Some Notes on the Concept of Power
Some Notes on the Concept of Power
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1467-9248.1963.tb01054.x
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发表时间：
1963-06
影响因子：
3.1
通讯作者：
P. H. Partridge
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
P. H. Partridge
权力是大众智慧和话语的众多术语之一，哲学家、历史学家和社会理论家也总是认为这些术语不可或缺。直到最近，我认为，在他们自信的时期，他们习惯性地让这个词落下，而不会对知识分子的良心产生任何不舒服的刺痛。当然，这已经不是真的了。权力现在是一个专门研究的主题；有些人甚至会把它变成一门单独的科学的‘领域’--我特别指的是那些政治学家，他们建议他们的主题应该被分离为对‘权力’或‘影响’或‘控制’的研究，这一建议。如果我在这些“笔记”中提出的论点中有任何东西的话，我肯定会给这位政治学家提供一份工作和半份工作。在拉斯韦尔和卡普兰的著作中，权力受到了细致入微的概念分析；它引起了量词的注意；它是对实际权力结构进行的越来越多的实证研究的主题。它不再是语言领域的普通硬币；至少，人们正在尽一切努力赋予它科学概念的尊严。人们可以问：取得了什么成功？人们甚至可能会给出颠覆性的暗示，最近的许多工作最明显地暗示的结论是，权力是一个概念或现象，太无定形、无序或像变色龙一样，永远不能被准确识别，更不用说任何值得被称为“测量”的东西了。也许社会学家和政治学家更好地寻找一套更易管理的概念来取代它；或者也许它毕竟是不可或缺的，但既然是这样，我们必须接受这样一种想法，即当我们与权力有关时，我们必须满足于生活在模糊、不确定和笼统的情况下。我不打算在这些“笔记”中考虑这个问题：这对我来说太难了。但我们至少可以肯定的是，我们还没有更接近我们在使用这个概念时可以期待的精确度或一致性的点。塔尔科特·帕森斯在一篇抨击莱特·米尔斯的《权力精英》的评论文章中，驳斥了米尔斯关于美国权力分配的许多经验结论。他给出了米尔斯与之合作的理由之一
POWER is one of the many terms of popular wisdom and discourse that philosophers, historians, and social theorists have also always found indispensable. Until very recently, I think, they have habitually let the word fall in their confident periods without any uncomfortable pricking of the intellectual conscience. This, of course, is no longer true. Power is now a subject of specialized study; there are some even who would make it the ‘field’ of a separate science-I refer especially to thme political scientists who have proposed that their subject should be detined as the study of ‘power’ or ‘influence’ or ‘control’, a suggestion which. if there is anything at all in the argument I advance in these ‘Notes’, would certainly present the political scientist with a job and a half. 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. It is no longer a common coin of the linguistic realm; at least, every effort is being made to give it the dignity of a scientific concept. It is permissible to ask: With what success? One might even let fall the subversive hint that the conclusion most clearly intimated by much of the recent work is that power is a concept or phenomenon, too amorphous, sprawling, or chameleon-like ever to be amenable to exact identification, to say nothing of anything that deserves to be called ‘measurement’. Perhaps the sociologists and political scientists would do better to search for a set of more manageable concepts to replace it with; or perhaps it is after all indispensable, but, since this is so, we must reconcile ourselves to the thought that where we are concerned with power, we must be satisfied to live with vagueness, indeterminateness and generality. I do not propose to consider this question in these ‘Notes’: it is too hard for me. But we can be sure a t least of this, that we have not approached any nearer the point where we can expect either precision or uniformity in the employment of the concept. Talcott Parsons, in a review article attacking Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, rejects many of Mills’s empirical conclusions about the distribution of power in the U.S.A. He gives as one of his reasons that Mills works with