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Forms of Power By Gianfranco Poggi. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2001. 256p. $66.95 cloth, $28.95 paper.
Regina F. Titunik, University of Hawaii at Hilo
The main themes of this book are prefigured in Gianfranco Poggi's two significant earlier works on the rise and character of the modern state: The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, 1978, and The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects, 1990, (especially in the first chapter of the latter). In connection with his discussion of state formation, Poggi put forward the view that political power is one particular form of social power and is distinguished from other types of social power by its control of the means of violence. In the current work, Poggi undertakes the considerable task of explicating power in its various forms. He abstracts the concept of power from the historical context of his previous works and, with characteristic lucidity, details the various forms of social power and their interrelations.
Poggi distinguishes three forms of social power-political, ideological/normative, and economic. This tripartite division of social power recalls Max Weber's distinction of "class, status and party" and other similar conceptualizations of a trinity of power forms reflecting the physical, psychical, and material needs of human beings. Indeed, Poggi readily adopts this familiar and useful tripartite formulation and rests his particular distinctions on the kinds of resources that are controlled by power holders, that is, wealth, status, and rulership.
In the broadest sense, power, for Poggi, signifies the human ability to "make a difference" to the world (p. 3). Human beings necessarily transform external nature in order to sustain their existence (and are in turn transformed by the results of their activities). Social power is recognizable when this ability to make a difference is used "in order to control the ability to make a difference that another individual possesses qua human" (p. 9). Poggi examines the political, ideological/normative, and economic expressions of social power successively and considers the interactions between the latter two forms and political power. He also adds a concluding chapter on military power, which, though an aspect of political power, has become sufficiently distinct from other aspects of the political system to warrant separate consideration.
Political power, which represents...