Power
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton (1887)
Power is the most uncanny concept of political language, because it is everywhere and yet shows itself reluctantly. Everyone senses that it works, no one likes to admit to exercising it. An emancipatory and at the same time critical view does not demonize power, for without it nothing common happens. But it poses the decisive question: When is power a common capacity, and when does it turn into domination over others?
Power and freedom
Power and freedom seem to be opponents: where one grows, the other dwindles. But that is true only for a particular form, power over someone, which narrows their room for manoeuvre up to the deprivation of freedom, imprisonment, the fetter. Alongside it there is power to, the capacity to be able to bring something about. In this sense power is the condition of freedom, not its enemy. Whoever can do nothing is not free but powerless.
Rainer Forst draws attention to the fact that the most effective power often sits in the head. It does not compel through chains but steers what people take for self-evident, reasonable or without alternative. This "noumenal" power is strongest when the dominated no longer even recognize their own situation as domination.1 Critical thinking begins exactly here: with the question of who actually defined what counts as normal.
Power and violence
Power is often confused with violence, but Hannah Arendt sharply separated the two. Power arises where people act together and rely on one another; it is by its nature shared. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental, it needs tools and appears precisely where power falls apart.2 A ruler who has to have people shot has already lost his power and replaces it with coercion.
This distinction is emancipatory, because it shows: violence is no sign of strength but of dwindling legitimacy. It can destroy and intimidate, but it can bring forth nothing commonly founded. Where only the cudgel speaks, understanding has already failed.
Money, exploitation and power
Power does not always wear a uniform, often it wears a suit. Money is one of its quietest and most effective forms: it provides access, time, attention and the possibility of having others work for one's own purposes. Where property concentrates, so does the power to determine the conditions under which many must live.
Exploitation is the form in which this asymmetry nests itself into the everyday. It rarely works as open coercion but as silent necessity: whoever depends on the wage seemingly voluntarily consents to conditions they did not choose. Here it shows that formal freedom and real dependence can coincide. A society that counts only legal freedom overlooks how unequally distributed power distorts the contract from the outset.
Power over the body
Most immediately power becomes palpable on the body, in sexuality and reproduction. Whoever disposes over the body of others exercises the nakedest form of domination; rape is its extreme. But power works already earlier and more subtly, in the norms that determine which bodies and which desires count as normal. Judith Butler has shown that gender is not mere nature but is brought forth through repeated norms. These norms give support and at the same time exercise power, because they exclude what does not conform to them.3 Sexist and racist domination often function like this: not as a single command, but as a practised self-evidence that assigns whole groups to their place.
The control of power
If power is unavoidable, then the decisive question is not to abolish it but to control it. The liberal tradition answers with the separation of powers: power is to limit power, so that none becomes autonomous. Jürgen Habermas supplements this institutional thought with a democratic one. Power is legitimate for him only where it feeds on coercion-free understanding, on the communicative power of free citizens, and not on money or mere administration.4
With this the circle closes back to Forst: power is justified as long as it can be justified to those affected and as long as they may co-determine and question the conditions under which they live.5 Power is emancipatory where it enables people to act together; the view remains critical as long as it asks who here determines whose life, and whether the dominated were ever asked. The magic word here is self-determination.