Conceptualizing Politics

particular, reciprocal case of deterrence, which remains a basic structure of any 
political interaction. In it both powers, the mightier and the less mighty, have 
enough nuclear power (the so-called second strike capability) as to dissuade 
each other from launching an attack. An incumbent office-holder, threatening 
her/his constituency to withdraw public funding if they do not vote for her/
him and s/he gets nonetheless re-elected, also acts in a deterrent mode.
4.   Political power and the others
As everybody knows, political power is intermingled with economic and cultural 
power and their many derivatives; the latter is also called ideological or in another 
profile ‘soft’ power (as differentiated from the ‘hard’ economic and military one). 
Domestically, as well as internationally, these several forms of power are often hardly 
extricable from one another. The question can be raised if one should not give up 
insisting on keeping these sorts of power from another and rather talk about power 
as one composite, multifaceted single item. I am going to argue against that, but 
before doing so it is advisable to specify what makes one form different from the 
others. The distinction is based on what constitutes the ultimate source of power in 
the several spheres: command over organised force for political power, ownership 
and/or control of the means of production for economic power, ownership and/or 
control over the shaping of ideas, images, beliefs and the related media (including 
the educational system) in the case of cultural power.
Now, the first and generic reason for keeping the various types of power from 
another is the superiority of distinction over conflation, which is – unfortunately 
not for all writers – an epistemological pillar.
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 The second one is substantive: nei-
ther economic nor ideological power can give the rulers the pervasive and binding 
control over everybody’s behaviour that the chance of resorting to force confers 
upon them. Neither a financial tycoon nor an influential spiritual leader would have 
reason to, say, sing, ‘I have attained supreme power’, as the new tsar does in Act 2  
of Mussorgsky’s 
Борис  Годунов/Borís Godunóv (1868–72). That the US or the 
French president would not say so either is due to her/his limits as constitutional 

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14  What is politics?
power-holder, not to a structural limit of political power. Due to its universal, 
binding and physically compelling character, this power – except in failed states or 
where a regime is fading – has a higher efficacy than the other types, as it can pen-
etrate the society in all its pores – schools, police stations, government offices, courts 
and prisons are everywhere. Economic constraints can also spread everywhere, and 
the power of money or of its scarcity certainly does, but they are not tied to a sin-
gle source of command, a single will. On the other hand, economic (rather than 
cultural) power needs a legal framework in order to operate: rules that bind debtors 
to repay their creditors, companies to deliver their products at the time written in 
the contract, employers to pay workers their full salaries on payday. Only political 
power can write these rules into law and enforce them, thus being an indispensable 
complement to other powers – though an anarcho-capitalist would disagree on 
politics being indispensable.
Having given an analytical clarification of the relationship between politi-
cal and economic power, what remains to examine is the overall assumption on 
 politics as just a reflex of economic power relations that can be found in differ-
ent (from rough to differentiated) terms in the various Marxist traditions. Marx 
himself oscillated between regarding government as nothing but ‘a committee 
for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’, as he and Engels 
wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848, 5), and opening up in his late years to 
the chance for political processes different from the violent revolution of the 
Paris Commune to bring about the overcoming of class society.
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 The  deterministic 
dependence of politics on economic power was never a theoretically correct view, 
and cultural factors – as Max Weber
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 showed more than a hundred years ago in 
his studies on the ‘economic ethics’ of world religions – are important in shaping 
economic and social structures. Worldviews, beliefs and ideas are of fundamental 
importance in shaping the reaction of individuals and communities to economic 
facts and conditions.
Today no scholar of politics would deny the relevance of economic factors and 
constraints, and a bright scholar would peer into the interplay of political processes 
with the shifting of economic structures and positions. But in many situations the 
much-talked-about ‘overwhelming power of the economy’ can turn out to be the 
failure of politics to set up timely and innovative strategies. To be overwhelmed in 
this case is obsolete politics and leaderships unable to catch up; they cannot rein-
vent themselves in a way capable to cope with the new constraints of the economy 
and technology and indulge in lamentation. Some reaction to modernisation and 
globalisation seem to go back to this pattern.