Power: the ability to get what one wants

"Power"
Kent Brudney
in
David Freeman's Political Concepts: An Introduction, 1994

"...power is the central concept of political analysis, at least since Machiavelli turned political science's atttention from 'what ought to be done' to 'what is done'..... The definition of power that pervades contemporary political science is grounded less in objective social science than it is in the mechanistic, egoistic assumptions of seventeenth century liberalism--the liberalism of the emerging free market. The philosophical foundations are rooted in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan.... Simply put, power is obtaining the object of an individual's desires, ie., getting what one wants. It assumes that power is exercised between or among individuals; it assumes that power is an aspect of interpersonal relations.... The problem that confronts the egoistic individual is that the objects of desire and interest are often unreachable through merely individual efforts....The means by which individuals can achieve the most generalized interest and desires and by which they can influence or compel the most people to think and act in ways that maximize those interests and desires is through the state....Simply put, power is the ability to get what one wants; social power is the ability to get other people to do what one wants, even if other people do not want to do it. And political power is the ability to get what one wants by means of the coercive power of the state....There are two good reasons for the attractiveness of the liberal understanding of political power. First, it is remarkable for its operational utility: it allows us to recognize power by observing political actors and their interactions with one another and with the governed....Second, the clarity of the liberal understanding provides the governed with the ability to see through the otherwise bewildering obfuscations of the powerful....the mainstream definition permits us to observe the exercise of political power by the personnel of the state; it steers us away from its exercise by institutions and organizations which are not formally affiliated with the state, but which nontheless exercise power....