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Phenomenon of Power

The debate over the place of politics as a phenomenon is currently focusing on the pursuit of its particular “objects,” and consequently on a corresponding construction of politics in terms of power or strength in its social environment. The “object” of political science, political power, appears as a given and essentially self-evident, despite the various differentiations concerning its specific aspects, the parameters which are considered together when studied, or the methodological precepts of research. This is the reason that the definition of politics does not present any particular problem.

However, this option presents a fundamental weakness, which consists in the fact that politics is defined in terms of one of its specific structural aspects, i.e. power as a differentiated authority, and not a function of the elements that constitute its nature. The identification of politics with power actually reproduces the reality of the political phenomenon in the context of the modern state, a reality that, despite reflecting the primary anthropocentric phase which the modern world is undergoing, is invested with characteristics of universal originality and of progressiveness by definition. In this context, the past, as a comparative argument, is not recorded among the interests of political science, and, of course, its invocation is attributed to intellectual trends that have a conservative content as far as progress is concerned.

I shall try to demonstrate the non-scientific and, of course, unhistorical foundations of this approach to the political phenomenon, which limit the science of politics to an evaluative role and quite often a legitimizing function in relation to the modern system. At the same time, I shall suggest the direction of an alternative hypothesis on the “object” of political science, and the development that inevitably presages the need for a radical reconsideration of its gnoseological and methodological arsenal.

Is power ultimately the primary inherent characteristic of society or is it simply politics? Conceding the identification of politics with power, it is obvious that we come to the conclusion - which political science entirely accepts as self-evident - that we cannot conceive of a politically organized society without political power. This political power is autonomous, in terms of monopoly and sovereignty, while nowadays it basically amounts to state power. After all, social man is by nature interwoven with the experience of political power.