Notes on the Elusiveness of Modern Power

Almost everyone agrees with Raymond Aron that power is not quantifiable and that the concept of power cannot play, in the study of international affairs, the role of the single yardstick which money plays in economics. And yet, since we are all convinced that politics in general, world politics in particular, entails a struggle for power, since many of us have been trained to stress the similarities between the behaviour of cities described by Thucydides and the conduct of states in this century, we tend to see in power, for all the diversity of its components and for all the complexity of its uses, a reasonably stable phenomenon, whose ingredients are not subject to incessant changes and whose exercise follows a limited and well-known number of imperatives or constraints.