Power as the key to understanding politics

Introduction

The statement says that power is crucial to understanding politics. It is largely true: to understand who gets to decide, why others obey and how decisions are justified, one has to ask about power. The answer shows why, and then notes where the claim needs qualification. The question belongs to the first unit of the syllabus, on theorising the political.

Politics is about power

The common view of politics is the rivalry of politicians for power, and it is certainly one aspect. But the notion goes deeper: politics concerns power and the way it is shared out. Politics as a practical activity is the discourse and struggle over the organisation of human possibilities, and it concerns the capacity of agents and institutions to maintain or change their environment and the resources and forces behind that capacity. Weber's wide definition of politics as independent leadership in action brings in every setting with relations of domination and subordination, from the trade union and the university to "sexual politics", and his narrower one concentrates on the state and who controls it.

Power and its legitimation

Power is a relationship in which one actor can make others act as it wishes whether or not they want to, and it is always embodied in persons, institutions and structures, never floating free. Politics as a practical activity is therefore a struggle over the capacity of agents and institutions to keep or change their social and physical environment and over the resources that underlie that capacity. Force is only one of its forms. Rulers try to convince the ruled that their rule is right, and when that succeeds, power becomes authority: people comply because they accept that those in office are entitled to give orders and that they themselves are bound to follow them. The work of winning that acceptance is called legitimation. Weber sorted its grounds into three types. The one typical of the modern state is legal-rational: officials are obeyed because rules empower them to command, and only within a defined field. The two older types are personal: obedience out of custom, to those who have always held power, and obedience to a leader whose extraordinary personal gifts inspire followers (charisma). Legitimacy saves rulers from having to display force at every turn, whereas a regime that has lost it must fall back on coercion and becomes precarious, which is why revolutions are often preceded by a period of sustained attack on the ideas that justified the old order (delegitimation).

Power has less visible faces. The ability to shape what people think possible produces manipulated consent, power that, as C. Wright Mills describes it, is exercised "unknown to the powerless", through education and the media; in Marxist terms, consent manipulated in this way would in time give rise to a false consciousness. Foucault went further. For him no class and no ruler owns power; it has no single seat but is exercised through the web of relations that makes up society, from the top to the bottom, and it creates as well as forbids, being bound up with knowledge so closely that the two cannot be separated. Feminists add that personal life is itself shaped by power, the personal is political, a point that widens the boundary of the political.

Power and the state

Weber defined the state not by its purposes but by its means: it is the community that effectively holds a monopoly on legitimate physical coercion inside a territory, and he described politics as striving to share power or to influence its distribution among states or among groups within a state. The state is not a single block: it comprises the government, the administration, the military and police, the judiciary, local government and assemblies, and its power has grown and become more centralised in modern times. Who staffs the state matters in elite theories, while Marxist and structural theories stress the social and economic context.

Qualification. Power does not exhaust politics. Politics also involves persuasion, deliberation and the search for shared solutions: a decision reached solely by violence or threat hardly counts as political, and politics presumes talk among those who differ. Defining politics only as a struggle for power can hide the cooperative and moral aspects, such as justice and the common good, that political theory also studies.

Conclusion

Power is a necessary key to politics: it explains conflict, authority, obedience, the state and the weight of structures and knowledge. It is not the only key, for politics is also the reasoned reconciliation of differences. The sensible view is that power is central, but must be studied together with legitimacy and with the purposes it serves.