Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends versus Old Tendencies

FROM Niccolo Machiavelli and David Hume to E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, power has been an important (some would say too important) variable in international political theorizing. Although some may regard power analysis as old-fashioned and outdated, recent refinements in social science thinking about power suggest the possibility of revitalizing this approach to understanding international relations. Exact turning points in intellectual history are difficult to identify, but many would regard the publication of Power and Society by Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan as the watershed between the older, intuitive and ambiguous treatments of power and the clarity and precision of more recent discussions.1 Since then, Herbert Simon, James March, Robert Dahl, Jack Nagel, and others have developed the idea of power as a type of causation.2 This causal conception of power, according to Nagel, has proved attractive for three reasons: First, there are compelling similarities between intuitive notions of power and