MULT10018 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Raymond Geuss
3 Jul 2018
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Lecture 9: Introduction: Power, Authority and
Legitimacy—key questions and ideas
Overview:
1. The Dimensions of Political Power
2. The Nature of the State
3. Authority, Legitimacy and Sovereignty
Questions:
1. What is the particular nature of political power?
2. How has the state been conceived and how might we approach this question?
3. What particular theoretical questions arise with the question of the state and
power?
The state tends to be considered a privileged actor in the deployment and use of power in
society. However, this is not a contested relationship. How the state uses, deploys and
access agents to power is not something that political science agrees upon in a particular
way—there are many conceptions of how and what type of relation the state has to power.
For example, when analysing the relationship between the state and power:
Some (feminists) would focus on the fact that the state could be understood as a
kind of overbearing expression of patriarchal power in our societies.
Some (Democrats) would see it as the ideal agent of social and political power being
vested in the power and how it, in this sense, can fulfil our aspirations to power by,
say, providing us with welfare services, or in franchising us to have the vote →
agency for people in some ways.
Some people would see it primarily as a feder on economic activities, an intrusion of
state power into economic life, whereas some people would focus on the way in
which states regulate economic life, deploys political power to, e.g., rectify and fix
irrational effects of markets.
There are lots of different ways of conceiving what the state does and how it
does it. In any sense, we can say the state is unique as a body in our society. It
mobilises populations in defence; monitors and polices us in a particular way;
regulates us and controls the floor of information in the public sphere. In a
variety of other ways, it exhibits a kind of central control over power in our
societies.
Most traditional theories of political science are fixated on this and saw this is a
proper subject of the discipline. Political scientists try to understand state power.
On the other hand, there is a lot of criticisms of that approach—a lot of ideas
that the state is no longer what it once was. There are new challenges, new
obstacles to state power. People often focus on the way in which global political
problems seem to restrict state’s capacity to deal with them, e.g. global
environmental crises, global economic crises, global humanitarian crises such as
refugee crisis etc. These all seem to challenge our idea that the state is a unique
and privileged actor.
In spite of that, the state is still very central in political science.
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I. What is Political Power?
- Power is quite central to political science as a discipline
- A lot of academic gatekeeping that happens between disciplines. A subject like this
looks at the way in which different disciplines attack, examine particular or the same
type of subjects, in this case, power
- Politics, as a form of study, has often put power at its particular purview. Power is
the central, organizing concept of social and political theory
‘Power is arguably the single most organizing concept in social and political theory’
(Terence Ball)
- Ball did not just mean that the question of politics is the question of power—who
has power, where are the effects of that power. He also meant that our conception
of power (the way we talk about power) tends to have a very big impact on our basic
understanding of, the core ideas and values of political life
E.g.
Freedom is often a question of power. Are we free when we’re free from the
power of others? Are we free when we are in power in some sense to do
something? → Basic distinction that structures how we think about power.
Notions of equality are often also structured around conceptions of power.
In some sense, some views would see a state attempting to make the society
more equal as a kind of unjust use of state power—use of state power to
reshape social life, to make us more equal. On the other hand, other views
would see the attempt to instil equality in society as spreading political
power, as equalizing power in society, in rectifying social divisions in a way
that makes us more equal.
Democracy is often thought of as a particular mode of attempting to organise
political power in a way that spreads political power, a way of making
political power horizontal and even.
- Defining Power: The first kind of basic distinction we make is Power-to and Power-
over
1. Power-to: He-Man
2. Power-over: He-Man and Battlecat
How some people exist in relationships of domination with others. Some people
have power over others in our societies. Power over others might involve getting
to do certain things, having certain privileges or influence over them. The
significance of that is it illustrates what we’re mainly interested in when we talk
about power in political science: we’re interested in the social relationship, in the
fact that one group or individual has the capacity to dominate others. We’re
interested in not just in one particular moment when it happened—we’re
interested in relationships that endure. Why there is a particular group manages
to leverage and execute political power over others reliably and with great
efficacy?
II. The Political Dimensions of Power
3 dimensions (Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical view)
1. Power as Decision-Making:
Often affiliated/associated with political leaders and the type of power they
deploy.
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Not restricted necessarily to political institutions, can be any organization
that has a leader, e.g. a social club, a corporation.
The idea that power is fundamentally identified by those who have the
capacity to make decisions and have them implemented. Power is about
mostly formal context in which someone manages to push their will through.
We saw today that the Kolechian government has now tabled and delayed its
tax reform bill for the companies’ acts. That’s a demonstration of their lack of
power to push that piece of legislation through against the existing political
situations.
People who think about power in this term are very much concerned with
how decisions get made, with formal institutions.
2. Power as Agenda Setting: Some argue more for conception of power as agenda-
setting, or what we call also non-decision, as they consider power as decision-making
inadequate.
The idea that certain agents in the society will have the capacity to prevent
formal or informal discussions of certain types of topics. The impetus behind
this idea was that the formal model in Power as Decision-making was too
restrictive—it only looked basically at whether an agent had the intention to
get a decision made, and then whether that decision was made → how it
tried to measure and track power within an academic framework
This second understanding said we have to try and think behind that, the way
in which institutions are structured, how agents might operate behind those
structures, how they might, in a sense, enclose power, and how those can
have real effects on our political lives.
The important thing is that while this is reformist, it also shares a lot of
assumptions with the first understanding (liberal) of what power is. For
example, they both assume that what we want as political agents is stable
and power is the ability to see those things. They don’t question why a
particular leader would have a proposed preference, they don’t question why
an individual within a social club is trying to do sth as well might have a
particular preference. They just look at, in a certain sense, whether that
agent is successful in having their will enacted.
3. Power as Preference Manipulation: Comes into play when the previous two
conceptions of power are regarded as simply too limited and largely inadequate by
someone like Lukes.
This is the aspect of power in which certain groups can have their wills
changed, structured or filtered through ideas, values, beliefs that don’t
actually pursue their interests, and in fact, might oppress them in particular
ways → they have their preferences manipulated; the idea that we might not
know what is in our interest, that there might be some systemic features of
society that prevent us from knowing.
The most common example of this would be the Marxist notion of ideology:
the idea that we don’t understand our current social relationships, that there
is an ideological veil which obscures our real oppression from us and instead
our values around democracy and freedom help reinforce that structure.
Another good example is the feminist concept of patriarchy: the idea that
there is a series of values, norms and beliefs in our society which force us to
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Document Summary
Overview: the dimensions of political power, the nature of the state, authority, legitimacy and sovereignty. The state tends to be considered a privileged actor in the deployment and use of power in society. How the state uses, deploys and access agents to power is not something that political science agrees upon in a particular way there are many conceptions of how and what type of relation the state has to power. For example, when analysing the relationship between the state and power: Some (feminists) would focus on the fact that the state could be understood as a kind of overbearing expression of patriarchal power in our societies. There are lots of different ways of conceiving what the state does and how it does it. In any sense, we can say the state is unique as a body in our society.
