power in politics essay

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When we talk about power in everyday life, we assume everyone has the same understanding of the word. But in politics, the term ‘power’ can be highly ambiguous, both in terms of definition and the ability to accurately measure the power of states or individuals. In this article, we will discuss what we mean by power in politics. 

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• Cell Biology

Which of these is a component of political power?

Foucault briefly joined the French Communist Party, but left due to ideological differences. (T/F)

Which of these academic subjects did Foucault NOT pursue? 

When was Foucault alive?

What was the main social dynamic that Michel Foucault was trying to shine a light on?

Which of these philosophical schools of thought are associated with Michel Foucault?

According to Michel Foucault power dynamics cannot be avoided (T/F)

Which of these ISN'T one of the titles we could attribute to Michel Foucault?

What did Michel Foucault's father expect him to pursue his career as?

Where was Michel Foucault from?

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Political power definition

Before a political power definition, we first need to define ‘power’ as a concept.

The ability to make a state or person act or think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted or thought otherwise and shape the course of events.

Political power is composed of three components:

Authority: The ability to exercise power through decision making, giving orders, or the ability of others to comply with demands

Legitimacy : When citizens recognise a leader's right to exercise power over them (when citizens recognise state authority)

Sovereignty: Refers to the highest level of power that cannot be overruled (when a state government/individual has legitimacy and authority)

Today, 195 countries in the world have state sovereignty . There is no higher power in the international system than state sovereignty , meaning there are 195 states that possess political power. The extent of each state's political power differs based on the three concepts of powe r and the three dimensions of power .

Power in politics and governance

The three concepts and dimensions of power are separate but closely related mechanisms which operate alongside each other in the international system. Together these mechanisms affect the balance of power in politics and governance.

Three Concepts of Power

Power in terms of capabilities/attributes - What the state possesses and how it can use them on the international stage. For example, the population and geographical size of a state, its military capabilities, its natural resources, its economic wealth, the efficiency of its government, leadership, infrastructure, etc. Pretty much anything a state can use to exert influence. Keep in mind that capabilities only determine how much potential power a state has rather than actual power. This is because different capabilities matter to different extents in different contexts.

Power in terms of relations - The capabilities of a state can only be measured in relation to another state. For example, China has regional dominance because its capabilities are greater than that of other East Asian states. However, when comparing China to the United States and Russia, China has fewer or more equal levels of capabilities. Here power is measured in terms of influence in a relationship, where power can be observed as the effect the action of one state has on another.

The two types of relational power

• Deterrence : Used to stop one or more states from doing what they would have otherwise done
• Compliance : Used to force one or more states into doing what they would have otherwise not done

Power in terms of structure - Structural power is best described as the ability to decide how international relations are conducted, and the frameworks in which they are conducted, such as finance, security and economics. Currently, the United States dominates in most fields.

All three concepts of power operate simultaneously, and all help determine different outcomes of power used in politics based on context. In some contexts, military strength might be more important in determining success; in others, it may be knowledge of the state.

Three Dimensions of Power

Steven Lukes most influentially theorised the three dimensions of power in his book Power, A Radical View. Luke's interpretations are summarised below:

• One-Dimensional View - This dimension is referred to as the pluralist view or decision-making, and believes that a state's political power can be determined in an observable conflict in global politics. When these conflicts occur, we can observe which state's suggestions most regularly triumph over others and if they result in a change of behaviour of other involved states. The state with the most 'wins' in decision-making is considered the most influential and powerful. It's important to remember that states often suggest solutions that further their interests, so when their suggestions are adopted during conflicts, they secure more power.

Two-Dimensional View - This view is a criticism of the one-dimensional view. Its advocates argue that the pluralist view doesn't account for the ability to set the agenda. This dimension is referred to as non-decision-making power and accounts for the covert exercise of power. There is power in choosing what is discussed on the international stage; if a conflict isn't brought to light, no decisions can be made about it, allowing states to do as they wish covertly regarding matters they don't want to publicise. They avoid the development of ideas and policies which are harmful to them, whilst highlighting more favourable events on the international stage. This dimension embraces covert coercion and manipulation. Only the most powerful or 'elite' states can use the power of non-decision making, creating a biased precedent in dealing with international political matters.

Three-Dimensional View - Lukes advocates this view, known as ideological power. He regards the first two dimensions of power as too intensely focused on observable conflicts (overt and covert) and points out that states still exercise power in the absence of conflict. Lukes, suggests a third dimension of power that must be considered - the ability to construct preferences and perceptions of individuals and states. This dimension of power cannot be observed as it is an invisible conflict - the conflict between the interests of the more powerful and the less powerful, and the ability of more powerful states to distort the ideologies of other states to the point where they are unaware of what is actually in their best interest. This is a form of coerciv e power in politics.

Coercive power in politics

The second and third dimensions of power incorporate the concept of coercive power in politics. Steven Lukes defines coercion in political power as;

Existing where A secures B's compliance by the threat of deprivation where there is a conflict over values or course of action between A and B. 4

To fully grasp the concept of coercive power, we must look at hard power.

Hard Power: The capability of a state to influence the actions of one or more states through threats and rewards, such as physical attacks or economic boycotting.

Nazi Germany is an excellent example of coercive power in politics. Although the Nazi party seized power and authority legitimately and legally, their power politics consisted mainly of coercion and force. Media was heavily censored and Nazi propaganda was spread to influence ideologies (third dimension of power). Hard power was used through the establishment of a secret police force that aimed to weed out 'enemies of the state' and potential traitors who spoke or acted against the Nazi regime. People who did not submit were publicly humiliated, tortured, and even sent to concentration camps. The Nazi regime carried out similar coercive power exertions in their international endeavours by invading and controlling neighbouring nations such as Poland and Austria with similar methods.

Importance of power in politics

Grasping the importance of power in politics is essential for a well-rounded understanding of world politics and international relations. The use of power on the international stage not only affects people directly but can also alter the balance of power and the structure of the international system itself. Political power is essentially the way states interact with one another. If the use of power in its many forms is not calculated, the results could be unpredictable, leading to an unstable political environment. This is why the balance of power in international relations is important. If one state has too much power and unrivalled influence, it could threaten the sovereignty of other states.

Globalisation has resulted in a deeply interconnected political community. Weapons of mass destruction have drastically increased the detrimental aftermath of war, and economies are deeply interdependent, meaning that a negative occurrence in national economies could result in a domino effect of worldwide economic consequences. This was demonstrated in the 2008 Financial crisis, in which an economic crash in the United States caused a global recession.

Example of Power in Politics

While there are countless examples of power in politics, the United States' involvement in the Vietnam war is a classic example of power politics in action.

The U.S became involved in the Vietnam war in 1965 as an ally of the Southern Vietnamese government. Their primary goal was to prevent the spread of communism . The Northern Vietnamese Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, aimed to unify and establish an independent communist Vietnam. U.S power in terms of capability (weaponry) were much more advanced than that of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong - a northern Guerrilla force. The same could be said of their relational power, with the U.S being recognised as a military and economic superpower since the 1950s.

Despite this, North Vietnamese forces prevailed and eventually won the war. Structural power outweighed the importance of power in terms of capability and relations. The Vietcong had structural knowledge and information about Vietnam and used it to pick and choose their battles against the Americans. By being tactical and calculated with the use of their structural power, they gained power.

The U.S cause of stopping the spread of communism was not internalised by enough of the Vietnamese public who were not in tune with the main political conflict in 1960s American culture - the Cold War between the capitalist U.S and the Communist Soviet Union. As the war progressed, millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed for a cause that Vietnamese civilians could not personally internalise. Ho Chi Minh used familiar culture and nationalist pride to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese and keep morale high for North Vietnamese efforts.

Power in Politics - Key takeaways

• Power is the ability to make a state or person act/think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted/thought otherwise, and shape the course of events.
• There are three concepts of power - capability, relational and structural.
• There are three dimensions of power theorised by Lukes - decision making, non-decision making and ideological.
• Coercive power is primarily a form of hard power, but can be used in line with soft power influences.
• Power in politics has a direct effect on everyday people, and if political power is not used cautiously, the results could be unpredictable, leading to an unstable political environment.
• Fig. 1 - Steven Lukes (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steven_Lukes.jpg) by KorayLoker (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:KorayLoker&action=edit&redlink=1) licensed by CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
• Fig. 2 - Reich Nazi Germany Veterans Picture postcard (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ludwig_HOHLWEIN_Reichs_Parteitag-N%C3%BCrnberg_1936_Hitler_Ansichtskarte_Propaganda_Drittes_Reich_Nazi_Germany_Veterans_Picture_postcard_Public_Domain_No_known_copyright_627900-000016.jpg) by Ludwig Hohlwein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Hohlwein) licensed by CC-BY-SA-4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
• Lukes, S. (2021). Power: A radical view. Bloomsbury Publishing

Flashcards in Power in Politics 12

Which of the following is NOT a work of Michael Foucault?

The Gay Science.

The 20th century.

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Frequently Asked Questions about Power in Politics

What are the three dimensions of power in politics?

• Decision making. 
• Non-decision making
• Ideological 

What is the importance of power in politics?

It holds great importance as those in power can create rules and regulations which affect people directly and can also alter the balance of power, as well as the structure of the international system itself.

What are the types of power in politics?

power in terms of capability, relational power and structural power

What is power in politics?

We can define power as the ability to make a state or person act/think in a way that is contrary to how they would have acted/thought otherwise, and shape the course of events.

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Essay on Politics: Topics, Tips, and Examples for Students

Defining What is Politics Essay

The process of decision-making that applies to members of a group or society is called politics. Arguably, political activities are the backbone of human society, and everything in our daily life is a form of it.

Understanding the essence of politics, reflecting on its internal elements, and critically analyzing them make society more politically aware and let them make more educated decisions. Constantly thinking and analyzing politics is critical for societal evolution.

Political thinkers often write academic papers that explore different political concepts, policies, and events. The essay about politics may examine a wide range of topics such as government systems, political ideologies, social justice, public policies, international relations, etc.

After selecting a specific research topic, a writer should conduct extensive research, gather relevant information, and prepare a logical and well-supported argument. The paper should be clear and organized, complying with academic language and standards. A writer should demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject, an ability to evaluate and remain non-biased to different viewpoints, and a capacity to draw conclusions.

Now that we are on the same page about the question 'what is politics essay' and understand its importance, let's take a deeper dive into how to build a compelling political essay, explore the most relevant political argumentative essay topics, and finally, examine the political essay examples written by the best essay writing service team.

Politics Essay Example for Students

If you are still unsure how to structure your essay or how to present your statement, don't worry. Our team of experts has prepared an excellent essay example for you. Feel free to explore and examine it. Use it to guide you through the writing process and help you understand what a successful essay looks like.

How to Write a Political Essay: Tips + Guide

A well-written essay is easy to read and digest. You probably remember reading papers full of big words and complex ideas that no one bothered to explain. We all agree that such essays are easily forgotten and not influential, even though they might contain a very important message.

If you are writing an essay on politics, acknowledge that you are on a critical mission to easily convey complicated concepts. Hence, what you are trying to say should be your main goal. Our guide on how to write a political essay will help you succeed.

Conduct Research for Your Politics Essay

After choosing a topic for the essay, take enough time for preparation. Even if you are familiar with the matter, conducting thorough research is wiser. Political issues are complex and multifaceted; comprehensive research will help you understand the topic better and offer a more nuanced analysis.

Research can help you identify different viewpoints and arguments around the topic, which can be beneficial for building more impartial and persuasive essays on politics. Sometimes in the hit of the moment, opposing sides are not able to see the common ground; your goal is to remain rational, speak to diverse audiences, and help them see the core of the problem and the ways to solve it.

In political papers, accuracy and credibility are vital. Researching the topic deeply will help you avoid factual errors or misrepresentations from any standpoint. It will allow you to gather reliable sources of information and create a trustworthy foundation for the entire paper.

If you want to stand out from the other students, get inspired by the list of hottest essay ideas and check out our political essay examples.

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Brainstorm Political Essay Topics

The next step to writing a compelling politics essay is to polish your thoughts and find the right angle to the chosen topic.

Before you start writing, generate fresh ideas and organize your thoughts. There are different techniques to systematize the mess going on in your head, such as freewriting, mind mapping, or even as simple as listing ideas. This will open the doors to new angles and approaches to the topic.

When writing an essay about politics, ensure the topic is not too general. It's always better to narrow it down. It will simplify your job and help the audience better understand the core of the problem. Brainstorming can help you identify key points and arguments, which you can use to find a specific angle on the topic.

Brainstorming can also help you detect informational gaps that must be covered before the writing process. Ultimately, the brainstorming phase can bring a lot more clarity and structure to your essay.

We know how exhausting it is to come up with comparative politics essay topics. Let our research paper writing service team do all the hard work for you.

Create Your Politics Essay Thesis Statement

Thesis statements, in general, serve as a starting point of the roadmap for the reader. A political essay thesis statement outlines the main ideas and arguments presented in the body paragraphs and creates a general sense of the content of the paper.

Creating a thesis statement for essays about politics in the initial stages of writing can help you stay focused and on track throughout the working process. You can use it as an aim and constantly check your arguments and evidence against it. The question is whether they are relevant and supportive of the statement.

Get creative when creating a statement. This is the first sentence readers will see, and it should be compelling and clear.

The following is a great example of a clear and persuasive thesis statement:

 'The lack of transparency and accountability has made the World Trade Organization one of the most controversial economic entities. Despite the influence, its effectiveness in promoting free trade and economic growth in developing countries has decreased.'

Provide Facts in Your Essay about Politic

It's a no-brainer that everything you will write in your essay should be supported by strong evidence. The credibility of your argument will be questioned every step of the way, especially when you are writing about sensitive subjects such as essays on government influence on economic troubles. 

Provide facts and use them as supporting evidence in your politics essay. They will help you establish credibility and accuracy and take your paper out of the realm of speculation and mere opinions.

Facts will make your essay on political parties more persuasive, unbiased, and targeted to larger audiences. Remember, the goal is to bring the light to the core of the issue and find a solution, not to bring people even farther apart.

Speaking of facts, many students claim that when they say ' write my essay for me ' out loud, our writing team is the fastest to respond and deliver high-quality essays meeting their trickiest requirements.

Structure Your Political Essay

Your main goal is to communicate your ideas to many people. To succeed, you need to write an essay that is easy to read and understand. Creating a structure will help you present your ideas logically and lead the readers in the right direction.

Sometimes when writing about political essay topics, we get carried away. These issues can be very emotional and sensitive, and writers are not protected from becoming victims of their own writings. Having a structure will keep you on track, only focusing on providing supported arguments and relevant information.

Start with introducing the thesis statement and provide background information. Followed by the body paragraphs and discuss all the relevant facts and standpoints. Finish it up with a comprehensive conclusion, and state the main points of your essay once again.

The structure will also save you time. In the beginning, creating an outline for essays on politics will give you a general idea of what should be written, and you can track your progress against it.

Revise and Proofread Your Final Politics Essay

Once every opinion is on the paper and every argument is well-constructed, one final step should be taken. Revision!

We know nothing is better than finishing the homework and quickly submitting it, but we aim for an A+. Our political essay must be reviewed. You need to check if there is any error such as grammatical, spelling, or contextual.

Take some time off, relax, and start proofreading after a few minutes or hours. Having a fresh mind will help you review not only grammar but also the arguments. Check if something is missing from your essays about politics, and if you find gaps, provide additional information.

You had to spend a lot of time on them, don't give up now. Make sure they are in perfect condition.

Effective Political Essay Topics

We would be happy if our guide on how to write political essays helped you, but we are not stopping there. Below you will find a list of advanced and relevant political essay topics. Whether you are interested in global political topics or political science essay topics, we got you covered.

Once you select a topic, don't forget to check out our politics essay example! It will bring even more clarity, and you will be all ready to start writing your own paper.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

Now that we know how to write a political analysis essay let's explore political argumentative essay topics:

• Should a political party take a stance on food politics and support policies promoting sustainable food systems?
• Should we label Winston Churchill as the most influential political figure of World War II?
• Does the focus on GDP growth in the political economy hinder the human development index?
• Is foreign influence a threat to national security?
• Is foreign aid the best practice for political campaigning?
• Does the electoral college work for an ideal political system?
• Are social movements making a real difference, or are they politically active for temporary change?
• Can global politics effectively address political conflicts in the modern world?
• Are opposing political parties playing positive roles in US international relations?
• To what extent should political influence be allowed in addressing economic concerns?
• Can representative democracy prevent civil wars in ethnically diverse countries?
• Should nuclear weapons be abolished for the sake of global relations?
• Is economic development more important than ethical issues for Caribbean politics?
• What role should neighboring nations play in preventing human rights abuse in totalitarian regimes?
• Should political decisions guide the resolution of conflicts in the South China Sea?

Political Socialization Essay Topics

Knowing how to write a political issue essay is one thing, but have you explored our list of political socialization essay topics?

• To what extent does a political party or an influential political figure shape the beliefs of young people?
• Does political influence shape attitudes toward environmental politics?
• How can individuals use their own learning process to navigate political conflicts in a polarized society?
• How do political strategies shape cultural globalization?
• Is gender bias used as a political instrument in political socialization?
• How can paying attention to rural communities improve political engagement?
• What is the role of Amnesty International in preventing the death penalty?
• What is the role of politically involved citizens in shaping minimum wage policies?
• How does a political party shape attitudes toward global warming?
• How does the federal system influence urban planning and attitudes toward urban development?
• What is the role of public opinion in shaping foreign policy, and how does it affect political decision making
• Did other countries' experiences affect policies on restricting immigration in the US?
• How can note-taking skills and practice tests improve political engagement? 
• How do the cultural values of an independent country shape the attitudes toward national security?
• Does public opinion influence international intervention in helping countries reconcile after conflicts?

Political Science Essay Topics

If you are searching for political science essay topics, check our list below and write the most compelling essay about politic:

• Is environmental education a powerful political instrument? 
• Can anarchist societies provide a viable alternative to traditional forms of governance?
• Pros and cons of deterrence theory in contemporary international relations
• Comparing the impact of the French Revolution and World War II on the political landscape of Europe
• The role of the ruling political party in shaping national policies on nuclear weapons
• Exploring the roots of where politics originate
• The impact of civil wars on the processes of democratization of the third-world countries
• The role of international organizations in promoting global health
• Does using the death penalty in the justice system affect international relations?
• Assessing the role of the World Trade Organization in shaping global trade policies
• The political and environmental implications of conventional agriculture
• The impact of the international court on political decision making
• Is philosophical anarchism relevant to contemporary political discourse?
• The emergence of global citizenship and its relationship with social movements
• The impact of other countries on international relations between the US and China

Final Words

See? Writing an essay about politic seems like a super challenging job, but in reality, all it takes is excellent guidance, a well-structured outline, and an eye for credible information.

If you are stressed out from juggling a hundred different course assignments and have no time to focus on your thesis, our dissertation writing services could relieve you! Our team of experts is ready to take over even the trickiest tasks on the tightest schedule. You just have to wish - ' write my essay ' out loud, and we will be on it!

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Annie Lambert

specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

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Article contents

Power in world politics.

• Stefano Guzzini Stefano Guzzini Uppsala University, PUC-Rio de Janeiro, Danish Institute for International Studies
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.118
• Published online: 20 April 2022

The concept of power derives its meanings and theoretical roles from the theories in which it is embedded. Hence, there is no one concept of power, no single understanding of power, even if these understandings stand in relation to each other. Besides the usual theoretical traditions common to the discipline of international relations and the social sciences, from rationalist to constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, there is, however, also a specificity of power being a concept used in both political theory and political practice. A critical survey of these approaches needs to cast a net wide to see both the differences and the links across these theoretical divides. Realist understandings of power are heavily impressed by political theory, especially when defining the ontology of “the political.” They are also characterized by their attempt, so far not successful, to translate practical maxims of power into a scientific theory. Liberal and structural power approaches use power as a central factor for understanding outcomes and hierarchies while generally neglecting any reference to political theory and often overloading the mere concept of power as if it were already a full-fledged theory. Finally, power has also been understood in the constitutive but often tacit processes of social recognition and identity formation, of technologies of government, and of the performativity of power categories when the latter interact with the social world, that is, the power politics that characterize the processes in which agents “make” the social world. Relating back to political practice and theory, these approaches risk repeating a realist fallacy. Whereas it is arguably correct to see power always connected to politics, not all politics is always connected or reducible to power. Seeing power not only as coercive but also productive should neither invite one to reduce all politics to it nor to turn power into the meta-physical prime mover of all things political.

• relational power
• structural power
• political realism
• constructivism
• post-structuralism
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Michel Foucault
• Steven Lukes

Introduction: Which Power?

For the battle-proof reader of analyses in the discipline of international relations (IR), “power in world politics” may immediately evoke proclamations of what power really is and where it lies, who has it and who endures it. It may also connect to a specific self-understanding of the field, which thinks of itself as being deserted by possible utopias and reform, forever caught in a world inevitably characterized by power politics, a tragedy not manageable by the faint-hearted and which the world can only ignore at its peril.

For its crucial place in the observation and practice of world politics, it comes as no surprise that there is no “usual” definition of power . But there is more to power’s multiple meanings than the different theories that may reframe it or the different practical understandings of power negotiated in international diplomacy. Its multiple meanings result from the specific role power has in discourses where it connects many different phenomena in various domains. It stands in for resources or capabilities, status, and rank, cause and its effect (influence), for rule, authority, and legitimacy, if not government, then again for individual dispositions and potentials, autonomy and freedom, agency and subjectivity, as well as for impersonal biases (e.g., the power of markets or symbols) or, as bizarre as it might sound at first, for symbolic media of communication. And this is not an exhaustive list.

As this short list shows, power informs not only the language of practitioners and explanatory theories but also of political theory; indeed, it is systematically intertwined with our understanding of politics. For power has become closely connected to the definition of the public domain ( res publica ) in which government is to be exercised.

Moreover, this interrelation of power and politics has become self-conscious in present-day world politics. The last decades of the 20th century have witnessed a double movement in the practitioners’ understanding of power. On the one hand, the contemporary agenda of international politics has exploded. For major diplomatic corps, it now includes virtually everything from monetary to environmental relations, from human rights to cyberspace. With this multiplication of international political domains, there is more “governance,” which means more international “power,” because actors have been able to consciously order and influence events that were not previously part of their portfolio. On the other hand, however, practitioners have been anxious for quite some time because power and actual control seems to be slipping away from them. Power is ever more “abstract, intangible, elusive” ( Kissinger, 1969 , p. 61, 1979 , p. 67). It has “evaporated” ( Strange, 1996 , p. 189). Indeed, the ease with which public debates have seized on topics like the structural forces of globalization, the dilemmas of an incalculable “risk society,” or the awe, if not sense of powerlessness, when confronted with the planetary range of governance problems induced by climate change, testify to the increasing concern that exactly when the world’s expanding agenda would need it most, actual power eludes leaders. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, the expansion of governance is accompanied by a sense of lost control. 1

Hence, “power in world politics” cannot be confined to an unequivocal encyclopedia article. Instead, the conceptualizations of power in their respective domains become central (for a more detailed justification, see Guzzini, 2013b ). Consequently, this article will make no further definitional effort to find a generally acceptable view of power (as did, e.g., Dahl, 1968 ). Although the following is informed by such undertakings when avoiding definitional fallacies, such attempts are, as a general strategy, less appropriate for an encyclopedia and probably not possible for such a contested term like power , as previous concept analyses have shown (as, e.g., Baldwin, 2002 ; Barnett & Duvall, 2005 ; Berenskoetter, 2007 ; Guzzini, 1993 , 2016 ). The interest here is not reducing the analysis of power to a single definitional core; rather, it is exploring the variety of usages and how they relate to each other.

The first section, “ Realist Power Analysis ,” looks at realist understandings of power that are heavily stamped by political theory, in particular when defining the particular ontology of “the political.” The second section, “ Power as Influence ,” then follows liberal and structural power approaches that use power as a central factor for understanding outcomes and hierarchies while generally neglecting any reference to political theory. Finally, the third section, “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes ,” looks at attempts to understand how power is understood in the constitutive but often tacit processes of social recognition and identity formation, of technologies of government, and of the performativity of power categories when the latter interact with the social world, that is, the power politics that characterize the processes in which agents “make” the social world.

Realist Power Analysis: The Distinctive Nature of World Politics and Its Explanation

Knowledge of world affairs was initially tied to the group practicing it. Actors observed themselves and distilled maxims of action from historical experience. While historians, sociologists, and macroeconomists look at their fields with an external expertise, the knowledge of international politics stems from the way diplomats and generals came to share practical lessons of the past (and this may also apply to the early days of law and management studies). Hence, the first way to think about power in world affairs is by following the meaning and purpose of power in the language of international practitioners.

And since it is fair to say that realism is the translation of that language into a codified system of practical maxims ( Guzzini, 1998 , 2013a ), analyzing classical realism provides such a bridge. For (many) classical realists, power is constitutive of politics—world politics in particular. It is part of a theory of domination. It is, moreover, related to the idea of government, not understood in its steering capacity, but in what constitutes political order. Finally, through the idea of the reason of state, power is related to the normative ideal of an ethics of responsibility as included in the “art of government.”

It is only in the disciplinary move where realism was to become a school of thought in the establishment of IR as a social science that the analysis of political order was translated into a rational theory of the maximization of power, or, put differently, where a theory of domination was subsumed under an explanatory theory of action. In this move, the purpose and understanding of power is narrowed and as this section will show, fraught with internal tensions.

The Nature of Power and the Definition of World Politics

A central tenet of classical realism is to look at the constitution of political order. That order is not defined in the Aristotelian sense of a polity organized around a common purpose, the common good, but in terms of the necessity of domination. This necessity of domination, in turn, explains why government has to be understood in a Machiavellian manner, that is, interested in the management of power. Indeed, 18th-century Europe experienced an increasing reduction of the meaning of politics to Machtkunst (approximately, the art/craft of power/governing) so typical of realism ( Sellin, 1978 ).

If order is understood mainly through the art of domination, then it becomes easier to understand why for Max Weber, in many regards the prototypical political (not IR) realist, physical violence and its control are, in turn, connected to the idea of politics and power. The threat or actual use of violence is the characteristic that sets politics aside from economics, law, or other spheres of social relations ( Weber, 1921–1922/1980 , pp. 531, 539). For realists, politics has specific tasks that can ultimately be resolved only through physical violence ( Weber, 1919/1988a , p. 557). Therefore, behind power, understood as the specific means of politics, stands the possibility of physical violence ( Weber, 1919/1988b , p. 550). A polity is based on domination, which is possible through the control of physical violence, which, in turn, constitutes, not the only means, but the politically characteristic and ultimate, means of power (for a detailed discussion, see Guzzini, 2017a ).

Classical realists stood squarely in this tradition but, as Hans Morgenthau and Raymond Aron respectively show, took different cues from it. Morgenthau added a Nietzschean twist. Just as for Weber, politics is struggle ( Weber, 1918/1988a , p. 329), but it is derived from human nature: The lust for power ( Morgenthau, 1946 , p. 9) or the drive to dominate ( Morgenthau, 1948 , p. 17), which is common to all humans. This adds an ontological status to power as being one of the fundamental drives of humans. This also explains why, for Morgenthau, whatever the final goal, power is always the immediate one ( Morgenthau, 1948 , p. 13), that is, the inevitable means. From there, Morgenthau builds an ultimately utilitarian theory of international relations that understands action in terms of the maximization of power and a foreign policy strategy of gauging power in an ethics of responsibility. Just as for Weber (for this argument, see Wolin, 1981 ), Morgenthau’s theory is ultimately guided by his political theory and ontology. In this, power constitutes the links among this political ontology, his explanatory theory, and a foreign policy doctrine (for a detailed account and critique, see Guzzini, 2020 ).

Also, Aron derives from Weber, but he does not follow Nietzsche in the way Morgenthau does, nor in the way Weber occasionally did himself when he fused national value systems with a view of an existential struggle, his eternal combat of gods ( Weber, 1919/1988b , p. 604f.). Aron is highly critical of such a position ( Aron, 1967 , p. 650). He starts from the idea that the international system has no world government comparable to the Weberian modern state, and, without a legitimate monopoly of the means of violence, it is in a “state of nature.” He is clear that this state of nature is not to be confused with a state of “war of all against all.” It refers to a sometimes highly conventionalized realm that is not part of a biological but a human order ( Aron, 1966 , pp. 482–483). Indeed, the parallel existence of a civil society (with a government) and an external sphere of multiplicity is something that has always existed and defines the backdrop against which politics is to be understood. Although without a Nietzschean touch, here, too, the management of violence and power becomes the constitutive principle of world politics as power politics, in which collective violence is not antithetical but fundamental to it. The best one can aspire to is a politics of the “art of the possible,” connected to this very particular responsibility that falls on political leaders to use the reason of state correctly.

Power in Realist Explanations

When moving from political to explanatory theory, power turns from being an ontology of order and politics to being an explanatory variable. Given its central place in realism’s political theory, it is perhaps normal that it would also acquire a central place in its explanatory theory. The drive for domination is translated into a utilitarian theory of power, security, or rank maximization. Power as part of a “vertical” theory of domination, as in realist, elite theories (e.g., Robert Michels or Vilfredo Pareto), becomes subsumed under a “horizontal” theory of action and its effects.

Such a move affects the underlying understanding of power. Power is understood either as capabilities/resources or, indeed, as their effects (influence). Resourceful actors (regular winners) are poles of power, and the configuration of those poles gives the main characteristic of the international order, namely its polarity. The government of world order is hence but the result of these two steps of the argument. This leads to two typical theoretical applications. Starting from the micro level of analysis, actors are seen as maximizing relative power or rank with the effect that this competitive behavior ends up in an always precarious balance of power. Starting from the macro level, the given polarity of the balance of power provides systemic constraints for internal balancing (arms race) and external balancing (alliances) that actors may ignore only at their peril.

This translation into a utilitarian theory of action, however, produces a series of conceptual problems. For being able to empirically identify a “maximization” of power or any “balance” of power, there must be a measure of power that indicates what is more or less, what is maximized. In other words, it requires a concept of power akin to the concept of money in economic theory, as also argued by John Mearsheimer (2001 , p. 12). In this analogy, the striving for utility maximization expressed and measured in terms of money parallels the national interest (i.e., security) expressed in terms of (relative) power. And yet, this central assumption has been challenged both by early realist critiques and institutionalist approaches.

Raymond Aron opposed this aggregated concept of power and the underlying power–money analogy ( Aron, 1962/1984 , pp. 99–102). Utilitarian economics trades on the possibility of integrating different preferences within one utility function. This is made possible by the historical evolution toward monetarized economies where money would fulfill the function of a shared standard of value. But in world politics, power does not play the same role. There is no equivalent in actual politics (and not just in theory) to money; power does not “buy” in the same way; it is not the currency of world politics. Even supposedly ultimate power resources like weapons of mass destruction might not necessarily be of great help in buying another state’s change in its monetary policies. More power resources do not necessarily translate into more purchasing power ( Baldwin, 1971 ). Without a precise measure, however, it is not clear when power has been maximized or when it is balanced, and whether this was intended in the first place ( Wolfers, 1962 , p. 106). Realist theories based on power are indeterminate, as Aron insisted.

In response, realists could insist that diplomats have repeatedly been able to find a measure of power, and hence the difference is just one of degree, not of kind (see the answer to Aron by Waltz, 1990 ). Yet, even if actors could agree on some approximations for carrying out exchanges or establishing power rankings, this is a social convention that by definition can be challenged and exists only to the extent that it is agreed upon, as acknowledged by Morgenthau (1948 , pp. 151–152) himself. Power resources do not come with a standardized price tag, and no type of resource is generally convertible (“fungible”). And if power is not providing a standard of value, then neither analysts nor actors know when and how some action is maximizing power nor how these maximizations “add up” to polarity. If one cannot reduce world politics to solely one of its domains (war and physical violence), and if one cannot add up resources into one pole, then the assessment of polarity is no longer clear—and with this the assessment of the type of international order and its causal effects. The measure of power is internal to a diplomatic convention whose stability is not granted; a point that later power analysis has developed (see “ Power as Convention: Performative and Reflexive Power Analysis ”).

It is here where the mix of the normative and explanatory stance of realism pulls the concept of power in opposite directions. The insistence on the almost impossible measurement of power, so important to realists from Morgenthau to Wohlforth (2003) , is crucial for realist practice. It instils the realist maxim of a posture of prudence in the diplomats, reminding them that they “cannot and should not be sure.” Yet, this indeterminacy makes the explanatory theory unfalsifiable; there is always one way to twist power indicators and understandings to make the story fit. In this way, using the central role of power to translate an ontology of order into a utilitarian explanatory theory led to problems for classical realism at both the micro and macro levels of analysis in terms of rank maximization and polarity analysis. At the same time, it provided the backdrop against which new conceptualizations developed.

Power as Influence: Relational and Structural Power in World Politics

International relations (IR) proceeded in its conceptualizations of power mainly with the purpose of fine-tuning the role of power in explanatory theories; political theory fell by the wayside. So institutionalists were aware of the indeterminacy, as well as at times the tautology, of a concept of power that IR scholars used as both a capacity and its effects. One of the possible remedies consisted in qualifying the very idea of a capacity were it to retain a distinctive causal effect. Another was to open up the black box of the translation process from power as control over resources to power as control over outcomes.

This focus on dyadic interaction reduces the initial purpose of understanding domination to understanding influence in different outcomes, and then to its aggregation. A theory of domination was not just subsumed under a theory of action; it seemed to get lost altogether. A series of scholars tried to counter this tendency. They identified a problem in the explanatory attempts to relate power only to the level of interaction. Instead, they conceived of power in “structural” terms to reintegrate more vertical components of domination into the analysis of power. Whereas the more institutionalist answer uses a relational understanding of power to qualify capacities as actual influence over outcomes, the structuralist answer was to include more non-agential or non-intentional factors into the analysis of outcomes to recuperate a sense of in-built hierarchical relations. More problematically, however, both approaches do more than just widen the analysis of power relations; they also tend to import this widening into the concept of power itself, as if a reconceptualization alone were sufficient for a comprehensive analysis of power.

Relational Power and Liberal Institutionalism

Power is not in a resource; it is in a relation. This stance was forcefully exposed by Robert Dahl (1957 , pp. 202–203) in political theory and by David Baldwin (1989 , 2016) within IR. Such an innocuous-looking statement is very consequential. In its behavioralist twist, such a relational approach tends to focus on actual influence understood as the causal effect of one actor’s behavior on another’s behavior. And it tends to look for the conditions that make this influence possible in the first place.

Both Dahl and Baldwin treat power and influence, capacities and their effects, interchangeably. That may sound odd, because most Western languages use two different words that capture different, if related, ideas. And yet, it is quite logical if one thinks about power as a central concept in (linear) causal explanations, as much of IR does. IR is interested in outcomes. If power were just in resources—latent, potential, and hence potentially “powerless” in affecting outcomes—then, so the story goes, why should one care about power in the first place? Scholars and practitioners wish to understand the actualized capacity to affect outcomes, that is, being able to impose one’s will or interests as the Weberian tradition has it. Indeed, for Dahl that understanding is the main way to understand “who governs” in an empirically controllable manner ( Dahl, 1961/2005 ). Government is constituted by the actual steering effects of elites where certain interests prevail. Dahl could relate power as influence on behavior to the wider understanding of the domestic political order. Influence in a behavioralist theory of action was aggregated to an analysis of government that discloses whether its elite is unified or multiple. Translated into IR, however, the absence of a world government means that IR scholars were left with the theory of action. When thinking world political order, influence is all there is.

Therefore, much of the analysis came to focus on the conditions that make such influence possible and the specific situational context which constitutes that certain resources come to constitute capabilities to affect outcomes. Understanding the relation crucially comes before the analysis of power therein. Bachrach and Baratz (1970 , pp. 20–21) provide a telling example to show the difference a relational approach makes. Let us assume a soldier returns to his camp. The guard asks him to stop or she will shoot. The soldier stops. Hence, the guard exercised power as influence. And yet it is not clear how. It could have been simply through the threat of using her arms. But it could also be because the soldier followed the rule of obeying an order, independently of the arms and the threat. Without a close analysis of the relation, indeed the individual motives, one would not know the kind of power relation this represents. But let us further assume that the soldier does not stop. The guard shoots. Now, it is ambivalent whether this shows an exercise of power. On the one hand, one could say that she succeeded in stopping the soldier from coming too close to the camp. On the other hand, the threat was clearly not successful. As Waltz (1967/1969 , p. 309) once noted, the most powerful police force is one that does not need to shoot to get its way in the first place. The exercise of power may paradoxically show the powerlessness of its alleged holder. And one can twist the example even further. Suppose the soldier had decided to take his life, and, by advancing, forced the guard to do it on his behalf. In this case, it was the returning soldier who got the guard to do something. Power was on his side in this asymmetrical relation. As the example shows, knowing resources is insufficient to explain the direction in which power is exercised; one needs to know the motives and values of the actors, as well as the general normative system involved. Indeed, once one knows them, the power relation could turn out to be reversed.

In IR, there have been three prominent ways to deal with this relational aspect. David Baldwin almost single-handedly introduced Dahl’s approach into IR. In the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, he became increasingly tired of analyses in terms of “conversion failures” or what he also called the “paradox of unrealized power” ( Baldwin, 1979 , p. 163), where the allegedly more powerful actor lost. If power means influence, it cannot fail. If it does, it means that power was either wrongly assessed or, more fundamentally, wrongly understood ( Baldwin, 1985 , p. 23).

Baldwin was most interested in qualifying the specific context in a relational approach. He shared Aron’s critique of what he called the lacking fungibility of power, in which power simply does not have the same standard of value function as money does in real economies ( Baldwin, 1979 , pp. 193–194, 1993 , pp. 21–22). As a result, he insisted that a relational approach to power requires the prior establishment of the specific “policy-contingency framework” within which power relations are to be understood: the scope (the objectives of an attempt to gain influence; influence over which issue), the domain (the target of the influence attempt), its weight (the quantity of resources), and the cost (opportunity costs of forgoing a relation) must be made explicit. Resources consequential in one policy contingency framework are not necessarily so in another. Scholars who do not see this multidimensionality and persist in the “notion of a single overall international power structure unrelated to any particular issue-area” are using an analysis that “is based on a concept of power that is virtually meaningless” ( Baldwin, 1979 , p. 193).

A second approach worked by checking the translation between the two classical power concepts in this interactionist tradition, namely control over resources and control over outcomes. Whereas Baldwin packaged much into situational analysis to uphold causal effects of behavior/policy instruments, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1977) downgraded a direct link between resources and outcomes that is hampered by bargaining processes and other effects during the interaction. They did, however, also qualify this process for a better assessment of what counts as a power resource in the first place. They expressed the relational component of power in terms of asymmetric interdependence. In this way, power as influence over outcomes is connected, but not reducible, to the resources possessed by one actor, yet valued by the other, and/or by resources of A that can affect the interests of B. Moreover, not just any effect is significant. In their distinction between sensitivity interdependence and vulnerability interdependence, they gave a more long-term twist to it because the mere capacity to affect B (sensitivity) is only ephemeral if B can find alternatives. Only if such alternatives cannot be found (vulnerability, understood in terms of the elasticity of substitution) is the relation asymmetric in a more significant sense. This way of defining power keeps the link to resources but denies a direct relation from resources to outcomes and qualifies what makes them constitutive by specifying the particular dyadic interaction.

Finally, Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power ( Nye, 1990 , 2007 , 2011 ) adds yet another aspect to the liberal analysis of these power relations. His emphasis on softer resources that can be influential depending on the context is not the original part; indeed, Baldwin’s power analysis was very much driven by his attempt to show that economic sanctions, and in particular positive sanctions (carrots, not sticks), can be influential. Rather, what specifically characterizes soft power is the focus on the mechanisms via which actors can have effects. In a way akin to structural power approaches (see “ Structural Power and Dependency ”), as well as classical realist definitions, the analysis of power starts from the receiving side: soft power lies in the capacity of “attraction” of an actor, which means that its analysis starts from those attracted.

In all three approaches, the epistemic interest consists in revalorizing foreign policy instruments in which military resources or coercive mechanisms are not necessarily the most influential; indeed, no resource has such general capacity. Baldwin opens up for positive sanctions and issue-area-specific resources. Keohane and Nye invite policies that avoid long-term vulnerabilities in interdependent relations or, even better, tie all countries into mutual vulnerabilities to moderate their behavior. And Nye’s soft power focuses on foreign policies that would make countries more attractive and, hence often get their way without much further ado. These approaches respond to a vision of an international order fragmented into different issue areas or international regimes.

The innumerable policy-contingency frameworks become confusing however: They make analysts lose sight of the forest for all the trees. With power as influence having subsumed domination under a theory of action, international order and hierarchy got lost. To see the whole forest, Keohane and Nye (1987) envisaged developing a generalized theory of linkages. And yet, precisely because of the lacking fungibility that makes power logics not reducible to each other across regimes, such a theory of linkages is not possible within this theoretical framework. If it were, the fragmentation could be subsumed under a meta-regime that effectively substitutes for a linkage theory.

This leaves the institutionalist approaches open to two further developments intrinsic to a relational approach. First, taking fungibility seriously excludes a single international power structure, as Baldwin pointed out, and, hence severs the link between power and international order. Just as in Dahl, the international order appears pluralistic. But the agent and interaction centeredness of such an approach does not persuade those for whom the absence of intended agential or interaction effects does not yet imply an absence of power or domination. For them, the relational approach needs to be complemented, if not superseded, by a more structural approach. Second, as Bachrach and Baratz’s (1970) illustration shows and as soft power further develops, the concept of power looks different if its understanding starts from the position of the alleged power holder or the recipient/subaltern. Add to this that interests or values, present in a relation, cannot be understood individually because norms or conventions, indeed meanings, are not private but intersubjective, and one ends up with a relational approach that connects power to shared understandings and norms. No longer agent centered, power analysis experiences a turn to material and ideational structures of power.

Structural Power and Dependency

In social and political theory, Steven Lukes’s seminal approach distinguishes three dimensions of power: a direct behavioralist one (Dahl), an indirect one about the many issues excluded from the actual bargaining (Bachrach & Baratz), and a third dimension where it is the “supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have” ( Lukes, 1974 , p. 27). Here, the absence of conflict does not necessarily indicate the absence of a power relation, but possibly its most insidious form. Lukes derives this approach from Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony. Domination is not simply imposed from above but must be won through the subordinated groups’ consent to the cultural domination they believe will serve their own interests. It works through a naturalized “common sense.” At the same time, Lukes is not merely interested in the origins of domination in the common sense shared by the subordinate. Rather, as a philosopher of liberal democracy, he sees the purpose of power analysis as being connected to what this tells us about individual autonomy or actual freedom ( Lukes, 1977 ) or, in a more structural fashion, how structures “shape fields of possibility” for agents, as Hayward (2000 , p. 9) puts it. The more material component of this structural analysis has inspired the approaches in international political economy (IPE) taken up in this subsection; the intersubjective mobilization bias and endogenization of identity and interest formation will be the subject in the final major section “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes: Social Recognition, Technologies of Government, and Performativity ”.

In IR, there have been several attempts to understand power beyond dyadic relations and bargaining by reaching out to a structural level of power (for the following, see Guzzini, 1993 ). Some of them are still very much in line with Bachrach and Baratz’s approach of seeing power not only in direct confrontation but also in indirect agenda setting, yet applied here more fundamentally to the rules of the game. Thus Stephen Krasner’s use of “meta-power” in his Structural Conflict refers to developing countries’ use of institutions and regimes not just as a lever against powerful states but also as a way to affect the rules of global liberalism. “Relational power refers to the ability to change outcomes or affect the behavior of others within a given regime. Meta-power refers to the ability to change the rules of the game” ( Krasner, 1985 , p. 14).

Susan Strange’s take on power overlaps to some extent but goes further. She uses structural power to refer to the increasing diffusion of international power, in both its effects and its origins, due to the increasing transnationalization of non-territorially linked networks. Structural power is, on the one hand, a concept similar to Krasner’s intentional meta-power: The ability to shape the structures of security, finance, production and knowledge ( Strange, 1985 , p. 15). Here, power is structural because it has an indirect diffusion via structures, that is, because of its diffused effects. On the other hand, it is structural because it refers to the increasingly diffused sources and agents that contribute to the functioning of the global political economy ( Strange, 1988 ). Taken together, the provision of global functions appears as the result of an interplay of deliberate and unintended effects of decisions and nondecisions made by governments and other actors. The international system appears as if run by a “transnational empire” whose exact center is difficult to locate because it is not tied to a specific territory, but whose main base is with actors in the United States ( Strange, 1989 ). A more vertical theory of domination reappears in this specific asymmetry: Even though actors in the United States might not always intend or be able to control the effects of their actions, the international structures are set up in a way that decisions in some countries are systematically tied to, as well as can fundamentally affect, actors in the same and other countries. This becomes visible when looking at power relations not from the standpoint of the power holder and intended action or intended effects, rather from the receiving side, where neither matters primarily. Whereas Krasner focused on the hidden power of the weak, Strange emphasizes the tacit power of the strong.

Lukes’s focus on autonomy is echoed in the emphasis on questions of in/dependence by dependency and Gramscian scholars. For Stephen Gill and David Law, structural power refers to “material and normative aspects, such that patterns of incentives and constraints are systematically created” ( Gill & Law, 1988 , p. 73). This clearly defines a form of impersonal power, where the impersonal material setting is nearly synonymous with the functioning of markets, and the normative setting corresponds to a form of Gramsci’s historic bloc ( Cox, 1981 , 1983 ). As a result, contemporary world politics is seen as a Pax Americana in which the analysis of transnational elites plays a major role for understanding domination ( Van der Pijl, 1998 ). The view from the periphery is central for dependency scholars. Autonomy in international relations is often translated in terms of sovereignty, yet another power-related concept. Dependency theories stem from the awareness that formal sovereignty did not bring much control for many countries in the Global South of their political processes ( O’Donnell, 1973 ) and their class formation and “associated-dependent” ( Cardoso & Faletto, 1979 ) or “crippled” economic structures ( Senghaas, 1982 ), where the structural effects of global capitalism rules through the workings of states and firms ( Dos Santos, 1970 ).

It is not by coincidence that most of these approaches are from what came to be called IPE in the late 1970s. They attribute power to nonstate actors and, indeed, to structures like global capitalism. By doing so, they politicize economic relations whose effects are not God-given or natural but the outcome of political struggles—struggles whose domination effects are left unseen in bargaining power approaches ( Caporaso, 1978 ). In this way, IPE is not just about international economic relations; its focus on structural features of domination redefines the realm of world politics itself.

Yet, while these approaches undoubtedly enrich power analysis by including indirect institutional, non-intentional, and impersonal practices and processes, they also risk overloading the single concept of power in the analysis when trying to keep power as the main explanatory variable ( Guzzini, 1993 ). William Riker distinguished between power concepts informed either by necessary and sufficient or by recipe-like (manipulative) kinds of causality ( Riker, 1964 , pp. 346–348), or, put differently, power concepts driven by analyzing either outcomes or agency. Baldwin, following a manipulative idea of power, needed to heavily qualify the situational context to keep the causal link between certain policy instruments and their effect, that is, power as influence, with the problem that such approaches tend to ignore non-manipulative factors in the analysis of power and domination. Structural power concepts include them, but then they tend toward a necessary and sufficient explanation in which all that affects the asymmetrical outcome is not just related to power but is included in the concept of power itself, as if the whole analysis of power were to be done by the factor/variable of power.

This raises a series of broader concerns for understanding power. First, it is clear that power needs to be disentangled from the potential tautology of being both resources and their effects. Indeed, it is better thought neither as a resource nor as an event (influence) but as a disposition, that is, a capacity to effect ( Morriss, 1987/2002 ) that does not need to be realized to exist. Second, it seems that reducing political theory to explanatory theory played a bad trick: The phenomenon of power in its many ramifications gets shoehorned into power as a central explanatory variable that is becoming the wider and more encompassing the more the analysis wishes to take the seemingly endless list of factors into account to understand political order. That invites a strategy of decoupling the analysis of power relations and the concept of power: More factors than power may enter the analysis of power relations ( Guzzini, 1993 ). But it could also imply something more fundamental, namely, that power is not to be used as a causal explanatory variable at all. In this context, Peter Morriss writes that power statements “ summarise observations; they do not explain them” ( Morriss, 1987/2002 , p. 44, emphasis in the original). Put differently, if it were to be used in explanations, the underlying vision of causality would have to be altered; a more dispositional understanding of causation in the social world would allow power a place in explanatory theories that would turn multifinal or indeterminate ( Guzzini, 2017b ) and which would be applicable to both agential and structural effects. Also here, the concept/factor of power would not exhaust all there is to say about power relations.

The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes: Social Recognition, Technologies of Government, and Performativity

So far, power has been understood either as an agency concept that focuses on agent dispositions, or as asymmetrical effects of action in social relations, or as dispositions of structures, which systematically mobilize biases, dis/empower agents materially, authorize their acts, and make certain actions un/thinkable in the first place. The rise of constructivism and post-structuralism and the establishment of international political sociology (IPS) pushes power analysis to take these relational and constitutive processes a step further. What distinguishes these approaches to power in IR is the different underlying process ontology and a social relationism that “presumes a non-essentialist view of social reality” ( Bially Mattern, 2008 , p. 696). A relational ontology takes its starting point not from units as fixed items that then interact, but from the relations through which their actual properties are continuously constituted (for IR, see Guillaume, 2007 ; Jackson & Nexon, 1999 ; Qin, 2018 ). The analysis focuses on the profoundly political processes that constitute subjects, their identities, as well as material and intersubjective contexts, that is, “how the world is made up,” in which power appears as an emergent property of such relations and processes ( Berenskoetter, 2007 , p. 15). This ontological shift characterizes three different research agendas in contemporary power analysis.

A first research line reframes the understanding of power in a more sociological analysis through a theory of action that is no longer utilitarian but based on the fundamental role of social recognition. The analysis of power is based on a certain vision of human nature, in that humans are viewed as profoundly social, their very identity constituted through the multiple spheres of recognition in which they live. This means, however, that power does not come out of a given drive that finds its expression in asymmetrical social interaction but resides in the constitutive processes that make up the identity of international actors and “govern” the practices that define membership and status in international society.

Second, the Foucauldian lineage of power analysis connects power analysis back to political theory. There, rather than seeing in the evaporation of agency control a sign of diminishing power, it looks at the mechanisms that keep the order together, or the “technologies of government,” where government is to be understood as all that which provides political order.

Finally, a third research line, often informed by the previous two, deals with the understanding of power when connected to the idea of the construction of social reality. There, power analysis is tied to the study of performativity, that is, the way discursive practices help create the subject they presuppose, as is prominent, for instance, in feminist theories and in the study of reflexivity, that is, the interaction between our knowledge and the social world. Perhaps unexpectedly, it is this line that connects power analysis back to the world of diplomatic and other international practice because it looks at the social conventions that establish proxies for power and the power of those conventions in world politics.

Having connected explanatory theories with both political theory and practice, this can be seen as a return to the initial realist concern with the nature of politics and order. It surely improves on the links between the three domains. But it risks repeating a realist fallacy. Whereas it is arguably correct to see power always connected to politics, not all politics is always connected or reducible to power. Seeing power not only as coercive but also productive should neither invite one to reduce all politics to it nor to turn power into the metaphysical prime mover of all things political.

The Power Politics of Recognition and Identity

As mentioned, IPS is a second answer to the attempt to theorize domination not reducible to a theory of action. In this tradition, power in world politics is not about steering capacity and agent influence. It is about the informal and often tacit ways in which order and hierarchy (stratification) is produced. Rather than seeing in soft and normative power simply mechanisms of institutionalization and socialization, it sees in them identity-constituting processes that end up constituting the borders of international society and its authorized members.

In a first research agenda in IPS, power is framed not within a utilitarian theory of action but in a social theory of recognition ( Pizzorno, 2007 , 2008 ). Using recognition for theorizing action and society can be derived from a series of sociological traditions, such as from Mead (1934) and Schutz (1964) to Berger and Luckmann (1966) , from Ricoeur (2004) , or from different post-Hegelian traditions ( Honneth, 1992 , 2010 ; Taylor, 1989 , 1992 ) and has informed IR scholars ever since the sociological turn (e.g., Ringmar, 1996 , 2002 ). There are two social theories of recognition that have been prominent in the rethinking of power relations in IR: Bourdieu’s field theory and Goffman’s symbolic interactionism, in particular his approach to stigma.

Bourdieu’s is still primarily a theory of domination organized around three fundamental concepts: habitus, practice, and field, which constitute each other (for a succinct presentation, see Guzzini, 2000 , pp. 164–169; Leander, 2008 ). Bourdieu’s concept of capital is the closest to the concept of power, sometimes used interchangeably. But it is only one element in the more general theory and analysis of domination (for a more detailed analysis, see Bigo, 2011 ; Guzzini, 2013c ). For the present purpose, it is important to stress Bourdieu’s relational understanding of power that is closely tied to phenomena of recognition. Hierarchies in fields are constituted by the distribution of capitals that are specifically relevant to the field. As previous relational approaches to power, Bourdieu’s theory of capital is relational in that it is never only in the material or ideational resource itself, but in the cognition and recognition it encounters in agents sharing the field and constantly negotiating their status within the field. Yet Bourdieu adds a further intersubjective component because his relational analysis of power insists on the complicity, or as he sometimes prefers to call it, the connivance, that exists between the dominating and the dominated. For this, he mobilizes a theory of symbolic action and symbolic power. Symbolic capital is the form that any capital will take if it is recognized in a strong sense, that is, perceived through those very conceptual categories that are, however, themselves informed by the distribution of capitals in the field ( Bourdieu, 1994 , pp. 117, 161). “Doxic subordination” is hence the effect of this symbolic violence, a subordination that is neither the result of coercion or asymmetrical interdependence nor of conscious consent, let alone a social contract, but of a mis(re)cognition ( méconnaissance ). It is a symbolic, and hence most effective, form of power. It is based on the unconscious adjustment of subjective structures (categories of perception) to objective structures. And so, according to Bourdieu, the analysis of “doxic acceptance” is the “true fundament of a realist theory of domination and politics” ( Bourdieu with Wacquant, 1992 , p. 143, my translation).

The initial usage of Bourdieu in IR had applied such misrecognition to the field of world politics itself, indeed to its very constitutive practices as applied by its realist elite. From early on, Richard Ashley tied the understanding of power to a social theory based on how relations and recognition constitute agency ( Ashley, 1984 , p. 259). Ashley tried to understand the specificity of international governance by using Bourdieu’s phrase of the “conductorless orchestration of collective action and improvisations” ( Ashley, 1989 , p. 255). He argued that, despite realist claims to the contrary, there is an international community under anarchy—and that it exists in the very realists who deny its existence ( Ashley, 1987 ). This community is all the more powerful in the international system as its theoretical self-description conceals its very existence by informing the common sense, shared in particular among practitioners: the power of the common sense.

In IR, a Bourdieusian analysis of how such recognition and misrecognition empowers certain agents has been applied to the study of international elites and the constitution of certain (expert) fields (e.g., Bigo, 1996 ). Anna Leander has shown how, in the military field, commercial actors are not just empowered in a trivial sense by having become more prominent, but how misrecognition has endowed them with epistemic power ( Leander, 2005 , pp. 811–812)—Bourdieu calls it épistémocratique ( Bourdieu, 2000 , p. 100)—that locks the field (temporarily) into a new doxa ( Leander, 2011 ). This doxa authorizing arguments and turning symbolic the capital of commercial agents provides, in turn, a vision and division of the worlds that “categorically” preempts ways to press for the accountability of commercial security forces ( Leander, 2010 ). Similar Bourdieu-inspired power analyses have focused on the “doxic battles” ( Berling, 2012 ; Senn & Elhardt, 2013 ) or the “never-ending struggle for recognition as competent in a given practice” ( Adler-Nissen & Pouliot, 2014 , p. 894). Such struggles are always embedded in the logic of practice that constitutes the field: Actors try to win a game whose rules they accept by playing it. Sending (2015) combines these approaches by showing how authority is not given to an actor but is the outcome of a continuous competition for recognition. The constituted authority defines, in turn, what is to be governed, how, and why. Consequently, power phenomena enter this type of analysis twice: Hierarchies within fields are a power phenomenon in themselves while being constituted by the power politics in the practices of recognition.

Bourdieu’s (1989) analysis of symbolic power is closely connected to his concern with the power of classifications (the visions and divisions of the world). Classifications literally make up the social world by organizing the social space, and hence its hierarchy, and by interacting with agent identity and their body ( Bourdieu, 1980 , pp. 117–134). In the analysis of world politics, this has been picked up mainly through Goffman’s (1963) analysis of stigmatization. Ayşe Zarakol (2011 , 2014 ) shows how Turkey’s, Japan’s, and Russia’s integration into the norms of (initially European) international society interacts with their state identity. Stigmatization is a process constitutive of international society, its hierarchy, and its inclusions or exclusions. At the same time, any state recognized as not yet normal or inferior in international society will experience ontological insecurity in the state’s self-understandings. Consequently, all action is necessarily informed by stigma-coping mechanisms, defiantly accepting, negotiating, or rejecting the stigma, but never being able to avoid it (see also Adler-Nissen, 2014 ).

Power practices understood through their interaction with identity processes are also fundamental for Janice Bially Mattern’s concept of “representational force” ( Bially Mattern, 2001 , 2005a , 2005b ). If identity is crucial for interest formation, then it is only a small step to analyzing how diplomatic practices, intended or not, can end up blackmailing actors by taking profit from contradictions in another actor’s self-understandings or between its action and self-representation.

The social ontology of this approach where the other is part of the self, and where action is driven by the need for recognition, thus gives rise to different practices and processes of domination.

Technologies of Government

Foucault reached the analysis of power in IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Ashley & Walker, 1990 ; DuBois, 1991 ; Keeley, 1990 ; Manzo, 1992 ). Foucault’s political theory revises Weber, and his empirical analysis translates Goffmanian sensibilities into a study of discourses and performativity, where discursive practices help create the subject they presuppose. The Weberian lineage is most visible in Foucault’s political theory, which can be seen as a new take on Weber’s stählernes Gehäuse ( Weber, 1904–1920/2016 , p. 171), initially translated as “Iron Cage,” where the development of (Western) capitalism and rationalism created a new modern subject, both emancipated and curtailed. It is the answer to a conservative paradox in modernity: How can the emancipation and empowerment of the citizen lead to more order and control in modern societies?

Here, Foucault develops a dual analysis of modern government. On the one hand, it analyzes the interaction between “regimes of truth” and order, that is, the way government is increasingly a set of practices based on knowledge to administer public and private life, using general “stat(e)”istics and offering services on their base. On the other hand, in a more Goffmanian vein, it looks at the way these regimes of truth, be it in medicine, psychology, education, penal law, and so forth, establish the “normal” and “deviant,” classifications that interact with the subjects who implicitly control themselves by “identifying” with the expectations implied in such classifications. Government consists in constituting the subject through which, in turn, it achieves order (e.g., Foucault, 1975 , p. 223ff.). A branch of postcolonial studies took its inspiration from Foucault to understand how imperial knowledge, for instance in the form of “Orientalism,” constituted the colonial “other” as a “lamentably alien” subject in the first place, making it governable, legitimating its governance, within which the subaltern participates in its own subjugation ( Said, 1979/2003 , respectively at pp. 94, 97, 207 (quote), 325).

It is not fortuitous that Foucault’s analysis of power comes in terms of “government,” which is also a semantic component of the French pouvoir (and not puissance ). Its focus is on the changing mechanisms and technologies in the provision of political order. It shares this focus on order with classical realists but takes a completely different approach. It does not base its analysis in the human lust for power or the inevitable clash of wills, all given before the analysis. The ubiquity of power is not to be found in the struggle for resources that define human relations, but in the impersonal processes that constitute the subjects and their relations in the first place ( Brown & Scott, 2014 ).

Such an approach to government makes the study of world governance its most obvious field in IR. And yet, such study has been mainly conducted in a Weberian way within neoliberal institutionalism (for a comprehensive reconstruction, see Zürn, 2018 ). This school tends to think governance mainly in terms of agency (who governs?), scope (what?), and normative content (for what?), raising issues of the various networks of actions, their steering capacity, and their legitimacy and contestation. Foucauldian approaches see governance constituted by its mechanisms (how?) (for a discussion of these four problematiques of governance, see Guzzini, 2012 ), be they the political economy of populations, the constitution of insurance and risk management ( Lobo-Guerrero, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ), or, indeed, the governmentality constituted by the increasing globalization of the fields of practice within which subjects subject themselves to varied “techniques of the self” ( Bayart, 2004 ). It is through the analysis of those rationalities of government that one can understand agency and scope in the first place.

Such a focus on modes and mechanisms problematizes governance differently. First, it does not assume a public realm (the states), markets, and civil society as something given prior to analysis, but studies how liberal rationalities of order have diffused and enmeshed all of them, producing hybrid authority (for a more IPE-inspired analysis, see Graz, 2019 ). Firms have to comply with corporate social responsibility and the state apparatus to become efficient in terms of new public management. By inventing new indices of productivity, such neoliberal practices constitute the public realm as a firm-like actor in the first place. And order is achieved through ever-new standards and accounting devices that work through their very acceptance by, for example, governments that need to be rendered “accountable” in such a way ( Fougner, 2008 ; Löwenheim, 2008 ).

For the same reason, Foucauldian analysis of nongovernmental organizations insists that, rather than seeing in this global civil society an anti-power or new power, “it is it is an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government” ( Neumann & Sending, 2010 , pp. 5, 17, 115; emphasis in the original). Rather than comparing the relative power for the assessment of rank and hierarchy, an analysis of governmentality concentrates on the new mechanisms through which (self-)regulated behavior, and hence order, is achieved. And here, nongovernmental organizations are not necessarily a barrier to government located out there with some hegemonic actors; they are themselves, perhaps unwittingly, part of it ( Hynek, 2008 ; Lipschutz, 2005 ; in a less Foucauldian vein, see Bartelson, 2006 ).

Power as Convention: Performative and Reflexive Power Analysis

IPS reconnects not only with the political theory of the nature of order and government but also with the practical concern of its use in world politics. Classical realists plead for prudence in the always indeterminate assessment of power to deal with “the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness” ( Kissinger, 1957 , p. 206). Akin to previous traditions in peace research, IPS scholars invite practitioners to reflect and potentially counter the discourses and often self-fulfilling processes that constitute and perpetuate social facts. It does not recoil, as classical realists did, from drawing out the implications of the conventional nature of international politics. Confronted with the missing fungibility of resources and the unavailable objective measure of power, Hedley Bull merely declared that an “overall” concept of power used for comparisons is “one we cannot do without” ( Bull, 1977 , p. 114) and pursued the analysis. IPS was to follow up on who “we” is.

For while there is no objective measure of power, there are social conventions to measure power. The understanding of power is not established by the observer, but by the actor. It becomes a social convention. Diplomats must first agree on what counts before they can start counting ( Guzzini, 1998 , p. 231). And those conventions are, hence the effect of negotiations within the diplomatic field and its processes of recognition and, in turn, constitute technologies of government themselves. Understandings of power inform practices and vice versa. Discourses of power are both performative in that they intervene in the social world and reflexive in that such practices re-affect those discourses.

This practical component of power has evolved with political discourse, at least in Western traditions. There are two prominent reasons why practitioners cannot do without an overall concept of power, namely the link of power to responsibility and the conventions of hierarchy that tie rank or status to power.

In our political discourse, the notion of power is attached to the idea of the “art of the possible,” identifying agency and attributing responsibility ( Connolly, 1974 , chap. 3). If there were no power, nothing could be done, and no one could be blamed for it. Therefore, re-conceptualizations of power, both among observers and practitioners, often have the purpose of widening what falls into the realm of power in order to attribute agency and responsibility. Things were not inevitable; not doing anything about it requires public justification. Here the ontological stance of the entire section meets a purpose of power analysis. An ontology that focuses on the constitution of things historicizes and denaturalizes issues ( Hacking, 1999 , pp. 6–7). And in showing how the present was not inevitable, it drags into the open the domination that goes into, as well as the modes of legitimation that follow, social facts. For instance, attributing power to the social fact of gender and the dispositions sedimented in gender scripts denaturalizes their role in the existing sexual stratification and in its reproduction. In short, in at least Western political discourse, attributing power politicizes issues ( Guzzini, 2000 , 2005 ; for an early statement, see Frei, 1969 ).

A second reason why diplomats cannot do without the overall concept of power is the established convention of organizing international society according to different strata, where “great powers” have special responsibilities but also privileges, the most important being “exemptionalism” and impunity. Here, rules, which apply to all others, may apply to them only at their discretion. To establish this special status, proxies of power are agreed to. As in Bourdieu’s field of power, where the conversion rates between different forms of capital are (socially) established ( Bourdieu, 1994 , p. 56), the overall hierarchy is the result of an ongoing fight to establish the rates of convertibility and hence hierarchy of capitals and social groups. It is the struggle for the “dominating principle of domination” ( Bourdieu, 1994 , p. 34).

This interaction between our conventions of what counts as power and political practice, be it rank or behavior, works both ways. Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power was meant not only to describe international relations but also to influence them. If all actors agreed on this understanding of power for attributing rank, then political competition would be about movies and universities, not military bases and economic exploitation. The understanding of power, if shared, changes social reality, here the very nature of world politics. In reverse, countries who wish to influence the conventions can also do this through their acts and their recognition. This is only logical for an actor trying to foster a convention for proxies of power that fit its profile. When Russia privileges hard power and its exercise, downplaying economic welfare or human rights and inciting behavior that strengthens this understanding, it influences the conventions to its benefit. The more others react in kind, the better. One of the reasons Russia is so keen on its “sphere of influence” is that such a sphere allows it to do things that otherwise would be forbidden. And it makes Russia equal to others that claim such a sphere (for instance, the Western Hemisphere for the United States). And precisely because international society knows that impunity is a proxy for rank, it applies economic sanctions and other measures. They are symbolic means in that they are not meant to return matters to the status quo. Yet they are very important ones, expressing a refusal to accept someone as a member of that limited club that has discretion in applying social rules. Obviously, such discretion and acceptance of impunity as a proxy for rank can only thrive when it is shared as a “gentlemen’s agreement” within the club, as during colonial times.

Even if careful scholarly discussion can discard some conceptualizations of power, there is no one root concept that one can unravel simply by digging deeper. Concepts derive their meanings from the theories in which they are embedded, like words in a language, and meet there the meta-theoretical or normative divides that plague and enrich our theorizing. Power is particularly complicated because it is a concept deemed important not only across different explanatory theories, with their underlying and conflicting ontologies, but also across different domains from philosophy to the lifeworld of the practitioner. It is perhaps not surprising that the realist tradition, in IR and elsewhere, has focused on power as a privileged way to link these three domains. This may indeed be one of its defining characteristics.

Initially, realist writings combined the domains of political theory, centered on the understanding of order in the polity, with the domain of explanatory theory by assuming that, in the absence of a genuine world polity, the analysis of capabilities and influence was all there could be and a political practice based on power and prudence. Yet having reduced much of power analysis to the disciplinary expectations of a U.S. social science, in particular political theory fell by the wayside. Liberal and structural scholars exposed the weaknesses in realist power analysis, from the fungibility assumption to the double link between agent resources to influence, and from there to a balance of power, which subsumed domination under action. They redefined the causal (or not) role for power, be it at the agent or the structural level. Finally, with the post-structuralist and constructivist turn, the analysis of power returns to the links between the three domains of ontology, understanding/explanation, and practice through the analysis of the power in the processes that constitute social facts and hierarchical subject positions.

Yet, what all these approaches risk is falling into the trap of a realist fallacy. It may well be that power is intrinsically connected to politics and the political, but not all politics can be reduced to power. Like geopolitical thinkers before (for a critique, see Aron, 1976 ), Foucault has reversed Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is but the prolongation of politics by other means, with the effect of making war the default position of the political. 2 But this can hardly account for all conceptions (and some would add for the reality) of politics. Hannah Arendt, for instance, a thinker close to the realist tradition for not propping her theory up by a banister or for having any post-totalitarian illusion about human nature ( Isaac, 1992 ; Kalyvas, 2008 ; Strong, 2012 ), strongly criticized the tendency “to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion.” And while “power is indeed of the essence of all government,” she redefined power to make it the “opposite” of violence, namely the “human ability to act in concert” ( Arendt, 1969 , respectively at pp. 44, 51, 56, 44). Her take on politics offers a way to include solidarity into our understanding of politics ( Allen, 1998 , pp. 35–37, 2002 , p. 143). She unties the link between power and violence in the realist tradition, whether classical or Foucauldian, and hence the reduction of politics to the means or technologies of control. And, as any reflexive analysis immediately realizes, this geopolitical or Foucauldian reversal of Clausewitz is a self-fulfilling prophecy by producing what its discourses presuppose (see the analysis of “ontogenetic war” in Bartelson, 2018 ) and hence hardly prudent advice for political practice.

This fallacy is but an expression of the temptation that emanates from power for the understanding of world politics. It is the temptation of a shortcut, where the concept of power is conflated with the analysis of all power phenomena, from symbolic violence to dependency, and where the ontology of power encompasses all there is to the nature of politics. In doing so, power is either taken not seriously enough or too much so. Realist explanations in IR have not taken power seriously enough by having one of its most reductionist understandings, as witnessed by the many critiques and developments discussed in this article. At the same time, the political realist tradition has played a bad trick in that it tacitly smuggles into international theory the thinking of politics only in terms of struggle and domination. Power analysis in world politics needs to both apprehend power in its comprehensive nature for its analysis and qualify the role of power in its understanding of politics.

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1. Others would turn the argument around and claim that this diffusion is a new mechanism that constitutes the present form of governance, a rule without steering. See the section “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes .”

2. Given Foucault’s own critique of the reduction to command and obedience (as in the Weberian realist tradition) and his nominalist understanding of power ( Foucault, 1976 , pp. 113, 123), the reversal of Clausewitz is not uncritical and surely less so than in some later followers.

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Power, Legitimacy & Authority: Key Concepts in Understanding Politics

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Introduction, bibliography.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character give him power. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned'? Get original essay - Abraham Lincoln

State of nature

Government formation, political issues, personal loyalty, my changing perspective.

• Beethnam, D., 2001. Political Legitmacy. pp. 107-116.
• Farell, L. O., 2019. Thomas Hobbs on the State on Nature , s.l.: s.n.
• Fieser, J. & Dowden, B., 1995. Internet enclyopedia of philophy; a Peer academic resorce. [Online]
• Available at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/
• [Accessed 2019 2019].
• Jacob Weisberg , 2008. Loyalty; It’s the most overrated virtue in politics.. [Online]
• Available at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/11/loyalty-is-the-most-overrated-virtue-in-politics.html
• Miller, D., 2003. Political Philosophy; A short intorduction. oxford : oxford press .
• Politics, 2002. Andrew heywood. 2nd ed. New York : Palgrave Macmillan.
• Robinson, N., 2019. Justifying power: the legitimation of authority, s.l.: s.n.

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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One Politics, power and community development: an introductory essay

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This chapter offers a critical overview of the book’s unifying theme: the complex and constant interplay between the processes of community development, politics and power. It discusses in turn the contested concepts of ‘community’, ‘community development’, ‘politics’ and ‘power’, before considering some key challenges for the global practice of community development in an increasingly neo-liberalised context. Against the dominance of managerialism and the fracturing of solidarity between citizens, Chapter 1 highlights the importance of a critical vision of community that supports diversity while promoting dialogue across distance and difference. Its latter sections introduce and summarise the varied perspectives presented by contributors to the book, from a range of settings around the world. It concludes with a hope that despite, or even because of, its critical orientation this book will be a politically useful and emboldening resource for its readers.

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We can define democracy as a government in which the people participate directly in governance or through their elected representatives. It is also a system of government whereby the citizens of a country are actively involved in decision making, and are ruled by a set of generally accepted norms and laws. Every democratic system has some principles on which they stand, from the old democracy to the modern day democracy. The first of these principles is the citizen rule. This […]

Politics Beyond Partisanship: the Essence and Evolution of Governance

When one hears the term 'politics', it is easy to conjure images of elected officials, heated debates, campaign trails, and perhaps even the occasional scandal. This imagery, often fueled by media portrayals, only scratches the surface of what politics truly encompasses. At its core, politics is about governance, decision-making, and the intricate dance of power, influence, and shared ideals that shape our societies. Historically, the origins of politics trace back to ancient civilizations. Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle […]

Donald Trump: a New Face of Politics 

Donald Trump "new face of Politics" Donald Trump is a gift to political cartoonists and satirists in general. One of the oldest and clearest depictions of a political election is as a race.  It is easy to depict and there is little confusion that when one candidate crosses the finish line and the others have not, a winner can be declared.  The race as a metaphor can also obscure clarity of a contest.  Take the following cartoon of May 31, […]

Democracy Definition and Meaning

By definition, democracy is a complex form of government with a constitution that guarantees universal personal and political rights, with fair elections and independent courts. According to Winston Churchill, democracy is the worst of all forms of government, except all others. The quote says that democracy has many shortcomings and weaknesses, but is still the best of all forms of government. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was twice British Prime Minister and led Britain through World War II. He is considered one […]

Nietzsche and Democracy

On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, it is clear that Nietzsche has a negative view of democracy. A close analysis of his text reveals Nietzsche was against egalitarianism and also a supporter of the struggle for liberty. On that account, the following essay will claim that Nietzsche was against democracy since he was more interested in the political forces that drive the march to liberty and that he believed that democracy was a source of weakness, since it […]

Democratic Peace Theory

After World War II, a known characteristic of affluent, liberal, democratic states is that they tend to not not engage in war with one another. The democratic peace theory attributes to this tendency to democracy itself, claiming that it is a key peacekeeper due to the obligatory culture of democracy to cooperate with the regime, both leaders and citizens for their own benefit. The capitalist peace theory justifies the maintenance of peace on the incentive of trade to maintain peace […]

The Direction of Democracy

With the recent election won by President Trump, a person who had little to no political background really questioned the direction in which democracy is going. I believe that President trump did not win the popular vote in this election because of his lack of participation in politics. This shocking outcome of the presidential race showed that if someone who is unqualified to be president can win the presidency then where does this leave democracy in our society today. In […]

Human Rights and Democracy

Governments across the globe provide basic rights, laws and freedoms for the citizens of their countries to live by. These rights and freedoms vary from country to country with some countries being granted more freedoms than others. Democratic countries are known for granting their citizens a vast amount of freedoms and rights. Research has shown that the more democratic a country is the less likely they are to suffer from human rights violations. However, human rights violations still occur in […]

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The United States has operated on an electoral based democratic platform for over 200 years, back as far as 1776 with the dawn of American democracy. This system of election to power has changed and evolved over the history of our country, but no change perhaps more influential than that made in 1804 with the ratification of the 12th amendment and formation of the electoral college. It has become modern controversy two centuries later whether our system of election is […]

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How To Write An Essay On Politics

Introduction to political essay writing.

Writing an essay on politics demands not only an understanding of political theories and practices but also the ability to analyze current events and historical trends. In your introduction, clarify the specific political topic or question you are addressing. This could range from an analysis of a political ideology, a discussion of a policy issue, an examination of a political event, or a critique of a political figure. Establish the relevance of the topic in the current political landscape and outline your essay’s objective. This approach will set a clear direction for your essay and engage your reader from the outset.

Analyzing Political Theories and Context

The main body of your essay should delve into the analysis of the chosen political subject. If you are discussing a political theory, such as liberalism, socialism, or conservatism, describe its fundamental principles and historical development. For essays focusing on specific policies or political events, provide a background that includes the key players, relevant history, and the social and economic context. Use this section to present and critically evaluate different viewpoints, ensuring your analysis is balanced and well-supported by evidence. This might involve drawing on political texts, speeches, policy documents, or scholarly articles.

Discussing the Impact and Implications

A critical aspect of a political essay is discussing the impact and broader implications of the topic. Analyze how the subject of your essay influences political behavior, government policies, or society at large. For instance, if you are writing about a political movement, discuss its impact on public opinion, policy-making, and electoral outcomes. Consider both the short-term effects and the long-term implications. This part of the essay is your opportunity to demonstrate the significance of the topic and its potential consequences for the future.

Concluding with a Thoughtful Reflection

Conclude your essay by summarizing the main points of your analysis and offering a thoughtful reflection on the topic. Reiterate the significance of the political issue or theory you have discussed and its relevance to contemporary politics. You might also offer predictions or recommendations regarding the future trajectory of the topic. A well-crafted conclusion will not only provide closure to your essay but also leave the reader with a deeper understanding of the complexities of politics and its pervasive influence on society.

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Home / Essay Samples / Science / Political Culture / Unpacking Politics: Understanding the Nature of Power

Unpacking Politics: Understanding the Nature of Power

• Category: Science , Government
• Topic: Political Culture , Political Participation , Political Socialization

Pages: 2 (1036 words)

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