Introduction

We have briefly dealt with the relationship between authority, legitimacy and political obligation. A point has been made there that a citizen’s loyalty towards and identification with the authority is assumed because of inherent legitimacy and consent it carries. Political obligation is easily maintained in such a situation and those subject to it, i.e., the modern citizens, follow orders and laws emanating from the authority not merely due to command or force but by willing allegiance. When there is deficit in willing allegiance, it leads to legitimacy crisis and breakdown of political obligation. Authority is a form of power, which has a legitimate claim to exercise power. This means, power is legitimate when it has willing obedience from the citizens. Willing obedience comes only when it is recognized that the power being wielded is not arbitrary, personalized and unjustified or being used for selfish ends. Contrarily, it is generally perceived that authority is the power, which is being exercised according to the rule of law, impersonal order and is being exercised in public interest. Power without willing obedience is a brute force and can be sustained only through coercive means. If we agree with Green, then ‘will, not force is the basis of the state’ and hence, force cannot sustain power of the state for long. Thus, it appears that power must be legitimate and more so in a democratic set-up. It is accepted that power, legitimacy and authority bear relationship with each other. We will seek to explore the scope and nature of this relationship and how power is legitimized and what grounds are invoked. In modern democracies, authority is based on consent of the people who are considered as supreme source of power. German sociologist, Max Weber has discussed three types of authority and the grounds on which they seek legitimacy.

Since power is considered to be a crucial factor in politics and it is said, politics is about power, a survey of its meaning, theories and the relationship between sovereignty, power, dominance and hegemony will be in order. What are the forms of power and how different sections of the society perceive its distribution in society? How different forms of power—economic, ideological and political, related and how they affect authority and its legitimacy? What is the nature of power distribution in different systems, capitalist, socialist and developing? Liberal theorists would argue that power is evenly distributed in society and manifests in different forms; a Marxian theorist would charge that power is a means of class dominance, while a feminist would insist that power in a male-dominated society is manifestation of patriarchy. An elite theorist unequivocally maintains that power distribution in society is shared by the elites, while a democrat scoffs at such an idea and would not settle unless it is agreed that power belongs to the people. A pluralist will be happy if different sectional interest groups are considered as negotiating for their respective power realms to decide resource allocation. An anarchist would associate power with force and seek to abolish any sign of force in society—religious, economic, political or administrative. In this situation of differing and often contesting views, what role power is play to in society and its development?

In political theory, power is also studied in relation to public decision-making, policy formulation, their execution, control and allocation of public and societal resources. In a political system and the structural–functional approach pioneered and advocated by Easton, Almond, Powell and others, it is suggested that to perform its output functions each political system does extraction, distribution or allocation and regulation or control.¹

What power does a political system have to perform these functions? Both Easton and Almond agree that the political system has the power of ‘authoritative allocation of values for society’ (Easton) or functions by ‘means of the employment, or threat of employment of more or less legitimate physical compulsion’ (Almond). Significance of understanding the political system in this way is that the political system analysis too has its basic premise grounded on the assumption of power as the main ingredient of output functions.

Power is not only identified with the State or the political system for decision-making, policy formulation, extraction, allocation and regulation but also with the individual for capacity-building and personality development. Positive liberals and those who support grounds for a welfare state such as J. S. Mill, T. H. Green and recently, C. B. Macpherson have discussed about the power of individual self-development. Macpherson has differentiated between developmental and extractive powers. He has argued that for their own self-fulfilment and for translating the liberal democratic government in participatory democracy, individuals need to realize developmental power.² Libertarian thinker, F. A. Hayek while distinguishing three different notions of ‘freedom’, has termed positive freedom as power to satisfy our wishes. Recently, Nobel Laureate and economist, Amartya Sen has argued that empowerment amounts to capability expansion of individuals so that life choices increase. For example, what choices are available if individuals are not educated, go without medical facilities, sanitation, drinking water and housing or for that matter are discriminated, based on criteria of gender. It brings the concept of empowerment of those who are marginalized. What does power mean in this context and how does public or societal power relate to this?

Conventionally, in political theory some thinkers have been identified with the power approach of politics. Kautilaya’s Arthashastra, Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’s Leviathan are considered as treatises that have advocated acquisition, maintenance, application and use of power by the rulers or the sovereign. Marx’s analysis of economic power has provided a powerful analytical tool to understand political process as an integral part of, and, in fact, a reflection of economic relations. A libertarian theorist, Milton Friedman in his Capitalism and Freedom has argued that economic power must balance political power and hence economic liberty should be treated as a prior condition of political liberty. Engels in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State analysed the evolution of ‘public power’³ (armed power of the State—police, jail, army, institution of coercion, etc.) and its association with the State as separated from the people’s power. For Gramsci, Engels’s agencies of public power are state apparatuses that provide means of coercion and stand in collaboration with the means of hegemony to help maintain overall dominance by the capitalist class. As mentioned above, Max Weber has dealt with the relationship between power, legitimacy and authority and has discussed about various forms of authority.

In the twentieth century, the power approach has been identified with various writers. Harold Lasswell views politics as an arena of Who Gets What, The title and Bertrand Russell has analysed the dynamics of power: A New Social Analysis. Robert Dahl (Modern Political Analysis, Polyarchy) and C. Wright Mills (Power Elite) have analysed the group and elite power dynamics. In India, Pranab Bardhan The Political Economy of Development in India has analysed how ‘dominant proprietary classes’ play more or less the same role that Wright Mill’s power elite play in America. In the field of international politics, writers such as Hans J. Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Henry Kissinger and others associated with the realpolitik approach, advocate power as an analytical variable for understanding international political process. Is power a relevant and suitable analytical variable for analysing and understanding the political process? Concepts such as balance of power, power vacuum, power elite, power broker, power bloc, power hungry politician, etc. are used not only by academic analysts but also by average citizens. No doubt, power is a powerful variable for analysing and understanding the political process, more so when we study power in its various forms—supremacy, authority, dominance, hegemony and influence.

Many of the developing countries for long have been under colonial power. Kautilaya, Machiavelli and Hobbes had talked about acquisition and maintenance of foreign territory or foreign sovereignty. Kings and rulers used to make colonies and maintain their power over the subjects. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, various Asian, African and Latin American countries were under colonial domination of the imperial powers belonging to Europe—England, France, Spain, Portugal, etc. When we say colonial power, what kind of power was that and how it came to dominate a vast territory of the earth? Was colonial power a manifestation of economic power or political power or ideological and cultural power, or a combination of all these?