Realist Accounts Of Power

[Page 557]In the explanation of realist accounts of power given here, as the term realism is used in the philosophical sense. Realist notions of power have other meanings in international relations.

A good starting point for understanding the realist approach to power is Jeffrey Isaac's claim that all three sides in the three faces of power debate (that is to say, including Lukes's radical view) reduce power to the regular behavior between two parties. Moreover, they remain within the framework of A having power over B or A making B do something it would not otherwise do. Realist approaches to the question of power have three criticisms of the limitations of such approaches. First, they see power as power over but not as power to. Second, they wrongly focus on the behavior of agents. Third, according to Jeffrey Isaac they conflate the possession of power with the exercise of power.

The first argument can be highlighted by taking the French and Latin terms for power—pouvoir and potere. In these cases, power means to be able to do something. This sense of power to rather than power over rests on a concept of power as enabling, something that for realists is usually rooted in a set of structural conditions. This requires attention to be paid to the underlying structural conditions that enable behavioral interaction. According to Isaac, the realist view of power requires us to look at social agents by looking at the relatively enduring social relations in which they participate. He defines this as social power, the capacities to act possessed by social agents by virtue of their positions in society. Power, understood in this sense, is thus a capacity, either constituted by, realized by, or emergent from the social relations we are engaged in.

The realist approach to power should therefore be considered structural in the sense that it focuses on the sociostructural preconditions for the operation of power. If we are to look at the power of agents, then we must understand this in terms of the social relations in which they are embedded. Such a view also sees power as a causal concept. However, this does not imply causality in the positivist sense of contingent effects, but in the sense of the necessary properties and intrinsic powers of social agents. Power is seen as the capacity to perform a particular act, or as Isaac puts it, the capacity to perform intentional activities and engage in normatively constituted practices.

This view of power has some similarities to poststructural approaches like Foucault's. Power is seen as enabling as well as constraining. Emphasis is placed on how power is socially distributed and dispersed, how it has no one single center but is present in all social relations, and how it is something strategic in the sense that it is constantly negotiated and renegotiated in the context of the complex social relations and practices that actors are engaged in.

In realist accounts, power is often taken to mean powers. This is particularly so when emphasizing causal processes and the properties of structures. In describing causal processes, philosophical realists might refer to these as tendencies on the basis that such powers may or may not be exercised, depending on a particular set of circumstances, counteracting processes, and so on. Such powers might be emergent in the sense that the properties and possibilities of entities are rooted in but not reducible to a particular structure or stratum. Here we see that notions of power or powers can be applied to structures as well as to agents. Indeed, even if the focus is on agents, this should be seen in structural or causal terms. Human powers, for example the ability to talk and express ideas, are emergent from certain physical (biological) and social conditions, but are expressed in their own unique and irreducible way.

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