Understanding Political Power

Political power is the center of the political life, understanding political power is the key to understanding politics. The philosophic thinking of political power problems is with the whole process of human civilization. The thought exploration on power problems has never stopped in the long evolution of western political thought.In western political thought history, there are mainly three ideas on the nature of power. In Weber's view, power is a person's ability of command other behaviors by his own will even in the condition that he is against by others, a person-to-person dominant force, domination and obedience is the essential characteristics of power relations. Power can't be without enforcement, enforcement can't be without violence. The power must be based on violence or violent threat. The more common obedience is, the more effective power is; the more universal resistance is, the more failure power is. Widespread resistance proved power failure. The sociologists represented by Peter Michael Blau, understood power as a social interaction forms and social exchange relations, as a kind of unequal interest exchange relations between man and man. From the perspective of social exchange theory, power is essentially a kind of interest exchange relationship. Entering power relations, people acquire many interests. In exchange, people must comply with superior's instructions and contribute to organizations. In Steven Lukas's opinion, power is not one or two dimension, but 3d. In political life, we must firmly believe power is both material and spiritual. The material power will imprison human body, but spiritual power will probably constrain human spirit. Obviously different from other power, spiritual right is a cognitive and misleading power which will create false consciousness, limit citizen's self-introspection ability, make citizens become not clever but dull and yield to cognitive biases, fallacy and illusion, as suppressed or killed citizens'judgments, regard the adult as the children and made them underpowered.Relevant to values of power, there formed two different and conflicting cognitions. In anarchist's opinions, freedom or autonomy has the ultimate value; enforcement is always a kind of crime, as conflicting forces with free or autonomous value, government is a kind of unnecessary evil. In most time of the human civilization development, although the government has always been there in fact, this does not mean that the government should exist. If people want to enjoy full freedom, his only rational choice is to abolish the authority and live in the society without government. Existing government forms are flawed, human good life should not depend on how to improve above government form, but how to make them exit the stage of history. It is to realize happy life that people choose to build government, but in real life, the government with mandatory power often becomes the important source of human sufferings.Contract scholars have different understandings from anarchists, they believe authority can be legitimized, freedom and authority are not completely conflicting, and living in anarchy is impossible and unrealistic. Even the anarchic order is possible, it can't be sustained. People who live in the state can get more happiness than those living in anarchy.On distribution of power, there mainly formed three ideas at present. Plato has elitist position; he insists that power is justified by knowledge. In the city-state political order, political power should be distributed according to knowledge; the philosopher who grasps the truth should become the king of city-state. In reasonable political order, the city-state should be ruled by philosophy-king. It is knowledge not wealth in modern society that justified power. The importance of Bible is that it advocated such a political power distribution ideas as"divine right of kings". It declared that God is existing, omnipotent, kind and just, political power should be distributed by god. The ownership of the political power should be decided by the will of god. The legality of political power exists among the will of god. In contemporary philosophers——Rawls'opinion, distribution justice in political field should be concerned about the allocation of civil rights, public power and positions. Whether right, power or positions are all the objects that must be allocated in political field. The distribution of these objects must insist on the principle of equal opportunity.Regarding to power control, there are mainly four modes. How to control the government, how to constraint government's power, an important method put forward by great thinkers in western political thought history is restricting power by power. The government's purpose is to protect citizens'rights, especially the right of life, liberty and property. Protecting citizens' basic rights is not only the base of government's justification, but also the important reason that citizens enter into civic society. The Hobbes'state is necessary to maintain public order, but this state is dangerous for citizens to have rights. All those who have power are easier to abuse power. To prevent abusing power, we must restrict power by power. The public choice theory represented by James Buchanan put forward their methods different from the power-separation theory. They emphasized the importance of institutional constraints on financial activities of government and stressed the government's fiscal responsibility. Besides power-separation and financial constraints, other thinkers like Arendt, etc., they lay stress on the importance of the transparency of the operation process of political power to restrict political power. Political power must exercise under the supervision of the general public, public space must be lit. The power exercising in invisible circumstances is mysterious power and also unable to be supervised. Power without supervision and constraint is easy to the corruptive power. In order to make the political power restrained, we must make a distinction between public and private field. The private field should maintain its privacy, but the public field should maintain its publicity.Facing the alienation of power, people will probably have three reactions to adjust power relations in addition to calling and election. Facing the alienation of power, Locke stressed the significance and the value of revolutionary rights, pointed out that civic revolutionary rights have irreplaceable positive meaning to the civilization of human political life. Right to revolution is a right possessed by citizens in political community to change and terminate power relations through public violence. This kind of right has very important value in constructing rational political order. Right to revolution is an important strength to prevent injustice, which has preventive function. Right to revolution is a force to restore social injustice, which has repaired function. In political life, one of the important values of revolutionary right is that it can change the bad government which makes injustice through public violence, and make social justice no longer get worse because of the bad government. Facing the alienation of power, Rawls emphasized the value of citizens'disobedience. Justice is the common pursuit of human society, and injustice is the objective fact of human society. In Rawls'opinion, most people in human society ever lived in an unjust environment to some degree, have suffered unpleasant experience of unjust treatment, and require to pursuit justice in unjust circumstance. Citizens in constitutional country have the duty to obey the justice system and take their responsibility in just institutions, that is to say, they have the duty to help their country to build just system when the justice system does not exist. Humans should learn how to maintain just social structures, know how to alter or amend social injustice. As with the way of violent revolution, civic disobedience has important value to change social injustice. Civic disobedience can be defined as an open and nonviolent action against law according to personal conscience and political actors, its purpose is usually in order to make the government's law or policies change. Facing the alienation of power, Albert Hirschman emphasized the importance of exit and calling. In Hirschman's view, exit is a repaired mechanism to make the decayed organizations reborn. If exit is a repaired mechanism to make the social problems solved outside, appeal is the repaired mechanism to make the social problems solved inside. As a kind of repaired mechanism, appeal has the function of reveal social problems, and provide the possibility to solve social problems internally. Appeal strengthens the collective memory.From the exploration of western political thought thinkers on the question of power, we can see that power is charming, and the problems relating to power is confusing. It must be admitted that the efforts of thinkers on research of power problems are not just satisfying their intellectual curiosity. In all kinds of thinkers'thinking about power problems, there has hope, also has disappointment, has fun, and also has pain. The questions put by them are far more than those questions what they have answered. Life itself is complex, and political life is even full of problems. Our thinking is not just to enjoy but to know and experience life, and further enrich or optimize our life.