‘Objective’ Interests and the Sociology of Power

Sociology

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 1981, Pages 161-184

  Benton, T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84972714375     PISSN: 00380385     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003803858101500202     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View, London, 1976.
2. S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View,, p. 33.
3. S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View,, p. 27.
4. R. A. Dahl, Who Governs?, New Haven, 1961.
5. For example, R. M. Merelman, ‘On the Neo-Elitist Critique of Community Power’, American Political Science Review, 62, 1968, pp. 451-60; and
6. N. W. Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, New Haven, 1963.
7. P. Bachrach and M. S. Baratz, ‘The Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review, 56, 1962, pp. 947-52; ‘Decisions and Non-decisions: An Analytical Framework’, American Political Science Review, 57, 1963, pp. 641-51; and Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, New York, 1970.
8. S. Lukes, ‘The Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review, 56, 1962, p. 22.
9. See P. Saunders, Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation, London, 1979, p. 36 ff.
10. S. Lukes, Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation, London, 1979, p. 9.
11. W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56, 1955-6, pp. 167-98. See also W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, 1964, chap. 8. For a criticism of Lukes's use of Gallie, see K. I. MacDonald, ‘Is ‘power’ essentially contested?’, British Journal of Political Science, 6, 1976, pp. 380-2. Lukes's reply (BJPS, 7, 1977, pp. 418-9) seems to concede that there are differences between his and Gallie's uses of the phrase ‘essentially contested’, but argues, with some justification in my view, that MacDonald wholly misses the point of his (Lukes's) argument.
12. See, for example, B. Barry's review of Lukes in Government and Opposition, 1975;
13. K. I. MacDonald, Government and Opposition, 1975, and John Gray, ‘Power, Structure and the State’, mimeo, Department of Government, University of Essex, 1977.
14. S. Lukes, ‘Relativism: Cognitive and Moral’, in Supplementary Procedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1974, reprinted in S. Lukes, Essays in Social Theory, London, 1977, pp. 154-74.
15. See S. Lukes, Power, 1977, cha p. 6.
16. S. Lukes, Power, p. 34.
17. For example, A. Bradshaw, ‘A Critique of Steven Lukes’ ‘Power: A Radical View’,’ in Sociology, 10, 1976, pp. 121-7; and
18. John Gray, ‘A Critique of Steven Lukes’ ‘Power: A Radical View’,’ in Sociology, 10, 1976, pp. 121-7,
19. S. Lukes, Power, 10, 1976, p. 47.
20. See W. E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Lexington, Toronto and London, 1974, p. 64.
21. See Grenville Wall, ‘The Concept of Interest in Politics’, Politics and Society, 5, 14, pp. 487-510.
22. A. Bradshaw, ‘The Concept of Interest in Politics’, Politics and Society, 5, 14, p. 122.
23. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, 1971.
24. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, 1971, p. 326.
25. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, 1971, p. 327
26. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, 1971, p. 327.
27. K. Marx, 18th Brumaire.
28. S. Lukes, p. 34. It is not, of course, my purpose to argue here that such despair is necessarily misplaced, but rather, that Lukes's use of Gramsci is incompatible with it.
29. In his recent book, The Theory of Power and Organisation, London, 1979, Stewart Clegg advocates a revision of Lukes's view of power by abandoning this ‘primitive’ causal concept of power altogether. This is a revision in the opposite direction from my own, which is designed to produce a more thoroughly and consistently causal conception than that offered by Lukes himself.
30. My distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’ here, corresponds closely to Anthony Giddens's distinction between a ‘broad’ sense of power, a logical component of the idea of ‘action’ itself, and a ‘narrow’ sense, proper to interactions between a plurality of actors. (See his ‘Remarks on the Theory of Power’ in A. Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory, London, 1977, pp. 347-8).
31. R. Harré and E. H. Madden, Causal Power, Oxford, 1975.
32. Harré and Madden, Causal Power, Oxford, 1975, p. 86.
33. Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, London, 1978, p. 94 fn.
34. Erik Olin Wright, Causal Power, Oxford, 1975, p. 99. An important difference, however, is in the conceptual link which Wright makes between class-capacities and interests (p. 98). Although Wright explicitly denies that attributions of ‘fundamental’ class interests make ‘an ahistorical moralistic claim’, it is not clear that he has a coherent alternative to this. Sometimes his position seems to approach that of Lukes, basing interest-ascriptions on conditional hypotheses about how classes would behave under conditions of autonomy (‘in the absence of the mystification and distortions of capitalist relations’). Elsewhere, it seems that his conception is closer to the Lukacsian one, in which not merely hypothetical conditions are supposed, but also a hypothetical (ideal-typical) rational class-actor (‘if workers had a scientific understanding of the contradictions of capitalism, they would in fact engage in struggles for socialism’). See E. O. Wright, pp. 87 ff.
35. There are some interesting parallels between my treatment of the agency/structure problem, here, and that given by Lukes himself, but, of course, in much greater detail and depth, in his essay ‘Power and Structure’ (in C. S. Lukes, Essays in Social Theory, London, 1978, pp. 3-29). I depart from him, though, in a number of respects. First, he tends, in my view, to conflate the concepts of ‘power’ and ‘agency’. For me, agency is the exercise of power, whereas the possession of a power is (principally) a structural property of an agent (individual or collective).