ABSTRACT

Power is usually conceived with the assumption of human separateness in the background. The concept of power was implicit in the earlier discussions of specific manifestations of separateness and being-in-relation. Power in its most general sense refers to persons' ability to do what they want, to meet their needs, to achieve their goals. Power can also be used to affect another person's decisions indirectly by structuring the other's alternatives in such a way that certain decisions never come up for consideration and other decisions must be made. The prevailing conception of power parallels the separate conception of autonomy. Most of the discussions of empowerment take the separateness of persons for granted and, therefore, also assume that all power is power to dominate. Empowerment changes the persons whose relationship to each other is empowering. The early civil rights movement was a movement of blacks for their own liberation. The empowerment came from the group itself.