Power, Authority, Domination Amedeo Bertolo (1983)

First published in 1983, this influential essay deals with the crucial problem of defining what anarchists mean when they talk about “power”. Bertolo highlights the need to go beyond pragmatic/heuristic definitions and unpack the complex conceptual knot of power, engaging with both historical and etymological aspects on the semantics of power. Whilst anarchism can be considered the most radical critique of domination to date both in theory and practice, a theory of power is still missing from the anarchist intellectual imaginary. Bertolo breaks down the concepts into three notions: power, domination, and authority, and tries to answer the question: to what extent does power include functions which belong specifically to a relationship of domination? Drawing from anthropology, biology, and political thought, Bertolo develops some intriguing hypotheses on the genesis of domination in human history and on the relationships between domination and power and their implications for anarchism.