ABSTRACT
The identification of power with dominance obscures the fact that power in a genuine democracy may be a human resource which can be used for the enlargement of human freedom. Scarcity versions of power have meant in no uncertain sense that power is power over others. In the United States it has been particularly easy to identify organized power with institutions, rather than with the social structure of American society, because of the absence of a hereditary aristocracy and because of the presence of pronounced individual vertical mobility. Liberal democracy has, accordingly, tended to resolve the problem of power by quantitative limitation of its use. The import of the immediately preceding section is that the generating source of organized power in any society inheres in the social structure of the society; and the locating of the source at the institutional level, however immediately plausible this may seem and attempts to control the use of, power.
