ABSTRACT
There is no simple way to resist the powerful attractions encouraging the simplification of messy politics into the pseudo-clarity of reductive morality that I analyze in the previous chapter. We can, however, clarify some of the conceptual confusions that encourage this reduction of politics to morality. How should we understand power and its relationship with goodness and morality? And therefore, how should we understand the relationship between politics and ethics? This chapter answers this question. It challenges the assumptions underlying a number of dominant theories of power, including those offered by Steven Lukes and Foucault. My ultimate target, however, are those attitudes toward power that we all have, and which guide us in facing both the real and imagined threats of power. The chapter provides a minimal description of power, specifically of acts of power against which the good would purportedly fight, and from this it builds a modest everyday ideology of power.
