political power

…is in the area of political power. Unable to afford the laissez-faire liberalism of Victorian Britain, European states early on took an active role in the regulation of labour markets, often siding with capital in support of rapid accumulation. At a time when the doctrines of voluntarism and state abstention…

…civil services were becoming autonomous powers in their own right, no longer subject to the traditional forms of control. This view is associated with the sociologists Max Weber, who criticized the bureaucracy of imperial Germany, and Robert Michels, who formulated the “iron law of oligarchy.” Michels’s law suggested that every…

A fundamental characteristic of libertarian thinking is a deep skepticism of government power. Libertarianism and liberalism both arose in the West, where the division of power between spiritual and temporal rulers had been greater than in most other parts of the world. In the…

Political differentiation into ruling classes and ruled masses provided a basis for imposition of taxes and rents that financed the development of professional soldiers and artisans, whose specialized skills far surpassed those of pastoralists and agriculturalists. The military and economic superiority that accompanied such skills allowed advanced communities…

The location of political power in the political system determines the access points and methods of influence used by interest groups. In authoritarian regimes, power usually lies with the dictator or a small cadre of officials. Thus, any interest group activity in such systems will be narrowly directed…

…the executive may be given power to alter provisions within limits set by the legislature. The legality of taxation has been asserted by constitutional texts in many countries, including the United States, France, Brazil, and Sweden. In Great Britain, which has no written constitution, taxation is also a prerogative of…

…to deploy or limit public power so as to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life. Like all aspects of human experience, political philosophy is conditioned by environment and by the scope and limitations of mind, and the answers given by successive political philosophers to perennial problems…

…of people to participate in political life. As mass political parties came to monopolize civic life, individual citizens retreated increasingly into private life. Political apathy and low turnouts at elections became matters of serious concern, calling into question the democratic claims of modern liberal societies. A similar concern centred on…

…vote and of enlarged purchasing power to more and more of the ignorant or ill-educated meant larger and larger opportunities for both demagogic and public-spirited propagandists to make headway by using fictions and myths, utopian appeals, and “the noble lie.” Interest was aroused not only by the lingering horror of…

…them by its focus on power—defined as the ability of one political actor to get another actor to do what it wants—at the international, national, and local levels. Political science is generally used in the singular, but in French and Spanish the plural (sciences politiques and ciencias políticas, respectively) is…

…interest and the struggle for power. According to realism, states exist within an anarchic international system in which they are ultimately dependent on their own capabilities, or power, to further their national interests. The most important national interest is the survival of the state, including its people, political system, and…

The struggle for power, for example, was accepted as a fact in past and current international politics, but attempts to make all other factors subordinate to or dependent upon power were thought to exclude too much of what is important and interesting in international relations. Similar assessments were…

…study of governance generally approaches power as distinct from or exceeding the centralized authority of the modern state.

Although politics is often regarded as having taken over the role once played by religion or myth in Western society, the situation is more complex than such a generalization would imply. Just as myth has always had a strong social and political element, so political movements…

…view is the conception of political authority as ultimately derived from or justified by a hypothetical “contract” between individuals, as in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Another is the idea, typical in economics and in other social sciences influenced by economics, that most social institutions and relationships can…

…of individual life to the authority of the state. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini coined the term totalitario in the early 1920s to characterize the new fascist state of Italy, which he further described as “all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” By the beginning of…

…gifted for large-scale planning needs power to give orders to those capable of executing his plans. Used for such purposes, power is good. But coveted for its own sake, it becomes oppressive to those subdued by it and harmful to the oppressor because he thus incurs the hatred of the…

…developed a formal definition of power that was frequently cited as an important (though incomplete) insight into the phenomenon. According to Dahl, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Dahl gave as an example a…

…justice into a by-product of power and denied any right of rebellion except when the sovereign becomes too weak to protect the commonwealth or to hold it together. (See below The materialism of Thomas Hobbes.)

He begins by defining political power as a

…societal peace and justice, and civil government cannot effect salvation. Although this conception allowed North American Lutherans to accept the separation of church and state in the United States and elsewhere, it also meant that Lutheranism, unlike Calvinism, made little effort to “Christianize” the social and political order. Historically, this…

…place to the phenomenon of power in the empirical study of politics. Merriam discussed how power comes into being, how it becomes “authority” (which he equated with power), the techniques of power holders, the defenses of those over whom power is wielded, and the dissipation of power. Lasswell focused on…