short essay on power and politics

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.

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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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• School Education /

Essay on Politics in 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 16, 2024

Essay on Politics: Every day we see or hear in the news about politics. Politics is not just about government, bureaucracy, elections, or political parties . The process of decision-making, active participation of the people, belief systems and values, etc. are all aspects of politics. Every year, there are elections in a state or region of the country. In a democracy like ours, people are free to choose their leaders. People vote for the candidate who they think will best represent their interests. This is what we were taught right from the beginning. This is just one of the many features of politics, for it is a multifaceted concept. 

Table of Contents

• 1 What is Politics?
• 2 How Politics Shape the Future of a Country?
• 3 100 Words Paragraph on Politics

Also Read: Essay on Road Accident

What is Politics?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, Politics refers to the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power. Talking practically, politics refers to all the activities a person or group of people wants in their interest. 

On a bigger level, politics involves the distribution and exchange of power among organizations and administrations, such as political parties. Politics includes different mechanisms and values, such as governance, political institutions and ideologies, elections, international relations, public policies, social change, etc. These mechanisms and values allow us to know what politics is about and how it works.

The concept of politics has been followed since ancient times. Today’s politics is more or less like the ancient Hindu political philosophy of Dharma. Dharma meant rules and orders, which everyone was abiding by through birth. It included duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and the right way of living.

How Politics Shape the Future of a Country?

Politics is meant for development. We have seen how political parties and other people play politics for their benefit. During election times, politicians make big promises to gain people’s interest. All the promises and decisions of political leaders are taken to shape the future of the country. 

• The progress in the economic, social, and cultural aspects of a country or region depends on political decision and their effective implementation. Policies related to education, healthcare, infrastructure, and the economy shape the conditions in which citizens live and work.
• To bring economic development, governments work on fiscal and monetary policies, taxation and trade agreements, and other similar laws.
• Infrastructural developments can be introduced to shape the physical and technological landscape of a country.
• Effective social policies like healthcare, education, and equality can help deal with everyday life.
• Friendly and cooperative diplomatic policies can help establish strong global relationships with other nations. Treaties, alliances, and trade agreements shape a country’s position in the international community, influencing its security, economic ties, and diplomatic engagements.
• Political decisions can have a significant impact on environmental challenges. Policies related to climate change, natural resource management, and environmental conservation determine a country’s commitment to sustainability and the well-being of future generations.
• Political support for research, development, and innovation drives technological advancements. Governments that invest in science, technology, and education contribute to a country’s ability to compete globally and adapt to the challenges and opportunities of the future.

A country with good and effective politics can thrive for longer. This can be only possible through effective decision-making by the political leaders, who form the decision-making body. Politics can shape the future of an individual and a country at the same time.

Also Read: Essay on My Ambition in 300 Words

Also Read: Essay on 5g Technology

100 Words Paragraph on Politics

Now that we have gone through an Essay on Politics, let us explore a paragraph on politics:

Ans: Politics refers to the activities of governance and decision-making in a country. Politics involves the distribution and exchange of power among organizations and administrations, such as political parties. Politics includes different mechanisms and values, such as governance, political institutions and ideologies, elections, international relations, public policies, social change, etc. These mechanisms and values allow us to know what politics is about and how it works.

Ans: Politics is an important field of study that goes beyond the traditional notions of partisan conflicts. It is an academic discipline that examines the structures, processes, and behaviors that shape governance and decision-making within societies. Politics makes us aware of governance, policy analysis, civic engagement, diversity of ideologies, social justice and advocacy, etc.

Ans: The different types of politics are democracy, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism, which include features of both democracy and authoritarianism.

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Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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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.

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• Robinson, N., 2019. Justifying power: the legitimation of authority, s.l.: s.n.

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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.

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Politics - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Politics involves the activities, actions, and policies used to achieve and hold power in a society. An essay on politics could analyze different political ideologies, examine the workings of political institutions, or discuss contemporary political issues such as electoral reform, corruption, or international relations. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Politics you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Social Media and Politics. Democracy

The social media age has completely dominated current day society. This time twenty years ago, information simply could not be accessed and spread in the instantaneous manner it is now. Social media has done great things for democracy: access to social media aids in obtaining educational information, increases voter activity, and it also promotes collectivity. As websites like Twitter and Facebook have risen to popularity, they are also used to educate the world and allow for precluded voices to be […]

Comparative Politics

Introduction Colonialism has had a great impact on the politics and economics of African states. Post-independence, African states have modeled themselves after the West, copying the centralized and authoritarian systems of administration of their colonial masters .All African states have political systems characterized by ethnic exclusions and marginalization. Although multi-party systems have emerged, the opposition operates under restriction by the ruling party. Additionally, corrupt behavior among African leaders has been influenced by experiences under colonial rule. Economically, African resources have […]

Elite Vs. Popular Democracy

Elite and popular democracy both have different perspectives when it comes to how a democratic system should work. In elite democracy, a rule is a heavy responsibility that should be borne by the few elite members of society, chosen by the people, who have proven themselves most capable. On the other hand, in popular democracy the people should rule themselves as much as possible, and the political system should facilitate their participation. Both models undertake a representative democratic form of […]

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The Relationship between Religion and Politics in the United States

The relationship between religion and politics continues to be an important topic in modern American society. In a radical act, the Constitution not only guaranteed religious freedom; it also stated that the United States would not have a national church and would not have religious tests for national office[1]. However, in American political life, some factors enhance the role of religion in a way that is not observed in other developed countries. In the article "How Politics Affects Religion: Partisanship, […]

How has Social Media Changed Politics?

The prevalence of social media in politics has made elected officials and candidates for the public office more accountable and accessible to the voters. The ability to continue to publish content and also broadcast it to the millions of people in the United States directly allows campaigns to carefully manage the candidates who run images based on the rich sets of analytics in real time and at almost little to no cost. The use of sites like twitter, Instagram, Facebook, […]

Madisonian Democracy

Madisonian Democracy was based on the idea that human are self interested. Factions would be form due to common interest. There would be fragmented power to avoid the tyranny of majority and minority power. The point of the Civil Rights Movement was to have minority fight against tyranny of the majority, and they wanting their basic rights. With their hard effort they were able to pass the Civil Rights Act. They did use Madisonian Democracy but it fail. This was […]

Women Participation in Local Governance and Politics

Introduction Global politics have remained a pipe-dream for women as it is largely dominated by men. Although a notable increase of female participants can be seen in various platforms, challenges that influence outcomes among women in matters that do with politics and governance need to be examined. Opportunities that can help foster and increase the capacity for women to participate in governance can be employed to address the challenges in the community and grassroots development. The study seeks to understand […]

President Donald Trump and his Politics

Over a year after President Donald Trump won the decision, there are still a few inquiries regarding what drove him to triumph: Was it veritable tension about the condition of the economy? Or on the other hand would it say it was prejudice and racial disdain? Over at the Washington Post, scientists Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica, and Cathy Cohen have distributed the consequences of another overview on these inquiries, with an attention on the 41 percent of white recent college […]

American Democracy

The textbook outlines what it believes to be the three main principles on which American democracy is based. These three principles are Political Equality, Plurality Rule and Minority Rights, and Equality before the law. It is important to actually understand what each of these principles actually means in this context, and so we will briefly go over each one. The first principle listed is Political Equality, which basically says that all law-abiding citizens that are adults are allowed to vote […]

Political Parties are Hurting American Politics

Are political parties hurting american politics? Yes Political parties are and have hurt American politics for several years now and it seems to be getting worse with the Republican and Democrat feud growing larger and becoming worse than ever before. A main reason why Political parties are hurting American Politics is because the individuals who run the parties care more about themselves than they do for everyone else and the welfare of America in general. For example, as of right […]

Race, Ethnicity and Politics

There have been a lot of studies focusing on the relationship between race and political attitudes or gender and political attitudes, however, as groups assimilate in the United States there has become an increase in the studies that evaluate how gender and race interact simultaneously. The work of both Gay and Tate (1998) and Philpot and Walton (2007) focuses on how gender and race interact for black women and whether gender and/or race guides decision making. According to Gay and […]

Jeffersonian Democracy

There have been pains taken when it comes to showing the wide range and diversity of how Jefferson thought, and even more so how he went with the changes through time, advocating the basis of commerce, industry and National Power. All these assets of Jefferson can be united under one actual label, that label being “Thomas Jefferson: Commercial Agrarian Democrat” . The likelihood is there of the label being stretched out to “Commercial Industrial Agrarian Democratic Federalist” if the leaning […]

Politics of Progress: the Era of the Enlightened Despot

The term "enlightened despot" refers to a type of government in which absolute rulers make changes to the law, society, and education that are based on ideas from the Enlightenment. In contrast to normal autocrats, enlightened despots believed in enlightenment ideals like reason, progress, and kindness while still maintaining their total power. This article looks into what enlightened authoritarianism is and some famous people who have been connected to it. It also looks at its effects and the ironies that […]

Politics and Reconstruction: Understanding the Role of Carpetbaggers

The word "carpetbaggers," which is sometimes buried in layers of historical intricacy and meaning, developed during the turbulent period of American Reconstruction after the Civil War. In its literal meaning, this phrase symbolized a bag made of carpet cloth, but in the socio-political language of the nineteenth century, it bore a weightier significance. Carpetbaggers were mostly Northerners who relocated to the South after the Civil War, bringing their goods in carpetbags, which many Southerners saw as a sign of opportunism. […]

Politics of the Middle Ages: the Structure and Impact of the Feudal Pyramid

The feudal pyramid, an emblematic representation of medieval civilization, embodies a meticulously organized social system in which individuals' rank and authority were pre-established and arranged in a hierarchical manner. The objective of this article is to elucidate the complexities inherent in the feudal system, a socio-economic framework that served as the fundamental structure throughout the Middle Ages, with a special focus on its prevalence in Europe. The pinnacle of the feudal hierarchy was occupied by the sovereign, often an individual […]

Politics and Policy: the Case of Gratz V. Bollinger

One of the most important decisions in American legal history is Gratz v. Bollinger, which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 2003. It deals specifically with affirmative action in higher education. This decision significantly influenced the discussions and regulations around racial admissions in colleges and universities, as did the concurrently resolved Grutter v. Bollinger case. This article highlights the relevance of the Gratz v. Bollinger ruling in the continuing discussion of educational equality and civil rights by […]

The Tyranny of the Majority

The Tyranny of the Majority is explained as a cruel and unfair treatment by leaders with absolute power over civilians. De Tocqueville, Author of Democracy of America states that the main point of democracy was the public having a sort of dedication to having the equality among the citizens in the U.S. The United States offers several examples of equality within the people, and how they express their action in society. By explaining the main power structures between the people […]

The Ideological Duel: Alexander Hamilton Vs. Thomas Jefferson in Shaping American Politics

The intellectual rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton during the early years of the US government continues to be one of the most captivating facets of US history. This article explores the divergent ideologies and historical legacies of these two founding fathers, whose ideas influenced early American politics and are still relevant to modern American philosophy. A significant contributor to the Constitution's formulation was the Caribbean-born lawyer Alexander Hamilton, who went on to become well-known in New York. He […]

Politics and Justice Collide: the Significance of US V. Nixon in American History

In the history of the United States, the case of United States v. Nixon, which was decided in 1974, is seen as one of the most important court cases ever. In this case, the President of the United States was up against the courts, which is something he had promised to protect as President. Not only did this case test the limits of the president's power, it also set a new bar for what the limits of executive privilege are. […]

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Pioneering Change in Politics and Policy

Anne-Marie Slaughter, an influential figure in the realms of international law and foreign policy, has carved a niche for herself as a progressive thinker and advocate for change in the contemporary world. With a career spanning academia, government, and non-profit sectors, Slaughter’s contributions have been pivotal in shaping discussions on global governance, women’s rights, and the future of work. This essay explores the journey, ideologies, and impact of Anne-Marie Slaughter, focusing on her influential roles and the progressive ideas she […]

Politics of Remembrance: the Significance of the 3rd of May

Of the events that have influenced history in many parts of the globe, May 3rd is recognized as a day of great historical importance. It is a day that has seen the beginning of key political movements as well as the remembrance of important historical and cultural moments. This article investigates the varied significance of May 3rd, looking at its influence and applicability in various historical and cultural situations. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth signing of the May 3, 1791, Constitution is […]

Democracy and Development

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 […]

United States: Democracy

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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Power of politics: meaning, types and sources of power.

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Power of Politics: Meaning, Types and Sources of Power!

The focal point of the study of political institutions is power and its uses. Although we think of the concept of power as being associated particularly with politics or so as to say political science, but it is, in fact, exists in all types of social relationships. For Foucault (1969), ‘power relationships are present in all aspects of society.

They go right down into the depths of society…. They are not localized in the relations between the state, and its citizens, or on the frontiers between classes’. All social actions involve power relationships whether it may be between employer and employee or between husband and wife (in patriarchal society). Thus, it is of fundamental importance for the sociology to study in its manifold ramifications.

Sociologists are concerned with social interactions among individuals and groups and more specifically, how individuals and groups achieve their ends as against those of others. In their study they take note of power as an important element that influences social behaviour. Sociologists are today concerned to analyse the diverse nature of power and that complexities it creates in human relationships, especially between state and society.

In the very simple language, power is the ability to get one’s way—even if it is based on bluff. It is the ability to exercise one’s will over others or, in other words, power is the ability of individuals or groups to make their own interests or concerns count, even when others resist.

It sometimes involves the direct use of force. Force is the actual or threatened use of coercion to impose one’s will on others. When a father slaps the child to prohibit certain acts, he is applying force. Some scholars have defined it that it necessarily involves overcoming another’s will.

To summarize, it may be said that ‘power is the ability of groups or individuals to assert themselves—sometimes, but not always—in opposition to the desires of others’. Many decisions are made without opposition because of the great power decision-makers wield.

According to Max Weber (1947), power is ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests’.

He further writes, positions of power can ’emerge from social relations in drawing room as well as in the market, from the rostrum of lecture hall as well as the command post of a regiment, from an erotic or charitable relationship as well as from scholarly discussion or athletics’. It plays a part in family (husband and wife) and school (teacher and the taught) relationship also.

Thus, for Weber, power is the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action. Alvin Genldner (1970) noted that power is, among other things, the ability to enforce one’s moral claims. The powerful can thus conventionalize their moral defaults.

Celebrated sociologist Anthony Giddens (1997) sees, ‘power as the ability to make a difference, to change things from what they would otherwise have been, as he puts it “transformative” capacity’. Power can be defined by saying that ‘A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests’. According to Steven Lukes (2005), power has three dimensions or faces: (1) decision-making, (2) non-decision-making, and (3) shaping desires.

For some social theorists, especially those linked to postmodernism, the very notion of large-scale macro structures of power has come under serious attack. For example, Foucault’s conception of power demands that we should approach it in a micro way, seeing power in all social relationships, and working in specific ways in all kinds of particular institutional settings—whether the prison or the clinic.

For Foucault, we must explore the intimate relationship between power and knowledge. Through his case studies of madness, medicine, prisons and sexuality, Foucault has highlighted the organization of knowledge and power. He argued that a new type of power, i.e., disciplinary power, has evolved during the 19th century.

It is concerned with the regulation, surveillance and government. Disciplinary power is exercised in prison, schools and places of work. Disciplinary power operates at the expense of individual freedom and choice. In his opinion, notions like ‘ruling class domination’ simply obscure the micro-realities of power.

Foucault’s ideas fit very well with the shift towards diverse non-economic political struggles such as feminists demonstrations about ‘control of bodies’. How far such conceptions of power/knowledge are useful as against the well-established approaches to power, such as Marxism, is a matter for debate among sociologists.

Types of Power :

Max Weber (1958) believed that there are three (not one) independent and equally important orders of power as under.

Economic power :

For Marx, economic power is the basis of all power, including political power. It is based upon an objective relationship to the modes of production, a group’s condition in the labour market, and its chances. Economic power refers to the measurement of the ability to control events by virtue of material advantage.

Social power :

It is based upon informal community opinion, family position, honour, prestige and patterns of consumption and lifestyles. Weber placed special emphasis on the importance of social power, which often takes priority over economic interests. Contemporary sociologists have also given importance to social status so much so that they sometimes seem to have underestimated the importance of political power.

Political power :

It is based upon the relationships to the legal structure, party affiliation and extensive bureaucracy. Political power is institutionalized in the form of large-scale government bureaucracies. One of the persistent ideas has been that they are controlled by elites, that is, small, select, privileged groups.

Political power concerns the activities of the states which is not confined to national boundaries. The networks of political power can stretch across countries and across the globe. Political power involves the power to tax and power to distribute resources to the citizens.

Besides, Weber’s types of power, there are a few other types also which are as under:

Knowledge power:

To Foucault (1969), power is intimately linked with knowledge. Power and knowledge produce one another. He saw knowledge as a means of ‘keeping tabs’ on people and controlling them.

Military power :

It involves the use of physical coercion. Warfare has always played a major role in politics. Modem mass military systems developed into bureaucratic organiza­tions and significantly changed the nature of organizing and fighting wars. According to Weber, few groups in society base their power purely on force or military might.

Ideological power :

It involves power over ideas and beliefs, for example, are communism, fascism and some varieties of nationalism. These types of ideologies are frequently oppositional to dominant institutions and play an important role in the organi­zation of devotees into sects and parties. According to Michael Mann (1986), there are two types of power, viz., distributional and collective.

Distributional power :

It is a power over others. It is the ability of individuals to get others to help them pursue their own goals. It is held by individuals.

Collective power :

It is exercised by social groups. It may be exercised by one social group over another.

Sources of Power :

There are three basic sources of power: force, influence and authority.

These are explained below:

As defined earlier, force is the actual (physical force) or threatened (latent force) use of coercion to impose one’s will on others. When leaders imprison or even execute political dissidents, they thus apply force. Often, however, sheer force accomplishes little. Although people can be physically restrained, they cannot be made to perform complicated tasks by force alone.

Influence :

It refers to the exercise of power through the process of persuasion. It is the ability to affect the decisions and actions of others. A citizen may change his or her position after listening a stirring speech at a rally by a political leader. This is an example of influence that how the efforts to persuade people can help in changing one’s opinion.

Authority :

It refers to power that has been institutionalized and is recognized by the people over whom it is exercised (Schaefer and Lamm, 1992). It is estab­lished to make decisions and order the actions of others. It is a form of legitimate power. Legitimacy means that those subject to a government’s authority consent to it (Giddens, 1997).

The people give to the ruler the authority to rule, and they obey willingly without the threat of force. We tend to obey the orders of police officer because we accept their right to have power over us in certain situations. Legitimate power is accepted as being rightfully exercised (for example, power of the king). Thus, sociologists distinguish power from authority.

Authority is an agreed-upon legitimate relationship of domination and subjugation. For example, when a decision is made through legitimate, recognized channels of government, the carrying out of that decision falls within the realm of authority. In brief, power is decision-making and authority is the right to make decisions, that is, legit­imate power.

Thus, there is a difference between authority and influence:

(1) Authority is an official right to make and enforce decisions, whereas influence is the ability to affect the actions of others apart from authority to do so;

(2) Authority stems from rank, whereas influence rests largely upon personal attributes; and

(3) Authority is based upon the status one holds, whereas influence is based upon the esteem one receives.

An admired institutional officer can have both authority and influence, whereas an unpopular officer has authority but little influence.

Types of Authority:

Max Weber (1922) has identified three t5T3es of authority as described below:

Traditional Authority:

It is the legitimate power conferred by custom, tradition or accepted practice. Traditional authority is ‘hallowed with time’, like that of a king, an established dynasty or a religious leader. It is based on an uncodified collective sense that it is proper and longstanding and should therefore be accepted as legitimate.

In patriarchal societies, the authority of husbands over wives or of father over his children is obeyed because it is the accepted practice. Similarly, a king or queen is accepted as ruler of a nation simply by virtue of inheriting the crown. For the traditional leader, authority rests in custom or tradition (inherited positions), and not in personal characteristics.

Legal—Rational Authority:

It is established in law or written regulations (formally enacted norms) that determine how the society will be governed. This is the form of authority found in workplaces, government, schools, colleges and most major social institutions.

Leaders derive their legal authority from the written rules and regulations of political systems. It is this type of authority that characterizes modem bureaucratic organizations. Rational authority rests in the leader’s legal right rather than in family or personal characteristics.

Charismatic Authority:

Weber also observed that power can be legitimized by the charisma of an individual. Charisma is ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary man and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’ (Weber, 1922).

Charisma is, therefore, unusual spontaneous and creative of new movements and new structures. The term ‘charismatic authority’ refers to the power made legitimate by the exceptional personal characteristics of the leader, such as heroism, mysticism, revelations, or magic.

Charisma allows a person to lead or inspire without relying on set rules or traditions. Charismatic authority is generated by the personality and the myths that surround the individual, like that of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Hitler and Pandit Nehru.

A charismatic leader attracts followers because they judge him or her to be particular wise or capable. It may be pertinent to mention that the charismatic authority is socially bestowed and may be withdrawn when the leader is no longer regarded as extraordinary.

Weber used traditional, legal—rational and charismatic authority as ideal types and as such are usually not found in their pure form in any given situation. In reality, particular leaders and political systems combine elements of two or more of these forms.

To Weber’s three major types of authority, some contemporary scholars have added a fourth type, professional authority (authority based on expertise). The authority of physicians or atomic scien­tists, botanists, etc., is the example of this fourth type of authority.

Related Articles:

• 6 Important Types of Power in Leadership
• Top 2 Sources of Power in Organisation

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Introductory essay

Written by the educators who created Cyber-Influence and Power, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in their field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around. Rebecca MacKinnon

Over the past 20 years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have transformed the globe, facilitating the international economic, political, and cultural connections and exchanges that are at the heart of contemporary globalization processes. The term ICT is broad in scope, encompassing both the technological infrastructure and products that facilitate the collection, storage, manipulation, and distribution of information in a variety of formats.

While there are many definitions of globalization, most would agree that the term refers to a variety of complex social processes that facilitate worldwide economic, cultural, and political connections and exchanges. The kinds of global connections ICTs give rise to mark a dramatic departure from the face-to-face, time and place dependent interactions that characterized communication throughout most of human history. ICTs have extended human interaction and increased our interconnectedness, making it possible for geographically dispersed people not only to share information at an ever-faster rate but also to organize and to take action in response to events occurring in places far from where they are physically situated.

While these complex webs of connections can facilitate positive collective action, they can also put us at risk. As TED speaker Ian Goldin observes, the complexity of our global connections creates a built-in fragility: What happens in one part of the world can very quickly affect everyone, everywhere.

The proliferation of ICTs and the new webs of social connections they engender have had profound political implications for governments, citizens, and non-state actors alike. Each of the TEDTalks featured in this course explore some of these implications, highlighting the connections and tensions between technology and politics. Some speakers focus primarily on how anti-authoritarian protesters use technology to convene and organize supporters, while others expose how authoritarian governments use technology to manipulate and control individuals and groups. When viewed together as a unit, the contrasting voices reveal that technology is a contested site through which political power is both exercised and resisted.

Technology as liberator

The liberating potential of technology is a powerful theme taken up by several TED speakers in Cyber-Influence and Power . Journalist and Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon, for example, begins her talk by playing the famous Orwell-inspired Apple advertisement from 1984. Apple created the ad to introduce Macintosh computers, but MacKinnon describes Apple's underlying narrative as follows: "technology created by innovative companies will set us all free." While MacKinnon examines this narrative with a critical eye, other TED speakers focus on the ways that ICTs can and do function positively as tools of social change, enabling citizens to challenge oppressive governments.

In a 2011 CNN interview, Egyptian protest leader, Google executive, and TED speaker Wael Ghonim claimed "if you want to free a society, just give them internet access. The young crowds are going to all go out and see and hear the unbiased media, see the truth about other nations and their own nation, and they are going to be able to communicate and collaborate together." (i). In this framework, the opportunities for global information sharing, borderless communication, and collaboration that ICTs make possible encourage the spread of democracy. As Ghonim argues, when citizens go online, they are likely to discover that their particular government's perspective is only one among many. Activists like Ghonim maintain that exposure to this online free exchange of ideas will make people less likely to accept government propaganda and more likely to challenge oppressive regimes.

A case in point is the controversy that erupted around Khaled Said, a young Egyptian man who died after being arrested by Egyptian police. The police claimed that Said suffocated when he attempted to swallow a bag of hashish; witnesses, however, reported that he was beaten to death by the police. Stories about the beating and photos of Said's disfigured body circulated widely in online communities, and Ghonim's Facebook group, titled "We are all Khaled Said," is widely credited with bringing attention to Said's death and fomenting the discontent that ultimately erupted in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, or what Ghonim refers to as "revolution 2.0."

Ghonim's Facebook group also illustrates how ICTs enable citizens to produce and broadcast information themselves. Many people already take for granted the ability to capture images and video via handheld devices and then upload that footage to platforms like YouTube. As TED speaker Clay Shirky points out, our ability to produce and widely distribute information constitutes a revolutionary change in media production and consumption patterns. The production of media has typically been very expensive and thus out of reach for most individuals; the average person was therefore primarily a consumer of media, reading books, listening to the radio, watching TV, going to movies, etc. Very few could independently publish their own books or create and distribute their own radio programs, television shows, or movies. ICTs have disrupted this configuration, putting media production in the hands of individual amateurs on a budget — or what Shirky refers to as members of "the former audience" — alongside the professionals backed by multi-billion dollar corporations. This "democratization of media" allows individuals to create massive amounts of information in a variety of formats and to distribute it almost instantly to a potentially global audience.

Shirky is especially interested in the Internet as "the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversations at the same time." This shift has important political implications. For example, in 2008 many Obama followers used Obama's own social networking site to express their unhappiness when the presidential candidate changed his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The outcry of his supporters did not force Obama to revert to his original position, but it did help him realize that he needed to address his supporters directly, acknowledging their disagreement on the issue and explaining his position. Shirky observes that this scenario was also notable because the Obama organization realized that "their role was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters." This tension between the use of technology in the service of the democratic impulse to convene citizens vs. the authoritarian impulse to control them runs throughout many of the TEDTalks in Cyber-Influence and Power.

A number of TED speakers explicitly examine the ways that ICTs give individual citizens the ability to document governmental abuses they witness and to upload this information to the Internet for a global audience. Thus, ICTs can empower citizens by giving them tools that can help keep their governments accountable. The former head of Al Jazeera and TED speaker Wadah Khanfar provides some very clear examples of the political power of technology in the hands of citizens. He describes how the revolution in Tunisia was delivered to the world via cell phones, cameras, and social media outlets, with the mainstream media relying on "citizen reporters" for details.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown's TEDTalk also highlights some of the ways citizens have used ICTs to keep their governments accountable. For example, Brown recounts how citizens in Zimbabwe used the cameras on their phones at polling places in order to discourage the Mugabe regime from engaging in electoral fraud. Similarly, Clay Shirky begins his TEDTalk with a discussion of how cameras on phones were used to combat voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election in the U.S. ICTs allowed citizens to be protectors of the democratic process, casting their individual votes but also, as Shirky observes, helping to "ensure the sanctity of the vote overall."

Technology as oppressor

While smart phones and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have arguably facilitated the overthrow of dictatorships in places like Tunisia and Egypt, lending credence to Gordon Brown's vision of technology as an engine of liberalism and pluralism, not everyone shares this view. As TED speaker and former religious extremist Maajid Nawaz points out, there is nothing inherently liberating about ICTs, given that they frequently are deployed to great effect by extremist organizations seeking social changes that are often inconsistent with democracy and human rights. Where once individual extremists might have felt isolated and alone, disconnected from like-minded people and thus unable to act in concert with others to pursue their agendas, ICTs allow them to connect with other extremists and to form communities around their ideas, narratives, and symbols.

Ian Goldin shares this concern, warning listeners about what he calls the "two Achilles heels of globalization": growing inequality and the fragility that is inherent in a complex integrated system. He points out that those who do not experience the benefits of globalization, who feel like they've been left out in one way or another, can potentially become incredibly dangerous. In a world where what happens in one place very quickly affects everyone else — and where technologies are getting ever smaller and more powerful — a single angry individual with access to technological resources has the potential to do more damage than ever before. The question becomes then, how do we manage the systemic risk inherent in today's technology-infused globalized world? According to Goldin, our current governance structures are "fossilized" and ill-equipped to deal with these issues.

Other critics of the notion that ICTs are inherently liberating point out that ICTs have been leveraged effectively by oppressive governments to solidify their own power and to manipulate, spy upon, and censor their citizens. Journalist and TED speaker Evgeny Morozov expresses scepticism about what he calls "iPod liberalism," or the belief that technology will necessarily lead to the fall of dictatorships and the emergence of democratic governments. Morozov uses the term "spinternet" to describe authoritarian governments' use of the Internet to provide their own "spin" on issues and events. Russia, China, and Iran, he argues, have all trained and paid bloggers to promote their ideological agendas in the online environment and/or or to attack people writing posts the government doesn't like in an effort to discredit them as spies or criminals who should not be trusted.

Morozov also points out that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are tools not only of revolutionaries but also of authoritarian governments who use them to gather open-source intelligence. "In the past," Morozov maintains, "it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. KGB...used to torture in order to get this data." Instead of focusing primarily on bringing Internet access and devices to the people in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, Morozov argues that we need to abandon our cyber-utopian assumptions and do more to actually empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs and other members of society, making sure that the "spinternet" does not prevent their voices from being heard.

The ICT Empowered Individual vs. The Nation State

In her TEDTalk "Let's Take Back the Internet," Rebecca MacKinnon argues that "the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and…the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us." It is clearly not a given, however, that governments, organizations, and individuals will use technology benevolently. Part of the responsibility of citizenship in the globalized information age then is to work to ensure that both governments and technologies "serve the world's peoples." However, there is considerable disagreement about what that might look like.

WikiLeaks spokesperson and TED speaker Julian Assange, for example, argues that government secrecy is inconsistent with democratic values and is ultimately about deceiving and manipulating rather than serving the world's people. Others maintain that governments need to be able to keep secrets about some topics in order to protect their citizens or to act effectively in response to crises, oppressive regimes, terrorist organizations, etc. While some view Assange's use of technology as a way to hold governments accountable and to increase transparency, others see this use of technology as a criminal act with the potential to both undermine stable democracies and put innocent lives in danger.

ICTs and global citizenship

While there are no easy answers to the global political questions raised by the proliferation of ICTs, there are relatively new approaches to the questions that look promising, including the emergence of individuals who see themselves as global citizens — people who participate in a global civil society that transcends national boundaries. Technology facilitates global citizens' ability to learn about global issues, to connect with others who care about similar issues, and to organize and act meaningfully in response. However, global citizens are also aware that technology in and of itself is no panacea, and that it can be used to manipulate and oppress.

Global citizens fight against oppressive uses of technology, often with technology. Technology helps them not only to participate in global conversations that affect us all but also to amplify the voices of those who have been marginalized or altogether missing from such conversations. Moreover, global citizens are those who are willing to grapple with large and complex issues that are truly global in scope and who attempt to chart a course forward that benefits all people, regardless of their locations around the globe.

Gordon Brown implicitly alludes to the importance of global citizenship when he states that we need a global ethic of fairness and responsibility to inform global problem-solving. Human rights, disease, development, security, terrorism, climate change, and poverty are among the issues that cannot be addressed successfully by any one nation alone. Individual actors (nation states, NGOs, etc.) can help, but a collective of actors, both state and non-state, is required. Brown suggests that we must combine the power of a global ethic with the power to communicate and organize globally in order for us to address effectively the world's most pressing issues.

Individuals and groups today are able to exert influence that is disproportionate to their numbers and the size of their arsenals through their use of "soft power" techniques, as TED speakers Joseph Nye and Shashi Tharoor observe. This is consistent with Maajid Nawaz's discussion of the power of symbols and narratives. Small groups can develop powerful narratives that help shape the views and actions of people around the world. While governments are far more accustomed to exerting power through military force, they might achieve their interests more effectively by implementing soft power strategies designed to convince others that they want the same things. According to Nye, replacing a "zero-sum" approach (you must lose in order for me to win) with a "positive-sum" one (we can both win) creates opportunities for collaboration, which is necessary if we are to begin to deal with problems that are global in scope.

Let's get started

Collectively, the TEDTalks in this course explore how ICTs are used by and against governments, citizens, activists, revolutionaries, extremists, and other political actors in efforts both to preserve and disrupt the status quo. They highlight the ways that ICTs have opened up new forms of communication and activism as well as how the much-hailed revolutionary power of ICTs can and has been co-opted by oppressive regimes to reassert their control.

By listening to the contrasting voices of this diverse group of TED speakers, which includes activists, journalists, professors, politicians, and a former member of an extremist organization, we can begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technology can be used both to facilitate and contest a wide variety of political movements. Global citizens who champion democracy would do well to explore these intersections among politics and technology, as understanding these connections is a necessary first step toward MacKinnon's laudable goal of building a world in which "government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around."

Let's begin our exploration of the intersections among politics and technology in today's globalized world with a TEDTalk from Ian Goldin, the first Director of the 21st Century School, Oxford University's think tank/research center. Goldin's talk will set the stage for us, exploring the integrated, complex, and technology rich global landscape upon which the political struggles for power examined by other TED speakers play out.

Navigating our global future

i. "Welcome to Revolution 2.0, Ghonim Says," CNN, February 9, 2011. http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/02/09/wael.ghonim.interview.cnn .

Relevant talks

Gordon Brown

Wiring a web for global good.

Clay Shirky

How social media can make history.

Wael Ghonim

Inside the egyptian revolution.

Wadah Khanfar

A historic moment in the arab world.

Evgeny Morozov

How the net aids dictatorships.

Maajid Nawaz

A global culture to fight extremism.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Let's take back the internet.

Julian Assange

Why the world needs wikileaks.

Global power shifts

Shashi Tharoor

Why nations should pursue soft power.

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• Essay on Politics

Essay on Politics for Students in English

Politics is a hugely important domain in the world and it has a profound impact on the functioning as well as the policies of the governments. Politics has an effect on all types of government including democratic, autocratic, monarchical, theocratic and others. The government is responsible for making decisions on different matters of public interest, issuing orders for the public health, directing the citizens towards development and growth, and performing a wide range of other related functions.

There are numerous definitions of what politics means. Politics can be described as the disagreement between the various groups on what they like. One of the broad definitions of politics, which is widely agreed, is the art of governance. The government is the entity having the legal authority of regulating people’s actions. The word politics is usually used for defining how the countries are governed and how the governments make the rules and the laws. 

Defining laws and regulations that tell people what they can or cannot do is one of the ways in which the government leads the people. These regulations and laws are enacted by the government for ensuring order and protection in the society. Beyond the laws, the government might also regulate the citizens and the functioning of the country in other ways. Most of the countries have specific groups or political parties for expressing their views and policies. 

The political parties form a consensus on the common policies or path that they should take in communicating their ideas or policies to the people. These parties support legislative bills or reforms and the candidates based on the agenda agreed upon by the members. The election is usually contested or fought between the opposite political parties of different spectrum. 

One of the conventional explanations of politics refers to politics being conducted within the system of checks and balances for avoiding misuse of political power. The several institutions that exist within the governing system include the legislative body that is responsible for making laws, executive body that imposes them, and judiciary that interprets them thus providing a powerful and well-rounded political spectrum.

If you want to study in detail about politics and its various concepts of applications for your essay in English then you can refer to it on the Vedantu website or app. Vedantu is a leading learning platform with a wide range of learning resources, tutorials, solutions, reference notes, and sample questions papers with solutions for students of different branches.

Short Politics Essay in English

Politics, in general, is the platform by which people create, maintain, and change the laws that govern their lives. As a result, conflict and collaboration are inextricably connected in politics. On the one hand, the presence of conflicting views, competing expectations, competing needs, and competing interests is expected to result in conflict over the rules under which people live.

Politics is fascinating because everyone has a different perspective on life and its rules. They have differing opinions about how they should live. What money should go to whom? What is the best way to disperse power to help the powerless? Is it better for society to be built on collaboration or conflict? And so forth. They also talk about how such disputes can be resolved. What is the best way to make decisions as a group? In what conditions does who have a say? How much say should each person have in decisions? The list goes on.

This, according to Aristotle, made politics the "master science," which he described as "the action by which human beings strive to better their lives and build and contribute to a Good Society." Politics is, first and foremost, a social practice. It's still a conversation, but the parties have reduced it to a monologue.

Any effort to grasp the sense of the word "politics" must always grapple with two major issues. The first is the different connotations that this word has in everyday speech. Unlike economics, geography, history, and biology, which most people think of as academic subjects, few people approach politics without preconceptions. The second, more complicated issue is that even well-respected authorities cannot agree about what politics is all about. It has infiltrated nearly every aspect of society.

Hence, we can say that the exercise of authority, the sacred science of governance, the making of unified decisions, the distribution of limited resources, the art of deceit and exploitation, and so on are all terms used to describe politics.

FAQs on Essay on Politics

1. How do we define politics?

Politics is the collection of activities connected with community decision-making or other types of power relations between individuals, such as resource allocation or status.

2. Name the Various national-level political parties in india.

There are several national-level political parties in India. The major ones include:

All India Trinamool Congress(AITC)

Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP)

Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP)

Communist Party of India(CPI)

Communist Party of India(Marxist)

Indian National Congress(INC)

National People’s Party(NPP)

Nationalist Congress Party(NCP)

3. What is the definition of politics?

Politics has numerous definitions and explanations. In the basic broad term politics can be defined as the art of governance through a collection of activities that are associated with society, decision-making, and power relations between the individuals, like status or resource allocation. The concept of politics is very important in the governance of a country and it is an important topic related to public life that the students must learn about.

4.  Which are the different major political parties in India?

There are several major political parties in India. Some of these political parties include All India Trinamool Congress (AITMC), Indian National Congress (INC), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (CPI), and National People’s Party (NPP) amongst a host of others. Each of these political parties have their own political manifesto based on which they conduct their operations.

5. Why is politics an important subject for students to learn?

Politics is related to day-to-day functioning of a country or a society and thus it is important for students to learn and be well informed about it. Politics includes vital policies and decisions that have a direct impact on people and as a responsible citizen it is crucial for students to have a basic grasp of developments in the country that charts out the future path of the nation.

6. How can I prepare for an essay on politics?

If you want to write an essay on politics then you would need to prepare well by understanding the definitions and various other aspects related to politics. One of the ways you can do this is by learning and reading about politics on the internet. You can also find a detailed essay on politics for students in English at Vedantu. This essay incorporates all the important points and provides an excellent guide on how the essay should be done.

7. How can I download the English essay on politics from Vedantu?

If you want to download the English essay on Politics provided by Vedantu then you can do it from either the website or the app. All you need to do is go to the English section and browse to the essay on politics. Here you will have the “Download PDF” option and you just need to click on that button to download the English essay by Vedantu on your device for free. Once you downloaded the PDF file you can access it offline any time you want.

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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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Short Stories and Political Philosophy

Power, prose, and persuasion, edited by erin a. dolgoy; kimberly hurd hale and bruce peabody - contributions by erin a. dolgoy; kimberly hurd hale; timothy mccranor; steven michels; mary p. nichols; bruce peabody; michael christopher sardo; natalie fuehrer taylor; drew kennedy thompson and abram trosky, also available.

Power and Politics in a Modern Organization Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Power and politics are two important parts of organizational behavior and effective management. Management and leadership skills are complex issues that demand the unique professional knowledge and expertise of a person. The problem of power and politics in a modern organization receives great attention in recent years influenced by changing cultural traditions and new management techniques (Pfeffer, 1992). The distinction between power and politics provides a framework for developing leadership strategy given one’s place in a situation, with or without power. The point of the difference between leadership and management challenges, and the different modes of operating that each requires are based on differences between power and politics within one organization.

Power is a bargain; employees entrust leaders in exchange for service. Indeed, it is possible to define this notion as a process “entrusted to perform a service” (Mintzberg, 1985). When individuals meet expectations, their credibility and chances for promotion increase; when they do not, they risk their image and position. Politics means a certain direction and approach to exercise power and make decisions. In both cases, good leadership skills are needed to provide effective governance if a person is to ensure political leadership and decision-making. To the extent that leaders and managers tried in the past to distinguish between leadership and power, they merely make a distinction between two kinds of power: formal and informal authority. In organizations, politics has usually been associated with informal authority, denoting the ability to gain and deploy power—that is, the power to influence and inspire a subordinate (Pfeffer, 1992). Power and politics are saddled with expectations that constrain the exercise of leadership. Consequently, equating leadership with informal power does little to help employees develop strategies of leadership, whether with or without power, to tackle the most important challenges. The dependency on power generated by distress has the special advantage of holding a social system together when other management tools fail to function properly (Daft, 2003).

An example of organizational politics is the promotion and training of all employees working with the company for 3 years. Politics allow the company to ensure an adequate supply of professional and competent staff and reduced redundancy rates. In this case, power relations will be a relationship between a manager/trainer and the employee/trainee assigned to further promotion. Power relationships become a critical feature of a holding environment. Leadership, however, such dependency discourages more adaptive social constructs and behavior. The pattern of dependency itself evolved not to enable a given troop to achieve new adaptations (for example, to venture into new technological innovations or address new kinds of work structure), but to enable the crowd to function routinely within the ecological zone to which its particular set of social behaviors had adapted already. Power and politics are interlinked as the main similarity between them are a strong impact on staff and employee relationships and a possibility to change the course of actions. That is, the management is not designed to invent new norms or role structures, but to direct, defend, and maintain order within the established processes. If a new kind of power appears, the staff will enact its procedure for routine predators and the alpha will valiantly attempt to fulfill his role, though unsuccessfully (Pfeffer, 1992).

In contrast to politics, power is connected with visibility. In this case, under visibility researchers imply innovation, critical skills, and making external relationships. So, power relations are achieved when behavior is made distinctive in certain kinds of ways. in its turn, leaders deal with the development and maintenance of the order. It makes sense to equate management with formal and informal authority in a world of technical problems in which expertise and well-designed procedures and norms suffice to meet the challenges we face. Politics and power can be expected to offer strategic direction, defense, course of action, conflict management, and normal maintenance. Many companies have thrived for long periods in quite stable environments due in large part to wise and expert politics and power. But when the company requires changes in employees’ values, attitudes, or behavior patterns, when responsibility, pain, and initiative must be distributed widely, our unrealistic expectations of authority serve as constraints on the exercise of leadership (Mintzberg, 1985).

In sum, power and politics are connected by their strong impact on the organization and the employees. Power usually refers to the personal characteristics of a leader/manager while politics refers to the general approach of the origination or an organizational unit. In the context of work, management often makes demands that frustrate people’s expectations for easy answers. Politics under pressure to deliver “leadership” all too often make the classic error of treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. Using politics and power as the main tools of influence, managers take responsibility for other employees’ problems and give them back ready-made solutions. Leaders gain power in the first place because they take duty and solve problems with such aplomb. Managers rarely receive power and have a possibility to develop organizational politics, as these are the main characteristics of organizational leadership.

Daft, R. L. (2003). Orga nizational Theory and Design . 9th Edition. South-Western College Pub; 8 edition.

Mintzberg, H. (1985). The organization as political arena’, Journal of Management Studies , 22 (2), 133-154.

Pfeffer, J. (1992). ‘Understanding power in organizations’, California Management Review , 34 (2), 29-50.

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IvyPanda. (2021, December 3). Power and Politics in a Modern Organization. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/

"Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." IvyPanda , 3 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

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IvyPanda . 2021. "Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

1. IvyPanda . "Power and Politics in a Modern Organization." December 3, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/power-and-politics-in-a-modern-organization/.

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Chapter 13: Power and Politics

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand the meaning of power.
• Recognize the positive and negative aspects of power and influence.
• Recognize the sources of power.
• Understand and recognize influence tactics and impression management.
• Learn the definition of a social network and how to analyze your own network.
• Understand the antecedents and consequences of organizational politics.
• Understand how ethics affect power.
• Understand cross-cultural influences on power use.

Video Connection: If you are interested in learning more about Steve Jobs as he describes pivotal moments in his life, view Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, available at the following Web site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

13.1 Focus on Power: The Case of Steve Jobs

In 2007, Fortune named Steve Jobs the “Most Powerful Person in Business.” In 2009, the magazine named him “CEO of the Decade.” Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), has transformed no fewer than five different industries: computers, Hollywood movies, music, retailing, and wireless phones. His Apple II ushered in the personal computer era in 1977, and the graphical interface of the Macintosh in 1984 set the standard that all other PCs emulated. His company Pixar defined the computer-animated feature film. The iPod, iTunes, and iPhone revolutionized how we listen to music, how we pay for and receive all types of digital content, and what we expect of a mobile phone.

How has Jobs done it? Jobs draws on all six types of power: legitimate, expert, reward, information, coercive, and referent. His vision and sheer force of will helped him succeed as a young unknown. But the same determination that helped him succeed has a darker side—an autocracy and drive for perfection that can make him tyrannical. Let’s take each of these in turn.

• Legitimate power . As CEO of Apple, Jobs enjoys unquestioned legitimate power.
• Expert power . His success has built a tremendous amount of expert power. Jobs is renowned for being able to think of markets and products for needs that people didn’t even know they had.
• Reward power . As one of the richest individuals in the United States, Jobs has reward power both within and outside Apple. He also can reward individuals with his time and attention.
• Information power . Jobs has been able to leverage information in each industry he has transformed.
• Coercive power . Forcefulness is helpful when tackling large, intractable problems, says Stanford social psychologist Roderick Kramer, who calls Jobs one of the “great intimidators.” Robert Sutton notes that “the degree to which people in Silicon Valley are afraid of Jobs is unbelievable.” Jobs is known to berate people to the point of tears.
• Referent power . But at the same time, “He inspires astounding effort and creativity from his people.” Employee Andy Herzfeld, the lead designer of the original Mac operating system, says Jobs imbues employees with a “messianic zeal” and can make them feel that they’re working on the greatest product in the world.

Those who work with him say Jobs is very hard to please. However, they also say that this means that Apple employees work hard to win his approval. “He has the ability to pull the best out of people,” says Cordell Ratzlaff, who worked closely with Jobs on OS X for 18 months. “I learned a tremendous amount from him.” Jobs’s ability to persuade and influence has come to be called a “reality distortion field.” As Bud Tribble put it, “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.” Hertzfeld describes his style as “a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.” The influence works even when you’re aware of it, and it works even on “enemies”: “No other high-tech impresario could walk into the annual sales meeting of one of his fiercest rivals and get a standing ovation,” which is what Jobs got in 2002 from Intel Corporation (the ally of Apple archrival Microsoft in the partnership known as Wintel: Windows + Intel).

Jobs’s power is not infallible—he was ousted from his own company in 1987 by the man he hired to help him run it. But he returned in 1997 and brought the company back from the brink of failure. The only years that Apple was unprofitable were the years during Jobs’s absence. Many watched to see how Apple and Jobs succeed with the iPad in 2010 (Hertzfeld, 1981; Kahney. 2008; Schlender, 2007; Sutton, 2007).

13.2 The Basics of Power

What is power.

We’ll look at the aspects and nuances of power in more detail in this chapter, but simply put, power is the ability to influence the behaviour of others to get what you want. Gerald Salancik and Jeffery Pfeffer concur, noting, “Power is simply the ability to get things done the way one wants them to be done” (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1989). If you want a larger budget to open a new store in a large city and you get the budget increase, you have used your power to influence the decision.

Power distribution is usually visible within organizations. For example, Salancik and Pfeffer gathered information from a company with 21 department managers and asked 10 of those department heads to rank all the managers according to the influence each person had in the organization. Although ranking 21 managers might seem like a difficult task, all the managers were immediately able to create that list. When Salancik and Pfeffer compared the rankings, they found virtually no disagreement in how the top 5 and bottom 5 managers were ranked. The only slight differences came from individuals ranking themselves higher than their colleagues ranked them. The same findings held true for factories, banks, and universities.

Positive and Negative Consequences of Power

The fact that we can see and succumb to power means that power has both positive and negative consequences. On one hand, powerful CEOs can align an entire organization to move together to achieve goals. Amazing philanthropists such as Paul Farmer, a doctor who brought hospitals, medicine, and doctors to remote Haiti, and Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer who founded the Central Asia Institute and built schools across Pakistan, draw on their own power to organize others toward lofty goals; they have changed the lives of thousands of individuals in countries around the world for the better (Kidder, 2004; Mortenson & Relin, 2006).

On the other hand, autocracy can destroy companies and countries alike. The phrase, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was first said by English historian John Emerich Edward Dalberg, who warned that power was inherently evil and its holders were not to be trusted. History shows that power can be intoxicating and can be devastating when abused, as seen in high-profile cases such as those involving Enron Corporation and government leaders such as the impeached Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich in 2009. One reason that power can be so easily abused is because individuals are often quick to conform. To understand this relationship better, we will examine some famous researchers who studied conformity in a variety of contexts.

Conformity refers to people’s tendencies to behave consistently with social norms. Conformity can refer to small things such as how people tend to face forward in an elevator. There’s no rule listed in the elevator saying which way to face, yet it is expected that everyone will face forward. To test this, the next time you’re in an elevator with strangers, simply stand facing the back of the elevator without saying anything. You may notice that those around you become uncomfortable. Conformity can result to engaging unethical behaviours because you are led by someone you admire and respect who has power over you. Guards at Abu Ghraib said they were just following orders when they tortured prisoners (CNN.com, 2005). People conform because they want to fit in with and please those around them. There is also a tendency to look to others in ambiguous situations, which can lead to conformity. The response to “Why did you do that?” being “Because everyone else was doing it” sums up this tendency.

So, does conformity occur only in rare or extreme circumstances? Actually, this is not the case. Three classic sets of studies illustrate how important it is to create checks and balances to help individuals resist the tendency to conform or to abuse authority. To illustrate this, we will examine findings from the Milgram, Asch, and Zimbardo studies.

The Milgram Studies

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale in the 1960s, set out to study conformity to authority. His work tested how far individuals would go in hurting another individual when told to do so by a researcher. A key factor in the Milgram study and others that will be discussed is the use of confederates, or people who seem to be participants but are actually paid by the researchers to take on a certain role. Participants believed that they were engaged in an experiment on learning. The participant (teacher) would ask a series of questions to another “participant” (learner). The teachers were instructed to shock the learners whenever an incorrect answer was given. The learner was not a participant at all but actually a confederate who would pretend to be hurt by the shocks and yell out in pain when the button was pushed. Starting at 15 volts of power, the participants were asked to increase the intensity of the shocks over time. Some expressed concern when the voltage was at 135 volts, but few stopped once they were told by the researcher that they would not personally be held responsible for the outcome of the experiment and that their help was needed to complete the experiment. In the end, all the participants were willing to go up to 300 volts, and a shocking 65% were willing to administer the maximum of 450 volts even as they heard screams of pain from the learner (Milgram, 1974).

The Zimbardo Study

Philip Zimbardo, a researcher at Stanford University, conducted a famous experiment in the 1970s (Zimbardo, 2009). While this experiment would probably not make it past the human subjects committee of schools today, at the time, he was authorized to place an ad in the paper that asked for male volunteers to help understand prison management. After excluding any volunteers with psychological or medical problems or with any history of crime or drug abuse, he identified 24 volunteers to participate in his study. Researchers randomly assigned 18 individuals to the role of prisoner or guard. Those assigned the role of “prisoners” were surprised when they were picked up by actual police officers and then transferred to a prison that had been created in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The guards in the experiment were told to keep order but received no training. Zimbardo was shocked with how quickly the expected roles emerged. Prisoners began to feel depressed and helpless. Guards began to be aggressive and abusive. The original experiment was scheduled to last 2 weeks, but Zimbardo ended it after only 6 days upon seeing how deeply entrenched in their roles everyone, including himself, had become.

The Relationship Between Dependency and Power Dependency

Dependency is directly related to power. The more that a person is dependent on you, the more power you have over them. The strategic contingencies model provides a good description of how dependency works. According to the model, dependency is power that a person gains from their ability to handle actual or potential problems facing the organization (Saunders, 1990). You know how dependent you are on someone when you answer three key questions that are addressed in the following sections.

S carcity refers to the uniqueness of a resource. The more difficult something is to obtain, the more valuable it tends to be. Sales people, for example, exploit this reality by making an opportunity or offer seem more attractive because it is limited or exclusive. At work, a manager might convince you to take on a project because “it’s rare to get a chance to work on a new project like this,” or “you have to sign on today because if you don’t, I have to offer it to someone else.”

Importance refers to the value of the resource. The key question here is “how important is this?” If the resources or skills you control are vital to the organization, you will gain some power. The more vital the resources that you control are, the more power you will have. For example, if Kecia is the only person who knows how to fill out reimbursement forms, it is important that you are able to work with her, because getting paid back for business trips and expenses is important to most of us.

Substitutability

Finally, substitutability refers to one’s ability to find another option that works as well as the one offered. The question around whether something is substitutable is “how difficult would it be for me to find another way to this?” The harder it is to find a substitute, the more dependent the person becomes and the more power someone else has over them. If you are the only person who knows how to make a piece of equipment work, you will be very powerful in the organization. This is true unless another piece of equipment is brought in to serve the same function. At that point, your power would diminish. Similarly, countries with large supplies of crude oil have traditionally had power to the extent that other countries need oil to function. As the price of oil climbs, alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydropower become more attractive to investors and governments. For example, in response to soaring fuel costs and environmental concerns, in 2009 Japan Airlines successfully tested a blend of aircraft fuel made from a mix of camelina, jatropha, and algae on the engine of a Boeing 747-300 aircraft (Krauss, 2009).

13.2 The Power to Influence

Sources of power.

Having power and using power are two different things. For example, imagine a manager who has the power to reward or punish employees. When the manager makes a request, he or she will probably be obeyed even though the manager does not actually reward the employee. The fact that the manager has the ability to give rewards and punishments will be enough for employees to follow the request. What are the sources of one’s power over others? Researchers identified six sources of power, which include legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, information, and referent (French & Raven, 1960). You might earn power from one source or all six depending on the situation. Let us take a look at each of these in turn and continue with Steve Jobs from the opening case as our example.

Legitimate Power

Legitimate power is power that comes from one’s organizational role or position. For example, a boss can assign projects, a policeman can arrest a citizen, and a teacher assigns grades. Others comply with the requests these individuals make because they accept the legitimacy of the position, whether they like or agree with the request or not. Steve Jobs has enjoyed legitimate power as the CEO of Apple. He could set deadlines and employees comply even if they think the deadlines were overly ambitious. Start-up organizations often have founders who use their legitimate power to influence individuals to work long hours week after week in order to help the company survive.

Reward Power

Reward power is the ability to grant a reward, such as an increase in pay, a perk, or an attractive job assignment. Reward power tends to accompany legitimate power and is highest when the reward is scarce. Anyone can wield reward power, however, in the form of public praise or giving someone something in exchange for their compliance. When Steve Jobs ran Apple, he had reward power in the form of raises and promotions. Another example of reward power comes from Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, who has the power to launch new companies or not. He created his company with the idea of launching other new companies as soon as they could develop viable ideas. If members could convince him that their ideas were viable, he gave the company a maximum of $250,000 in seed money, and gave the management team and employees a 30% stake in the company and the CEO 10% of the company. That way, everyone had a stake in the company. The CEO’s salary was capped at $75,000 to maintain the sense of equity. When one of the companies, Citysearch, went public, all employees benefited from the $270 million valuation.

Coercive Power

In contrast, coercive power is the ability to take something away or punish someone for noncompliance. Coercive power often works through fear and it forces people to do something that ordinarily they would not choose to do. The most extreme example of coercion is government dictators who threaten physical harm for noncompliance. Parents may also use coercion such as grounding their child as punishment for noncompliance. Steve Jobs has been known to use coercion—yelling at employees and threatening to fire them. When John Wiley & Sons Inc. published an unauthorized biography of Jobs, Jobs’s response was to prohibit sales of all books from that publisher in any Apple retail store (Hafner, 2005). In other examples, John D. Rockefeller was ruthless when running Standard Oil Company. He not only undercut his competitors through pricing, but he used his coercive power to get railroads to refuse to transport his competitor’s products. American presidents have been known to use coercion power. President Lyndon Baines Johnson once told a White House staffer, “Just you remember this. There’s only two kinds at the White house. There’s elephants and there’s ants. And I’m the only elephant” (Hughes, Ginnet, & Curphy, 1995).

Expert Power

Expert power comes from knowledge and skill. Steve Jobs has expert power from his ability to know what customers want—even before they can articulate it. Others who have expert power in an organization include long-time employees, such as a steelworker who knows the temperature combinations and length of time to get the best yields. Technology companies are often characterized by expert, rather than legitimate power. Many of these firms utilize a flat or matrix structure in which clear lines of legitimate power become blurred as everyone communicates with everyone else regardless of position.

Information Power

Information power is similar to expert power but differs in its source. Experts tend to have a vast amount of knowledge or skill, whereas information power is distinguished by access to specific information. For example, knowing price information gives a person information power during negotiations. Within organizations, a person’s social network can either isolate them from information power or serve to create it. As we will see later in this chapter, those who are able to span boundaries and serve to connect different parts of the organizations often have a great deal of information power. In the TV show Mad Men , which is set in the 1960s, it is clear that the switchboard operators have a great deal of information power as they place all calls and are able to listen in on all the phone conversations within the advertising firm.

Referent Power

Referent power stems from the personal characteristics of the person such as the degree to which we like, respect, and want to be like them. Referent power is often called charisma —the ability to attract others, win their admiration, and hold them spellbound. Steve Jobs’s influence as described in the opening case is an example of this charisma.

Starting from when we are babies, we all try to get others to do what we want. We learn early what works in getting us to our goals. Instead of crying and throwing a tantrum, we may figure out that smiling and using language causes everyone less stress and brings us the rewards we seek.

By the time you hit the workplace, you have had vast experience with influence techniques. You have probably picked out a few that you use most often. To be effective in a wide number of situations, however, it’s best to expand your repertoire of skills and become competent in several techniques, knowing how and when to use them as well as understanding when they are being used on you. If you watch someone who is good at influencing others, you will most probably observe that person switching tactics depending on the context. The more tactics you have at your disposal, the more likely it is that you will achieve your influence goals.

Al Gore and many others have spent years trying to influence us to think about the changes in the environment and the implications of global warming. They speak, write, network, and lobby to get others to pay attention. But Gore, for example, does not stop there. He also works to persuade us with direct, action-based suggestions such as asking everyone to switch the kind of light bulbs they use, turn off appliances when not in use, drive vehicles with better fuel economy, and even take shorter showers. Ironically, Gore has more influence now as a private citizen regarding these issues than he was able to exert as a congressman, senator, and vice president of the United States.

Commonly Used Influence Tactics

Researchers have identified distinct influence tactics and discovered that there are few differences between the way bosses, subordinates, and peers use them, which we will discuss at greater depth later on in this chapter. We will focus on nine influence tactics. Responses to influence attempts include resistance, compliance, or commitment. Resistance occurs when the influence target does not wish to comply with the request and either passively or actively repels the influence attempt. Compliance occurs when the target does not necessarily want to obey, but they do. Commitment occurs when the target not only agrees to the request but also actively supports it as well. Within organizations, commitment helps to get things done because others can help to keep initiatives alive long after compliant changes have been made or resistance has been overcome.

• Rational persuasion includes using facts, data, and logical arguments to try to convince others that your point of view is the best alternative. This is the most commonly applied influence tactic. One experiment illustrates the power of reason. People were lined up at a copy machine and another person, after joining the line asked, “May I go to the head of the line?” Amazingly, 63% of the people in the line agreed to let the requester jump ahead. When the line jumper makes a slight change in the request by asking, “May I go to the head of the line because I have copies to make?” the number of people who agreed jumped to over 90%. The word because was the only difference. Effective rational persuasion includes the presentation of factual information that is clear and specific, relevant, and timely. Across studies summarized in a meta-analysis, rationality was related to positive work outcomes (Higgins, Judge, & Ferris, 2003).
• Inspirational appeals seek to tap into our values, emotions, and beliefs to gain support for a request or course of action. When President John F. Kennedy said, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” he appealed to the higher selves of an entire nation. Effective inspirational appeals are authentic, personal, big-thinking, and enthusiastic.
• Consultation refers to the influence agent’s asking others for help in directly influencing or planning to influence another person or group. Consultation is most effective in organizations and cultures that value democratic decision making.
• Ingratiation refers to different forms of making others feel good about themselves. Ingratiation includes any form of flattery done either before or during the influence attempt. Research shows that ingratiation can affect individuals. For example, in a study of résumés, those résumés that were accompanied with a cover letter containing ingratiating information were rated higher than résumés without this information. Other than the cover letter accompanying them, the résumés were identical (Varma, Toh, & Pichler, 2006). Effective ingratiation is honest, infrequent, and well-intended.
• Personal appeal refers to helping another person because you like them and they asked for your help. We enjoy saying yes to people we know and like. A famous psychological experiment showed that in dorms, the most well-liked people were those who lived by the stairwell—they were the most often seen by others who entered and left the hallway. The repeated contact brought a level of familiarity and comfort. Therefore, personal appeals are most effective with people who know and like you.
• Exchange refers to give-and-take in which someone does something for you, and you do something for them in return. The rule of reciprocation says that “we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us” (Cialdini, 2000). The application of the rule obliges us and makes us indebted to the giver. One experiment illustrates how a small initial gift can open people to a substantially larger request at a later time. One group of subjects was given a bottle of Coke. Later, all subjects were asked to buy raffle tickets. On the average, people who had been given the drink bought twice as many raffle tickets as those who had not been given the unsolicited drinks.
• Coalition tactics refer to a group of individuals working together toward a common goal to influence others. Common examples of coalitions within organizations are unions that may threaten to strike if their demands are not met. Coalitions also take advantage of peer pressure. The influencer tries to build a case by bringing in the unseen as allies to convince someone to think, feel, or do something. A well-known psychology experiment draws upon this tactic. The experimenters stare at the top of a building in the middle of a busy street. Within moments, people who were walking by in a hurry stop and also look at the top of the building, trying to figure out what the others are looking at. When the experimenters leave, the pattern continues, often for hours. This tactic is also extremely popular among advertisers and businesses that use client lists to promote their goods and services. The fact that a client bought from the company is a silent testimonial.
• Pressure refers to exerting undue influence on someone to do what you want or else something undesirable will occur. This often includes threats and frequent interactions until the target agrees. Research shows that managers with low referent power tend to use pressure tactics more frequently than those with higher referent power (Yukl, Kim, & Falbe, 1996). Pressure tactics are most effective when used in a crisis situation and when they come from someone who has the other’s best interests in mind, such as getting an employee to an employee assistance program to deal with a substance abuse problem.
• Legitimating tactics occur when the appeal is based on legitimate or position power. “By the power vested in me…”: This tactic relies upon compliance with rules, laws, and regulations. It is not intended to motivate people but to align them behind a direction. Obedience to authority is filled with both positive and negative images. Position, title, knowledge, experience, and demeanor grant authority, and it is easy to see how it can be abused. If someone hides behind people’s rightful authority to assert themselves, it can seem heavy-handed and without choice. You must come across as an authority figure by the way you act, speak, and look. Think about the number of commercials with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who look and sound the part, even if they are actors. People want to be convinced that the person is an authority worth heeding. Authority is often used as a last resort. If it does not work, you will not have much else to draw from in your goal to persuade someone.

From the Best-Seller’s List: Making OB Connections

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

– Dale Carnegie

How to Make Friends and Influence People was written by Dale Carnegie in 1936 and has sold millions of copies worldwide. While this book first appeared over 70 years ago, the recommendations still make a great deal of sense regarding power and influence in modern-day organizations. For example, he recommends that in order to get others to like you, you should remember six things:

• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
• Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.

This book relates to power and politics in a number of important ways. Carnegie specifically deals with enhancing referent power. Referent power grows if others like, respect, and admire you. Referent power is more effective than formal power bases and is positively related to employees’ satisfaction with supervision, organizational commitment, and performance. One of the keys to these recommendations is to engage in them in a genuine manner. This can be the difference between being seen as political versus understanding politics.

Impression Management

Impression management means actively shaping the way you are perceived by others. You can do this through your choice of clothing, the avatars or photos you use to represent yourself online, the descriptions of yourself on a résumé or in an online profile, and so forth. By using impression management strategies, you control information that make others see you in the way you want to be seen. Consider when you are “being yourself” with your friends or with your family—you probably act differently around your best friend than around your mother (Dunn & Forrin, 2005).

On the job, the most effective approach to impression management is to do two things at once—build credibility and maintain authenticity. As Harvard Business School Professor Laura Morgan Roberts puts it, “when you present yourself in a manner that is both true to self and valued and believed by others, impression management can yield a host of favorable outcomes for you, your team, and your organization” (Stark, 2005).

There may be aspects of your “true self” that you choose not to disclose at work, although you would disclose them to your close friends. That kind of impression management may help to achieve group cohesiveness and meet professional expectations. But if you try to win social approval at work by being too different from your true self—contradicting your personal values—you might feel psychological distress.

It’s important to keep in mind that whether you’re actively managing your professional image or not, your coworkers are forming impressions of you. They watch your behaviour and draw conclusions about the kind of person you are, whether you’ll keep your word, whether you’ll stay to finish a task, and how you’ll react in a difficult situation.

Since people are forming these theories about you no matter what, you should take charge of managing their impressions of you. To do this, ask yourself how you want to be seen. What qualities or character traits do you want to convey? Perhaps it’s a can-do attitude, an ability to mediate, an ability to make a decision, or an ability to dig into details to thoroughly understand and solve a problem.

Then, ask yourself what the professional expectations are of you and what aspects of your social identity you want to emphasize or minimize in your interactions with others. If you want to be seen as a leader, you might disclose how you organized an event. If you want to be seen as a caring person in whom people can confide, you might disclose that you’re a volunteer on a crisis helpline. You can use a variety of impression management strategies to accomplish the outcomes you want.

Upward Influence

Upward influence , as its name implies, is the ability to influence your boss and others in positions higher than yours. Upward influence may include appealing to a higher authority or citing the firm’s goals as an overarching reason for others to follow your cause. Upward influence can also take the form of an alliance with a higher status person (or with the perception that there is such an alliance) (Farmer & Maslyn, 1999; Farmer et al., 1997). As complexity grows, the need for this upward influence grows as well—the ability of one person at the top to know enough to make all the decisions becomes less likely. Moreover, even if someone did know enough, the sheer ability to make all the needed decisions fast enough is no longer possible. This limitation means that individuals at all levels of the organization need to be able to make and influence decisions. By helping higher-ups be more effective, employees can gain more power for themselves and their unit as well. On the flip side, allowing yourself to be influenced by those reporting to you may build your credibility and power as a leader who listens. Then, during a time when you do need to take unilateral, decisive action, others will be more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and follow. Both Asian American and Caucasian American managers report using different tactics with superiors than those used with their subordinates (Xin & Tsui, 1996). Managers reported using coalitions and rationality with managers and assertiveness with subordinates. Other research establishes that subordinates’ use of rationality, assertiveness, and reciprocal exchange was related to more favorable outcomes such as promotions and raises, while self-promotion led to more negative outcomes (Orpen, 1996; Wayne et al., 1997).

Downward Influence

Downward influence is the ability to influence employees lower than you. This is best achieved through an inspiring vision. By articulating a clear vision, you help people see the end goal and move toward it. You often don’t need to specify exactly what needs to be done to get there—people will be able to figure it out on their own. An inspiring vision builds buy-in and gets people moving in the same direction. Research conducted within large savings banks shows that managers can learn to be more effective at influence attempts. The experimental group of managers received a feedback report and went through a workshop to help them become more effective in their influence attempts. The control group of managers received no feedback on their prior influence attempts. When subordinates were asked 3 months later to evaluate potential changes in their managers’ behaviour, the experimental group had much higher ratings of the appropriate use of influence (Seifer, Yukl, & McDonald, 2003). Research also shows that the better the quality of the relationship between the subordinate and their supervisor, the more positively resistance to influence attempts are seen (Tepper et al., 2006). In other words, bosses who like their employees are less likely to interpret resistance as a problem.

Peer Influence

Peer influence occurs all the time. But, to be effective within organizations, peers need to be willing to influence each other without being destructively competitive (Cohen & Bradford, 2002). There are times to support each other and times to challenge—the end goal is to create better decisions and results for the organization and to hold each other accountable. Executives spend a great deal of their time working to influence other executives to support their initiatives. Research shows that across all functional groups of executives, finance, or human resources as an example, rational persuasion is the most frequently used influence tactic (Enns & McFarlin, 2003).

13.3 Organizational Politics

Organizational politics.

Organizational politics are informal, unofficial, and sometimes behind-the-scenes efforts to sell ideas, influence an organization, increase power, or achieve other targeted objectives (Brandon & Seldman, 2004; Hochwarter, Witt, & Kacmar, 2000). Politics has been around for millennia. Aristotle wrote that politics stems from a diversity of interests, and those competing interests must be resolved in some way. “Rational” decision making alone may not work when interests are fundamentally incongruent, so political behaviours and influence tactics arise.

Today, work in organizations requires skill in handling conflicting agendas and shifting power bases. Effective politics isn’t about winning at all costs but about maintaining relationships while achieving results. Although often portrayed negatively, organizational politics are not inherently bad. Instead, it’s important to be aware of the potentially destructive aspects of organizational politics in order to minimize their negative effect. Of course, individuals within organizations can waste time overly engaging in political behaviour. Research reported in HR Magazine found that managers waste 20% of their time managing politics. However, as John Kotter wrote in Power and Influence , “without political awareness and skill, we face the inevitable prospect of becoming immersed in bureaucratic infighting, parochial politics, and destructive power struggles, which greatly retard organizational initiative, innovation, morale, and performance” (Kotter, 1985).

In our discussion about power, we saw that power issues often arise around scarce resources. Organizations typically have limited resources that must be allocated in some way. Individuals and groups within the organization may disagree about how those resources should be allocated, so they may naturally seek to gain those resources for themselves or for their interest groups, which gives rise to organizational politics. Simply put, with organizational politics, individuals ally themselves with like-minded others in an attempt to win the scarce resources. They’ll engage in behaviour typically seen in government organizations, such as bargaining, negotiating, alliance building, and resolving conflicting interests.

Politics are a part of organizational life, because organizations are made up of different interests that need to be aligned. In fact, 93% of managers surveyed reported that workplace politics exist in their organization, and 70% felt that in order to be successful, a person has to engage in politics (Gandz & Murray, 1980). In the negative light, saying that someone is “political” generally stirs up images of backroom dealing, manipulation, or hidden agendas for personal gain. A person engaging in these types of political behaviours is said to be engaging in self-serving behaviour that is not sanctioned by the organization (Ferris et al., 1996; Valle & Perrewe, 2000; Harris, James, & Boonthanom, 2005; Randall et al., 1999).

Examples of these self-serving behaviours include bypassing the chain of command to get approval for a special project, going through improper channels to obtain special favours, or lobbying high-level managers just before they make a promotion decision. These types of actions undermine fairness in the organization because not everyone engages in politicking to meet their own objectives. Those who follow proper procedures often feel jealous and resentful because they perceive unfair distributions of the organization’s resources, including rewards and recognition (Parker, Dipboye, & Jackson, 1995).

13.4 Understanding Social Networks

Social networks.

We’ve seen that power comes from many sources. One major source relates to who you know and how much access you have to information within your organization. Social networks are visual maps of relationships between individuals. They are vital parts of organizational life as well as important when you are first looking for a job. For example, if you are interested in being hired by Proctor & Gamble, you might call upon your social network—the network of people you know—to find the people who can help you accomplish this task. You might ask your network if they know anyone at Proctor & Gamble. If you did so, the people you’d call on aren’t just your friends and family—they’re part of your informal network. In fact, research finds that 75% to 95% of all jobs are never formally advertised but are filled through such social networks (Hansen, 2008).

Much of the work that gets done in organizations is done through informal networks as well. Networks serve three important functions. First, they deliver private information. Second, they allow individuals to gain access to diverse skills sets. Third, they can help create power.

Social networks connect people with others. Consider networking websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, where being connected with many people makes you more visible. In business, the more central you are, the more power you will have. The closer you are to more people, the more powerful you are (Cross, Parker, & Cross, 2004). If you are the person who many people link to and you serve as a node between people, you have brokering power—you can introduce people to each other. People high on this “betweenness” are also in a position to withhold information from one person to the next, which can happen during power plays. You also have a greater number of people to call on when you need something, which makes you less dependent on any one person. The more ties you have that are incoming (toward you), the more trusted you are.

Social network analysis shows who communicates with whom, who knows whom, and where gaps in communication or collaboration may exist. After conducting a network analysis, organizations can take actions to modify people’s roles or responsibilities in ways that improve communication or diffuse innovation throughout the organization more effectively by putting people or departments in touch with each other.

Building Your Own Network

There are several simple steps you can take to help build your own social network. For example, you can go to lunch with someone new. You can also try to do more to encourage, help, and share with others. You can seek information outside your own class or work group. You can spend time with people from work outside work. All these suggestions are effective ways to naturally build your social network.

13.5 The Role of Ethics and National Culture

Ethics and power.

Power brings a special need for ethics, because the circumstances of power make it easy for misuse to occur. As we have seen, a company president wields at least three sources of power: legitimate from the position they hold, coercive from the ability to fire employees, and reward such as the ability to give raises and perks. Expert power and referent power often enter the mix as well. Now take the example of setting the CEO’s pay. In a public company, the CEO presumably has to answer to the board of directors and the shareholders. But what if the CEO appoints many of the people on the board? What if the board and the CEO are friends? Consider the case of Richard Grasso, former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), whose compensation was $140 million plus another $48 million in retirement benefits. At that time, the average starting salary of a trader on the NYSE was $90,000, so Grasso was being paid 1,555 times more than a starting employee. The NYSE Board of Directors approved Grasso’s payment package, but many of the board members had been appointed to their positions by Grasso himself. What’s more, the NYSE’s function is to regulate publicly traded companies. As Hartman and Desjardins noted, “the companies being regulated by the NYSE were the very same companies that were paying Grasso” (Hartman & Desjardins, 2008). Grasso ultimately resigned amid public criticism but kept the $140 million. Other CEOs have not faced the same outcry, even though average CEO pay increased 200% to 400% during the same time period that average worker pay increased only 4.3% (CEO paycharts, 2005). Some CEOs have earned a great deal of respect by limiting what they are paid. For example, Japan Airlines CEO Haruka Nishimatsu earns the equivalent to $90,000 per year while running the 10th largest airline in the world. In addition, he rides the bus to work and eats in the company cafeteria with everyone else (Petersen, 2009).

Video Connection: Haruka NishimatsuIf you are interested in learning more about CEO Haruka Nishimatsu, view this CBS News video segment, available at the following Web site: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4761187n

13.5 Getting Connected: The Case of Social Networking

Networking has the potential to open doors and create possibilities for jobs and partnerships. Networking establishes connections between individuals and access to information that one might not normally have access to. Reaching out to strangers can be an intimidating and nerve-racking experience. In business, the more central you are, the more power you have. Creating connections and ties to other people affords you the opportunity for power and the ability to more closely control your future, so while at times networking might feel awkward and uncomfortable, it is a necessary and important part of establishing and maintaining a career.

Online social networking sites play an important role in this networking process for individuals both professionally and personally. With 1,200 employees in 2010, Facebook has 350 million users around the world, and LinkedIn has over 60 million members in over 200 countries. A new member joins LinkedIn every second, and about half of the members are outside the United States. These online sites have created new opportunities for networking and allow individuals to branch out beyond their normal world of industry, school, and business. The key is to avoid costly missteps as employers have begun to search online for information about prospective and current employees. In 2009, 8% of companies reported that they had fired an employee for misuse of social media.

Many of these online sites have become a tool for business. For example, LinkedIn targets working professionals and provides them a way to maintain lists of business connections and to use those connections to gain used by professionals. The power of social networking flows in both directions. Employers can screen applicants through their online accounts and recruiters more than ever are using these sites to view background information, individual skill sets, and employment history, which can be cross-referenced with submitted applications. Job seekers can review the profiles of those at top management firms and search for mutual contacts. LinkedIn also provides statistics about firms, which can be useful information for individuals looking at potential employers.

Networking is about building your brand and managing relationships. Using social networks as a vehicle to market one’s self and make professional connections is becoming increasingly common, as well as using loose ties or connections through others to open doors and land jobs. In an increasingly high-tech and digital world, it is important to be aware and conscious of the digital footprint that we create. But with careful cultivation, these online networks can present many opportunities (Hof, 2008; Horswill, 2009; How to use social networking, 2008; Lavenda, 2010; Ostrow, 2009;).

13.6 Conclusion

Power and politics in organizations are common. In most cases, each concept is necessary and executed with skill and precision. Unfortunately, power can lead to conformity from those around us, and this occurring conformity can breed corruption. The amount of power you have has strong ties to how much others depend on you. If you are deemed a valuable resource within an organization, then you are able to wield that dependability to make demands and get others to do what you want. Besides having an innate or acquired control over particular resources, there are several social aspects of power to draw on.

Methods for obtaining more power in an organization can often lead to political behaviours. As one person seeks to influence another to support an idea, politics begins to play out. Though necessary in some instances, many people that follow the rules see the politics of an organization as resulting in an unfair distribution of resources. Still others, despite understanding the politics of a given organization, see it as an unnecessary time consumer.

Politics, influence, and power can often reside within your social network. When an individual is core to a social structure, they will often have some degree of control over others. Social networks can also help you acquire jobs, make beneficial connections, and generally make life easier. It is often a good idea to analyze your social network and determine if it needs to be strengthened or tailored.

13.7 Exercises

Organizational Behaviour Copyright © 2019 by Seneca College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion

• May 17, 2019

Bruce Peabody and Kimberly Hurd Hale and Erin A. Dolgoy

• Articles , Arts & Culture Articles

This edited volume explores the relationship between short stories and political philosophy, broadly understood. More specifically, each chapter analyzes a single, brief fictional narrative to address the innovative ways that short stories grapple with the same complex political and moral questions studied in political theory and ethics. We have selected short stories as our medium because they offer specific pedagogical advantages to teachers and students of political philosophy. Our baseline assumption is that we can learn new lessons about even the most widely-read works and ongoing debates in political philosophy by turning to the short story. While not our focus, we are also confident about the inverse proposition: that the political theorists examined in this volume can offer fresh interpretations of and insights into select works of fiction.

We have designed this book to model various ways in which the short story may be used as an access point for the challenging works of political philosophy encountered in a wide range of higher education courses. In this way, we present this project as a resource to both recent students of politics as well as established scholars. We intend this book to stimulate classroom conversations, and to encourage instructors to reexamine how they teach the great thinkers and debates of political theory, especially by incorporating short stories in their own classrooms. In addition to these teaching objectives, we hope that Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion will be of use to future researchers in political theory and the various disciplinary fields that draw on its bountiful tradition of writers and ideas. In particular, we believe that political science subfields such as American political thought, politics, literature, and film, cultural studies, and science, technology, and politics will all benefit from considering the edifying uses of fictional narratives.

The breadth and flexibility of our goals informs this diverse collection. The contributors to this volume do not adhere to a single theme or intellectual tradition. Rather, taken together, their work is a celebration of the intellectual and literary diversity available to students and teachers of political philosophy. With this context in mind, this edited volume strives to illuminate the varied, rich potential of the short story as a medium for political discussion and teaching. [1]

Political Philosophy and Fiction: The Case for Congruity

At this point, a skeptical reader might wonder: what distinctive returns can we hope to get from a volume dedicated to the study of short stories and political philosophy? At first glance, one might discern a sizable gap between the means, and ends, of fiction and political theory, a gap that has been debated at least since Plato’s Republic . [2] After all, these two enterprises have discrete purposes, canons, tools of engagement, and accepted forms. Much of fiction, for example, is designed simply to entertain, not an attribute traditionally associated with the core ambitions of tracts of political philosophy, which seeks to educate and persuade.

Moreover, short fictional stories tend to be rooted in a singular, if not idiosyncratic, tale, “generally fasten[ing on] to a moment or an incident or a few moments and a few incidents.” [3] Through this relatively narrow focus, the short story can achieve what Edgar Allen Poe identified as “a certain unique or single effect ,” providing the reader with a powerful sense of purpose and satisfaction. [4] But such emphases seem divergent from political philosophy’s aspiration to provide typologies, to universalize, or at least to offer enduring arguments about the complexities of human existence and the best political order. In other words, if short stories achieve much of their power through individual narratives dense with “authenticating detail,” [5] political philosophy, in contrast, is marked by the “abstractness of its generality.” [6] For these and other reasons, one might well concur with Irving Howe that political fiction “is peculiarly a work of internal tension.” [7] Mitchell Cohen arrives at a similar point in identifying the “political short story” as producing a collision of two “realms,” that come together, at best, in an “uneasy” fashion. [8]

The contributors to this volume have a different perspective. We find a great deal of overlap and affinity between the concerns of fiction and political philosophy. The agendas of poets and philosophers are much more shared than oppositional, and the overall purposes of political theory and short fiction narratives are not only compatible but often interdependent. While drawing on different assumptions about how we express what it means to be human, what serve as our best sources of knowing and meaning, and even the nature of beauty, there are good reasons for reading philosophy and literature as part of a common project. And where the relationship between literature and political thought seems unavoidably “uneasy” or even orthogonal, we think this tension can be productive.

Common Ends, Different Means

While we hope to illustrate the congruity and utility of reading short stories alongside political philosophy over the course of this volume, one may ask: What is the preliminary evidence to support these claims? Consider, first, the contention that the broad concerns of political philosophy and the short story as a literary device are shared and even homologous. Generally speaking, political philosophy is comprised of at least three central, and often intertwined, threads of intellectual thought and related research programs. The first strand draws specifically on the field’s philosophical orientation by engaging in “the search for certainty and truth, not merely by the pursuit of methodological purity or self-critical understanding,” and by attempting to identify reliable if not “unshakeable” knowledge about political phenomena. [9] A second, cognate tradition of political philosophy focuses on specifically normative questions, especially debating and proposing “forms of the good life” (for individuals, communities, and states), identifying “what is morally proper” behavior, and providing “yardsticks for public conduct.” [10] The third strand relates to the history of political thought, especially by placing the different thinkers who have contributed to the first two projects into a “sequenced story” or conversation. [11]

With respect to fiction, the characters, conflicts, societies, and worlds depicted within short stories are microcosms, controlled by authors, but designed to be engaged by readers. This engagement occurs through numerous means, but at least one strategy includes building trust between author and reader through narratives, characters, and settings rooted in “verisimilitude” and authenticity, that is, showing what is true about our shared experience, struggles, and values. [12] As Cohen puts it, political fiction “endeavors through imagination to discern some truth(s) about political reality and the human condition.” [13]

This common interest in elucidating human truth(s) can be found in a variety of forms. Certainly, a mainstay of both political philosophy and literature is revealing the recurring sources and stakes of conflict between individuals, society, and the state. As Mary P. Nichols notes in her contribution to this volume, “Conflicting Moral Goods: William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,”” for the characters in William Faulkner’s corpus, “truth-telling involves telling stories.” Another truth-seeking approach common in both traditions entails examining the multiplicity and paradoxes of human nature and desires. Literary critic and short story writer Lionel Trilling explains that fiction can reveal “to us the complexity, the difficulty, and the interest of life in society, and which best instructs us in our human variety and contradiction.” [14]

Indeed, both political philosophy and fiction explore not just what is true , but what is real , which historian Hayden White distinguishes as an interest not just in “what we can assert to be true about something,” but “everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be.” [15] In other words, both political philosophy and fiction are interested in exploring the range of plausible and interesting interpretations of complex social and political phenomena.

Given its specificity of setting and characters, not to mention its status as invented storytelling, it might initially seem odd to think of fiction (especially short stories) as building unshakeable or at least enduring knowledge. But as Irving Howe points out in Politics and the Novel, works of fiction use distinct tools to access reality and human existence, trying “to confront experience in its immediacy and closeness” rather than through generality and abstraction. [16] Vivid description that awakens the five senses “makes the reader a sensory participant” in a story, but is most effective as a technique when it rings true, comporting with readers’ experience with the actual (or an imagined) world. [17]

Moreover, fictional narratives uniquely convey facets of human identity of concern to political philosophy. Thus, as Alasdair MacIntyre has famously argued, “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth.” [18] In this way, studying fiction is an unavoidable part of wrestling with our self-expression and it can be a necessary basis for understanding distinct concepts of political philosophy, such as MacIntyre’s nested, “narrative” notion of the self, or Anne Norton’s claim that writing serves as a signature activity through which we become confined by modern practices of “our own construction.” [19] According to Robin Bates, the Romantic poet Percy Shelley understood great literature as a way to access our “best selves” and overcome “social institutions [that] impede humans from reaching their greatest potential”—certainly the perennial concerns of political philosophy as well. [20]

One might also note that much of fiction is designed to be popular and widely consumed, and in this way it can help surface and capture aspects of human nature, including the hopes, fears, and limitations of a given people. As Hannah Arendt contends, “the literature of science fiction…[serves] as a vehicle for mass sentiments and mass desires” including the persistent “ rebellion against human existence as it has been given,” which we wish to exchange for conditions of our own creation. [21] In a similar vein, Kimberly Hurd Hale reminds us that “[u]nlike philosophy . . . literature does not necessarily seek to improve man or the city; it rather serves as a mirror for the audience,” even if it is sometimes a funhouse mirror (that plays with and exaggerates our traits) or a magic mirror (that allows us to transmit features of ourselves to imagined settings). [22]

Both political philosophy and fiction evince recurring interest in specifically normative concerns as well. Numerous novels as well as shorter fictional works provide indispensable, vivid, and contained frameworks within which to consider enduring and emerging questions of justice and political ethics. Indeed, this has arguably always been a core concern of fiction. As Annie Lamott explains, works of fiction “help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.” [23] Moreover, Shelley’s famous claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” is, in part, a reflection of how fiction authors have long expressed “visions of equality and liberation” in, for example, promoting women’s emancipation and attacking slavery. [24] As we will see in this volume, short stories can communicate a writer’s political and social values, depict (intractable) conflicts between our cherished ideals, criticize existing institutions and conventional norms, and show us the stakes of the status quo or of revolutionary change.

Indeed this last point reveals another way in which the agendas of (political) fiction and philosophy often merge: they both help to isolate and inspect settled epistemological and moral assumptions—and imagine alternatives. As Ann Pellegrini puts it, poetry and literature can be a “resource for imagining and engaging in civic life…[p]art of why poetry and the other arts are so valuable is that they can open spaces of imagination counter to the way things are or must be.” [25] Ever since Plato asked his interlocutors in the Republic to dream up cities in speech, political philosophers have attempted to transcend the here and now in search of a better, if not the best life. Indeed, as Michael Sandel argues, the job of the political theorist is to assume the challenge of “taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange…Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.” [26]

Similarly, fiction writers have often found, as Trilling explains, that an invented story can be “an especially useful agent of the moral imagination.” [27] The authors of short stories and novels create characters and conditions that reveal possibilities that are otherwise hidden. These authors use their knowledge of things as they are as springboards of change and choice. Works of fiction, since they are not bound by extant social and political conditions, provide a mirror to draw out our own preconceptions, and a projector through which we imagine things as they can be. Political and ethical philosophy demands self-reflection and self-improvement for individuals and societies, as does the best fiction.

Short Stories: Advantages of Form and Function

As we have discussed, one broad reason to examine or study short stories in the context of political philosophy is their many shared goals (such as describing and accounting for the human condition, prescribing ideals and preferred ways of life, and imagining alternatives). Another central rationale focuses, somewhat paradoxically, on what novel things we can learn with renewed (and original) pairings of stories and theory. Moving beyond the overlapping agendas of fiction and political philosophy, we can identify a number of ways in which these works complement, complete, and even challenge one another.

At a minimum, reading fiction can deepen and reinvigorate our interpretation of important political thinkers and enhance and refine our understanding of major contributions to the history of political thought. A story can ground, test, and apply the abstract precepts of a political philosophy, and, perhaps, work out contradictions or competing ideals illustrated by the theorist. In these ways, short stories can help us sympathetically consider different philosophers’ claims and moral systems, and give them the fairest and most serious consideration, if only by temporarily leading us to spend a hypothetical day in the life of these thinkers’ imagined worlds. Thus, as Erin Dolgoy demonstrates in her chapter, “Big Data for the Good Life: Ken Liu’s “The Perfect Match,”” Jeremy Bentham’s recommendations for an architectural panopticon, as a more efficient means of disciplining and surveilling prisoners, is explicitly applied to contemporary technologies in Liu’s story. Similarly, as Kimberly Hurd Hale argues in “Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” and the Examined Life Worth Living,” Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” situates Socrates’ discussion of memory and legacy in Plato’s Symposium against the twenty-first century’s possibility of a radically extended human lifespan.

More broadly, the seductive form and compelling craft found in well-executed fiction can subtly induce readers to take seriously ideas they might otherwise reject outright if introduced as ideology or straightforward prescription. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle and Jean Anouilh’s play Antigone (first performed in France during the Nazi occupation) are two well-known examples of this phenomenon. Edward Alexander makes the case that writers like Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling were able to introduce ideas antagonistic to prevailing “social and political views” (including critiques of liberal democracy) because so many admired their style and ‘literary qualities.’” [28] Cohen makes a similar point in noting that political fiction in its various forms can ask “questions that Power prefers to avoid”—sometimes masking overt critiques or commentary through analogy or symbolism (Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible stand as two such illustrations separated by nearly two millennia). [29]

Of course, as this last point suggests, short stories not only reinforce and develop the lessons and tenets contained in the works of political thought, they also induce us to re-examine, transcend, or overtly criticize these works, perhaps because we recoil at seeing their operation in (imagined) practice. For example, as Christopher Sardo argues in his chapter, “The Terrible Justice of Reality: Suffering, Structural Injustice, and the Dilemma of Political Responsibility in ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,’” students generally accept the principles of utilitarianism (usually eager to embrace any effort to simplify or quantify difficult ethical decision-making), until they are confronted by phenomena like the abused child that makes possible the happy city in Ursula Le Guin’s tale. As Abram Trosky makes clear in “Jumping at our Reflection: Pastoral Dystopia and Reaction in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,’” reading a story like “The Lottery” can spur students to question the traditions and customs they unthinkingly accept in their own lives.

Why does fiction, in general, and short stories in particular, leverage these peculiar analytic, epistemological, and critical contributions? To begin with, we note the advantages that accrue from the distinctive form of the short story, especially its brevity. There are practical advantages to this succinct quality (it is easier to assign and teach contained readings), but there are also more far-reaching intellectual returns. Especially in contrast with the sometimes sprawling and dense works of political philosophy (Hobbes’s Leviathan , for example, exceeds 200,000 words), the works of short fiction referenced in this volume are more circumscribed and accessible. While we in no way argue that short stories can take the place of protracted study of the classics of political philosophy, they can serve as a supplement, or enhancement, to students’ engagement with the canon. For readers, undistracted immersion in a short story facilitates an immediacy and thoroughness of comprehension—what Poe called “the immense force derivable from totality .” [30]

To the extent that political philosophy and brief fiction are both interested in world-building, the short story has a clear pedagogical advantage, if only because it is likely to command readers’ attention and communicate the “unity of impression” and “fullness” of the author’s intention. As Poe puts it, “[d]uring the hour of perusal [demanded by a short story,] the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences—resulting from weariness or interruption.” [31] In contrast, even the most committed scholar will surely need to take at least a short pause between, say, reading Volumes I and II of Das Kapital. But once the fiction reader’s attention has been grabbed by the foray into the world of the short story, he or she will, we hope, be inspired to continue the search for wisdom through increased engagement with the works of political philosophy.

As this discussion suggests, the dividends of the shorter read are psychological as well as intellectual. The self-contained structure of short stories assists us in overcoming the interpretive challenges posed by textual exegesis, including what Charles Taylor and others have famously labeled as the conundrum of the “hermeneutical circle,” that is, the problem of how to read a text intelligibly as a whole without reference to its constituent parts, components that are themselves imperfectly understood without reference to the whole. [32] Such a puzzle is arguably lessened in succinct works that can be read, and even re-read, in one sitting. The brevity of such works also forces us to become more exacting and careful readers, a skill that improves our ability to understand and analyze complicated philosophical arguments.

Moreover, the distinctive methods embraced by fiction of all kinds furnish it with singular means to awaken the understanding and sympathies of readers—and to spur them to make unexpected connections. As Carol Muske-Dukes puts it, the fictional “imagination is a protean force. It creates metaphors—linking unlike things, spinning analogies, spinning insights—re-making the world.” [33] In addition, as noted earlier, even when it seeks widely shared or comprehensive truths, creative writing typically resorts to particulars as a span to universals: individual narratives, characters, personalities, conflicts, settings, and details that suggest greater depth of meaning and provide an intimate and instant source of connection for readers. In the context of short stories that are either overtly or implicitly political (and, therefore, interested in wider observations about ideology or ideals) this tension between specific form and general content can be provocative and productive. As Howe exclaims, “it is precisely from this conflict [between the immediate and universal] that the political novel gains its interest.” [34]

The broad license of fiction to draw on fantasy, speculation, explorations of conscience and inner life, contradiction, and imagined lives and worlds also gives it a special purchase to awaken our senses and engage our emotions. In traditional political and ethical discussions, interlocutors are held to a certain standard of rationality and logic. Reason is paramount, and emotions are regarded as impediments to be overcome. However, for most individuals, our political and ethical opinions about the world are informed by our (irrational) passions or inherited (and mostly unexamined) predispositions. In this regard, literature allows us catharsis; it presents a framework within which to examine our reason and confront our passions. Moreover, the appeal to emotion through expressive narrative is a way to link artist and reader in a manner that is more approachable and intelligible than the esoteric and sometimes impenetrable language and forms of formal philosophy. [35]

Somewhat related to this argument, fiction writers possess a distinctive capacity to enter the thoughts and evaluate the interests of each character they present—potentially offering both these figures’ own subjective interpretations of their lives (and consciousness) as well as a more overarching authorial narrative, a “god’s eye” view of their thoughts and behaviors. Among other benefits, these competing orientations can provide readers with a kind of Weberian verstehen , a sympathy for and purchase on the motivations of subjects, of which even the authors themselves may not be fully aware. [36] Stated differently, “[b]y enabling us to identify and sympathize with the characters and the situations in which they find themselves, the story invites us to reflect also on ourselves and our own personal and civic experiences.” [37]

Taken together, then, creative and fictional works can uniquely teach us about ourselves. As Hale notes, “[a] marriage of philosophy and poetry is necessary to understand the full depth of human nature.” [38] Through revealing elements hidden, submerged, or elided in traditional political philosophy and other works, fiction can give us a more complete understanding and picture of our essence, experiences, frustrations, and aspirations. In turn, this helps us understand and imagine political life as it might become, for better or worse. As Susan McWilliams summarizes, both creating and consuming fiction engages us because we:

“perceive it as novel and personal, and it offers . . . the opportunity to connect to important (and often abstract) disciplinary conversations in new and immediate ways. It helps [us] . . . wrestle with the complications of political narrative, and makes [us] better readers and critical thinkers . . .[and more] effective citizens.” [39]

The Endemic Tradition of Storytelling

Even if one accepts that short stories have the potential to help us understand, criticize, and even disrupt political philosophy, a dubious observer might still demur that such a task is too demanding, requiring a fusion of incompatible if not outright alien materials and points of view. A wider perspective on this subject suggests, however, that the posited links between shorts stories and political philosophy are unsurprising, longstanding, and somewhat unavoidable.

In this regard, we first note that the use of mythical, historical, and wholly imagined narratives is endemic to political philosophy, serving specific and important functions in this disciplinary approach. Perhaps the most well-known and enthusiastic proponent of this tradition is Plato, whose work is rich with such tales, stretching from the brief allegories of the Ring of Gyges and the Myth of Er in the Republic to the creation of the lost island of Atlantis in the Timaeus and Critias . But this basic turn to invoking illustrative and evocative stories is recurring if not omnipresent in the history of political thought. Augustine’s City of God draws on a tale of the (physical and spiritual) fall of Rome as a prompt for explaining the fate of the wicked. Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant famously debated the strict demands of the categorical imperative by teasing out the implications of an imagined, dramatic encounter in which “a murderer [has] asked us whether a friend of ours whom he is pursuing has taken refuge in our house.” [40] Indeed, theorists’ varied invocations of the “state of nature” and other thought experiments amount to descriptions and accounts of mostly imagined settings, as a way to unspool the shortcomings (and capacities) of humanity and the basis of our need for political and social organization. And the modern era is rife with philosophers’ imagined utopias espousing the benefits of science, technology, and progressivism, as well as their corresponding (and perhaps inevitable) warnings about dystopias.

What accounts for the persistent allure of deploying self-contained stories in the great works of political philosophy? While we concede the obvious—it is impossible to summarize fairly or accurately millennia of different traditions of thought drawn from across the globe—we point to several factors that explain this gravitational pull. Perhaps most obviously, many works of political philosophy have either an explicit or implied agenda of world, or state, building. The philosophers’ episodes, anecdotes, analogies, and hypotheticals encourage us to consider alternatives to the status quo, and to begin this process of shifting from the world we inherit to a new universe in which our self-awareness and moral lives are more informed, rational, or freely chosen. Stated differently, in the context of political philosophy, short stories help us travel to new places, locales that are morally unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and even outright alien to our current vantage points. As the novelist M.T. Anderson explains, one of the purposes of travel, whether in life or in fiction, is “to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.” [41]

We can also understand the stubborn link between political philosophy and short stories through a previously mentioned point: philosophers turn to fictional and imagined narratives to connect with their readers. The very novelty and abstractness of political philosophy requires some grounding or application. Myths or fables (re)introduce or underscore a philosopher’s ideas and ethical beliefs in more familiar, universal, and timeless forms. Through this approach, readers can be coaxed into a shared space in which they can develop comfort and facility with a political thinker’s overall project. Self-contained stories enable political theorists to emphasize points that might otherwise be lost or have their impact diminished. It is one thing for Niccolò Machiavelli to write that wickedness can be an effective, albeit dangerous, tool for acquiring power, and quite another proposition for him to recount the tale of Agathocles the Sicilian, the “[s]on of a potter” who “led a foul life” at every stage of his career. In Machiavelli’s indelible telling, Agathocles rose from “the very dregs of the people, to be King of Syracuse.” He seized power decisively and memorably, at one point assembling “the people and senate of Syracuse as though to consult with them on matters of public moment” but, instead, putting many of them to death. [42]

Beyond this mechanism of intense illustration, a story within a theory can also psychologically and morally orient readers. John Rawls described his process of reflective equilibrium as involving a “back and forth” between our moral instincts, particular cases or dilemmas, and more overarching precepts of justice and morality. [43] In a similar manner, reading a short story in the context of a more encompassing political philosophy or social theory can serve as an instant prompt to test our own views of right and wrong. In other words, the narrative can give us license to depart the familiar world entirely, or to keep one reassuring foot in it while exploring alternatives to the status quo.

Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries

Beyond these diverse benefits for readers, scholars, and teachers, we note a final potential (and potentially rewarding) consequence of reading short stories in conjunction with political philosophy and ethics. Such an approach encourages us to bridge and even disrupt various disciplinary divides, thereby drawing on the insights of research and scholarship from across the academy. Furthermore, we have already seen some of the ways in which the distinct forms and techniques of political science (such as its interest in systematic deductive and inductive analysis, generalization, and abstractions) can come into productive tension with the more sui generis and individual experiences communicated to readers through fiction. [44]

Understood in this way, this volume’s situating of short stories alongside major works of political philosophy can be thought of as its own exercise in cross-disciplinary studies, as well as being part of a more general invitation to trace the far-reaching roots of political philosophy through myriad fields of study and creative enterprises. Indeed, a number of chapters in this volume depict common fictional and philosophical interest in particular puzzles of human existence, organization, and evolving society—such as the ways we reconcile our increasing reliance on technologies that seem to reduce individual agency with our continued desire to preserve limited government and civil rights. To some extent, then, this book can be read as a series of diagnostic reflections on these challenges—an approach that calls for varied perspectives on a single issue, rather than disciplinary adherence to method or ideology. Thus, while our project is primarily focused on political philosophy and short stories, we imagine and hope that some of the chapters and arguments that follow will bring a diverse group of colleagues in such areas as politics, literature, communications, film, popular culture, and science and technology, into collusion, collision, and mutual fructification, especially in the context of wrestling with both longstanding and emergent political problems. [45]

Existing Scholarship and the Contributions of this Volume

Given the commonalities and complementarity of short stories and political theory, there is a surprising gap in scholarship which systematically discusses the political and moral applications of individual short stories. Cohen’s Rebels and Reactionaries , for example, assembles a laudable collection of “political short stories.” But aside from the author’s brief but rewarding introduction, his volume does not offer readers sustained insight into how the assembled stories relate to the texts most often included on political philosophy syllabi. [46] More recently, Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Shaub have added their work, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song , to the list of resources for educators interested in incorporating non-traditional materials into the theory curriculum. What So Proudly We Hail is specifically intended as a reader for a (national) civic education. It is, the authors explain, “a book about America for every American.” [47] And again, the focus of their text is on the primary readings, rather than independent analysis.

Our project attempts to redress this dearth. Each chapter in this collection considers a single short story, analyzed through the lens of political philosophy. Some chapters investigate the links between an individual political theorist and a specific story, while others apply multiple philosophers, engaging whole categories or traditions of political thought. In general, the contributors do not claim that fiction writers are explicitly or consciously adopting (or rejecting) a specific philosopher’s perspective or credos (unless there is specific evidence to this effect). For example, Bruce Peabody’s chapter, “From the Iron Cage to the “Waters of Babylon:’ Rationalization and Renewal in a Weberian World,” which analyzes Stephen Vincent Benét’s story “By the Waters of Babylon,” does not assert that Benét is an informed adherent of the ideas of Max Weber. Rather each chapter makes the case that we can understand both political philosophy and our aggregated collection of short stories in a deeper and more profound way by reading them together, and, along the way, our different contributors trace some remarkable affinities (and important differences) in the concerns and insights of both fiction and philosophy writers.

The individual contributors to this volume come from diverse scholarly orientations and intellectual traditions within the field of political science, illuminating the capacity and productiveness of the short story as a crucible for testing and applying core ideas from political philosophy. Over the course of the entire collection, therefore, we are able to engage a wide range of political and ethical questions. Our authors have varied styles and emphases, sometimes advancing a single continuous thesis, at other times using their featured stories to engage in a series of mostly separate ruminations or interpretations.

We do not, of course, ask or expect our readers to agree with all of the conclusions or interpretations reached by our volume authors; indeed, the editors of this volume do not share a consensus on all of these points. But we anticipate that the many discrepancies and disagreements between readers and authors fostered by this project will lead to productive discussion, and will mimic some points of contention and debate in the classroom. Stated differently, we hope our readers will critically evaluate this volume and use it as a prompt to re-examine their own approaches to the featured philosophers, and as an opportunity to rethink how they teach these seminal figures.

As noted, while differing in their intellectual priorities and approaches, each of the ensuing chapters is self-contained, tied together through the project of using literature to teach politics. With the exception of this Introduction and the editors’ Conclusion, our contributors begin by outlining their overall argument before moving into a brief summary of the plot, and characters of the short story under consideration. We note in this regard that each chapter’s ensuing analysis and focus centers on the short story under review, rather than the philosopher(s) being invoked. This means that readers less familiar with a particular theorist or theory may wish to do additional reading of the relevant primary texts. Indeed, while our contributors provide sufficient background and context so their arguments can be readily adapted for research or class use, their investigative essays are not intended as replacements for or complete accounts of the original, featured short stories or the associated works of political philosophy.

The settings of our showcased stories range from the wholly familiar, drawing on the assumption that we are more trusting when we “observe similarity between the fictional and the real worlds,” to the unsettling and uncanny, to the wildly fantastic. [48] Through these varied landscapes and dreamscapes our fiction authors use their stories to conserve, warn, cajole, disrupt, and innovate. But each story, contains a core meditation on universal questions asked by each society, and each generation, throughout human history. The chapters in this volume examine stories penned by a wide variety of authors from different eras and cultures, who draw upon diverse intellectual traditions. For simplicity’s sake, we have ordered our chapters alphabetically, by the essay contributor’s last name.

In “Big Data for the Good Life: Ken Liu’s “The Perfect Match,”” Erin Dolgoy considers the social and political implications of ubiquitous technology through the lens of Liu’s 2012 short story, “The Perfect Match.” The chapter draws from contemporary literature on online technologies, as well as theoretical works, including arguments presented by Socrates, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. The chapter begins with a discussion of self-knowledge. The second section turns to the relationship between knowledge, more generally understood, and politics. The third section examines the role of digital technologies in our quest for self-knowledge. And the fourth section considers digital surveillance.

Kimberly Hurd Hale’s “Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” and the Examined Life Worth Living” presents a harrowing tale of a future world marked by environmental degradation, radical advancements in anti-aging medicine, and an absolute ban on human procreation. This chapter places Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” (2006), in which the characters’ search for immortality forces the reader to examine what it means to live a human life, and what it means to make human life worth living, in conversation with political philosophy’s greatest exploration of this subject, Plato’s Symposium . If Socrates is correct in his famous assertion that “[t]he unexamined life is not worth living,” [49] then teachers and students of political philosophy ought to make such an examination, and determine what, exactly, makes a life worthwhile.

In “All the World’s a Cage: Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist,” Timothy McCranor and Steven Michels explore the nature of art and the artist rejected by the modern world. The unnamed title character in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” (1922) has the uncommon ability to abstain from food. The first section of this chapter includes the obvious comparison between this Artist and Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of human nature and the manner in which the masses can be resistant to messages that challenge commonly held notions of justice or ethics. The analysis also draws upon Plato and Aristotle and their teachings on virtue as it concerns the body and the soul. Next, the chapter turns to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s teaching on natural man to discern Kafka’s lessons on modernity and the human condition.

Mary P. Nichols’ “Conflicting Moral Worlds: William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”” analyzes the story of a ten-year boy growing up in the post-Civil War South, who is torn between his loyalty to this father and family and his repugnance at what his father does, asks him to do, and tries to teach him. In Faulkner’s 1939 work, Sartoris “Sarty” Snopes is “pulled two ways like between two teams of horses,” yet by the end of the story Sarty betrays his cruel and revengeful father by revealing to his father’s “enemy” that his father is about to burn his barn. Faulkner’s story is more complex, however, than any simple opposition between family ties and individual freedom. Faulkner presents a larger and more intricate moral world than one marked solely by conflict between individual freedom and authority. How do we live in that larger world, his story asks us to consider, while giving its due to both constitutive ties and freedom?

In “ From the Iron Cage to the “Waters of Babylon:” Rationalization and Renewal in a Weberian World,” Bruce Peabody draws on Stephen Vincent Benét’s apocalyptic short story “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937) to illustrate fundamental precepts of Max Weber’s political and social theory. “By the Waters of Babylon” helps readers see and understand the power of Weber’s typology of political authority, and appreciate his account of the relentless, iconoclastic power of rationalization as an organizing force in our modern lives. Ultimately, both Weber and Benét grapple with an especially salient and troubling question in the twenty-first century: how can we balance our endless hunger for technical mastery of the world with our human nature and needs?

Christopher Sardo’s contribution in “The Terrible Justice of Reality: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and the Dilemmas of Political Responsibility” looks at Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), which describes a utopian city, free from political, economic, or clerical oppression, where citizens live lives of perfect happiness. Their happiness, however, is made possible by the perpetual suffering of an innocent child, every citizen knowing that their lives “depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” Read through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s and Iris Marion Young’s theories of political responsibility, “Omelas” asks: what does it mean to be responsible in an unjust world that has preceded and will outlast one’s life?

In “Kinship, Community, and the Bureaucratic State: A Study of Wendell Berry’s “Fidelity,”” Drew Kennedy Thompson investigates the agrarian essays, poetry, and fiction of contemporary author Wendell Berry, which engage political questions surrounding the legitimate basis for authentic community. His short story “Fidelity” (1992) illustrates the confrontation of authentic community with the divergent values of the rational bureaucratic state. In “Fidelity,” the membership of a small town implicates itself in the “kidnapping” of a dying man from a hospital and returns him home to spend his final hours restored to his place , surrounded by neighbors and relatives. The story illustrates the competing political demands of the family and the modern industrial state, and the uncertain limits of moral and legal obligations owed to each. Negotiations between the public and private aspects of death and dying can call into question the moral legitimacy of any civil code inserting itself where it does not belong. As Thompson argues, the debt of love owed by the living to the deceased answers to a transcendent ethic beyond the scope of rational calculation or political expediency. The obligations of kinship and the necessities of modern civil society, then, inevitably come into conflict.

Natalie Fuehrer Taylor’s ““The Incarnation of My Native Land”: Clover Adams in Henry James’ “Pandora”’ offers an analysis of Marian “Clover” Adams, an often overlooked and unappreciated figure in American political history. Immortalized by Henry James as the inspiration for the character of Mrs. Bonnycastle in his story “Pandora” (1909), Clover Adams exemplified the patriotism, keen wit, and independence of thought unique to American women of the time. Drawing on the Founders’ comments in the Federalist Papers , and Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of American women in Democracy in Ameri ca, this chapter examines the importance of a female perspective to American political thought, and the relationship between women and democracy in the American republic.

In “Jumping at Our Reflection: American Dystopia and Reaction in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,”” Abram Trosky explores the tensions at the heart of Jackson’s iconic story, and perhaps political philosophy itself: the urban/rural divide; the putative need for myth and sacrifice to effect and maintain social cohesion; and the challenges and temptations that culturally-embedded creatures face in introducing more individualistic or cosmopolitan narratives. “The Lottery” (1948) has shocked generations of readers with its pithy portrayal of the easy coexistence of folksiness and barbarism, and the inertial power of tradition over familial or other moral commitments. This chapter examines the story’s ability to serve as an entryway into discussions of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and Immanuel Kant’s deontology.

Finally, in the Conclusion the editors of this volume offer a brief discussion of pedagogical strategies for using the individual chapters, theorists, and short stories discussed in this book in the classroom, especially focusing on undergraduate courses in political philosophy and ethics.

It is our sincere hope that the chapters contained in this volume either introduce readers to new stories that help us understand the enduring questions of political life, or illuminate familiar tales in new ways, deepening our appreciation for the role of literature and fiction in the study of political philosophy.

[1] For the purposes of this volume, we understand a short story as a literary narrative of 30,000 words or less. We adopt this (admittedly arbitrary) figure from multiple sources, including the Writer’s Digest . See http://www.writersdigest.com/.

[2] Plato, Republic , trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 607b.

[3] Mitchell Cohen, Rebels and Reactionaries (New York: Dell, 1992), xiv.

[4] Edgar Allan Poe , Selected Poetry and Tales , ed. James M. Hutchisson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012), 526.

[5] John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 25.

[6] Michael Freeden, “Ideology, Political Theory and Political Philosophy,” in Handbook of Political Theory, eds. Gerald F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2004), 6; Joanne Brown, “Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults,” The ALAN Review 26 (1998), http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html.

[7] Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 20.

[8] Cohen, Rebels and Reactionaries, xiii.

[9] Freeden, “Ideology, Political Theory and Political Philosophy,” 4-5.

[11] Freeden, “Ideology, Political Theory and Political Philosophy,” 3.

[12] Rick W. Busselle and Helena Bilandzic, “Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories,” Communication Theory 18 (2008): 268.

[13] Cohen, Rebels and Reactionaries, xv. William Wordsworth arrives at a similar conclusion in his description of poetry as “the most philosophic of all writing…[since] its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion.” William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 105.

[14] Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 510.

[15] Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality ,” Rethinking History 9 (2005): 147.

[16] Howe, Politics and the Novel , 20.

[17] Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 173.

[18] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 216.

[19] Ann Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 25.

[20] Robin Bates, “How Poets are the Legislators of the World,” September 3, 2015, https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/how-poets-are-the-legislators-of-the-world/

[21] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 2-3.

[22] Kimberly Hurd Hale, The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 6.

[23] Annie Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), 15.

[24] Quoted in Bates, “How Poets are the Legislators of the World.”

[25] Carol Muske-Dukes, “Obama + Shelley Get it Right: Poets ARE the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World!,” HuffPost, August 23, 2012, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-muskedukes/obama-shelley-get-it-right_b_1620590.html

[26] Michael Sandel, “The Moral Side of Murder,” accessed June 5, 2018, http://justiceharvard.org/themoralsideofmurder/.

[27] Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent , 510.

[28] Edward Alexander, Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: And Other Stories of Literary Friendship (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2009), 26.

[29] Cohen, Rebels and Reactionaries, xxii.

[30] Poe , Selected Poetry and Tales , 526.

[32] Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers , Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 18.

[33] Muske-Dukes, “Obama + Shelley Get it Right”

[34] Howe, Politics and the Novel , 20.

[35] As Wordsworth explains in the context of discussing the relatability of poetry, if the poet “is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings” this difference is only a matter of degree since each of us shares these same “general passions and thoughts and feelings.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 108.

[36] Basit Bilal Koshul, M ax Weber and Charles Peirce: At the Crossroads of Science, Philosophy, and Culture (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), 21.

[37] Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub, eds., What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2011), xix.

[38] Hale, Politics of Perfection, 8 .

[39] Susan McWilliams, “Creative Writing and the Study of Politics,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50(4) (2017): 1097.

[40] Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 611.

[41] Sue Corbett, “Children’s Bookshelf Talks With M.T. Anderson,” Publisher’s Weekly, October 4, 2006, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/11669-children-s-bookshelf-talks-with-m-t-anderson.html

[42] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. N. H. Thompson (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 21.

[43] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), 20.

[44] Cohen, Rebels and Reactionaries, xiv.

[45] The physicist Freeman Dyson has offered a somewhat related argument in encouraging us to return to a Romantic age conflation of science and poetry, when “scientists and the poets belonged to a single [productive] culture.” Freeman Dyson, Dreams of Earth and Sky (New York Review Books, 2015), 128.

[46] Cohen, Rebels and Reactionaries, xiii.

[47] Kass, Kass, and Schaub, What So Proudly We Hail , xi.

[48] Busselle and Bilandzic, “Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories,” 268.

[49] Plato, Apology of Socrates , in Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds, trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West, 1st edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 38a.

This excerpt is from Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion (Lexington Books, 2018). Our review of book is available here .

Bruce Peabody is Professor of Political Science at Fairleigh Dickinson University; Kimberly Hurd Hale is Associate Professor of Politics at Coastal Carolina University; and Erin A. Dolgoy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College. They are editors of Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion (Lexington, 2018).

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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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The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters

They can’t claim they didn’t know.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

O n the morning of August 8, 2022 , 30 FBI agents and two federal prosecutors conducted a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate. The reason for the search, according to a 38-count indictment , was that after leaving office Trump mishandled classified documents, including some involving sensitive nuclear programs, and then obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

On the day before the FBI obtained the search warrant, one of the agents on the case sent an email to his bosses, according to The New York Times . “The F.B.I. intends for the execution of the warrant to be handled in a professional, low key manner,” he wrote, “and to be mindful of the optics of the search.” It was, and they were.

Over the course of 10 hours, the Times reported, “there was little drama as [agents] hauled away a trove of boxes containing highly sensitive state secrets in three vans and a rented Ryder box truck.”

On the day of the search, Trump was out of the state. The club at Mar-a-Lago was closed. Agents alerted one of Trump’s lawyers in advance of the search. And before the search, the FBI communicated with the Secret Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues,” according to the testimony of former Assistant FBI Director Steven D’Antuono. It wasn’t a “show of force,” he said. “I was adamant about that, and that was something we all agreed on.”

The search warrant itself included a standard statement from the Department of Justice’s policy on the use of deadly force. There was nothing exceptional about it. But that didn’t prevent Trump or his supporters from claiming that President Joe Biden and federal law-enforcement agents had been involved in a plot to assassinate the former president.

In a fundraising appeal, Trump wrote,

BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME! It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.

On May 23, Trump publicly claimed that the Department of Justice “authorized the use of ‘deadly force’ in their Illegal, UnConstitutional, and Un-American RAID of Mar-a-Lago, and that would include against our Great Secret Service, who they thought might be ‘in the line of fire.’”

Read: The two-time Trump voters who have had enough

Trump supporters echoed those claims, as he knew they would. Steve Bannon, one of the architects of the MAGA movement, said , “This was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him. They wanted a gunfight.” Right-wing radio hosts stoked one another’s fury, claiming that there’s nothing Trump critics won’t do to stop him, up to and including attempting to assassinate him and putting the lives of his Secret Service detail in danger.

The statement by Trump went beyond inflaming his supporters; it created a mindset that moved them closer to violence, the very same mindset that led thousands of them to attack the Capitol on January 6 and threaten to hang Vice President Mike Pence. Which is why Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion asking the judge overseeing Trump’s classified-documents case to block him from making public statements that could put law enforcement in danger. “Those deceptive and inflammatory assertions irresponsibly put a target on the backs of the FBI agents involved in this case, as Trump well knows,” he wrote.

M otivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.

Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.

I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of the angels?

Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics.

But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside.

If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel.

One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is.

It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory that is relevant only to you and your tiny corner of the world. It’s an entirely different matter if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and subverting American democracy.

I n his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy , J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-rights legislation.

Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held “strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to Garner, “against the will of their Creator.”

“Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, “Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.”

Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation.

“The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.”

A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “ God the Original Segregationist ,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education . It became influential within pro-segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those “trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.”

Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans? Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than Albert Garner and Carey Daniel. My point is that all of us believe there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we make reflect on our character. Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.

Read: The voters who don’t really know Trump

This doesn’t mean those in MAGA world can’t be impressive people in other domains of life, just like critics of Trump may act reprehensibly in their personal lives and at their jobs. I’ve never argued, and I wouldn’t argue today, that politics tells us the most important things about a person’s life. Trump supporters and Trump critics alike can brighten the lives of others, encourage those who are suffering, and demonstrate moments of kindness and grandeur.

I understand, too, if their moral convictions keep them from voting for Joe Biden.

But it would be an affectation for me, at least, to pretend that in this particular circumstance otherwise good people, in joining the MAGA movement, in actively advocating on its behalf, and in planning to cast a vote for Trump, haven’t—given all we know—done something grievously wrong.

Some of them are cynical and know better; others are blind to the cultlike world to which they belong. Still others have convinced themselves that Trump, although flawed, is the best of bad options. It’s a “binary choice,” they say, and so they have talked themselves into supporting arguably the most comprehensively corrupt man in the history of American politics, certainly in presidential politics.

Whichever justification applies, they are giving not just their vote but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead. Many of them are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.

Election latest: Nigel Farage criticised for 'disgraceful' comments on Ukraine war - as analysis shows high earners benefit most from Reform plans

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is under fire after reiterating he blames the West and NATO for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, analysis for Sky News shows his party's tax plans disproportionately benefit those on higher incomes.

Saturday 22 June 2024 11:11, UK

• General Election 2024

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• Farage under fire for 'disgraceful' comments on Ukraine war
• Sunak says Reform UK leader's comments 'completely wrong'
• Labour: 'Shocking' to see Farage 'get down on his knees and kiss Putin's boots'
• Jon Craig:  Has the Reform UK leader made his first mistake of the election campaign?
• Reform UK's tax plans disproportionately benefit high earners, analysis shows
• Labour defends Starmer after Rowling accused him of 'abandoning' women
• Live reporting by Ben Bloch

Election essentials

• Manifesto pledges: Alliance Party | Conservatives | Greens | Labour | Lib Dems | Plaid Cymru | Reform | SNP | Sinn Fein | Workers Party
• Trackers:  Who's leading polls? | Is PM keeping promises?
• Campaign Heritage: Memorable moments from elections gone by
• Follow Sky's politics podcasts: Electoral Dysfunction | Politics At Jack And Sam's
• Read more:  Who is standing down? | Key seats to watch | What counts as voter ID? | Check if your constituency is changing | Guide to election lingo | Sky's election night plans

We've just heard from Rishi Sunak, who was asked about Nigel Farage's assertion that the West "provoked" Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The PM told broadcasters: "What he said was completely wrong and only plays into [Vladimir] Putin's hands.

"This is a man who deployed nerve agents on the streets of Britain, who's doing deals with countries like North Korea.

"And this kind of appeasement is dangerous for Britain's security, the security of our allies that rely on us, and only emboldens Putin further."

As the polls show Labour still comfortably ahead of the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak was asked by broadcasters if he is "deluded" for still talking about winning the election as his colleagues talk about preventing a Labour "supermajority".

The PM replied: "Of course I'm going to fight hard until the last day of this election because there is a choice for the country.

"Continue having your taxes cut with the Conservatives, providing you with that financial security, protecting your pension, getting down immigration.

"The alternative is handing a blank cheque to the Labour Party."

He warned voters not to "let Labour sleepwalk into Number 10", saying they should "scrutinise their plans, ask what it means for you and your family".

"Can you really afford Labour's thousands of pounds of tax rises?

"I want to keep cutting your taxes. That's the choice that everyone has in front of them in a couple of weeks' time."

Campaigners are saying that there are still thousands of victims of the Windrush scandal who have not received proper compensation, nor been given citizenship.

Many say it is because they don't trust the Home Office, and Rishi Sunak was asked by broadcasters why this has not been resolved.

The PM replied that "so many people suffered an injustice under successive governments over a long time" and "the Home Office has been working hard to rectify things".

"I think over 16,000 people now have been given the appropriate documentation that they deserve, and tens of millions of pounds in compensation has been paid out and something like 200 different community and outreach events have also been organised.

"But of course the Home Office is always reflecting, taking on feedback and seeing how it can improve and make sure that we right the wrongs of the past."

Nigel Farage's comments about Russia's invasion of Ukraine are not the only ones to have caused controversy in recent days.

The Reform UK leader has also accused Rishi Sunak of not understanding "our culture", in what has been criticised as a dog whistle.

Asked by broadcasters how Mr Farage's comments make him feel, the Southampton-born PM said: "I love this country deeply for what it has done for my family.

"My grandparents emigrated here with very little, and two generations later I have the enormous privilege of being our prime minister.

"And that's why I will work my hardest to repay this country for everything that it has done for my family."

Mr Sunak is the first British-Asian prime minister. He was born in Southampton to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent.

As we've been reporting, Reform UK leader and candidate, Nigel Farage, is under fire from across the political spectrum for saying that the West and the expansion of the EU "provoked" Russia's invasion of Ukraine ( more here ).

The party chairman, Richard Tice, has put out a tweet this morning, seemingly in response to the furore.

He wrote: "An apology. One of our candidates farted yesterday.

"The ever windy Daily Mail and Tory party want him to resign. We will not be launching an investigation."

It is unclear if the social media post is about Mr Farage, or another of his party's candidates who have been criticised for previous comments.

But the Daily Mail is the only newspaper to have put the controversy as the main story on the front page.

We're now more than four weeks into the campaign and can see how the parties are faring in seats they have been targeting, for better or worse.

Watch where the party leaders have visited on our animated map below.

Using the two YouGov MRP polls conducted for Sky News since the election was called, we can examine whether visits from the party leaders have improved their fortunes - or made them worse.

Read the full analysis from our elections analyst, Dr Hannah Bunting , and data journalist Joely Santa Cruz  here:

JK Rowling has said she will "struggle to support" Labour if Sir Keir Starmer keeps his current stance on gender recognition, saying that he has effectively abandoned women concerned about the effect of transgender rights on women ( more here ).

Labour's Steve Reed said in response that the party has "the proudest track record of any political party when it comes to defending the rights of women".

He pointed to the Equal Pay Act, for example, and said Labour wants to go further in closing the gender pay gap, if elected to government.

The Harry Potter author was formerly a party member and donor, but has not continued due to her dissatisfaction with his stance.

But Mr Reed said she's "wrong", telling Sky News: "The Labour Party has always stood up for the rights of women. We will stand up for the rights of women into the future as well."

He said it was "very wrong that trans people were being used at one point as a political football", and that they "experience huge difficulties and challenges in their lives".

"I think we should offer them whatever support we can. That has no bearing whatsoever on our intention and the necessity to support women in their fight, continuing fight for equality."

A Labour spokesperson said in a statement that the Equality Act 2010, passed by the last Labour government, makes clear that "sex and gender are different".

"That’s why we have consistently said that we will not introduce self ID and that we will protect single sex spaces for biological women."

They added: "Keir was right to say that the discussion around these issues can become too polarised.

"After years of division under the Conservatives, Labour will bring the country together and ensure that everyone is treated with dignity and respect."

We spoke a short while ago with Labour's shadow environment secretary, and we started by asking for his reaction to Nigel Farage's comments that the West "provoked" Russia's invasion of Ukraine ( more here ).

Steve Reed replied that it was "absolutely shocking to hear those kind of comments coming from a high profile British politician".

He said the West needs to "stand up" to Russia, but "instead of that, we see Nigel Farage get down on his knees and kiss Vladimir Putin's boots".

A Labour government, he said, would "continue very, very strong support for Ukraine".

Mr Reed went on to say that he is "absolutely" confident that no such sentiment exists in the Labour Party, noting that when pro-Russian material was shared by a candidate recently, there was "very swift action" taken.

"I'm very, very sorry indeed to see Nigel Farage backing a brutal, murderous dictator like Vladimir Putin rather than standing up to that kind of bullying," he added.

The senior Labour frontbencher also said it is "absolute nonsense" that the expansion of the EU in any way contributed to the war starting.

Slashing red tape for Britain's pubs, restaurants and music venues would be the focus of a review launched within the first 100 days of a Tory government, the party has said.

Ministers would look into ways to "crack down" on councils imposing "disproportionate conditions" and restrictions on licences as part of a bid to boost the UK nighttime economy, the Conservatives say.

It comes as Rishi Sunak seeks to shift the focus of the campaign away from the betting scandal that has thrown his party into fresh turmoil in recent days.

The Tories used the announcement to attack Labour's record on nightlife in London and Wales, as polls continue to put the opposition party on course for a historic victory on 4 July.

Business minister Kevin Hollinrake said: "The nighttime economy is a vibrant sector that's vital to our economy and our society as a whole.

"We've always supported our nighttime economy, with business rates reliefs, economic support during the pandemic - but wherever Labour have been responsible for the sector, it's suffered.

"We'll continue to back our nighttime economy - Labour would cripple it further with higher taxes and more burdensome regulation."

A betting scandal has engulfed the Tory party in recent days, and Rishi Sunak has been under fire for refusing to suspend candidates under investigation over alleged wagers placed on the date of the 4 July contest.

We asked Tory candidate David Simmonds if he is comfortable with the decision not to suspend these candidates, and he replied that "we need to see the outcome of those investigations".

"If it turns out that they've broken the law, that's a different matter. But at the moment it's speculation."

He said the party needs to know "the facts about any individual before making a decision".

Asked how he felt when he heard about the bets, Mr Simmonds pivoted to attacking Labour, saying: "The key message from this is if you're going to win quite a lot at the bookies as a result of this, you're going to need it if there's a Labour government, because you're going to have to pay for their tax rises."

When pushed by Sky's Anna Jones, he admitted the allegations are "uncomfortable".

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Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

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By Jonathan Swan ,  Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

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