Debating the dimensions: Amy Allen, Rainer Forst and Isaac Ariail Reed in dialogue-review of The Four Dimensions of Power by Mark Haugaard

ABSTRACT

In this article Amy Allen, Rainer Forst and Isaac Reed debate the four dimensions of power, as framed by Mark Haugaard, in The Four Dimensions of Power, and Haugaard responds. This discussion involves the following: the relationship between agency and authority; ideology and acquiescence; power-over, power-to and power-with; structural constraint; bias and exclusion; the distinction between deep and shallow conflicts; the concept of reification; foundational Truth claims and modest truths; how social ontology or being-in-the-world relates to power; a pragmatist account of democracy as nonzero-sum power and its normative grounds; and a discussion of the relative value of theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• agency
• ideology
• reification
• democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Allen

Amy Allen: Amy Allen is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Head of the Philosophy Department at the Pennsylvania State University. Her most recent book is Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2021).

Rainer Forst

Rainer Forst: Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and Director of the Research Center Normative Orders. His most recent publications are Normativity and Power (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Die noumenale Republik (Suhrkamp, 2021).

Mark Haugaard

Mark Haugaard: Mark Haugaard is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Political Power, published by Routledge, and the book series, Social and Political Power, with Manchester University Press. He has published extensively upon power and his most recent publications include The Four Dimensions of Power: understanding domination, empowerment and democracy, 2020, Manchester University Press.

Isaac Ariail Reed

Isaac Ariail Reed: Isaac Ariail Reed is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (University of Chicago Press, 2020), as well as the co-editor of Social Theory Now (with Claudio Benzecry and Monica Krause) and The New Pragmatist Sociology (with Neil Gross and Christopher Winship).