When Robert Dahl wrote, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do,” he posed a problem that long outlasted the debate in which he was engaged. His argument was, in large part, a critique of elite theories of community power, which he and his fellow pluralists effectively discredited as ideologically motivated and methodologically lax. But Dahl's larger ambition – to explicate, systematically, “the central intuitively understood meaning” of the concept of power – survived the dispute. In the decades following, most political theorists who studied power adopted Dahl's formulation of the problem of how power shapes freedom. The result is a considerable literature consisting largely in debates about how best to answer the question, “What do we mean when we say that A has power over B?” Contemporary theorists challenged nearly every element of Dahl's answer to this question, including his explication of the scope of responses by B that A can affect, and the means by which A might exercise power over B, as well as his behavioralist and logical empiricist epistemological assumptions and his pluralist ideological conclusions. They devoted almost no critical attention, however, to his definition of the problem itself.

In this chapter I challenge the view that Dahl's question is the best question to ask when studying power.