Is the study of power central to understanding politics?

Introduction

The question asks whether power is the key to understanding politics, and for reasons. Unit I of the syllabus asks what politics is and how the idea of the political is theorised. My answer is yes: no account of politics makes sense without power, because the state, the struggle over it and the less visible ways people are ruled are all relations of power. But power is central, not sufficient: politics also concerns legitimacy, consent and the collective choices a community must make.

Why power is central to politics

1. The state is defined by power. Weber defined the state by its successful claim, inside a given territory, to be the only body entitled to use physical force legitimately. In his narrower sense, a political question is one about who controls state power, for what ends it is used and with what results. Since modern times the state has steadily widened its scale and grip, with a more complex bureaucracy, larger armed forces and more regulatory welfare agencies, so the study of how that power is used is unavoidable.
2. Power is a relationship found in every group. The common view is that politics is about power and how it is shared out. Power here is not an abstraction but a relation that exists wherever one person can make others obey whether they want to or not, and it creates leadership, domination and subordination. In Weber's broader sense politics is present wherever there is a structure of power and a struggle for leadership, so one can speak of the politics of a trade union, a university or the relation between men and women.
3. Politics as an activity is about the capacity to act. Seen as a practical activity, politics concerns the capacity of agents and institutions to keep or change their social and physical surroundings, the resources behind that capacity and the forces that shape its use; it therefore runs through private as well as public life.
4. Legitimacy is a question about power. Holders of power want their rule accepted as right, because accepted power saves force: people then obey freely. Weber's three grounds of legitimate rule, tradition, the personal gifts of a leader and legal-rational rules, are all ways of justifying power. For C. Wright Mills legitimation is one of the central ideas of political science, whose study turns on how power-holders justify their power and how far they succeed.
5. The hidden faces of power. Power can shape people's consciousness so that they accept the existing order without seeing any alternative, which turns their consent into manipulated consent. Foucault treats all social relations as relations of power, working from the bottom up, productive as well as repressive, and bound up with knowledge, and he asks political theory to stop centring on the sovereign.
6. The critical traditions start from power. For Marxism the property-owning class creates the state to suppress the dissent of the propertyless class, so the state is a class instrument. In feminism's second wave, the claim that the personal is political read women's personal lives as reflecting the power structures of a patriarchal society.

What a study of power alone leaves out

1. Politics is more than force. Politics hardly exists where decisions are reached only by violence or threat, because that defeats the process of making a collective decision; it arises because people living together must decide how to share resources, how to deal with other groups and how to plan for the future. (2) Consent matters as much as coercion. Every political system is kept up by a mix of the two, and a system is more stable the more people obey because they accept it as legitimate; in a democracy, participation by citizens is what gives policies that legitimacy. (3) Politics as a human good. Aristotle held that man is by nature a political animal and that people can express their nature as reasoning, virtuous beings only through political engagement. (4) Normative questions. Political theory also asks what the ends of political institutions should be and what arrangements would make a good society, questions that a description of who holds power cannot settle.

Conclusion

The study of power is central to understanding politics: the state is defined by its claim to legitimate force, every group has its own politics of leadership and domination, and the critical traditions show power at work in class, gender and knowledge. Yet power explains politics only together with legitimacy, consent and the shared decisions of a community, and political theory must still ask how power ought to be used.