Systematically lucky

Zan Boag: Have you arrived at your own definition of power?

Keith Dowding: No, I don’t really have one, actually, and I’m not sure that that’s the right way to go about science. I mean, it seems to me that scientists don’t define energy and then go and search for it. What they do is examine certain phenomena and then they look at their characteristics and they say that’s what energy is.They define it after analysis, not before.

I think it’s fine to say look, this is my definition of power and this is how I’m going to look at power for this particular analysis – I’m not making the claim that it’s the notion of power which should be defined in all places and all times.

I do think that power is a dispositional thing, something that you can have without using, without operating all the time. That leads me to think that power is a capacity, so if you want to look at the power of something, you need to look at its capacities or its resources. Some people think that power is power to, the ability to do things. Some people think social power or power should always be seen as power over, the ability of some people to control others. I call the second one social power, and I think social power is a subset of the first one. That is, one way in which I can get certain things is to get other people to do them for me, and that might be some kind of power relationship. But the other sort of claim is the difference between those who see power as being a property of social structures and those who see it as being a property of agents. And I very much see it as a property of agents given the resources they have.

Can power and inequality be separated? Or are they inextricably intertwined?

You can be unequal in all