Comprehending Power in Christian Social Ethics

Christine Firer Hinze examines how socio-political power has been modeledin recent social theory and Christian ethics, and considers its theological andsociological underpinnings. The interaction of two models of power, "power over"and "power to" is traced in the works of selected religious (Reinhold Niebuhr,Jacques Maritain, Paul Tillich, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and social (MaxWeber, Karl Marx, Hannah ARendt, Michel Foucault, and Anthony Giddens) theoristsof the past century. Hinze advances a constructive argument in favor of a theorythat systematically integrates power's superordinating and collaborativefeatures, and does so in a manner that coheres with the ethicist's underlyingtheological and sociological commitments. Appealing to a variety of warrants,she offers a comprehensive approach to power that takes "power to" as itsdescriptive and normative starting point and relegates "power over" to a limitedand strictly instrumental role in socio-political practice.