Social Power and Social Causation: Towards a Formal Synthesis

Matthew Braham
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Matthew Braham: University of Groningen

Chapter 1. in Power, Freedom, and Voting, 2008, pp 1-21 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract An impressive list of economists, political scientists, and philosophers starting with Thomas Hobbes and including Herbert Simon (1957), James March (1955), Robert Dahl (1957, 1968), Felix Oppenheim (1961, 1976, 1981), William Riker (1964), Virginia Held (1972), and Jack Nagel (1975) have claimed that there are key and compelling similarities between what is ordinarily considered to be an ascription of social power and that which is considered under the more general rubric of causality. Hence to say: ‘i has (had) power to x’, is to assert that i can (did) cause an outcome x. ‘i has (had) power over j’ , is to assert that i can (did) cause j to act in a specific way (in a manner that he would not otherwise do).

Keywords: Causal Ascription; Social Power; American Political Science Review; Positive Duty; Causal Contribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-73382-9_1

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