Abstract

MONTBRUN, Alberto. Notes for a critical review on the concept of "power". Polis [online]. 2010, vol.9, n.25, pp. 367-389. ISSN 0718-6568.  doi: 10.4067/S0718-65682010000100022.

The concept of power has been one of the most traditional and rooted in political science, since the early considerations of the Greeks up to the present. It is still today a term of extraordinary actuality in popular and scientific language. However, when we inquire into its real materiality, we note that it is elusive, confuse and diffuse. Since the emergence of positivism, through the bourgeois revolutions, the concept remained more or less unchanged. With the emergence of Marxism, of modern ideologies and critical schools, its rationalization and redirection was persecuted, but without questioning the essence of its meaning. We suggest that, starting from the Complexity Theory and Network Theory that the concept could well be left out of political science or be confined only to the scope of force or coercion.

Keywords : power; complex adaptive systems; network theory.