A response to Pamela Pansardi

In her article in this journal, Pamela Pansardi makes a number of important and original points about the relation between power to and power over. I here try to draw a somewhat different lesson from these points. I argue that her stress on our interdependence is making an important substantive, not conceptual, point; as a result, the concept of power as an ability concept is unaffected. I also suggest that our understanding of power over needs to be formulated more narrowly, and that we need a richer conceptual vocabulary to describe power in human interactions. Finally, Pansardi usefully draws attention to the difference between the terms power and ability, but does not succeed in demonstrating the redundancy of my distinction between ability and ableness.