An Analysis of Social Power

Abstract

EW PROBLEMS in sociology are more perplexing than the problem of social power. In the entire lexicon of sociological concepts none is more troublesome than the concept of power. We may say about it in general only what St. Augustine said about time, that we all know perfectly well what it is-until someone asks us. Indeed, Robert M. MacIver has recently been induced to remark that There is no adequate study of the nature of social power.1 The present paper cannot, of course, pretend to be a reasonably adequate study. It aims at reasonableness rather than adequacy and attempts to articulate the problem as one of central sociological concern, to clarify the meaning of the concept, and to discover the locus and seek the sources of social power itself. The power structure of society is not an insignificant problem. In any realistic sense it is both a sociological (i.e., a scientific) and a social (i.e., a moral) problem. It has traditionally been a problem in political philosophy. But, like so many other problems of a political character, it has roots which lie deeper than the polis and reach into the community itself. It has ramifications which can be discerned only in a more generalized kind of inquiry than is offered by political theory and which can ultimately be approached only by sociology. Its primitive basis and ultimate locus, as MacIver has emphasized in several of his distinguished