Editorial

摘要

The power debates have been dominated by three traditions of analysis: the conflictual view, which has its antecedents in Hobbes and Weber, where power constitutes domination; the consensual perspective, with origins in the work of Spinoza and Rousseau, in which power constitutes a capacity for action; and the constitutive perspective, with intellectual roots in Machiavelli and Nietzsche, in which power creates subjects and is responsible for both the capacity for action of social agents and acts of domination. The prime contemporary representatives of the conflictual view are Dahl (1957), Lukes (2005), and Hayward and Lukes (2008); the consensual, Arendt (1958, 1970), Parsons (1963), Barnes (1988), Habermas (1979, 1983), and Morriss (2002, 2009); and that of the constitutive, Foucault (1979, 1980), Dean (2010), Rose (2008), Clegg (1989), Clegg et al. (2006), Hayward (2000), Allen (2007), and Haugaard (2003, 2010). Within the constitutive perspective there is a division between the followers of Foucault (Dean and Rose) and the rest. Allen, Clegg, Hayward, and Haugaard are explicitly conscious of the duality of power: that power is both a condition of agency, and thus freedom, yet simultaneously a source of domination. This is implicit in Foucault, especially in the later work, but there is also a constant normative bias in Foucault, which can slide into the assumption that power equates with domination, thus obscuring the insight that, as a condition of agency, there exists normatively legitimate power. Indeed, the normative question that confronts normative political theorists of power is how to distinguish power as domination from legitimate power.