Introduction and Comments

Extract

What unites most articles in this issue of Perspectives is the search for power. The authors seek power for different reasons—to enable political leaders to be more effective, to eliminate its insidious effects on citizens and the polity, to end group-based strife, or to produce better social science theories. That the search for power would unify otherwise disparate articles is hardly surprising; if our discipline has any center toward which its many peripheries gravitate, it is the study of power in all of its many manifestations.