Description: political locavore
I have been thinking about the increased visibility of power as a concept for months, now. It’s the product of the steadfast focus on power in Black Lives Matter movement. Through this focus BLM achieves an exceptionally consistent sublimation of this broad theoretical concept into specific, everyday reality. I’m sure in the past people have done the same thing with “freedom.” Now we have the same regular concretization of the concept of “power.”
It’s addictive, thinking more and more about power, all the time. I know it’s not everyone’s thing, but as for me, I like it so much I traded years of my young, potentially-profitable life going to school for it.
Thinking about power is at the heart of political science. When we study politics, we study the social distribution of resources — that is, “ who gets what, when and how .” The research we do aims to explain “who gets what”; who gets the majority of votes, the favorable trade deal, the tax break, or the prison sentence. This focus on “who gets what” can also be expressed as “who has the power to achieve what outcome.” Describing the nature of power, then, becomes very important to being able to understand t