Lecture
Power emerged with the emergence of human society and accompanied its development, which was reflected in various teachings on power. At the early stage of their development, political views as a whole had not yet managed to stand out in a relatively independent area of human knowledge and were an element of the integral mythological worldview. In the myths of ancient peoples, the notion of the divine origin of the existing relations of power and order dominates . According to these myths, the cosmos, in contrast to chaos, in the Greek terminology, is ordered by the presence and effort of the gods, while the earthly orders are part of the world, cosmic order.
At the same time, in ancient mythology, the question of the method and nature of the relationship of the divine principle with earthly relations is solved and addressed in various ways. For example, according to the ancient Chinese myth, the power is of divine origin, but the Chinese emperor is the only point of contact with the heavenly powers, representing at once the son of heaven and the father of his people.
In accordance with the religious and mythological views of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the gods, being the source of power of the ruler, continue to be the original rulers and legislators, solving earthly affairs.
The divine nature of power, the rules of conduct, the laws — all of these, according to the then views, corresponded to the divine order of justice, which was later formulated as the “theory of natural law.”
The rationalization of political ideas observed in the I millennium BC. , meant a departure from the mythological ideology, the formation of scientific approaches to the problem of power. In China, the philosophical doctrine of Confucius (551-479 BC), Mo-Tzu (479-400 BC), Laozi (VI-V centuries BC) played an important role. - the founder of Taoism, the idea of legism ( Shan Yang , 390-338 BC.), in India - the teachings of the Buddha , in Persia - Zarathustra .
The process of rationalization of originally religious and mythological views on power and politics in ancient Greece ( Democritus, Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius , etc.) was very radical and fruitful. For ancient Greek political thought it was typical to analyze various forms of government. So, for Plato, the ideal state as the rule of the best and noble is an aristocratic state. But the most correct form of state, according to Aristotle, is polity, in which the majority rules in the interests of the common good. Politia is the "middle" form of the state, and the "middle" element in it dominates in everything: in the rights - purposefulness, in property - the average wealth, in dominion - the middle class. According to Cicero, simple forms of power, such as royal power, the will of the aristocracy and the people's power are not good for society because of their one-sidedness and instability.
In Ancient Rus, the problems of the prince's autocracy, the social base of its power are covered in such well-known literary sources as The Tale of Bygone Years, The Novgorod Chronicle, Russkaya Pravda, and others.
An important problem of a later time was the struggle for the supremacy of power between church and secular power . The denial of the divine, supernatural origin of power, the sanctity of its institutions, bringing them down to earthly levels, everyday life, to the “sinful” human nature, appeared to the Renaissance thinkers as a weapon in the struggle to autonomize the socio-political process, was part of the core ideas of humanism. So, N. Machiavelli (1469-1527 gg.) Sought to separate the real political activity from religious grounds, investigated the power as the ratio of power and subordinates, its structure, the establishment of laws. N. Machiavelli's sympathies are on the side of the moderate republic, or the "mixed" form of the state, which combines the democratic, aristocratic and monarchical elements of power and is more durable than the "simple" forms.
Representatives of Western European thought T. Hobbes (1588-1679) and D. Locke (1632-1704) addressed issues of power, its sources. The power of the state, according to Hobbes, is a consequence of the social contract, which once and for all limits the disastrous desire of people to exercise their individual power. This power, alienated from the "natural man" and acquiring an independent existence, is a product not of natural, but of conscious human institutions. The idea of a social contract was also accepted by J.-J. Rousseau , however, endowing with power not the sole sovereign sovereign, but the people's association, expressing the common will of the whole people as the resultant of the private will of the people. D. Locke, in contrast to Hobbes, considered power as a means to ensuring a civil state that most closely corresponds to the natural nature of man.
An important role in the development of the theory of power was played by S. Montesquieu (1685-1775). In his book, On the Spirit of Laws, the idea of separation of powers was formulated, developed into a theory substantiating the principles of legality, political freedom and giving the right to play the role of a true regulator of relations between the state and citizens.
The peculiarity in the analysis of the problem of power is found in I. Kant, I. Fichte, G. Hegel , Russian thinkers A. Herzen, N. Chernyshevsky, V. Solovyov, N. Berdyaev and others.
In addition, in the early era of the history of political thought, the reverse side of the phenomenon of power was also noticed. Aristotle, and later Montesquieu, pointed to the danger of abuse of the power of persons vested with it, of using their power capabilities for their private benefit, and not for the common good.
Modern concepts of power can be classified on a number of grounds. First of all, the conceptual approaches to the interpretation of political power, with a certain degree of conventionality and relativity, can be divided, with the most general logical-epistemological analysis, into two large classes:
Attributive-substantive approaches to the understanding of power, in turn, can be divided into:
Potential-volitional concepts proceed from the definition of power as the ability or ability to impose the will of any political entity. This approach was particularly influential in the tradition of German political thought . Hegel and Marx, Fichte and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Weber used the concepts of "volitional properties" or "volitional abilities" in the most different, sometimes even cognitively polar definitions of power. According to the classical definition of Weber, power is "any opportunity to carry out one's own will within these social relations, even in spite of resistance , regardless of what this possibility is based on." Strictly speaking, such a definition of power, if desired, can be interpreted as a "volitional attitude", but the accents from Weber, just like Hegel or Marx, are still shifted to interpreting it as some kind of potential of a political subject with special substantive qualities of a carrier. authorities.
In many volitional definitions and approaches to power, the question is raised about the means of its realization and the methods of “distribution”. One of the first who defined power as “power distribution”, and also discovered its most important feature in the control of resources, was in the 1930s. American political scientist C. Merriam.
This allows us to identify a specific instrumental-power concept of power, associated primarily with the Anglo-American tradition . Already in the “Leviathan” of Hobbes, the power that the sovereign possesses is described not only as a certain abstract potential, but also as a real means of coercion, a form of forceful influence. The supporters of the "force model" of the power of the Anglo-American school of "political realism" adhere to the phenomenon of power as a real force (i.e. means of realization of the will), which both in the internal (D. Kathlin) and international (G. Morgentau) politicians define power as a forceful influence of a political subject who controls certain resources and, if necessary, uses even direct violence .
And finally, in modern political theory, the systemic and structural-functional concepts of power are developed, associated primarily with the works of T. Parson, D. Eaton, G. Almond, M. Crozier, and others. According to Parson, power is most likely is a special integrative property of the social system, with the goal of maintaining its integrity , coordinating common collective goals with the interests of individual elements, as well as ensuring the functional interdependence of the subsystems of society based on the consensus of citizens and the legitimization of leadership Government.
Relational , interpreting power with the help of the category of "social relations" closely coexist with attributive and substantial concepts of power. It must be said that these approaches are rather closely intertwined with each other, as, for example, in behaviorism. The behavioral (behavioral) approach reduces the diversity of powerful communication to the elementary relationship between the behaviors of two individuals-actors and the corresponding influences of one on the other. Behaviorists G. Lassuel and A. Kaplan define power as the relationship of two actors as follows: "A has power over B with respect to K values, if A is involved in making decisions that affect B policy related to K values." Thus, power becomes the relation of two behaviors and influences, in which one side imposes its decision on the other.
These concepts are joined by the so-called interactionist theories , according to which the power attitude plays the role of a special way of sharing resources between people ( P. Blau ) or asymmetrical interaction with changing roles of actors when dividing zones of influence ( D. Rong ), as well as the main “stabilizer” in the cumulative system of social relations, providing through the regulation of constantly emerging conflicts over the distribution and redistribution of material, ideological and other resources ( R. Dahrendorf, L. Ko zer and others.) social equilibrium and political consensus.
Finally, the most complex and combined approaches include communicative ( X. Arendt, J. Habermas ), as well as post-structuralist (or neo-structuralist) ( M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu ) power models, considering it as a repeatedly mediated and hierarchical communication mechanism between people unfolding in the social field and communication space. In this connection, Arendt notes that power is not a property or a property of a separate political subject, but multilateral institutional communication. The emergence of power as a social phenomenon is due to the need to harmonize the public actions of people with a joint interest prevailing over the private one. Habermas defends the point of view that power is the macro-mechanism for mediating the contradictions between the public and private spheres of life, which, along with money, ensures the reproduction of natural channels of communication between political actors.
As for the newest post-structuralist (or non-structuralist) concepts of Foucault’s “archeology and genealogy of power” and Bourdieu’s “field of power”, they are not united by a substantive-attributive, but rather a relational vision of power as a relationship and communication. Foucault notes that power represents not just the relations of the subjects, but a kind of communication modality, i.e. “relationship of relations”, non-personalized and un-materialized, since its subjects are every moment in constantly changing energy lines of tension and ratios of mutual forces. Bourdieu substantiates his own concept of "symbolic power", which he reduces to a set of "capitals" (economic, cultural, etc.), distributed among agents in accordance with their positions in the "political field", i.e. in a social space formed and constructed by the hierarchy of power relations itself.
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Political science
Terms: Political science