1.1 In Search of a Definition
Social communication often takes place through the use of words whose meaning we do not fully understand. When we utter them or hear them, we do not exhibit any doubts at all. We display the same mechanical attitude which is elicited by the most obvious and commonplace expressions. But these are words which evoke many and different things within us and which mark the boundary of a “territory” whose identity appears very uncertain to us.
“Society” and “power” belong to this category of words. In discussing the former, Ortega y Gasset took to task two of the “founding fathers” of sociology. And he wrote:
the works with which Auguste Comte inaugurated sociological science amount to over five thousand densely written pages. Well, from all of them one could not even manage to put together enough lines to fill a single page telling us what Comte understood by society. [And that is not all:] the book in which this science or pseudoscience celebrated its first intellectual triumph – Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, published from 1876 to 1896 – contains no fewer than two thousand five hundred pages. I do not believe that there are more than fifty lines employed by the author to ask himself what societies – these strange realities which are the subject of this obese publication – are.1
Fortunately, not everyone has done as Comte and Spencer did. Ortega was well aware of this; and he himself attempted an ambitious work, which was unluckily never completed, aimed at “deciphering” the social phenomenon.2 The Spanish thinker’s statements about the word “society” can also be extended to “power”. Max Weber, whose definition is recurrently used as an opening to any discussion of the subject, understood power as “the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) from a given source will be obeyed by a given group of persons”.3 It would appear from this passage that the author is exclusively interested in describing the effects of the act of command. And power occupies the scene as something given, as something which cannot be broken down into its generating factors. It is true that Weber immediately afterward added that the probability of seeing the actor’s will achieved “may be based on the most diverse motives of compliance: all the way from simple habituation to the most purely rational calculation of advantage”.4 But the reference to a “compliance” triggered by an action which is “instrumentally rational”, namely by an action in which the person who obeys obtains an immediate advantage in strictly economic terms, appears to have been put there almost accidentally. Weber should not have referred to one type of action, but rather to all intersubjective relations.
Although he saw power as the “fundamental concept in social science”,5 Bertrand Russell wrote that “love of power, in the widest sense, is the desire to be able to produce intended effects upon the outer world, whether human or non-human”, which, according to Russell, is a “part of human nature”.6 But to speak of “human nature”, something which needs in turn to be explained, does not help us to go any further. If we move on to consider Guglielmo Ferrero, we will notice that his main concern was to highlight the consequences which ensue from a lack of legitimacy in state power.7 And Bertrand de Jouvenel also focused on this kind of power, setting himself the goal of clarifying its “origin”; but he failed to achieve even that limited goal, because he followed Necker in claiming that within the power of rulers there is “a magical efficacy”, an “unknown ascendancy”.8
Nor does one get any further when one considers the domain of prevailing political science. Robert A. Dahl’s definition reveals its full Weberian inspiration. For he states that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do”.9 He also specified that power is a relationship between actors. But he does not go beyond this.10 And other authors have not strayed from this approach. This applies to Bachrach and Baratz, according to whom it is true that
Bachrach and Baratz also argue that nobody “can have power in a vacuum, but only in relation to someone else”.12 And yet they fail to provide an in-depth analysis of this very line of inquiry. And when authors like Catlin and Lasswell ventured to analyse what precedes political reality,13 David Easton countered by writing:power is exercised when A participates in the making of decisions that affect B […, but] is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A.11
It might be necessary […] to devote time to such a comprehensive examination of power situations in order to develop a generalized theory of power. This theory would be very helpful to the political scientist, but by the nature of his task he directs his attention not to power in general but to political power.14
Where can we turn to, then? Steven Lukes wrote that what determines the limitation of Weber’s definition is the methodological individualism he adopted.15 But Lukes makes two mistakes. First of all, Weber’s definition is not insufficient because of the individualistic method he used, but because of the fact that he did not in fact make full use of that method. If he had made use of the theory of action, he would have been in a position to break down “power” into its “component” parts; and he would not have presented it as something given. In the long history of the debate on method, Carl Menger’s work is a genuine milestone. And it clarifies that methodological individualism requires that we “reduce human phenomena to their most original and simplest constitutive factors”, and then “try to investigate the laws by which more complicated human phenomena are formed”.16 Weber, therefore, was not the victim of an excess of individualistic methodology. What happened is the exact opposite. In analysing power, his approach was not individualistic enough. And this can be said of all those authors who make fleeting references to the intersub...