Three Dimensional Power
Uploaded by super-powers on Oct 25, 2005
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CHAPTER 3: THREE-DIMENSIONAL POWER
PRV, first published as a short book some thirty years ago in the context of an ongoing
debate, makes several contentious claims in an extremely brief compass. It offers a
definition of the concept of power, claiming both that the concept is ‘essentially
contested’ and that the conceptual analysis proposed is superior to those criticized; and it
claims to provide a way of analyzing power that goes deeper and is at once value-laden,
theoretical and empirical. As indicated, these claims face a series of difficulties and
objections (not least that they are mutually incompatible) that many critics have pressed
and pursued. In considering these claims, difficulties and objections, the question before
us is: what in the foregoing presentation, reproduced as Chapter 1 of this volume, is to be
abandoned, what qualified, what defended and what developed further?
In this chapter I shall, first, resume what has already been suggested concerning the
specificity of power as domination within the wider conceptual field of power in general
and defend focusing on power in this sense. Second, I will ask whether it is plausible to
think that we can arrive at an uncontested way of understanding it and argue that, because
of its links with no less contested notions of freedom, authenticity, autonomy and real
interests, it is not. Third, I will defend the claim that power has a third dimension--
securing the consent to domination of willing subjects--against two kinds of objection:
that such consent is non-existent or very rare, and that it cannot be secured. Finally, I will
argue that conceiving of power in this way cannot dispense with a defensible
understanding of the notions of ‘real interests’ and ‘false consciousness.’
The Definition of Power
In the first place, as already adumbrated in Chapter 2, the definition of ‘the underlying
concept of power’ offered in Section 5 of PRV is, plainly, entirely unsatisfactory in
several respects. Following others in the ‘power debate,’ it focuses on the exercise of
power, thereby committing the ‘exercise fallacy’: power is a dispositional concept,
identifying an ability or capacity, which may or may not be exercised. Secondly, it
focuses entirely on the exercise of ‘power over’--the power of some A over some B and
B’s condition of dependence on A. Thirdly, it equates such dependence-inducing power
with domination, assuming that ‘A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests,’
thereby neglecting what we have seen to be the manifold ways in which power over
others can be productive, transformative, authoritative and compatible with dignity.
Fourthly, assuming that power, thus defined, affects the interests...