What is Power?

The philosophy of "What is Power?" is one of the most enduring and contested questions in political philosophy, social theory, and ethics. Unlike questions about truth or beauty, power is not an abstract ideal but a practical reality that shapes every human relationship, from the family to the state, from the workplace to the international arena. Philosophers have offered competing answers, but most agree on this: power is the capacity to produce effects – to make things happen, to overcome resistance, to shape the behaviour of others, to determine outcomes. Yet beyond that basic definition, deep disagreements remain. Is power necessarily a zero-sum game, where one person's gain is another's loss, or can it be positive-sum, created and shared? Is power always coercive, or can it be productive, enabling and empowering others? And who should wield power, and to what ends? These are not merely philosophical puzzles. As an anthropologist, I have to remind us that they are also empirical questions, and that the answers vary significantly across human societies and cultures.

For the classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through to Hobbes and Locke, power is primarily about legitimate authority and the right to rule. Plato argued that power should be held by philosopher-kings – those who know the Form of the Good. Aristotle distinguished between good and corrupt forms of power: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity were good because they served the common good; tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, in its corrupt form, served the interests of the ruling few. Hobbes offered a darker view. In the state of nature, power is the capacity to take what you can and keep what you have – a condition of war of all against all. The solution is to surrender individual power to a sovereign who holds absolute authority in exchange for peace and security. For Hobbes, power is ultimately about the ability to compel obedience through fear. Locke disagreed, arguing that legitimate power derives from the consent of the governed. Rulers hold power in trust for the people, and if they abuse it, the people may resist. This contractarian tradition, that is, power as delegated authority, conditional on just rule, became the foundation of liberal democracy.

Yet anthropology issues an immediate challenge to this entire tradition: it draws exclusively on European thought. Concepts of power in Confucian thought, in African ubuntu philosophy, in Indigenous governance traditions, or in the cosmological frameworks of Melanesian or South Asian societies offer fundamentally different understandings, some of which do not map neatly onto Western distinctions at all. Ethnographic studies, from Marshall Sahlins on hunter-gatherer societies to Pierre Clastres's work on Amazonian peoples in Society Against the State, demonstrate that power is not organised in the same way across all human communities. Some societies actively resist the centralisation of power altogether, which challenges the implicit assumption running through the classical tradition that hierarchy and sovereign authority are natural or inevitable features of political life.

Niccolò Machiavelli stands as the great realist in this story. In The Prince, he separates power from morality. The effective ruler must be willing to be cruel, deceitful, and ruthless when necessary. Power is not about justice or consent; it is about maintaining control. Machiavelli's question is not who should rule, but how does a ruler stay in power? While Hobbes shares some of this realism, it is Machiavelli who most clearly articulates the view that power is amoral – a tool to be used skilfully, not a trust to be exercised justly. Here too, anthropology offers a corrective. Marcel Mauss's work on gift exchange, developed further by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins, reveals how power is often constituted not through domination or strategic ruthlessness but through reciprocity and obligation. The big-man societies of Melanesia accumulate influence not by hoarding resources but by giving them away — an inversion of the Hobbesian and Machiavellian model entirely, and a reminder that the realist tradition, however penetrating, reflects a particular cultural imagination of what power looks like.

The most radical shift in thinking about power came from Michel Foucault. For Foucault, power is not something possessed by individuals or institutions, nor is it simply top-down and repressive. Instead, power is productive and everywhere. It operates through discourses, practices, and social norms that shape what we think of as normal, true, and even desirable. Foucault analysed how prisons, schools, hospitals, and asylums do not merely constrain people; they produce subjects – docile bodies, disciplined minds, compliant citizens. Power works not mainly through violence or law, but through knowledge, surveillance, and normalisation. For Foucault, even our sense of who we are, our very identities, desires, and values, is shaped by power relations. This view is unsettling because it suggests that there is no pure, power-free position from which to critique power. We are always already within its web.

Anthropologists such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas had reached related conclusions through different routes, showing how power operates through ritual, taboo, and symbolic systems in ways that neither liberal political philosophy nor Foucault's discourse analysis fully captures. The power of a chief may derive not from force or consent but from perceived proximity to ancestral spirits — pointing to dimensions of legitimacy rooted in the sacred and the cosmological that secular Western philosophy tends to overlook entirely.

Feminist and postcolonial thinkers have emphasised that power is not only about individuals or discourses; it is embedded in social structures that systematically privilege some groups and disadvantage others. Power operates through patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and capitalism, and not merely as the conscious actions of individuals, but as the taken-for-granted background of social life. Iris Marion Young argued that oppression is not always the result of a tyrant's will, but is often the product of everyday practices, cultural assumptions, and institutional rules that systematically constrain some groups while enabling others. To understand power, one must look not only at who gives orders but at who benefits from the way society is organised, even without anyone intending to harm.

Postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon showed how colonial power shaped not only political and economic relations but also the very identities and self-understandings of both colonisers and colonised. Power is not just about controlling territory; it is about controlling narratives, representations, and the production of knowledge. Anthropology deepens this strand considerably, not least because the discipline carries its own uncomfortable history as a tool of colonial administration. Its subsequent self-critique, through thinkers like Talal Asad and Johannes Fabian, offers a more granular and self-aware account of how knowledge production and power are entangled than philosophy alone can provide, because anthropology has had to reckon with its own complicity in the structures it now critiques.

Some political theorists, particularly in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, have distinguished between coercive power, power over others, and communicative power, which is power exercised with others. Arendt argued that true power arises when people act together in concert, not when one person dominates another. Power, in this sense, is the capacity to achieve collective goals through agreement and cooperation, not through violence or manipulation. Feminist theorists, notably Mary Parker Follett, introduced the concept of "power with" as opposed to "power over," in which empowerment is not about taking power from others but about enabling everyone to participate and contribute. This view has been influential in community organising, management theory, and democratic theory. To these accounts of collective and communicative power, anthropology adds a crucial further dimension through James Scott's concept of everyday resistance, the foot-dragging, gossip, feigned ignorance, and quiet non-compliance that Scott called the "weapons of the weak." This sits between Foucault's diffuse power/knowledge and Arendt's organised collective action, capturing how people without formal power navigate and subtly subvert structures without open confrontation. It is a form of agency that purely philosophical accounts of power tend to miss, yet it is perhaps the most common way that ordinary people across history and across cultures have related to those who hold power over them.

The philosophy of power is not merely an academic exercise - sorry, I tend to say this about all our philosophic topics at the Lower Red Lion. Every political debate, every organisational decision, every social movement, and every personal relationship involves questions about who has power, how it is used, and whether its use is legitimate. To ask "What is power?" is to ask who gets to decide, who benefits, and who is silenced. No single answer has commanded universal agreement, but most philosophers would accept this: power is the capacity to produce effects, to shape outcomes, to overcome resistance, to define reality.

I would argue from my biased position that anthropology enriches and also complicates that conclusion by insisting that power looks different depending on where and among whom you study it, and that a philosophy of power which draws only on one tradition risks mistaking the particular for the universal. Whether power is exercised justly or unjustly, openly or covertly, in the service of the common good or private interest, through domination or through the gift, through law or through ritual, that is the question that makes the philosophy of power a matter of urgent, practical, and genuinely global concern that has an impact on all of us.