Power (social and political)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Power is the ability of a person to control or influence the choices of other persons. The term authority is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust; indeed all evil and injustice committed by man against man involve power.
The use of power need not involve coercion (force or the threat of force). At one extreme, it more closely resembles what everyday English-speakers call "influence", although some authors make a sharp distinction between influence as a more general concept, and power as intended influence. Template:Fact
The exercise of power seems endemic to humans as social and gregarious beings.
Much of the recent sociological debate on power revolves around the issue of the enabling nature of power. A comprehensive account of power can be found in Steven Lukes Power: A Radical View where he discusses the three dimensions of power. Thus, power can be seen as various forms of constraint on human action, but also as that which makes action possible, although in a limited scope. Much of this debate is related to the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), who, following the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), sees power as "a complex strategic situation in a given society [social setting]". Being deeply structural, his concept involves both constraint and enablement. For a purely enabling (and voluntaristic) concept of power see the works of Anthony Giddens.
