Excerpt from The State as an Object of Sociological Analysis

Abstract

Political power is a key category in the sociological analysis of the state. Specialists in the theory of state and law have devoted particular attention in recent years to the elaboration of this category. Numerous works devoted to this subject reveal the essential features of power as a volitional social relation and define the correlation between power and authority, persuasion and coercion, leadership [rukovodstvo] and domination, power and influence, political power and state administration, etc. (1) What is more, researchers treating the problem of political power in socialist society have correctly called attention to the fact that socialist society places primary emphasis on such aspects of the functioning of this institution as leadership and influence (2), that politics under the conditions of an all-people's state, especially government [upravlenie], constitutes the unified interaction of party, state, and societal leadership within the framework of a unified governing system. (3) At the same time, they call attention to the illegitimacy of equating power with government, to the fact that political power is hardly the sum of state and other forms of leadership, is not an element or attribute of social government, but is its nucleus, since specifically it "determines the social nature of government and its basic goals and spheres of action because it expresses politics." (4)