When exploring the various attributes of power we must identify how the powerful attain compliance. In 1974 Steven Lukes’ Power: A Radical View was published. Lukes' aim was to demonstrate that the one and two-dimensional view on power was inadequate, and that from the two emerged a more suitable angle to demonstrate the varying dynamics of power: the third dimensional view.
The first dimensional
view of power, or the pluralist view, explores Robert Dahl’s The Concept of
Power 1957, Nelson Polsby’s Community Power and Political Theory 1963, and
Raymond Wolfinger’s Nondecisions and the Study of Local Politics 1971. Lukes
believed the exercise of power, i.e. the difference between possession of power
and its exercise, is the central theme to this view. He also claimed that its
focus is on studying observable behaviour and specific outcomes in order to
determine decision making and to extract reliable conclusions.
“Thus I conclude that this first,
one-dimensional, view of power involves a focus on behaviour in the making of decisions on issues over which there is an observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as expressing policy
preferences, revealed by political participation.” (Lukes, 1974, p19)
The second dimensional view of power or the critics’ view
of the first dimension as it has been referred to, is a qualified analysis of
the restrictions of the pluralistic view. Lukes explores the work of Peter Bachrach and
Morton Baratz’s Two Faces of Power 1962 who
claim that ‘mobilization of bias’ is allowed through specific control of the
political agenda. The different types of power that came into play to achieve
this control include: coercion, influence, authority, force and manipulation.
This view, according to Lukes, examined nondecision making as well as decision
making paying attention to observable conflict with a wider group of interests.
Lukes wrote that the two dimensional view is ‘too
committed to behaviourism’ and was inadequate in expressing the importance of
latent conflict. He claimed there were three dimensions of power in modern
society. He argued that the first two views of power focused on power arising
from conflict, but did not take into consideration that the power that emerges
from preventing such conflict in arising, could be considered a greater form of
power than the rest.
“The trouble seems to be that both Bachrach and Baratz and the pluralists suppose that because power, as they conceptualize it, only shows up in cases of actual conflict, it follows that actual conflict is necessary to power. But this is to ignore the crucial point that the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent such conflict from arising in the first place.” (Lukes, 1974, p27)
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