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The Economic Approach to the Analysis of Power and Conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Brian Barry
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‘POWER’ AND ‘CONFLICT’ ARE BOTH TERMS WE DO NOT SEEM TO BE able to do without, however much we may be worried by what methodological purists say. We tend to feel that if we could understand the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict we would have the key to the explanation of political events in the world as a whole, a particular society, or some group - some association or organization - within a society.

This feeling is in my view quite justified, but only in this sense: that if we had an analysis of the state of a society (etc.) that was sufficient to enable us to talk confidently about the distribution of power and the lines and amounts of conflict, we would already be in a position to be able to explain political events. In other words, as a means to being able to describe the situation in terms of power and conflict, we would have to build up information and ways of analysing that information, so good, that we would indeed be able to explain political events. But the logical relationship among the elements would be, not that because we could talk about power and conflict we could explain political events but rather that because we could explain political events, we could talk about power and conflict.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1974 , pp. 189 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1974

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References

1 ‘Truth’ in Philosophical Papers, p. 98.

2 Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oslo, n.d. [circa 1971].

* Author’s Note. This paper was given at the Workshop on Political Theory of the European Consortium for Political Research held at Strasbourg on 28th March—4th April 1974. It will appear in a revised and expanded form in a volume of papers originally given at the Workshop, Power and Politics: Some European Perspectives (Wiley: forthcoming) edited by the author.