The Phenomenon of Power: The Social and Psychological Foundations of Power Relations

Today, in the academic environment and on the practical level, many methods are used to assess the motive of collective and internal (personal) power. At the same time, less and less attention is being paid to the issue of the phenomenon of power itself, epistemological and ontological side of it. In this work, variety of approaches to the analysis of the phenomenon of power are considered, evidence is provided that power, first of all, has a social basis and the motive of expanding power is an internal engine for all human activity. In order to form clear definitions related to such a complex phenomenon, it became necessary to integrate the ideas of power of many authors. However, due to the breadth of the notion of power, it is difficult to reduce it to one simple definition. The reader needs to understand the impossibility of fully covering everything related to the phenomenon of power in one scientific article. One of the indirect goals pursued in this work is to revive the discussion about the foundations of the concept of power and power relations.