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Showing posts from May, 2022

Fourth Face of Power

  Politics is power. Quite simply, power is politics, politics is power. As Ball notes, `power is arguably the single most important organising concept in social and political theory'. The concept of power links it to the ability to achieve a desired outcome, sometimes referred to as power to. The concept of power has long been studied by political thinkers: For Machiavelli, power is an end in itself, and whatever means are necessary for a prince to acquire and maintain political power are justified. Thomas Hobbes however saw that competition for goods of life becomes a struggle for power because without power one cannot retain what one has acquired. One cannot retain power without acquiring more power. German sociologist Max Webber linked power of authority and rules, and focused on structures and bureaucracy. Robert Dahl continues Weber’s approach, both in the definition of power and in the attribution of it to a concrete human factor.   In “The Concept of Power” (1957), Dahl d