Rethinking Power: From Marx Through Critical Theory
to the New Paradigm of Complexity
*last updated on February 27, 2026
When faced with conflict, we often reach for blame. It feels natural to look for a culprit—someone responsible for harm, someone who caused things to go wrong. This instinct shapes everything from personal arguments to political struggles. Yet across cultures and centuries, thinkers have repeatedly questioned whether suffering can really be explained so simply. Again and again, they have asked why life together produces pain at all, and whether the problem lies not in particular people but in deeper patterns of human existence.
Across both Eastern and Western traditions, thinkers have offered strikingly different explanations for why harm exists. Some located suffering in desire and attachment; others in failures of virtue, imbalance, fear, or inequality; still others in divine order, moral corruption, or the limits of human reason. Philosophers debated whether human beings are fundamentally good or dangerous, free or constrained, responsible for their actions or shaped by forces beyond their control. What unites these otherwise divergent approaches is not agreement about human nature, but a shared effort to explain suffering in general terms. Even when thinkers viewed humans as deeply flawed, they tended to locate the source of harm in recurring moral, psychological, social, or structural conditions—not in the moral failure of particular groups of people singled out as uniquely to blame.
Yet for all their depth, these reflections largely remained within scholarly, philosophical, or religious conversations. They influenced how people thought, but only indirectly how societies organized themselves. There was not yet a widely shared public framework that translated these insights into a broadly accessible explanation of social conflict—one capable of naming injustice at scale and mobilizing collective action. That shift would come later, with Karl Marx.
Marx offered a way of explaining suffering and conflict that was at once simple, compelling, and politically actionable. By framing social life in terms of struggle between classes—between those who benefit from existing arrangements and those who are harmed by them—he provided a language that could travel far beyond philosophy. His ideas inspired revolutions, shaped political regimes, and informed experiments in social organization across the globe, from the Soviet Union to China and beyond. The consequences were mixed and often tragic, particularly where abstract ideals were imposed on real human lives. At the same time, Marxist ideas also helped fuel movements for labor rights and social protections that many now consider essential.
Whether embraced or rejected, Marx’s influence is difficult to overstate. His framework did something earlier traditions had not: it turned suffering into a political problem with identifiable causes and possible remedies. In doing so, it transformed how societies talk about harm, injustice, and responsibility—and laid the groundwork for later theories that would place power at the center of social analysis.
When faced with conflict, we often reach for blame. It feels natural to look for a culprit—someone responsible for harm, someone who caused things to go wrong. This instinct shapes everything from personal arguments to political struggles. Yet across cultures and centuries, thinkers have repeatedly questioned whether suffering can really be explained so simply. Again and again, they have asked why life together produces pain at all, and whether the problem lies not in particular people but in deeper patterns of human existence.
Across both Eastern and Western traditions, thinkers have offered strikingly different explanations for why harm exists. Some located suffering in desire and attachment; others in failures of virtue, imbalance, fear, or inequality; still others in divine order, moral corruption, or the limits of human reason. Philosophers debated whether human beings are fundamentally good or dangerous, free or constrained, responsible for their actions or shaped by forces beyond their control. What unites these otherwise divergent approaches is not agreement about human nature, but a shared effort to explain suffering in general terms. Even when thinkers viewed humans as deeply flawed, they tended to locate the source of harm in recurring moral, psychological, social, or structural conditions—not in the moral failure of particular groups of people singled out as uniquely to blame.
Yet for all their depth, these reflections largely remained within scholarly, philosophical, or religious conversations. They influenced how people thought, but only indirectly how societies organized themselves. There was not yet a widely shared public framework that translated these insights into a broadly accessible explanation of social conflict—one capable of naming injustice at scale and mobilizing collective action. That shift would come later, with Karl Marx.
Marx offered a way of explaining suffering and conflict that was at once simple, compelling, and politically actionable. By framing social life in terms of struggle between classes—between those who benefit from existing arrangements and those who are harmed by them—he provided a language that could travel far beyond philosophy. His ideas inspired revolutions, shaped political regimes, and informed experiments in social organization across the globe, from the Soviet Union to China and beyond. The consequences were mixed and often tragic, particularly where abstract ideals were imposed on real human lives. At the same time, Marxist ideas also helped fuel movements for labor rights and social protections that many now consider essential.
Whether embraced or rejected, Marx’s influence is difficult to overstate. His framework did something earlier traditions had not: it turned suffering into a political problem with identifiable causes and possible remedies. In doing so, it transformed how societies talk about harm, injustice, and responsibility—and laid the groundwork for later theories that would place power at the center of social analysis.
Marx and the Binary Logic of Social Struggle
At the center of Marx’s analysis was a compelling binary: oppressors and oppressed. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that each historical era can be understood through this division. In antiquity, the struggle was between masters and slaves; in feudal Europe, between lords and serfs; in modern industrial society, between bourgeoisie and proletariat—the owners of capital and the workers who sold their labor. Human suffering, in this view, was not an unfortunate side effect of life together but the predictable result of one group benefiting from the labor of another.
Marx’s critique was directed primarily at capitalism, which he saw as a system that masked exploitation behind promises of progress, growth, and freedom. He drew attention to the ways capitalist structures concentrate wealth and power while rendering the conditions of workers’ lives precarious. Today, few people hold a purely celebratory view of capitalism untouched by such critique. Even those who see value in market economies often acknowledge that, taken to extremes, capitalism produces deep inequality and harm. In this sense, Marx’s influence endures not because all his conclusions are accepted, but because he helped make visible the costs that glossy narratives of economic success tend to obscure.
One reason Marx’s framework spread so widely was its clarity. He offered a way of understanding suffering that did not rely on personal failure, moral weakness, or fate. Poverty and hardship could be interpreted as outcomes of social structures rather than individual shortcomings. Workers were not isolated victims but members of a class with shared conditions and shared interests. This narrative transformed private suffering into collective meaning and gave conflict a clear direction. It also traveled well—far better than more nuanced or internally complex accounts.
That clarity, however, came at a cost. Marx’s own scholarly work was more intricate and self-critical than the simplified story that became widely known. Yet many people encountered Marx not through Capital but through The Communist Manifesto, a text written explicitly for mobilization. Its force lay in its sharp contrasts and moral urgency, not in theoretical subtlety. Complexity tends to remain confined to specialists; clarity spreads. What endured in public consciousness was not the full texture of Marx’s thought, but its most legible and oppositional elements.
It was this clarity that gave Marx’s ideas their extraordinary reach. They inspired revolutions, shaped political movements, and influenced social policy across continents, while also provoking fierce opposition. Whether celebrated or condemned, Marxism could not be ignored. Marx provided something earlier traditions had not: a common, accessible language for naming social suffering and injustice—one that moved beyond scholarly debate and into public life, reshaping how societies understood conflict, responsibility, and change.
The Rise of Critical Theory and the Emphasis on Power
Marx’s framework did not remain fixed in the 19th century. Over time, it was expanded, reinterpreted, and applied to new contexts, giving rise to what became known as critical theory. If Marx had identified class struggle as the central engine of history, later thinkers asked how similar dynamics might operate in other domains—race, gender, colonialism, physical ability, and education. The conviction remained: society’s problems were not accidents but the result of enduring structures. What changed was the scope of inquiry.
The early critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School argued that inequality is reproduced not only through economic relations but also through social institutions, norms, and everyday practices. Domination, they suggested, persists not simply in workplaces or markets but in education, culture, and the formation of consciousness itself. As the 20th century unfolded, this approach was extended further. Feminist theorists analyzed patriarchy as a structural system woven into work, politics, and family life. Critical race theory emerged in US law schools in the late 1970s and 1980s to show how racism is embedded in legal institutions rather than reducible to individual prejudice. Postcolonial theory examined how colonial domination continued after formal independence, through economic dependency and global hierarchies. Across these strands, the method was consistent: make hidden structures visible.
As these analyses accumulated, a new question came into focus. If inequality is structural rather than accidental, what sustains those structures? What allows some arrangements to persist, even when they produce harm? It was here that the concept of power moved to the center of analysis—not as an abstract philosophical idea, but as a way of naming how structures are maintained, defended, and reproduced over time.
By the late 20th century, critical theory was no longer confined to academic debate. Its language seeped into the humanities and social sciences, informed activism, and shaped public discourse. Terms such as “systemic injustice,” “structural inequality,” and “oppression” became increasingly common in public discourse (especially in academic-adjacent and activist contexts). Even people unfamiliar with Marx or the Frankfurt School could describe social problems as “structural,” a sign of how widely this way of seeing had spread.
One of the most enduring legacies of this expansion was the centrality it gave to the notion of power. Building on Marx’s distinction between oppressors and oppressed, critical theory helped make “power” a common way of describing inequality and domination. To speak of people “in power” or of “power imbalances” became everyday shorthand for injustice, often carrying a strongly negative connotation. Power was no longer understood simply as a general capacity to act, but increasingly as the mark of those who benefited from unequal structures and resisted change.
Power, Its Legacy, and Its Limits
Even outside explicitly Marxist traditions, the modern understanding of power owes much to Marx’s framing of oppressors and oppressed. When scholars, policymakers, or activists talk about social problems today, they rarely cite Marx directly, yet they often rely on assumptions that trace back to his vision of struggle: that power is something possessed, held by some and denied to others. In this view, power is finite, unevenly distributed, and closely tied to domination. Justice, accordingly, becomes a matter of redistributing power—empowering those who lack it and restraining those who have too much.
Marx’s legacy produced important achievements. Yet the very clarity that made this language effective also introduced limitations. Complex social dynamics were increasingly reduced to contests between two sides. This framing proved mobilizing, but it also flattened the landscape of human relationships. It encouraged a moralized view of conflict in which disagreement could slide into condemnation and structural critique into accusation.
These limitations become visible in public debate and policy alike. When problems are explained solely as the result of “those in power” blocking change, solutions often focus on restraining elites without attending to the wider web of causes. Yet social systems are rarely one-directional. Reforms aimed at correcting injustice can produce unintended consequences; people can be simultaneously constrained and constraining. Individuals rarely fit neatly into the roles of oppressor or oppressed. The binary lens struggles to account for these contradictions.
The dominance of this framework also obscures the fact that it is not the only way to think about power. Alongside Marxist and critical traditions, other scholars have developed different accounts. Max Weber treated power as the ability to carry out one’s will despite resistance, without assigning it inherent moral value. Michel Foucault described power not as a possession but as something that circulates through practices, institutions, and forms of knowledge. Pierre Bourdieu showed how inequality persists through internalized dispositions that make social hierarchies appear natural. These perspectives complicate the idea of power as a simple hierarchy of domination.
Despite this diversity within scholarship, the understanding of power shaped by Marxism and critical theory remains dominant in everyday language. Power is still most often imagined as something to be seized, resisted, or redistributed. This moralized conception has shaped how societies interpret conflict and pursue change. It illuminates some truths, but not all of them.
Recognizing both the importance and the limits of this inheritance opens the door to a different approach. If the binary vision of power no longer captures the complexity of social life, then understanding conflict requires more than sharper accusations or better redistribution. It requires rethinking what power is, how it operates, and how people are entangled within it.
From Blame to Complexity: Toward a New Paradigm
If the language of power inherited from Marx and critical theory has illuminated much, it has also reached its limits. To move forward, we need a way of seeing social problems that begins not with blame but with complexity. Power, in this view, is not simply hoarded by some and denied to others. It circulates, shifts, and entangles, shaping lives in ways that resist clean division into opposing sides. This perspective is less emotionally satisfying than a binary one. It offers fewer villains and fewer certainties. But it comes closer to describing how social life actually works.
Thinking in terms of complexity changes how responsibility is understood. To recognize that individuals are embedded in systems is not to deny agency or excuse harm. People still make choices, and those choices matter. But they do so within conditions they did not fully create and cannot fully comprehend or control. Responsibility, then, is neither erased nor absolute; it is distributed across persons, institutions, histories, and meanings. This does not weaken ethical judgment—it deepens it.
A complexity-oriented perspective also reframes the task of social change. If problems persist not only because of malicious actors but because of interlocking structures and shared assumptions, then change cannot be achieved solely by defeating enemies or redistributing power from one group to another. It requires cooperation across differences, sustained attention to unintended consequences, and a willingness to revise strategies when they fail. Social problems begin to look less like battles to be won and more like knots to be patiently untangled.
This way of seeing highlights a dimension often obscured by binary frameworks: people are never only powerful or only powerless. Individuals and groups occupy both positions at once—constrained in some contexts, influential in others. Power operates through relationships, roles, habits, and meanings, not just through overt domination. Ignoring this complexity can lead even well-intentioned interventions to reproduce the very patterns they aim to undo.
What I am proposing, then, is not a rejection of Marx or critical theory, but a continuation of their work at a different level. Their focus on power was decisive and necessary. But to understand why conflict and suffering persist—and why solutions so often fall short—we need a more flexible conception of power itself. One that treats power and powerlessness not as opposing states, but as intertwined conditions of human life.
What makes this shift a matter of paradigm rather than emphasis is the way frameworks shape perception itself. As Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions famously argued, paradigms do not simply organize answers; they organize questions. They guide what researchers look for, what counts as evidence, and what kinds of explanations appear plausible or illegitimate. A paradigm is productive precisely because it narrows vision. It offers coherence and direction, but it also makes certain possibilities harder to see. This is why paradigms tend to persist even when their limitations are widely acknowledged: they continue to structure inquiry long before they are consciously defended.
The binary paradigm of power operates in this way. When social problems are approached through a framework that presumes clear divisions between the powerful and the powerless, inquiry naturally gravitates toward identifying culprits, tracing domination, and assigning blame. Scholars working within this lens are not acting in bad faith; they are following the questions the paradigm makes available. Evidence of harm caused by those “in power” becomes salient, while forms of mutual constraint, contradiction, and unintended consequence may recede into the background. Over time, findings accumulate that reinforce the framework itself. What is being observed feels like confirmation, when in fact it is often alignment between expectation and interpretation.
A paradigm centered on complexity shifts this orientation before any particular conclusions are drawn. Instead of beginning with the assumption that injustice must be explained through domination alone, it begins with the expectation that social life is entangled, layered, and resistant to single-cause explanations. When researchers approach problems with openness to complexity, they tend to find it: overlapping forms of agency and constraint, power and vulnerability existing side by side, harm emerging from coordination failures as well as from exploitation. This does not eliminate conflict or responsibility, but it redistributes attention. The questions change, and with them, the answers that become visible.
In this sense, a paradigm of complexity does not reject what earlier frameworks revealed. Like Kuhn’s scientific revolutions, it incorporates what remains valid while revising what has become restrictive. The binary paradigm of power was necessary to expose structural injustice and challenge complacency. But when it becomes the only way of seeing, it limits both understanding and imagination. A complexity-oriented paradigm does not promise moral clarity or easy solutions. What it offers instead is a more faithful account of human action—and with it, the possibility of responses better matched to the tangled realities of human life.
At the center of Marx’s analysis was a compelling binary: oppressors and oppressed. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that each historical era can be understood through this division. In antiquity, the struggle was between masters and slaves; in feudal Europe, between lords and serfs; in modern industrial society, between bourgeoisie and proletariat—the owners of capital and the workers who sold their labor. Human suffering, in this view, was not an unfortunate side effect of life together but the predictable result of one group benefiting from the labor of another.
Marx’s critique was directed primarily at capitalism, which he saw as a system that masked exploitation behind promises of progress, growth, and freedom. He drew attention to the ways capitalist structures concentrate wealth and power while rendering the conditions of workers’ lives precarious. Today, few people hold a purely celebratory view of capitalism untouched by such critique. Even those who see value in market economies often acknowledge that, taken to extremes, capitalism produces deep inequality and harm. In this sense, Marx’s influence endures not because all his conclusions are accepted, but because he helped make visible the costs that glossy narratives of economic success tend to obscure.
One reason Marx’s framework spread so widely was its clarity. He offered a way of understanding suffering that did not rely on personal failure, moral weakness, or fate. Poverty and hardship could be interpreted as outcomes of social structures rather than individual shortcomings. Workers were not isolated victims but members of a class with shared conditions and shared interests. This narrative transformed private suffering into collective meaning and gave conflict a clear direction. It also traveled well—far better than more nuanced or internally complex accounts.
That clarity, however, came at a cost. Marx’s own scholarly work was more intricate and self-critical than the simplified story that became widely known. Yet many people encountered Marx not through Capital but through The Communist Manifesto, a text written explicitly for mobilization. Its force lay in its sharp contrasts and moral urgency, not in theoretical subtlety. Complexity tends to remain confined to specialists; clarity spreads. What endured in public consciousness was not the full texture of Marx’s thought, but its most legible and oppositional elements.
It was this clarity that gave Marx’s ideas their extraordinary reach. They inspired revolutions, shaped political movements, and influenced social policy across continents, while also provoking fierce opposition. Whether celebrated or condemned, Marxism could not be ignored. Marx provided something earlier traditions had not: a common, accessible language for naming social suffering and injustice—one that moved beyond scholarly debate and into public life, reshaping how societies understood conflict, responsibility, and change.
The Rise of Critical Theory and the Emphasis on Power
Marx’s framework did not remain fixed in the 19th century. Over time, it was expanded, reinterpreted, and applied to new contexts, giving rise to what became known as critical theory. If Marx had identified class struggle as the central engine of history, later thinkers asked how similar dynamics might operate in other domains—race, gender, colonialism, physical ability, and education. The conviction remained: society’s problems were not accidents but the result of enduring structures. What changed was the scope of inquiry.
The early critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School argued that inequality is reproduced not only through economic relations but also through social institutions, norms, and everyday practices. Domination, they suggested, persists not simply in workplaces or markets but in education, culture, and the formation of consciousness itself. As the 20th century unfolded, this approach was extended further. Feminist theorists analyzed patriarchy as a structural system woven into work, politics, and family life. Critical race theory emerged in US law schools in the late 1970s and 1980s to show how racism is embedded in legal institutions rather than reducible to individual prejudice. Postcolonial theory examined how colonial domination continued after formal independence, through economic dependency and global hierarchies. Across these strands, the method was consistent: make hidden structures visible.
As these analyses accumulated, a new question came into focus. If inequality is structural rather than accidental, what sustains those structures? What allows some arrangements to persist, even when they produce harm? It was here that the concept of power moved to the center of analysis—not as an abstract philosophical idea, but as a way of naming how structures are maintained, defended, and reproduced over time.
By the late 20th century, critical theory was no longer confined to academic debate. Its language seeped into the humanities and social sciences, informed activism, and shaped public discourse. Terms such as “systemic injustice,” “structural inequality,” and “oppression” became increasingly common in public discourse (especially in academic-adjacent and activist contexts). Even people unfamiliar with Marx or the Frankfurt School could describe social problems as “structural,” a sign of how widely this way of seeing had spread.
One of the most enduring legacies of this expansion was the centrality it gave to the notion of power. Building on Marx’s distinction between oppressors and oppressed, critical theory helped make “power” a common way of describing inequality and domination. To speak of people “in power” or of “power imbalances” became everyday shorthand for injustice, often carrying a strongly negative connotation. Power was no longer understood simply as a general capacity to act, but increasingly as the mark of those who benefited from unequal structures and resisted change.
Power, Its Legacy, and Its Limits
Even outside explicitly Marxist traditions, the modern understanding of power owes much to Marx’s framing of oppressors and oppressed. When scholars, policymakers, or activists talk about social problems today, they rarely cite Marx directly, yet they often rely on assumptions that trace back to his vision of struggle: that power is something possessed, held by some and denied to others. In this view, power is finite, unevenly distributed, and closely tied to domination. Justice, accordingly, becomes a matter of redistributing power—empowering those who lack it and restraining those who have too much.
Marx’s legacy produced important achievements. Yet the very clarity that made this language effective also introduced limitations. Complex social dynamics were increasingly reduced to contests between two sides. This framing proved mobilizing, but it also flattened the landscape of human relationships. It encouraged a moralized view of conflict in which disagreement could slide into condemnation and structural critique into accusation.
These limitations become visible in public debate and policy alike. When problems are explained solely as the result of “those in power” blocking change, solutions often focus on restraining elites without attending to the wider web of causes. Yet social systems are rarely one-directional. Reforms aimed at correcting injustice can produce unintended consequences; people can be simultaneously constrained and constraining. Individuals rarely fit neatly into the roles of oppressor or oppressed. The binary lens struggles to account for these contradictions.
The dominance of this framework also obscures the fact that it is not the only way to think about power. Alongside Marxist and critical traditions, other scholars have developed different accounts. Max Weber treated power as the ability to carry out one’s will despite resistance, without assigning it inherent moral value. Michel Foucault described power not as a possession but as something that circulates through practices, institutions, and forms of knowledge. Pierre Bourdieu showed how inequality persists through internalized dispositions that make social hierarchies appear natural. These perspectives complicate the idea of power as a simple hierarchy of domination.
Despite this diversity within scholarship, the understanding of power shaped by Marxism and critical theory remains dominant in everyday language. Power is still most often imagined as something to be seized, resisted, or redistributed. This moralized conception has shaped how societies interpret conflict and pursue change. It illuminates some truths, but not all of them.
Recognizing both the importance and the limits of this inheritance opens the door to a different approach. If the binary vision of power no longer captures the complexity of social life, then understanding conflict requires more than sharper accusations or better redistribution. It requires rethinking what power is, how it operates, and how people are entangled within it.
From Blame to Complexity: Toward a New Paradigm
If the language of power inherited from Marx and critical theory has illuminated much, it has also reached its limits. To move forward, we need a way of seeing social problems that begins not with blame but with complexity. Power, in this view, is not simply hoarded by some and denied to others. It circulates, shifts, and entangles, shaping lives in ways that resist clean division into opposing sides. This perspective is less emotionally satisfying than a binary one. It offers fewer villains and fewer certainties. But it comes closer to describing how social life actually works.
Thinking in terms of complexity changes how responsibility is understood. To recognize that individuals are embedded in systems is not to deny agency or excuse harm. People still make choices, and those choices matter. But they do so within conditions they did not fully create and cannot fully comprehend or control. Responsibility, then, is neither erased nor absolute; it is distributed across persons, institutions, histories, and meanings. This does not weaken ethical judgment—it deepens it.
A complexity-oriented perspective also reframes the task of social change. If problems persist not only because of malicious actors but because of interlocking structures and shared assumptions, then change cannot be achieved solely by defeating enemies or redistributing power from one group to another. It requires cooperation across differences, sustained attention to unintended consequences, and a willingness to revise strategies when they fail. Social problems begin to look less like battles to be won and more like knots to be patiently untangled.
This way of seeing highlights a dimension often obscured by binary frameworks: people are never only powerful or only powerless. Individuals and groups occupy both positions at once—constrained in some contexts, influential in others. Power operates through relationships, roles, habits, and meanings, not just through overt domination. Ignoring this complexity can lead even well-intentioned interventions to reproduce the very patterns they aim to undo.
What I am proposing, then, is not a rejection of Marx or critical theory, but a continuation of their work at a different level. Their focus on power was decisive and necessary. But to understand why conflict and suffering persist—and why solutions so often fall short—we need a more flexible conception of power itself. One that treats power and powerlessness not as opposing states, but as intertwined conditions of human life.
What makes this shift a matter of paradigm rather than emphasis is the way frameworks shape perception itself. As Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions famously argued, paradigms do not simply organize answers; they organize questions. They guide what researchers look for, what counts as evidence, and what kinds of explanations appear plausible or illegitimate. A paradigm is productive precisely because it narrows vision. It offers coherence and direction, but it also makes certain possibilities harder to see. This is why paradigms tend to persist even when their limitations are widely acknowledged: they continue to structure inquiry long before they are consciously defended.
The binary paradigm of power operates in this way. When social problems are approached through a framework that presumes clear divisions between the powerful and the powerless, inquiry naturally gravitates toward identifying culprits, tracing domination, and assigning blame. Scholars working within this lens are not acting in bad faith; they are following the questions the paradigm makes available. Evidence of harm caused by those “in power” becomes salient, while forms of mutual constraint, contradiction, and unintended consequence may recede into the background. Over time, findings accumulate that reinforce the framework itself. What is being observed feels like confirmation, when in fact it is often alignment between expectation and interpretation.
A paradigm centered on complexity shifts this orientation before any particular conclusions are drawn. Instead of beginning with the assumption that injustice must be explained through domination alone, it begins with the expectation that social life is entangled, layered, and resistant to single-cause explanations. When researchers approach problems with openness to complexity, they tend to find it: overlapping forms of agency and constraint, power and vulnerability existing side by side, harm emerging from coordination failures as well as from exploitation. This does not eliminate conflict or responsibility, but it redistributes attention. The questions change, and with them, the answers that become visible.
In this sense, a paradigm of complexity does not reject what earlier frameworks revealed. Like Kuhn’s scientific revolutions, it incorporates what remains valid while revising what has become restrictive. The binary paradigm of power was necessary to expose structural injustice and challenge complacency. But when it becomes the only way of seeing, it limits both understanding and imagination. A complexity-oriented paradigm does not promise moral clarity or easy solutions. What it offers instead is a more faithful account of human action—and with it, the possibility of responses better matched to the tangled realities of human life.