Political philosophy

Power

The classical and historical inquiry into authority, force, legitimacy and the conditions under which power becomes rule rather than mere compulsion.

The classical inquiry

Power is the older question and a harder one to handle because the word itself does not mean the same thing in every period. The Greek dunamis and kratos and the Roman imperium, potestas and auctoritas are not interchangeable, and the differences are philosophically load-bearing.

Plato's Republic opens with Thrasymachus' definition of justice as the interest of the stronger — that is, with power identified with rule and rule with the right of the powerful. The rest of the dialogue is a sustained argument against that identification: a defence of the proposition that power without the right ordering of the soul of the one who holds it collapses into something less than rule, both for the holder and for those subject to it.

Aristotle's Politics keeps the careful distinction between rule that is for the good of the ruled and rule that is for the benefit of the ruler only. The medieval distinction between potestas and auctoritas — power one has and the standing on which others willingly defer to it — formalises a related point.

What the tradition adds

The Roman literature on imperium and auctoritas (Cicero, the historians, the legal tradition) shapes the Western political vocabulary down to the modern period. Augustine's analysis of the libido dominandi in the City of God presses the question of what desire for power does to the person who has it. The realist early-modern tradition (Machiavelli most explicitly) takes up the question of how a ruler should act when the relation between virtue and necessity is genuinely difficult.

The modern concept of sovereignty (Bodin, Hobbes and after) is a distinctively early-modern construction; the classical vocabulary maps onto it only partially. We treat the differences as philosophically real rather than collapsing them.

Why it matters for Virtue & Power

Power is the second of the platform's two anchor concepts. The relation between virtue and power is not a settled question; it was not settled in antiquity and it is not settled now. The site has a separate section page, Power, that reads the same inquiry from a different vantage.

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