SOC433H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Merriam-Webster, False Consciousness, Intentionality
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Lecture 1
• Submission to power is the earliest and most formative experience in human life
o Dennis Wong
Merriam- Webster says:
• Definition of power
o Ability to act or produce and effect, ability to get extra based hits, capacity for being
acted upon or undergoing an effect
What is power ?
Weberian perspective; Based on class, status and party
• The chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against
the resistance of others who are participating in that action
o Power at the individualistic level
• In his essay called “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), Weber tied power to the state. He defines the
state as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
• People have to do things even when they don’t want to do it
• The state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory
o The monopoly of the forces of violence through control of the military
• Criticisms
o The focus on intentionality
o Focuses on a context of wills
▪ Sees power as conscious and deliberate
o Power can be seen as actualized and anticipatory (not something that you can observe but
something that you have to understand based on the nature of relationships)
o The focus on state power and violence focuses on the power that something like a leader
has
Marxist perspective : the structural relationship between the haves and have nots in society
• Power cannot be described outside of the particular mode of society
• Agency, motive and intentionality is not as important
• Power exists as a consequence of class dynamics
• Definition: Capacity to one class to realize its interests in opposition to other classes
o But this definition lacks the mode of production
o We need to know the key class relations in order to fully understand power
• Power is concentrated in the ruling class
• Criticisms
o Over simplifies how power can transcend over class struggles
o The ruling class by virtue of its ruling ascribes power
o What comes first the class or the struggle for power
o Why isn’t the working class rise up together and over throw the ruler (false
consciousness)
o Neglects the intersecting forms of power
▪ Race, gender
o Ignores or plays individual forms of power
▪ Power within the peer or family level
Pluralistic power
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