ABSTRACT
Power is one of the many terms of popular wisdom and discourse that philosophers, historians, and social theorists have also always found indispensable. Power has been subjected to minute and detailed conceptual analysis as in the work of Lasswell and Kaplan; it has attracted the attention of the quantifiers; and it is the subject of an ever-increasing flood of empirical studies of actual power structures. This chapter proposes to take "power" as being the most inclusive term, and, within this wider concept, it distinguishes two poles, the pole of "influence" and the pole of "domination". The chapter suggests how the authors might arrange a number of situations all involving the exercise of power in order along the scale. It concludes that attributions of power always involve future reference. Assertions about the power that an individual or a group possesses are assertions about an existing structure or system of processes and also about future effects.
