Power, by which is meant here social, economic or political power, is at the heart both of actual political conflict, and of the discipline of political science. Despite this it is extremely hard to give any useful definition, and not only are most definitions contentious, but some theorists hold that value freedom cannot exist in accounts either of what power is or when it exists. The safest definitions are, typically, formal, and perhaps vacuous. Thus one very common definition of power in modern political science is ‘the ability of A to make B do something B would not choose to do’. The trouble is that such definitions raise almost more questions than they answer. For example, if I get B to want something they ‘would not otherwise want’, which I want, am I not exercising power? Or, suppose two people both try to get B to do (different) unwanted things, which is to be seen as the more powerful? How does one deal with ‘potential’ power, the power I might well have, but choose not to use, to make someone do something? What are the sources of power? Above all, there is a problem of measuring power. This is not simply an erudite quibble, because important modern theories about the nature of politics, especially élitism and pluralism, depend on answers to these questions. It is held against pluralism, especially in the version represented by the community power studies, that only open conflicts between identified interests are taken as evidence for the theories of power distribution, while a secret élite who managed to ensure that no one ever got the chance of attacking them would be regarded as powerless.
Clearly no one definition can be satisfactory to all needs, and no use of the concept of power can guarantee to be value free.
Notwithstanding all this, we have an intuitive understanding of power as something that may indeed, as in the words of Mao Zedong, come out of the mouths of guns, but also out of the mouths of people, as with ‘powerful’ orators, which can be wielded evilly, but also for good, and which does ultimately depend on the ability to change peoples’ preferences. The preferences may be between obeying or dying, or they may be much more trivial preferences, perhaps for one toothpaste over another. To use ‘power’ as a concept at all involves assuming some basic possible human autonomy, some set of preferences that would ‘naturally’ exist. While this is obviously sometimes no problem (we would naturally prefer not to tell robbers where our valuables are, and pulling our fingernails out is an effective use of power to change our preferences), sometimes the arguments become highly metaphysical. It is the belief that power relations are endemic to all human interaction and largely determine the qualityof human life that makes the concept central, and justifies political science as an academic discipline, because politics is, ultimately, the exercise of power. What has, perhaps, emerged in political science over the last generation is an increasing tendency to see power as arising from relationships, rather than being wielded consciously by individuals. This has partly been helped by the radical thinking of power as endemic, even in the language and discourse of thinkers associated with the French post-modernists.
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