ix Writers on power have often complained that the word does not exist in a verb form, at least in English. The difference between "having" and "exercising" power - a version of the actual/potential distinction - is thought to be obscured by the absence of a verb form, a problem that does not arise with "influence" or "control." [JLJ - one can "power" one's way through a situation, one can "struggle", "force", "compel", "make someone do something", "pressure", "constrain", "strangle" etc.]

p.1 The most general use of the word 'power' in English is as a synonym for capacity, skill, or talent. This use encompasses the capacity to engage in certain kinds of performance, or 'skill' in the strict sense, the capacity to produce an effect of some soft on the external world, and the physical or psychological energies underlying any and all human performances - the 'power to act' itself, as it were.

p.6 Power is often defined as a capacity to control or influence others. [JLJ - human beings possess a capability to ponder the world they live in and make predictions about what will happen next. Critical to this is the concept of power. Power can exist as a concept in the mind, used to predict, plan and anticipate, or it can be attached to an expression of (or latent potential for) social coercion in the real world. The mind ultimately ponders how to "go on" - perhaps all discussion of power relates back to thought - how to go on in a complex world which contains cues and clues to the schemes of those we interact with.

p.7 Power is sometimes said to be potential rather than actual, to be 'possessed' without being 'exercised', when others carry out the wishes or intentions of the power holder without his ever actually having issued a command to them or even having interacted with them at all to communicate his aims. Carl Friedrich has called such cases 'the rule of anticipated reactions'... Robert Bierstedt is entirely correct in maintaining that 'it may seem redundant to say so, but power is always potential'.

p.7-8 For A's power over B to be real when it is not actually exercised, B must be convinced of A's capacity to control him and must modify his behaviour accordingly.

p.8 When power is regarded as a capacity, therefore, and when it is understood to include B's acts based on his anticipations of A's reaction to them, the distinction between latent and manifest, or potential and actual, power is implicit in the very definition of power.

p.21 power... the capacity to produce intended and foreseen effects on others

p.22-23 Goldhamer and Shils... write: 'A person may be said to have power to the extent that he influences the behaviour of others in accordance with his own intentions.'

p.75 it is to the advantage of the power holder to possess the capacity to wield different forms of power, and the more so the more extensive the power relation

p.125 The stress on resources is reminiscent of Hobbes's definition of power as 'man's present means to any future apparent good'. Possession of means or resources that may be employed to wield power over others is not, however, any guarantee that they will in fact be so employed.

p.126-127 Friedrich's well-known phrase 'the rule of anticipated reactions'. People may react to the possessor or controller of resources by anticipating the effective use of these resources to control their own actions. For this anticipatory reaction to take place, however, they must know or believe that someone actually possesss the relevant resources and that there is a reasonable probability of his using them to wield power should their own actions or inactions fail to accord with what they may take to be his wishes... It is preferable therefore to use the term 'latent' rather than 'potential' to indicate the double sense of power as a a dispositional concept, for 'latent' suggests the covert presence of something actually affecting a situation in constant to the weaker implication of 'potential' that something may assert its presence under purely hypothetical or counter-factual conditions.

p.141 it must be emphasized that any group by virtue of its sheer existence as a group constitutes a collective resource - actual, potential or possible.

p.143 imputed power may also sometimes lead to actual power

p.144 Hannah Arendt acknowledges the primacy of collective resources in her definition of power when she writes that

power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.

p.149 the sheer existence of a group, of any group, in itself constitutes a potential collective resource for political use.