What Is Power? (It Is Not a Thing)
*last updated on February 27, 2026
People disagree about “power” all the time—and not only because they hold different values. Often they are talking about different things while using the same word. One person means authority. Another means coercion. Another means influence, wealth, charisma, institutional position, or even inner strength. If we don’t pause to ask what we mean by the word, we can end up arguing past each other, convinced the other person is missing something obvious.
Dictionaries don’t fully solve this problem. They show how many meanings “power” can carry, including senses that have nothing to do with social life. In this project I’m mostly interested in power in human relationships—in how people affect each other’s possibilities, choices, and outcomes. That focus matters, because a word that travels across domains can make it deceptively easy to assume we all mean the same thing when we don’t.
This confusion is not limited to everyday speech. “Power” is also a major conceptual term in the humanities and social sciences, and it has been used in many different ways. Thinkers such as Weber, Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Arendt, Bourdieu, and Foucault have each offered influential accounts of what power is, where it lives, how it operates, and how it reproduces itself. Those traditions sometimes overlap, but they also carry different assumptions about human behavior, social order, agency, conflict, and legitimacy. It is possible to cite a famous theory of power and still leave important questions unasked—especially the deceptively simple one: what exactly are we pointing to when we say “power”?
Dictionaries don’t fully solve this problem. They show how many meanings “power” can carry, including senses that have nothing to do with social life. In this project I’m mostly interested in power in human relationships—in how people affect each other’s possibilities, choices, and outcomes. That focus matters, because a word that travels across domains can make it deceptively easy to assume we all mean the same thing when we don’t.
This confusion is not limited to everyday speech. “Power” is also a major conceptual term in the humanities and social sciences, and it has been used in many different ways. Thinkers such as Weber, Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Arendt, Bourdieu, and Foucault have each offered influential accounts of what power is, where it lives, how it operates, and how it reproduces itself. Those traditions sometimes overlap, but they also carry different assumptions about human behavior, social order, agency, conflict, and legitimacy. It is possible to cite a famous theory of power and still leave important questions unasked—especially the deceptively simple one: what exactly are we pointing to when we say “power”?
One reason that question is hard to keep in view is that language quietly pushes us in the opposite direction. In English it is natural to speak as if power were a kind of object: you can have power, lack power, gain it, lose it, give it, take it, use it, abuse it. This grammar can make power feel like a thing that exists “out there,” separable from the people involved. But that ease of speech can become a trap. If we treat power as a possession, we miss how often it depends on relationships, roles, expectations, recognition, and shared meanings—on patterns that can shift across situations and change as people respond to one another.
A small linguistic clue helped me see this more clearly. In a very preliminary look across a few languages I know, the word we translate as “power” tends to gather around two ideas: ability and influence. That is, power points both to what someone can do and to the effects their actions can have—especially in relation to other people. I cannot speak for all languages, and this is not a linguistic proof. But it fits a basic fact about human social life: we constantly have to navigate capacities and constraints, permissions and prohibitions, dependence and leverage. We need words for the difference between being able to act and being blocked, between affecting others and being affected by them.
This is where my project begins to part ways with a common everyday assumption: that some people “have power” and others “don’t.” That way of speaking can describe something real—there are obvious inequalities in resources, status, safety, and institutional authority. But it can also oversimplify. People can be powerful in one context and constrained in another. They can influence in certain directions while being blocked in others. A person may have authority on paper and still lack practical control; another may lack formal status and still shape outcomes through relationships, knowledge, or timing. Once we look closely, power rarely behaves like a stable substance that sits inside an individual. It shows up through interactions, and it changes as the interaction changes.
That is why, throughout this project, I treat power as a relational phenomenon rather than a thing. Power is not an object that a person carries around. It is a way of describing patterns in social life—patterns in who can do what, who can affect what, whose preferences become reality, and whose options are narrowed. Those patterns can be anchored in institutions and material conditions, but they also depend on meaning: on what people believe is normal, legitimate, shameful, admirable, dangerous, allowed, or inevitable. Meanings do not merely interpret social life; they help produce it. They guide attention, shape expectations, and influence what people attempt, tolerate, resist, or accept.
I also use the terms “power” and “powerlessness” as analytical categories, not as verdicts about whole people. The language makes them sound like opposites, and sometimes that binary is rhetorically useful. But lived reality is messier. A single relationship can include both agency and constraint, initiative and vulnerability. Even when an imbalance is obvious, the details matter: what forms of influence exist, what forms of capacity are present, what kinds of pressure are being applied, and what kinds of refusal are still possible. The point is not to dissolve real inequalities into vagueness. The point is to keep the phenomenon complex enough to be understood—because when we flatten power into a thing that someone simply has or doesn’t have, we often lose sight of how power actually works, and we lose sight of each other.
A small linguistic clue helped me see this more clearly. In a very preliminary look across a few languages I know, the word we translate as “power” tends to gather around two ideas: ability and influence. That is, power points both to what someone can do and to the effects their actions can have—especially in relation to other people. I cannot speak for all languages, and this is not a linguistic proof. But it fits a basic fact about human social life: we constantly have to navigate capacities and constraints, permissions and prohibitions, dependence and leverage. We need words for the difference between being able to act and being blocked, between affecting others and being affected by them.
This is where my project begins to part ways with a common everyday assumption: that some people “have power” and others “don’t.” That way of speaking can describe something real—there are obvious inequalities in resources, status, safety, and institutional authority. But it can also oversimplify. People can be powerful in one context and constrained in another. They can influence in certain directions while being blocked in others. A person may have authority on paper and still lack practical control; another may lack formal status and still shape outcomes through relationships, knowledge, or timing. Once we look closely, power rarely behaves like a stable substance that sits inside an individual. It shows up through interactions, and it changes as the interaction changes.
That is why, throughout this project, I treat power as a relational phenomenon rather than a thing. Power is not an object that a person carries around. It is a way of describing patterns in social life—patterns in who can do what, who can affect what, whose preferences become reality, and whose options are narrowed. Those patterns can be anchored in institutions and material conditions, but they also depend on meaning: on what people believe is normal, legitimate, shameful, admirable, dangerous, allowed, or inevitable. Meanings do not merely interpret social life; they help produce it. They guide attention, shape expectations, and influence what people attempt, tolerate, resist, or accept.
I also use the terms “power” and “powerlessness” as analytical categories, not as verdicts about whole people. The language makes them sound like opposites, and sometimes that binary is rhetorically useful. But lived reality is messier. A single relationship can include both agency and constraint, initiative and vulnerability. Even when an imbalance is obvious, the details matter: what forms of influence exist, what forms of capacity are present, what kinds of pressure are being applied, and what kinds of refusal are still possible. The point is not to dissolve real inequalities into vagueness. The point is to keep the phenomenon complex enough to be understood—because when we flatten power into a thing that someone simply has or doesn’t have, we often lose sight of how power actually works, and we lose sight of each other.