Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T17:06:09.914Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Politics and Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

P. H. Partridge
Affiliation:
Australian National University Canberra

Extract

In recent years, political scientists have talked a great deal about the proper definition of their subject, and of how the ‘field’ of the political scientist is best distinguished from that of other social scientists. One proposal that is frequently made is that political science might quite properly be defined as the study of power, its forms, its sources, its distribution, its modes of exercise, its effects. The general justification for this proposal is, of course, that political activity itself appears to be connected very intimately with power: it is often said that political activity is a struggle for power; that constitutions and other political institutions are methods of defining and regularising the distribution and the exercise of power, and so on. Since there seems to be some sense in which one can say that, within the wider area of social life, the political field is that which has some special connection with power, it may seem plausible then to suggest that the study of politics focusses upon the study of power.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1963

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 119 note 1 Gerth, and Mills, , Character and Social Structure (1954), p. 195.Google Scholar

page 121 note 1 Lasswell, and Kaplan, , Power and Society (1950).Google Scholar

page 121 note 2 p. 195.

page 121 note 3 Lasswell, H. D.: Politics: Who Gets What When How? (1936).Google Scholar

page 127 note 1 But this suggests another point that deserves fuller discussion. It suggests that once again it is more illuminating to think in terms of a continuum than of firm and clear distinctions and divisions. I am, of course, constructing an ‘ideal’ type, enormously over-simplified, and suggested by the highly developed political systems of economically advanced, highly civilised, European countries. Even amongst those countries, one could arrange a number of continua: e.g., they differ (and each one itself varies from time to time) as regards the importance for their political life of highly general policy issues as contrasted with more particular, ad hoc, issues and decisions. Again, they vary in regard to the extent that political struggle gets detached from policy-conflict and takes rather the form of a ‘pure’ competition for power among individuals and groups. And, of course, there has been a great deal of discussion concerning the sense in which very simple peoples may be said to possess a political system;Google Scholarsee, e.g., Fortes, and Pritchard, (eds.): African Political Systems. It would be an interesting question whether, among the simplest peoples, one can anywhere find anything that at all resembles the policies and policy-conflicts of developed societies.Google Scholar

page 132 note 1 I have not tried to distinguish ‘the state’ from other organisations which are political in structure and functioning. The conventional criteria are not wildly misleading: all members of the community (the community being specified territorially) are subject to the state's authority; the state claims ultimate authority in the sense that the legal system may provide that its authority and its decisions shall prevail over those of other associations; the state reserves for itself the sole use of certain types of sanction; also, it is sometimes added, the state concerns itself with issues that are ‘more public’ in the sense that they are wider in their incidence. For the purposes of the argument of this paper, I do not need to concern myself with the rather tricky matter of distinguishing the state from other political organisations which operate in fields of public policy. Perhaps it will be enough to remark that again, as regards the criteria traditionally invoked to differentiate the state from other associations, we are dealing with continua, not with definite and sharply discernible boundaries.Google Scholar

page 135 note 1 In Edward Shils's book, The Torment of Secrecy, there is a very interesting discussion of social freedom and its conditions. In this connection Shils uses the concept of ‘autonomous’ spheres of social life with great confidence.Google Scholar