Weber’s expression ‘chance’ entails two further plausible, closely related characteristics of power:

1. First, power refers to a probability of complete assurance of a given party’s success.
2. Secondly, power is always potential because it refers not so much to the doing of something (to the actual “production of effects”, proposed by others as an alternative definition of power) but to the capacity of doing something, of producing effects if and when one chooses.

In other words, power does not need to be exercised (by overcoming opposition or otherwise) in order to exist. Paradoxically, the exercise of power may consume it and/or expose it, when actually brought to bear, to the risk of being found wanting, of failing to do its number as it were. Rather, power is at its most powerful when those subject to practise their subjection to it without its being actually exercised, when it operates through the power subjects’ memory of past exercises of it or their imagination of future ones, when it needs to be at most symbolically represented rather than actually put into action.

References

Weber, Max. 1940. Class, Status, and Party. New York: Free Press.

Weber, Max. Economy and Society. G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958.

Shills, Edward. (1971/1960). Mass Society and Its Culture. In Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning (Eds.). Mass Culture Revisited. New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: New American Library.

Durkeim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press, 1964a; orig. 1893.