⁂ Concepts · Society · No. 140
Power

Gary, Indiana: the company got what it wanted without acting, and the archive shows an absence.

Power

The capacity to shape what others do, what they can do, and what they take to be possible.

Theme
Society, politics and power
Tradition
Cross-tradition
Term fixed
1532

In plain terms

The obvious sense of power is getting someone to do something they would not otherwise do. That is real and it is the least of it.

A second kind operates before that: keeping a question off the agenda so that no decision is ever taken. Nobody wins the argument because nobody has it.

A third operates earlier still: shaping what people want and what they take to be normal, so that no grievance forms. On this account the most complete exercise of power is invisible to everyone involved, including the powerful, and it leaves no trace of a conflict because there was none.

The difficulty with the third is obvious. If power is most effective when nobody notices, then any absence of complaint can be read as evidence of it - and the theory becomes very hard to be wrong about.

As a philosopher would put it

Weber's definition is the probability that an actor can realise their will despite resistance, which locates power in a relation between agents and makes conflict its evidence.

Lukes's three faces expand this. The first is decision-making power in observable conflict. The second, from Bachrach and Baratz, is agenda-setting - the mobilisation of bias that keeps issues from being raised. The third is the shaping of preferences themselves, such that people accept arrangements contrary to their real interests.

Foucault's reconception is more radical. Power is not held but exercised, not merely repressive but productive - it produces knowledge, subjects and norms - and it operates capillary-wise through institutions and practices rather than emanating from a sovereign. Where there is power there is resistance, and the two are internal to each other.

The standing objection to both the third face and to Foucault is that they make power unfalsifiable and dissolve the agent who could be held responsible.

Where you meet it

Matthew Crenson's 1971 study compared air pollution politics in two Indiana steel towns of similar size and similar pollution levels.

East Chicago had multiple employers and passed an air pollution ordinance in 1949. Gary was a company town built by US Steel, and the issue did not reach the political agenda for a further decade. When it eventually did, the ordinance that emerged was weak.

Crenson's point was about what the record does not contain. US Steel did not lobby against clean air legislation in Gary, and there is little evidence of it doing much at all. Its reputation for power meant local politicians anticipated its reaction and did not raise the question. The company got the outcome it wanted without acting, and the archive shows an absence rather than a struggle.

That is the second face of power documented in a case where the first face would have found nothing to measure.

What is actually disputed

Whether power can be identified where there is no conflict.

The pluralist position, associated with Dahl, is that power is measured by who prevails in observable decisions, and that anything else is speculation about counterfactuals nobody can test. The radical position is that this restricts the concept to its least significant form and treats the most effective exercises of power as invisible by definition.

Lukes accepts the epistemological difficulty and argues that real interests can be identified by asking what people would want under conditions of relative autonomy - which critics regard as licensing the analyst to overrule what people actually say they want.

Foucault's account avoids that by dropping real interests altogether, at the cost of leaving little basis for saying that one arrangement of power is worse than another. Habermas pressed exactly this, and the exchange remains the standard reference point for the problem.

Defined against

  • Legitimacy Power is the capacity to make things happen; legitimacy is the claim that one is entitled to. Every regime needs both and they come apart constantly

Philosophers

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Legitimacy 1651 · Ideology 1846 · Domination 1997 · Hegemony 1935 · The state 1532

Machiavelli treats power as a subject in its own right rather than as an application of ethics; Weber's definition and Foucault's reconception are the two moves that shape the modern discussion.