Comment: Politics as a power concept. (2008, 20 Marks)
The power approach defines politics by an activity, the struggle to acquire, keep and use power wherever it occurs, rather than by an institution, the state. Its roots lie in Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. The behavioural movement made it the discipline’s organising idea, and its critics have spent a century qualifying it.
The Main Statements
- Max Weber (“Politics as a Vocation”, 1919): politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, among states or among groups within a state. The state itself is defined by its means, the monopoly of legitimate physical force.
- George E. G. Catlin (The Science and Method of Politics, 1927) made control, one will seeking to direct another, the basic unit of political analysis.
- Harold D. Lasswell (Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, 1936) opened with the study of politics is the study of influence and the influential. The influential get most of the available values: deference, income, safety. With Abraham Kaplan (Power and Society, 1950) he called political science the study of the shaping and sharing of power.
- Hans J. Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations, 1948) carried the idea abroad: international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.
- William A. Robson (1954) held that political science is concerned primarily with power in society: its nature, basis, processes, scope and results.
- Robert A. Dahl (Modern Political Analysis, 1963) called any persistent pattern of relationships involving power, rule or authority a political system. Firms, unions and churches thus have politics too.
What the Approach Achieved
- It moved the discipline from formal-legal description to actual behaviour in parties, pressure groups, bureaucracies and elites.
- It made power observable and measurable: Dahl’s counterfactual test asks whether B did what B would not otherwise have done.
- It reads Indian politics better than the constitutional text can. M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste, Rajni Kothari‘s Congress system of factional bargaining, and money as a power resource all describe real distributions of power. In 2024 the Supreme Court struck down electoral bonds, holding that anonymous donations denied voters information and invited quid pro quo.
The Critiques
- Too wide. David Easton (The Political System, 1953) found power in every relationship, so it could not mark off the political; he defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values for a society.
- Power is not domination. Hannah Arendt (On Violence, 1970) held that power is people acting in concert. Equating politics with command confuses power with violence, which appears only when power fails.
- Politics as conciliation. Bernard Crick (In Defence of Politics, 1962) saw politics as conciliating rival interests by giving each a share in power. Tyranny that simply seizes power ends politics rather than expressing it.
- Normative silence. From Aristotle onward, politics has concerned the good life and justice. The power approach says who gets what, not who ought to.
- Widening and decentring. Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) called politics power-structured relationships, and the personal is political carried the approach into the family. Steven Lukes and Michel Foucault then showed that power works through agendas, desires and norms. The question “who holds power?” misses power that has no holder.
Conclusion
Politics cannot be described without power, but it cannot be reduced to it. The power approach supplies realism about who gets what. Its critics supply what realism omits: legitimacy, shared action and purpose. The defensible view treats politics as the struggle for power and for the right to exercise it.