Influence and Power

Some years ago, on request of the German Political Science Association (DVPW), an empirical investigation „On the state and the orientation of political science in the Federal Republic of Germany“ was conducted by Carl Böhret. Among other interesting 1 information, in the paper that was subsequently published the author presented the results of a survey among 254 political scientists in the Federal Republic on what they considered to be the sine qua non basic concepts of the discipline. In various respects, the data are remarkable. 2 On the one hand, the enormous diversity of the answers corroborates statistically what has long been known from experience, i. e. , the existence of an extremely wide variety of standpoints, perspectives, and approaches within the discipline. An interesting case in point is the concept of power. Somewhat surprisingly, ‘power’ was not the most frequently mentioned term. But, it did, of course, end up at the very top of the list, in third place behind ‘conflict’ and ‘interest’. What is noteworthy is that it gained this position by being named only 81 times, that is, by less than a third of the respondents. This is no insignificant detail. Certainly, to that minority of scholars whose conceptions of politics do include ‘power’ as an indispensable basic concept, the approaches of the vast majority of their colleagues for whom, as their answers in the survey reveal, ‘power’ does not play an eminent role must appear, in an 3 important sense, mistaken or perhaps even incomprehensible.

This book will be of interest to legal, political and other social theorists/philosophers. Unique in its topics as well as in its approach, the book takes substantial steps towards answering essential questions about political influence. It analyses the concepts of social, political and legal power with a view towards arriving at an adequate and theoretically relevant distinction between power and influence.

This volume

contains an extensive overview and critical assessment;

explores the conceptual relationship between freedom and power;

assesses the distinctions made in existing scholarship between power and influence;

presents the author’s own proposal for a definition of influence as opposed to power;

combines insights from political theory, legal philosophy and the general theory of norms;

is densely argued, yet accessible to all interested readers without any prerequisite of special prior knowledge;

is transparently structured, written in a clear style, avoiding social-scientific jargon and using ordinary language.

 

"Exact but not exacting, this is a fine work of overview and analysis; it makes an excellent contribution to the literature on power and freedom."

Philip Pettit, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University

"In this work, the author assumes the task of a ‘logical clean-up’ – an extremely valuable contribution to the promotion of scientific rigour and clarity in political scholarship." [This book] "gives the reader orientation in a conceptual jungle." [It is] "an excellent analysis of the relationships between normative and social power."

Ernesto Garzón Valdés, Prof. em. of Legal Philosophy, President of The Tampere Club

"A genuinely pioneering contribution insofar as the author – to my knowledge: for the first time ever – succeeds in giving a conceptually rather clear profile to a descriptive-analytic and normative understanding of the phenomenon of influence and in elucidating – again, by way of thorough and profound analysis – that this is much more than an academic glass-bead game, because our understanding of such essential normative foundations of political theory as freedom and equality is inextricably linked to the concepts of power and influence, and because this is the only way how we can come to see the fundamental obstacles to a coherent interpretation and institutional realization of the idea of the democratic Rechtsstaat."

Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, Prof. of Political Theory, Darmstadt University of Technology