Generations of men have used the notion of "power" to make sense of their political experience. Despite the fact that the term has recently fallen into comparative disfavor, the scholarly debate over the nature of power continues, with experts still striving to obtain an exact understanding of what power really is. The works collected by John R. Champlin here clearly set forth all the important arguments in the lively dispute, with a focus on the essential question: can the concept of power be used to unify the study of politics?The contributors to this work search for a definition of power, assess the value of serious political analysis in terms of power, and illustrate applications of the "power concept" to issues locally, nationally, and internationally. Hans Morgenthau supports a power-based political theory; he is countered by Charles A. McClelland and James G. March. Seeking a coherent, useful definition of the term, Thomas Hobbes investigates power in terms of its cause, and Dorothy Emmet draws up a list of distinct uses of power. Theodore Lowi achieves a fresh start on power studies by distinguishing "arenas" of power according to expectations of costs and benefits. The Lowi contribution bears on the debate over how the United States is to be characterized. Opposing C. Wright Mills' theory of the power elite as well as the idea of pluralism, Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz find that opportunities for participation in political decisions and power are very unequally distributed.This unique debate on the definition of power, engaging all sides in direct dialogue with one another, includes the work of important leading scholars in this area of thought. Together with an excellent introduction by the editor, the debate gives an active dimension to this book that will enliven all college classes and interested audiences.

The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.

Recent economic and political developments in the Third World and in Communist and advanced industrial societies have challenged some of the most cherished assumptions of social science, forcing social scientists to rethink many of the categories of their discipline. In a concisely written and provocative book, the author traces this process of rethinking. He does so by going back to the nineteenth-century origins of political sociology and economy, and by exploring more recent attempts by American scholarship to fashion from the writings of Smith, Marx, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim a new universal theory of modernization and political change. The author argues that these attempts led to a new intellectual crisis, which could be resolved only by a "paradigm shift," that is, by refocusing the discipline from the classical concept of social relations to a new global concept of the division of labor and systems of exchange. Overall, the volume may be read both as an intellectual history of modern political science, and as an attempt to fashion an analytical tool for empirical research. As such, it will be of interest to students of political philosophy as well as of comparative politics.

This new book by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito addresses the profound crisis of contemporary politics and examines some of the philosophical approaches that have been used to try to understand and go beyond this crisis. Two approaches have been particularly influential – one indebted to the thought of Martin Heidegger, the other indebted to Gilles Deleuze. While opposed in their political thrust and orientation, both approaches remain trapped within the political ontology that has framed our conceptual language for some time. In order to move beyond this political ontology, Esposito turns to a third approach that he characterizes as ‘instituting thought’. Indebted to the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this third approach recognizes that the road to reconstructing a productive relation between ontology and politics, one that is both realistic and innovative, lies in instituting praxis. Building on this insight, Esposito conceptualizes social being as neither univocal nor plurivocal but as cross-cut by the dual semantics of political conflict. This new book by one of the most original European philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, social and political theory and the humanities generally.

The contributors investigate policy paradigms and their ability to explain the policy process actors, ideas, discourses and strategies employed to provide readers with a better understanding of public policy and its dynamics.

Media power is a crucial, although often taken for granted, concept. We assume, for example, that the media are 'powerful'; if they were not, why would there be so many controversies over the regulation, control and impact of communicative institutions and processes? Further, we assume that this 'power' is somehow problematic; audiences are often treated as highly susceptible to media influence and too much 'power' in the hands of one organization or individual is seen as risky and potentially dangerous. These concerns have been at the heart of recent controversies involving the relationships between media moguls and political elites, the consequences of phone hacking in the UK, and the emerging influence of social media as vital gatekeepers. Yet it is still not clear what we mean by media power or how effective it is. This book evaluates contrasting definitions of media power and looks at the key sites in which power is negotiated, concentrated and resisted - politically, technologically and economically. Combining an evaluation of both previous literature and new research, the book seeks to establish an understanding of media power which does justice to the complexities and contradictions of the contemporary social world. It will be important reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and activists alike.