Journal article2025Dominik Tylka
CitationTylka, Dominik. “Człowiek czterowymiarowy – wizje jednostki w teoriach władzy Stevena Lukesa i Michela Foucaulta.” Teoria Polityki, no. 11 (2025): 187–210. https://doi.org/10.4467/25440845TP.25.011.21648.
Abstract
The article reconstructs the political anthropologies implicit in Steven Lukes’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of power. It compares the kinds of causality attributed to the individual in both approaches, distinguishing interactional, structural, epistemological and ontological dimensions. The comparison is used to identify the limits within which the human subject can be problematised in each theory and the theoretical justifications for those limits.
Author's summary
This article develops a framework that I regard as important for my broader research on power: theories of power always contain assumptions about what kind of actor the individual can be. By comparing Lukes and Foucault through four dimensions of causality, I show how different accounts of agency and subject formation lead to substantially different understandings of power.
Keywords
theory of power, three-dimensional theory of power, Steven Lukes, Michel Foucault, political anthropology, subjectivity
About the author
Dominik Tylka
Institute of Political Science and Public Administration, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw
Dominik Tylka is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science and Public Administration, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. His research focuses on social and political power, individual agency, and the conditions under which asymmetries of resources become effective and relatively durable relations of compliance. He is particularly interested in the interaction between social structures and individual responses, including obedience, adaptation, circumvention and resistance.