Conceptualizing Politics

2.  Power and political power
While we all welcome the power of the sun to make life on earth possible or 
enjoy the purchasing power of our salary, when it comes to political power, many 
are likely to be wary of it or to loathe it from the outset. We will discuss later our 
attitude towards this ambiguous notion, but let us first find an agreement on what 
we mean by it.

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10  What is politics?
For power in human and social relationships we have an overarching definition, 
which is in its simplicity logically elegant: power it is the ability of actor A to make 
actor B (or actors B, C, D . . .) act as B would not otherwise act. This definition is called 
relational because power is all-defined as a feature intrinsic to and deriving from the 
relationships among actors. It tells us nothing about the actors or the tools used by 
them, and it does without ‘thick’ notions such as will or interest. Power is not just 
actual power, as it is rather an ability – as Thomas Hobbes noted – projecting itself 
in the future, promising to bring us ‘some future apparent Good’ (Hobbes 1651, 58).
In this definition B would not act like that without A’s intervention, but not 
necessarily because s/he or it is opposed to A’s indications. For example, traffic laws 
and the enforcing agencies have the power to make a boy or girl who is learning 
to drive respect traffic rules, not however against their will or interest – on the 
road, driving by the rules is first of all in my own interest. Maybe we simply did 
not know about them, and do easily agree to submit to them; but without the 
power of the parliament passing the rules and the administration enforcing them, 
we would not drive in a regular manner;
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 on the other hand, finding on every ride 
an agreement on how to drive with all other traffic participants would be infeasible, 
time-wasting and lastly life-destroying. Political power with the same formal fea-
tures (legislation+enforcement in a sovereign polity) can result either in top-down 
impositions (‘pay more taxes’, ‘obey the conscription law and go to the front’) or in 
binding central coordination, as in the case cited.
Now, the scattered presence of this second moment of coordination does not go 
as far as to justify Hannah Arendt’s definition of power as ‘to act in concert’ (Arendt 
1972, 143); this is a shapeless view on power and does not at all fit political power, 
from which the moments of verticality and asymmetry (see §6 in this chapter) 
cannot be removed. Even power instances in which the moment of coordination 
is significant cannot be seen as a ‘concert’ of equal voices, because in any case the 
coordinator possesses a better knowledge of the process than everybody else and 
insofar also more power.
All-inclusive (from the economy to human relationships in the family) as it is 
in its abstractness, the relational definition is a good basis for understanding power, 
though not capable of closing in on what we strive to grasp in its specificity: political 
power. We move therefore to a second definition, which indicates the instrument 
used by political power to assert itself, insofar as adding to the formal structure 
described in the first definition an element related to its content. This second 
instrumental or substantive
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 definition reads: A’s ability to make B act as B would not 
otherwise do constitutes political power if it is guaranteed in the very last instance by A being 
able to use or threaten force for the implementation of her/his/its preferences. We will later 
see how in the entities called states, political power is endowed with the legitimate 
monopoly of force.
It is wrong to say that political power consists primarily or exclusively of force. 
Not even the prince of political realism, Niccolò Machiavelli, went so far, given that 
in Chapter XII of Il Principe/The Prince he wrote that state power relies on both 

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Politics and power  11
‘good laws’ and ‘good armies’ (Machiavelli 1532, 42). It is one thing to say that power 
uses or threatens force in the first place in order to impose its preferences; it is a very 
different thing to say that domestically or internationally political power sometimes 
uses force, but mostly employs other procedures to assert itself, while in any case, 
these other procedures are backed by A’s and B’s knowledge that, if they fail, force 
could (but will not necessarily) be in the very last instance brought to bear. B can be 
a tax evader, in the countries in which tax evaders can be given prison sentences, or 
a region on its way to unilaterally seceding from the home country, or a state caught 
in an irreconcilable tension with state A. Guaranteeing A’s power is different from 
being the whole of it, while force remains in the ‘horizon of expectations’
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 of the 
participants of a political game. More on the link between political power and force 
as well as on the notion of influence will be said in the following.
Instead of force we can almost interchangeably say violence. I do not see chances 
for a conceptual distinction to be established, not at all in the untenable sense that 
force is legitimate whereas violence is not. When we say violence we are simply 
putting the accent on how B perceives the effect of the physical force applied by 
A on her or his body. Force or violence though it be, it is nearly always – except 
in duels between princes, abounding in literature rather than in history – organised 
force or violence (police forces domestically; armies, navies, air forces and cyber war 
units internationally), as political interaction happens among collective actors such 
as parties or countries.
Power guaranteed by force is not the only way how actor A can change the 
behaviour of actor B. Going back to the relational definition, A can try to drive B to 
acting as B would have not otherwise acted also without relying on the guarantee 
of last resort provided by force and without expecting B to act in a binding way 
according to A’s preferences. In this case we speak of influence rather than power, a 
concept that explains many an interaction in the political field and is particularly 
important in international relations. Influence is however a complement rather 
than an alternative to political power guaranteed by force, which mostly finds its 
culmination and stabilisation in state power, supported by the monopoly of legiti-
mate force.