Examine the nature and meaning of power. (2020, 15 Marks)
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince, 1532) made power rather than virtue the object of political analysis, and it has been the discipline’s central variable ever since. Yet no definition has settled it; each captures part of it, making power an essentially contested concept.
Meaning: The Classic Definitions
- Bertrand Russell (Power: A New Social Analysis, 1938) defined power as the production of intended effects. He called it the fundamental concept of social science, as energy is of physics.
- Max Weber (Economy and Society, 1922) defined it as the probability of carrying out one’s will within a social relationship despite resistance.
- Robert A. Dahl (“The Concept of Power”, 1957) offered an intuitive idea: A holds power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. Power here belongs to individuals, is observable, and consists in prevailing over others.
Nature: Five Contested Features
- Relational, not a possession. Wealth or weapons are resources; power exists only in what happens to someone else.
- Power-over or power-to. Weber and Dahl describe domination. Hannah Arendt (On Violence, 1970) held that power is people acting in concert. It belongs to a group and enlarges capacity rather than controlling others.
- Zero-sum or variable-sum. C. Wright Mills treated power as a fixed quantity, so one side’s gain is another’s loss. Talcott Parsons (1963) saw it as a generalised medium, like credit, that grows when legitimacy backs it.
- Three faces. Dahl studied decisions. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (“Two Faces of Power”, 1962) added non-decisions, issues kept off the agenda by a mobilisation of bias. Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 1974) added the shaping of wants themselves.
- Structural and diffuse. For Marxists, power grows out of relations of production and its nature is exploitation. For feminists, it lives in patriarchy, so the personal is political. Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, 1976) went further: power is everywhere… because it comes from everywhere. Exercised rather than held, it is productive as well as repressive, creating knowledge, norms and subjects.
Testing the Accounts
- Dahl’s test made power measurable, but misses power that prevents conflict or works through shared capacity.
- Lukes sees further, but he must attribute “real interests” people do not acknowledge, which risks paternalism.
- Foucault’s ubiquity blurs degrees: a parent and a torturer both exercise power. Jürgen Habermas objected that it leaves no ground from which to condemn domination.
- In India, caste subordination sanctified by scripture was power in Lukes’s third sense, which is why B. R. Ambedkar attacked the sanction itself. India’s 65 internet shutdowns in 2025 were informational control at its crudest. Aadhaar-linked welfare reflects Foucault’s governing of populations.
Conclusion
Power is a relation with several faces: constraint and capacity, coercive and productive. No single definition exhausts it, because each answers a different question, and its meaning shifts with the state itself, from the sovereign’s sword to the database.