In this article it is argued that social power can be created based upon either the reproduction of social order or coercively but that in complex societies the former is the more important. Building upon the ideas of a number of authors - including Arendt, Parsons, Barnes, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, Giddens, Foucault and Clegg - a typology of seven forms of power creation is developed in a manner which allows for diverse phenomena from previously divergent perspectives to be woven (...) together into a theoretical whole which renders them commensurable. At the foundational level, social order presupposes the recreation of shared meanings which enable actors to act in collaboration in a way which they could not otherwise do. This observation is used as the basic premise from which to re-examine the reproduction of social order and the relationship between power, structure and knowledge. Among other things, this allows the author to render Lukes' `false consciousness' argument commensurable with Foucault's power/knowledge hypothesis. (shrink)

An introductory guide to some of the most significant perspectives on the subject of power within social and political theory.

Ernest Gellner was a unique scholar whose work covered areas as diverse as social anthropology, analytical philosophy, the sociology of the Islamic world, nationalism, psychoanalysis, East European transformations and kinship structures. Despite this diversity, there is an exceptional degree of unity and coherence in Gellner's work with his distinctly modernist, rationalist and liberal world-view evident in everything he wrote. His central problematic remains constant: understanding how the modern world came into being and to what extent it is unique relative to (...) all other social forms. Ten years after his death, this book brings together leading social theorists to evaluate the significance of Gellner's legacy and to re-examine his central concerns. It corrects many misunderstandings and critically engages with Gellner's legacy to provide a cutting edge contribution to understanding our contemporary post-9/11, global, late modern, social condition. (shrink)

This article explores the conditions of possibility for democracy through the analysis of power and authority. Political power, as distinct from coercion, is the key to democracy, as a set of institutions for managing conflict. These institutions presuppose authority, which constitutes a performative act that is validated relative to local perceptions of reasonableness. Democratic power constitutes a nonzero-sum institutionalization of conflict reproduced through the structuring of authority relative to certain principles that allow for repeat play, including equality, impartiality and separation (...) of spheres. This presupposes a democratic subject who is restrained and accountable. (shrink)

From the perspective of sociological theory, Foucault’s concepts of power, power-knowledge, and discipline are one-sided. While Foucault contends that there is no center of power, his account of power remains top-down or structural, missing the interactive and enabling aspects of power. A more balanced view would suggest that all exercises of power include meaningful agency (the ability to do something); social structures (not simply as constraints but as interactive creations); social knowledge (including both reifying truth claims and enabling truth or (...) knowledge); and social-ontological being-in-the-social-world (both as enabling and dominating). (shrink)

This book is devoted to the work of Robert A. Dahl, who passed away in 2014. Dahl was one of the most important American political scientists and normative democratic theorists of the post-war era, and he was also an influential teacher who mentored some of the most significant academics of the next two generations of American political science. As an incredibly productive scholar he had a career that spanned more than half a century, his first book was published in 1950 (...) his last was in 2007 at the age of 92. As a political scientist, he was respected even by those who were critical of his works. This theoretical significance and profound influence is reflected in the collection of chapters in this volume, which reads like a ‘who’s who’ of the contemporary US political science scene. His co-author Bruce Stinebrickner documents the evolution of his and Dahl’s seminal text, _Modern Political Analysis_ and how it became the standard introduction to American political science for nearly fifty years. Katharine MacKinnon’s chapter is of significance for its insights upon Dahl and also represents a succinct statement of a feminist reading and critique of contemporary political science. Steven Lukes contributes a highly concise statement of the difference between one-dimensional and three-dimensional power. This work will be a standard reference work for any researchers or those interested in the work of Robert Dahl, among both established academics and students. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _Journal of Political Power_. (shrink)

The Panopticon Writings By Jeremy Bentham (Edited by Miran Bo ovic, Verso, 1995. ISBN 1-85984-958-X (hbk) 34.95. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening By Gemma Corradi Fiumara, Routledge, 1995, Pp. 231. ISBN 0-415-04927-X. 12.99. Foreign Bodies By Alphonso Lingis, Routledge, 1994, Pp. vii + 236. ISBN 0-415-90990-2. 45.00 (hbk), 15.99 (pbk).

This article explores the conditions of possibility for democracy through the analysis of power and authority. Political power, as distinct from coercion, is the key to democracy, as a set of institutions for managing conflict. These institutions presuppose authority, which constitutes a performative act that is validated relative to local perceptions of reasonableness. Democratic power constitutes a nonzero-sum institutionalization of conflict reproduced through the structuring of authority relative to certain principles that allow for repeat play, including equality, impartiality and separation (...) of spheres. This presupposes a democratic subject who is restrained and accountable. (shrink)

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power presuppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that (...) social actors have multiple interpretative horizons available to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism. (shrink)

This book sets out to theoretically delineate the relationship between agency, structure and power. The author offers an original appraisal and critique both of the work of power theorists, such as Lukes and Clegg and of structuration theory as represented in the work of Giddens.

This article analyses the relationship between power and freedom. In the first part, two ideal types of freedom are distinguished: natural freedom and social freedom. These forms of freedom are theorized as in tension relative to levels of social integration, mutual dependence and power-to. Social freedom consists in the duality of structure, where constraints limit natural freedom, but simultaneously enables power-to. In the second half, the four dimensions of power are analysed, relative to these two forms of freedom. The first (...) dimension concerns decisional freedom; the second structural bias which actors are aware of; the third concerns epistemic reasons for accepting a disadvantageous trade-off of natural to social freedom; and in the fourth dimension, relations of un-freedom and freedom are explained relative to the construction of social ontology. The article argues that in complex modern society social freedom requires restraint upon natural freedom. (shrink)

In the literature, the power debate is divided between modern and postmodern positions. The former hold that power and truth are opposites, while the latter view them as mutually constitutive. These debates mix epistemological, normative and sociological claims. Using classical sociological methods, strict criteria for valid functional explanations are set out and the relationship between power and truth is explained in these terms. It is argued that agents use truth to create local social capital for themselves, which has the unintended (...) functional effect of reinforcing the effectiveness and stability of social systems. This entails an account of authority as a performative act that meets with a felicitous reaction by others. (shrink)