Week one: what is Power: The Key Concept in Political Sociology

If we begin with the idea that politics is “the generalized process by which the struggle over power in society is resolved” (Braungart 1981: 2), at the outset, then we can understand that power is at the core of the work of political sociologists. The goal is to explain the connections between social interactions, social structures, and social processes altered by struggle and resolution. We must define what we mean by power. Defining power is not as straightforward as one might think. Certainly, we all have experienced power in some way, perhaps the influence of a friend who cajoles and pushes us to go to a political meeting, or the force of a mugger who con- fronts us, taking an iPod at gunpoint! Power is encountered every day and every hour. Let’s take a look at several definitions, identifying as we go the differences that reflect debates on how power is conceptualized.

The works of Karl Marx and Max Weber serve as the classic foundations for defining power. Marx established that economic structures like corporations, owners of capital, and more immediately, the boss represent societal sources of power. The use of wages to influence worker performance or attendance is a significant creation of capitalist society. According to Marx, the relationship between worker, wage, and class interests was the source of alienating individuals not only from pursuing nonwork-related self-interests but also alienating individuals from each other. For Marx, power has an economic context rooted in the relationships between and among social classes. Weber picks up this theme and offers one of the first formal political sociological analyses of power. Unlike Marx, Weber located power in a variety of social spaces including both economic and non-economic contexts. For Weber, power was rooted in formalized social systems such as organizations or bureaucracies, as well as in social institutions such as religion and law. Weber differed from Marx in that he argued that power was not simply just about eco- nomic relationships, but rather a function of social patterns, culture, and social organization. These early approaches to the study of power offer one of the first debates in political sociology about the nature of the society–politics relationship. Weber developed many of the early formal statements about power and politics, defining power as: “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (1947: 152). This definition was launched after nearly a century of attempts at clarification, precision, and nuanced understandings of power. Since Weber’s study of power in the early 1900s, social scientists have focused on what is meant by the distribution of power in society, as well as identifying what kinds of resources make some individuals and groups powerful or powerless. Others have extended the notion that politics is inherent in most if not all aspects of social action and expression in human interactions.