Justice, Power, and Authority: How the Iapd Framework Clarifies the Roles of Social Actors

If we are to address today’s power imbalances and to know justice in the Anthropocene, social actors will need to know what power is. This paper presents a new conceptual analysis that distinguishes between four idealized types of social relationships: Influence, Authority, Power, and Domination ("the IAPD framework"). By focusing on only one type of social relationship, the so-called 'power debates' between Mills, Dahl, Bachrach & Baratz, Lukes, Foucault, Gaventa, and others, were too limited. By contrast, the IAPD framework takes social relationships as its starting point, allowing conceptual space for the full range of actual social interactions. Part 1 of the paper identifies the six properties inherent in social relationships: (1) identity, or the in-group/out-group membership (Plato’s The Republic, Popper (1945, 1947), Habermas, Cronin, & De Greiff, 1998); (2) scope, the where, when, and what of the relationship (Dahl 1987); (3) intensity, the depth of feeling (Mann 1986); (4) possibility, meaning rights, options, and choice (Hirschman 1970, Frankl 1984); (5) sanction, the extent to which punishment, clemency, deprivation, and reward are normalized in the relationship (Machiavelli 2014 [1532], Lasswell & Kaplan 1950); and (6) well-being, the objective interests and subjective values of the members in the relationship (Gaventa 1986, Nyman & Nilsén 2016, Wilkinson & Pickett 2019, Sen 2000). Part 2 briefly shows how the IAPD framework can be applied to clearly and reliably distinguish power relationships from relationships of influence, authority, and domination. Part 3, argues that there is an inherent tension between justice, power, and authority. From a normative perspective, moral authority relationships, with their basis in membership well-being, minimize sanction; yet enforcement mechanisms, in particular punishment, are a defining characteristic of power relationships. It will be shown that, in practice, social actors pursing justice carefully balance these two competing demands.