Note on power

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.

Conclusion

Power is the ability to get others to act. No political system runs on consent alone or on coercion alone; each mixes the two, and the more willingly people accept the rules as legitimate, the steadier the system is. Legitimacy is not strictly required for survival, though: a government that has lost it can last a good while by leaning chiefly on force, but its footing is then insecure, and a system resting far more on force than on consent has met one of the conditions for revolution. In political theory power is therefore studied together with consent, coercion and the structures that carry it.