What is social power? How does it fit into the world of institutions, practices, rules, and norms in which we live our lives? Of what does the authority of a president or the informal power of a fashion guru exist?

A peculiar fact of the field of social ontology – concerned as it is with concepts like institutions and collective action – is that social power has been almost completely missing from it. In this book, Åsa Andersson rectifies this deficiency. She provides a new approach to the conceptual analysis of social power and explains the forms it takes, using recent developments in social ontology. The various forms of social power share a common feature; they depend for their existence on collective intentionality.

Andersson also offers a critical discussion of John Searle’s, Margaret Gilbert’s, and Raimo Tuomela’s work, probably the most important theories of the social world available today. She concludes with an investigation of normativity in relation to the social world, arguing that moral facts are social facts.

ÅSA ANDERSSON is a philosopher at Lund University.