular essence. And it is always a translational tool ? not only between different academic language games but between these and the world of mundane practises. Different concepts will articulate different practices; some will reveal more of some practices; others more or less of these and, perhaps, other practices.

The articles in this Handbook represent paradigmatic perceptions of power within theoretically conceived `local language games'. The articles are not intended as summaries of particular debates, rather they provide exemplars of `cutting edge', `state of the art' work, drawing on various social science perspectives. Power is not the property of any one social science discipline. Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Theory, Organization Studies, Geography, and different perspectives within and transcending each of these, such as Feminism, all make a contribution. All use the concept of power as a central and defining

concept. Within each of these broad disciplinary divisions, there are local power debates, each of which encapsulates a vision of its own, defined by a perspective.

In commissioning for the Handbook, the editors have sought to provide exemplars of best practice within fields. In explaining the nature of paradigms, Thomas Kuhn argued that when one has understood an exemplar of a piece of work within a paradigm one should, within that paradigm, be able extrapolate from that work to problem-solving in general,. If, as a competent member of a scientific community, one properly understands Newton's account of the gravitational forces acting upon falling objects, one should be able to apply this to pendulums without ever having been shown how to do so (Kuhn 1962). The social sciences do not have the predictive consistency of the natural sciences, nor, in terms of their being sciences of culture rather than of nature, should they necessarily ascribe to this as a holy grail. Nonetheless, it is still the case that specific well chosen exemplars of a debate or perspective within sub-disciplines, should give the less initiated reader, or the power specialist reading outside their paradigm, a way into the terrain of core power debates. Simultaneously, to the specialist, each of these contributions is intended as an original contribution which pushes a particular paradigm further.

Framing the field

In the first chapter Gerhard Goehler introduces the distinction between `power to' and `power over', a debate that has its roots in Aristotle's distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power. The point of departure for the chapter is the theorization of power as it appeared after Lukes' (1974) summary of the field. In that summary, power, it was argued, was a concept with an essence that was highly contested; liberal, reformist and radical approaches to the concept had been identified. The 1980s complicated the picture; the idea that there might be a single essence at the back of diverse conceptions became harder to hold. For Goehler, as for a number of other scholars, the distinctions of ordinary language are a possible way out of

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