A working list of definitions.
Power is the capacity to bring about outcomes: by acting directly, by shifting another agent’s behaviour, by setting the conditions under which others act, or by producing agents and possibilities that didn’t exist before. It comes in five overlapping forms. The English word “power” smears across all five; pulling them apart is most of the work.
Power-to is the capacity to act (to make, to bring something about) independent of any other agent. A solo inventor with a working prototype has it without power over anyone. It is the substrate of the rest: you can’t shift B, sustain a structure, or write the rules without first being able to act. When people demand “more power” in their lives, they usually mean this.
Agentic power is the capacity of one agent to shift another’s behaviour toward outcomes the first prefers, against the second’s resistance, across some domain. A has power over B to the degree B’s behaviour tracks A’s preferences more than it would in A’s absence: no counterfactual gap, no power. It is capacity, not exercise (an unfired gun is still a threat), and always over some domain: a landlord controls where a tenant sleeps, not what they read.
Structural power is the capacity of a system (a market, a bureaucracy, a body of law, a norm, an infrastructure) to shift behaviour against people’s preferences with no agent willing the shift. The signature matches agentic power; the counterfactual differs: there is no A to remove. A worker taking a low wage is coerced not by the employer but by the labour market, a structure with no author, experienced by those inside it as a fact of the world rather than a thing being done to them.
Constitutive power is the capacity to set the structure others then operate inside: to write the rules, pick the defaults, design the platform, draw the map. Agentic in form (someone wills it into being), its effect runs through structural power (once embedded, it shifts behaviour without further input). It is the highest leverage per unit effort (a structure shapes every interaction it mediates, for as long as it lasts), then decays into structural power with no author, which is why old constitutive choices are so hard to undo.
Generative power is the capacity to produce new agents, capacities, desires, or possibilities: to bring into existence what wasn’t there before, rather than shift or arrange what already is. The other four operate on a given set of agents and options; this one changes the set. It runs opposite to the standard image of power: it gives you wants and self-conceptions you wouldn’t otherwise have had. It is the hardest to resist: by the time you can name yourself its subject, it has already made the “you” who would resist.
An egalitarian society simultaneously raises the floor of power-to, caps concentrations of power-over, distributes constitutive power broadly, and biases structural power toward enabling rather than constraining. Four dials, not one: win on one while losing the others and it isn’t egalitarian. The floor, not the average, is what counts; power-over is capped rather than abolished, since the target is to prevent domination, not authority; and the rule-writing is distributed, the dial most often left out and the one that quietly sets the rest. They have to move together or they undo each other.
Legitimacy is the property that makes power voluntarily accepted by those subject to it: legitimate power runs on compliance, illegitimate on enforcement. It is a property power can have, not a sixth form: any of the kinds above can be legitimate, illegitimate, or contested. Two senses get confused. Descriptive: those subject to it actually accept it as rightful, a fact about behaviour. Normative: it meets an external standard (consent, procedural fairness, justice), a claim about what ought to be acceptable. They come apart both ways: a regime can be widely accepted yet unjust (most stable tyrannies), or normatively legitimate yet rejected on the ground (most failed reforms).