defeat.
More will be said below about military power and its relationship to power in general and to coercive force. The remarks above, however, are sufficient to illustrate the ambiguities of power. The remainder of this essay will consider the meaning of power by comparing and contrasting the definitions and analysis of Dennis Wrong, in his book Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses, with that of Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, in their article "Decisions and Non-decisions: An Analytical Framework."
As a sort of pre-definition, this discussion is concerned with power in the human, relational context, and particularly with political power in the broad sense -- including, for example, the power of employers over employees, but not the power of friendship or love. Nevertheless it is notable that the word "power" is associated not only with potentates and cops but with engines and with storms. Indeed, the power of car engines and electricity is probably the use of the word we learn first as children, long before we ever learn the phrase "political power." Our concept of what power means in the social and political sense must therefore somehow be rooted in that broader sense of the capacity to make things happen. Nevertheless, we are concerned here with finding a useful definition of power in a social or political context -- loosely speaking, with what it normally means when heard on the news.
In brief, Wrong adopts a broad and inclusive definition of power, as "the capacity of some persons to produce intended and foreseen effects on others" (2002, p. 2). Within that definition, Wrong finds a wide variety of actions or conditions as constituting power, from the sort conveyed at gunpoint to the sort expressed by the phrase "doctor's orders." In contrast, Bachrach and Baratz adopt a much more restrictive definition of power, and one not capable of such succinct characterization. To them,
A power relationship exist...