Two Faces of Power

We have seen countries around the world going to wars because of power. Power decides who controls what and who. What happens if the controlled do not want to be controlled?  If power is properly distributed and there is no abuse of power then a society cannot have that arise from mismanagement of power.

In the article “Two Faces of Power” Peter Bachrachand and Morton S. Baratz the multiple faces of power. The authors discuss that sociologists, scholars, and political scientists share different views of power distribution. While most sociologists believe that power is very centralized, scholars and other people argue that power is widely spread. In this paper Bachrachand and Baratz are arguing that power has two faces. In a simple example, the two authors point out that sometimes people just look that is ruling and making decisions but they do not look at the source of the power.

We can cite the revolutions that having taking place in the Arab world as a great example of this scenario. Their leaders became so powerful such that they thought they were irreplaceable and they were ruling with absolute authority. However, once people got tired the started uprising in order to change their society. In this case we see also that ordinary people are the source of power and they can change power holders to their favor. Bachrachand and Baratz finish the argument by saying that people need to study power without taking sides and they propose that a new model for studying power be developed. In this model researchers and scholars have to be neutral.