Moral Authority as a Power Resource

Abstract

Nearly half a century has passed since Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan generated a treatise on political theory that advocated analysis of power as a framework for analysis of political process. Fully half a century has passed since Hans J. Morgenthau confidently assured us of the universality, in politics as in nature, of the principle of the balance of power and defined the interests of states in terms of power. More than half a century has passed since Edward Hallett Carr set out to disabuse institutionalists and “idealists” of what he regarded as their utopian illusions and asserted a fundamental precept of the realist critique of prewar institutionalism, that politics is “in one sense always power politics.”3 The central role of power as an analytic construct in classical realist, structural realist, and structural neorealist scholarship has been so pervasive that the assertion requires no further elaboration. Still, the notion of “power” in the discipline and its usefulness as an analytic construct remain “essentially contested.”