ABSTRACT
I say ‘asked’ rather than ‘answered’ advisedly, since that guileless-looking question sums up one of the central perennial concerns of political theory. Out of this mass of material I shall pick two opposed traditions, which I shall dub the ‘power-diffusion’ view and the ‘power-concentration’ view; and I shall conduct my discussion in terms of these two models. Such drastic simplification of a complex tradition of argument carries dangers, I am well aware, but I shall comfort myself with Bacon’s dictum that ‘truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion’.
