Empowerment and obsolescence: Rejecting the self-transcending power claim

Abstract Some accounts of power seek to show the value of the exercise of power by one party over another. One influential account of this sort is Wartenberg’s (1990) transformative account. According to the transformative account, some uses of power-over are to be valued in virtue of the fact that they empower the party over whom power is exercised by developing that party’s abilities or capacities. However, only some empowering uses of power are to be vindicated: those that are self-transcending, that seek to bring about a situation in which the exercise of power over the subordinate agent eventually becomes unnecessary. The limits placed by the transformative account are curious, leaving seemingly benign uses of power-over out in the cold. In this paper I seek to show that these particular limits are misguided: empowering uses of power-over need not be self-transcending.