On Power and Responsibility

The article focuses on Lukes’ treatment of the relation between power and responsibility. By attempting to draw a sharp distinction between power and structural constraint, I argue, Lukes unnecessarily excludes from his analysis a wide range of significant and inegalitarian social constraints on freedom. The article defends a more structural approach to the study of power, one that employs democratic evaluative standards. Power relations are more or less legitimate, by this view, depending on the extent to which they enable the people they affect to help shape and reshape them. Contra Lukes’ claim that structural approaches are incapable of accounting for the relationship between power and responsibility, I argue that they are fully compatible with theories of political responsibility. Even if no identifiable agent or agents can be held morally responsible for creating a given relation of domination, those actors whose actions helped produce that relationship are obligated to attempt to understand and to change it.