This a conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke that took place at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main on 12 April 2010. The conversation begins with some thoughts on the concept of power, in particular, on Foucault's and Arendt's respective interpretations of this concept. It then moves to consider the complex interrelationships between power and recognition, addressing questions such as the relationship between domination and social struggle, the transmission of subordinating social and cultural norms by way of the structural asymmetries of the parent–child relationship and the possibility of distinguishing valid or freedom‐enabling modes of recognition from ideological or dominating ones.

This article discusses the role of Islam in Turkish politics from a power politics perspective. The central role attributed to Islam stems from both institutionalized power blocs in Turkish politics and the concentration of power play on the issue of Islam. The article argues that the real struggle is not about the prevention of a possible threat of religious fundamentalism to the secular character of the state, but it is a matter of who controls the public sphere and public opinion. Finally, it suggests that in order to normalize power politics and integrate it into the democratic process, it is necessary to redefine the public sphere and to open it to plural means of participation and new political actors.

In this article, we investigate the relationship between space and the state. We argue that this relationship is largely ignored by writings on the state and state formation within Sociology and International Relations. To analyse the space–state relationship, we focus on spatial practice which configures space in a particular historical context. We suggest that political organisation is always conditioned by a particular configuration of space specific to its historical context, while at the same time, space can serve as a medium of power to reconfigure these very relationships. In turn, the state territory is both conditioned by a spatial reality, and at the same time, a conscious effort to shape space as a means of power for the state. Illustrating this historically, we present two different examples where we investigate the spatial practice of state formation. First, the case of state formation in early modern Denmark illustrates the territorialisation of European states in early modern Europe. Second, the formation of an Israeli state after WWII illustrates how a state was created within an international system already based on a sovereign territorial order, and also, suggests the development of new territorial practices.

This essay makes both empirical and theoretical claims. Empirically, it develops one of the first sociological approaches to the recently completed 2008 Presidential campaign in the USA. Theoretically, it offers a cultural‐sociological challenge to the kinds of instrumentalist, materialist, and institutionalist approaches that have been central to power studies. In democratic societies, the struggle for ultimate power is a symbolic conflict. The goal is to become a certain kind of collective representation, one that embodies the ideals of the civil sphere. The struggle to represent the civil sphere is performative, of sculpting an image and projecting it to fragmented audiences. Such efforts to fuse actor and audience are mediated by relatively independent interpretive processes, launched not only by political and social antagonists but by the very mass media upon which the successful projection of messages depend. For this reason, successful struggles for civil power are highly contingent. One must not only become a hero but a hero inside of civil society, working the binaries that confer and undermine legitimacy, but one must also work the boundaries, framing the relations that connect the civil sphere with such noncivil spheres as economy, race, gender, and religion, boundaries that are fluid and subject to construction.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Hoy is more open to Žižek's radical rethinking of the notion of ideology, since this is grounded in a thorough‐going rethinking of such associated concepts as false consciousness, subjectivity, truth and reality (see pp. 214–226).

London, Routledge, 2007, 256 pp., ISBN: 978‐0‐415‐42781‐4, $160 (hardback); ISBN: 978‐0‐415‐42782‐1, $49.95 (paperback). Though it has taken some 30 years, the sociology of emotions has finally com...

This article explores the relationship between habitus and social power. It is argued that legitimacy and violence constitute an alternative basis of social power. The former is based upon habitus, while the latter is an extension of natural power. The complex processes whereby the state’s monopoly on violence and education are used to create habitus, thus legitimacy, are explored. The complex relationship between power legitimacy and habitus emerge as central to making sense of three‐dimensional power, hegemony, discourse formation, symbolic violence and democracy.

Dahl's classic analysis of power needs a few more or less minor corrections and it needs to be extended so that power can be exercised other than by punctual actions and can have other than punctual effects. But corrected and extended in this way, it provides a base from which it is possible to articulate a number of radical points of view and, in particular, to define the sort of control or domination that is opposed to freedom, on the traditional republican conception.

This article examines the concept of ‘domination’ as it is treated in the second edition of Steven Lukes’ (2005) Power: A radical view. It argues that Lukes’ conception of domination is preoccupied with the condition of being dominated, neglecting to adequately define dominance and the relationship of domination. This conceptual imbalance is closely related to intrinsic problems of distinguishing between domination and ‘social control’ more generally. The conclusion offers a provisional, disaggregated ‘ensemble’ of concepts for talking about different modes of domination with different attendant moral implications, suggesting a need for a less monolithic conception of domination.