Artem Muchnik

Mark Shirk

GVPT200

Response paper #2: Power: A Radical View

In the reading Power: A Radical View, Steven Lukes offers a decent view at power in my opinion and the way he does it is that he covers the view of power from three different perspectives; One-Dimensional, Two-Dimensional, and Three-Dimensional. In my opinion the most common view of power in the current world now is the Three-Dimensional view of power. I believe this due to the fact that it focuses on decision-making and control over political agenda, issues and potential issues, observable and latent conflict, and finally subjective and real interests. This is easy to see in the current world because for example for focus (a) in the current world in every government power is harnessed through the political agenda; such as when it is decided to go to war, it is all because of power and is lead by political decisions to do so. The other parts of the Three-Dimensional view of power fall under the first parts quite well; when a decision is made in the interest of power all other (b) issues and potential issues with another state for example fuel the power struggle even more, along with any (c) conflicts previously had with the two parties in the power struggle, and both parties (d) interests are to resolve the conflict usually and still retain said power.

The one-dimensional view, often called the ‘pluralist view’ of power focuses mostly on who prevails in cases of decision making, thus the locus of power is determined, compared to the two-dimensional view where power embraces coercion, influence, authority, force and manipulation. While the three dimensional view of power involves a thoroughgoing critique of the behavioral focus of the first two views. This makes the three-dimensional view more sophisticated and more versatile in my opinion.

A very important part of power is in fact coercion, as mentioned in the two-dimensional view of power. If A can get B to do what A wants and B cannot stand up against A’s attacks, then in fact it is a very successful type of power, and almost every if not all conflicts had historically were achieved this way; for example during WW2, the allies won against the axis due to their superiority power-wise and thus through coercion triumphed as they were able to get the axis powers to do as they wanted due to their power. Along with that comes influence because when one has power they have significantly more influence over what goes on politically, and in order to have that one needs a significant amount of authority.

Another way to see power is through force and manipulation; for example when one state has a lot of power is may easily force or manipulate another state to get what it wants; for example if one state has power over the economy of another state it can use that to manipulate what it wants to an extent form the other state.
Overall I believe that all three are important to be utilized in order to have the proper view and control of power, but the more prevalent and more current perspective is the third-dimensional view because it encompasses the first and second dimensional views of power, therefore being the most efficient view.