On the Concept of Power: Possibility, Necessity, Politics

"Power" is the central organizing concept for politics. However, despite decades of debate across political science, sociology, and philosophy, scholars have not yet settled on a proper definition of power. Existing definitions fail because they are either circular or so far removed from the ordinary, quotidien meaning of power that they cannot credibly claim to be about the same concept. Political science has looked at how power works, but according to Guido Parietti, fails to define what power means.

In On the Concept of Power, Parietti proposes a more proper definition of power--as the condition of having available possibilities and representing them as such--and examines its implications for the study of politics, both empirical and normative. By neglecting the category of possibility, significant portions of political science and philosophy become incapable of conceptualizing power, and therefore politics. Specifically, Parietti asserts that the main failure of political science is in obscuring power's correspondence to the category of possibility in favor of causality and probability; political philosophy, on the other hand, tends to prioritize various forms of a teleologically oriented normativity. All these approaches end up discarding possibility in favor of oriented potentialities, ultimately anchored to various forms of necessity, and are therefore incapable of properly conceptualizing power in accordance with its meaning in ordinary language. Bringing together different disciplinary discourses, On the Concept of Power concludes by examining the conditions for power to have an actual referent; in other words, for politics to appear in our world. In this original and ambitious critique of the prevailing approaches to political theory and political science, Parietti examines what it means to have power and what may endanger our access to and exercise of it.