Ideals, Interests and Power: Notes

Political concepts
- Politics: who gets what, when, how
- Case study of feminism (and three major campaigns)
- Three different understandings of politics, each more expansive than the other.
- “The Personal is Political”

The ability to get someone else to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do; imposing one’s will on another. (‘power-over’)
The study of politics focuses on power as a social relationship.
Particularly interesting is where power is accepted / ‘legitimate’ within a community: where people obey the powerful because they think they ought to.
Thucydides (c.455-c.400 BCE): "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

Smart rulers turn power into authority via legitimacy
Coercion is, in some senses, the least successful exercise of power; it suggests that power is not ‘normalised’ or accepted.
Smart rulers make their governments ‘legitimate’.
Coercion only as a last resort.
The Soviet Union used psychiatry as a weapon against those who opposed the regime.

For most of the history of political thought, the key question was: ‘who rules?’
Political thinkers were interested in the right person for the job of ruler (‘strong’; ‘committed’; with the right ‘background’, or ‘education’)
E.g. Confucian tradition

Western political theory since the mid-17th Century has emphasised the dangers of power (‘liberalism’ with a small ‘l’)
John Locke (late 17th Century): state power was conditional upon the CONSENT of the people; state power should be divided
Montesquieu (mid-18th Century): the separation of powers (legislative, executive, judicial)

The ‘tyranny of the majority’ in a democracy?
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Consequently, liberals talk about ‘Rights’, and often insist that rights be embodied in constitutions, or at least be protected.

FIRST: Who prevails? Who makes the decisions?
- Obvious, visible: the behaviour of people in decision-making (who talks to whom, who ‘counts’ most in these discussions, and what are the bargaining chips).
- This is the subject of everyday political behaviour, with politicians, parties, pressure groups and media.
SECOND: Who decides what gets decided?
- Supplements the first view by looking at things kept off the current political agenda.
- The media “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about”. (B.C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1963, p. 13.)
THIRD: ‘ideological’ power.
- People may desire things that are opposed to their own self- interest.
- Controversial because it introduces the concept of ‘interests’.

Power is a key element of politics; some argue that it is the defining element
Power is exercised in many ways; the most interesting are those where power is subtle, or unobserved, or ‘internalised’
The structures of our representative government are deeply influenced by historical concerns about the abuse of power
Relations of power are pervasive throughout all societies, and help to shape them, not just the observable tip of the iceberg: government
Understand the relationship between Power and Authority
Understand the three dimensions of Power