The faces of power revisited

ABSTRACT

The phrase ‘faces of power’ grows out of the ‘community power debate’ several decades ago. This essay focuses on aspects of the debate that have been overlooked, misinterpreted, forgotten, and/or which deserve further discussion. Since one of the principal participants in the debate has recently revised his thinking significantly, the debate is re-examined from this perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• interests
• democracy
• community
• debate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. But for Dahl, there would not be 14,000 Google citations to a fifty page pamphlet published in 1974.

2. For an overview of this literature, see Polsby (1980); Ricci (1980); Waste (1986); and Dowding (2011).

3. Baer et al. (1991), p. 176.

4. Lukes (2015) disputes this interpretation and compares the distinction to one by John Rawls between a ‘concept’ and a ‘conception.’ The terminology used by moral philosophers, of course, may differ from that commonly used by social scientists. Compare King et al. (1994), Goertz (2006), and Brady and Collier (2010).

5. The precise meaning of the term ‘research driver’ is not as clear as one might wish.

6. See Ricci (1980), Polsby (1980), Waste (1986), and Dowding (2011).

7. Digeser (1992).

8. Frey (1971), p. 1092.

9. Dahl describes the process for calculating the 14,000 faces in a paper delivered at the 1964 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and reprinted in Dahl (1997), pp. 295–296.

10. Domination is perhaps the most abused and ill-defined concept in the lexicon of power.

11. Although Simon won a Nobel Prize in economics, he was a political scientist by training, having received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam.

12. This important book has not received the attention it deserves from scholars writing on power. In the ‘Guide to Further Reading,’ (2005 p. 163) Lukes dismisses Nagel’s book as ‘a study of influence, not power.’ Considering that Nagel describes his proposed concept of power as ‘dispositive,’ a bit more by way of explanation would have been helpful.

13. Lukes, of course, has not abandoned his insistence that the concept of power is ‘essentially contested.’ I shall not repeat the arguments against this position that I discuss in Power and International Relations (2016, pp.62–66) or those put forth by numerous others, e.g., Oppenheim (1981); Macdonald (1977); Dowding (2006); Haugaard (2010); Lovett; and McLachlan (1981).

14. On this point, see Gallarotti (2010a, 2010b)).

15. See also, Adam Smith (1776); Blau (1964); and Baldwin (1971;Baldwin 1978) on this point.

16. For an overview of these works, see Baldwin (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David A. Baldwin

David A. Baldwin is Wallach Professor Emeritus in Department of Political Science at Columbia University in the City of New York and Senior Political Scientist in the School of International and Public Affairs at Princeton University. (U.S.A.) His recent books include Economic Statecraft: New Edition (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Power and International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2016.)