Power

2010

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power presuppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons available to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.

Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance?, 2015

Power Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance? How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.

Masking the Systematic Violence Perpetuated By Liberalism Through the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’, 2016

Starting from the European conquest in 1492 which established the beginning of colonialism, going through the establishment of liberalism’s racial (‘social’) contract, and coming to present times of neocolonialism and neoliberalism, this paper underscores the interdependence between colonialism and liberalism, and liberalism’s systematic violence of oppression, arguing that the term ‘totalitarianism’ is unable to shed light onto this violence. The paper is organised into three sections. Firstly, I make the case against liberalism’s congratulatory self-assessments, contending that colonialism has always already co-existed and been perpetuated through liberalism. I highlight the futility and liberal characteristics of the term ‘totalitarianism’, to then unsettle Hannah Arendt’s account of it as an allegedly unexpected, unique and unprecedented abnormality of modernity. It will be seen that her linking between imperialism and colonialism lacks a comprehensive analysis of the violence prevalent within social relations: more precisely, the violence of racism which persists under liberalism. In the second part, attention is shifted to the solipsistic historicity and identity of Europe/the West, and its concurrent violence of ‘othering’. The colonial dimensions of ‘modernity’ and its hierarchical binaries will become apparent through an analysis of the way in which the ideology of whiteness characterises this violence and absorbs the radical alterity (absolute difference) of the non-European. The Holocaust, it will be argued, ought to be considered a particularity of colonialism: it is colonialism brought home to Europe. The third section stresses the need to de-link social relations and (re)presentations, state structures, practices and knowledge from the colonial matrix of power by employing a decolonial approach to history, knowledge and practice.

International Sociology, 2019

This essay reviews works in (political) sociology that offer alternatives to sociology-as-usual. Sociologists with even fleeting awareness of the recent history of political sociology are surely familiar with the cultural turn, the global turn, and the turn toward complexity; however, another turn seems to be afoot, one toward existential concerns that direct us to recover how people experience 'the complex contradictions of the social and political world' (Taylor, The New Political Sociology, p. 197). Complex experiences often leave behind residues or 'traces,' and contributors in a recently edited volume challenge sociologists to unlock the social significance of these traces and find new ways to capture what our methods capture so poorly, namely, popular forgettings, geographies of exclusion, and the slow erasure of deeds, memories, and other subjugated knowledges belonging to individuals who find themselves dismissed, dispelled, or disenfranchised by nation-states. Traces left behind by individuals navigating the complexities of contemporary experiments in human 'being' are just the sort of analysis that must, in principle, place the actor at the center of analysis, and, after careful study, we now appreciate that despite the analytical ease of assuming that actors are singular, sociologists should examine actors as plural and unearth their essential multiplicity.

Politics, 1997

Power is probably the most universal and fundamental concept of political analysis. It has been, and continues to be, the subject of extended and heated debate. In this article I critically review the contributions of Bachrach and Baratz, and Lukes to our understanding of the multiple faces of power. I suggest that although the former's two-dimensional approach to power is ultimately compromised by the residues of behaviouralism that it inherits from classic pluralism, the latter's three-dimensional view suggests a potential route out of this pluralist impasse. To seize the opportunity he provides, however, requires that we rethink the concept of power. In the second half of the paper I advance a definition of power as context-shaping and demonstrate how this helps us to disentangle the notions of power, responsibility and culpability that Lukes conflates. In so doing I suggest the we differentiate clearly between analytical questions concerning the identification of power w...

2019

‘Power’ is one of the central concepts in the social sciences, and yet there is no single definition in use. The aim of this lecture series is to provide an overview of the most important understandings of power in sociology and political theory. It does so through a close engagement with the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour, as well as a series of group exercises centred around such contemporary phenomena as the upsurge of populist parties, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the #MeToo movement and the Fridays for Future demonstrations. The lecture is part of Modul 1422 “Macht-Herrschaft-Gesellschaft”, and is offered as double sessions between the 6th May and the 3rd June 2019. The successful completion of the course requires regular attendance and active participation in the group exercises. Detailed information about the individual lectures, including literature and background material, is available on Canvas.

Critical Quarterly, 1989