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Steven Lukes's 'Power: A Radical View' identifies three dimensions of power. The first dimension is overt: A gets B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl). The second is covert: A controls the agenda so that B's interests never reach the table (Bachrach and Baratz). The third is structural: A shapes B's preferences, beliefs, and self-understanding so that B does not even recognize domination — power operates through ideology, socialization, and institutional norms. This framework expands political analysis beyond visible coercion to encompass systemic oppression, hegemony, and the ways in which domination can be invisible to those who suffer it. It connects directly to feminist, postcolonial, and critical race analyses of how power structures persist without overt force.
Apply all three dimensions to a single case — e.g., workplace gender dynamics. First dimension: a manager assigns women lower-status tasks. Second dimension: promotion criteria are set so women's contributions are systematically undervalued. Third dimension: women internalize the belief that leadership is not for them. This layered analysis shows why focusing only on overt coercion misses most of how power operates.
Your study of political authority and legitimacy established the basic question: when is power justified? Authority is power recognized as legitimate — accepted by those subject to it because they regard it as rightfully exercised. But this picture, as Lukes points out, is incomplete. It assumes we can read off from behavior and expressed preferences whether power is being exercised over people. Lukes argues that the most profound and pervasive forms of power are precisely those that are not visible as power — including to those who suffer it.
The first dimension of power (Robert Dahl's pluralism) is overt and measurable: A gets B to do something B would not otherwise do. You can study it by observing who wins when interests conflict. Political scientists study voting records, lobbying outcomes, and policy decisions. Who got their preferred outcome? Power, on this view, is what produces winning in observable conflicts. This is an improvement over naive theories that identify power with formal authority, but it still misses a great deal.
The second dimension (Bachrach and Baratz, the theory of non-decisions) reveals that power also operates by controlling what gets on the agenda. The powerful do not just win in conflicts — they prevent conflicts from arising by ensuring that some interests never become issues. Grievances that are suppressed, options that are never considered, populations whose demands are treated as illegitimate — all of these represent power exercised through agenda control. The absence of conflict is not evidence of the absence of power; it may be evidence of power so complete that resistance is never mobilized.
The third dimension (Lukes's own contribution) is the most radical and the most contested. Power shapes preferences, desires, and beliefs — particularly the self-understanding of dominated groups. Through socialization, ideology, institutional norms, and cultural narratives, dominated people may come to accept their situation as natural, inevitable, or deserved. Your work on feminist political philosophy provides direct examples: if women internalize the belief that leadership is not for them, or that their care work is naturally theirs to perform, these preferences are not simply given — they are produced by power relations. Antonio Gramsci called this hegemony: the dominance exercised not through force but through the willing consent of those who have accepted the dominant group's worldview as common sense.
The hard epistemological question this raises is: how do we distinguish authentic preferences from preferences shaped by domination? Lukes does not claim dominated people are stupid or deceived; he claims they are human beings whose understanding of what is natural or possible has been shaped by circumstances not of their choosing. The answer is not to dismiss expressed preferences but to ask whether the conditions under which preferences formed were themselves conditions of freedom or of constraint. This connects directly to distributive justice debates: a just distribution of social goods may require attending not just to what people say they want, but to the social conditions that produced those wants.
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