“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.”
“Power” is one of the most central concepts in politics. For many years political scientists and sociologists have debated the term and tried to agree on its precise content. In a recent study about economic power concentrations in the Netherlands, Mokken and Stokman and their collaborators surveyed the theoretical position of the concepts “power” and “influence”. Most of the theoretical debates are held within the confines of American political science. A number of contributions in a recent issue of The American Political Science Review show that these debates have not yet come to an end. Most of these debates concern “community power”, that is power as it manifests itself within local communities. The most important contributions to this debate have been made by American and British political scientists.