Skip to content

2 min read

Steven Lukes

Summary

Steven Lukes is a British political theorist and Professor at New York University; author of Power: A Radical View (1974, 2005), in which he developed the three faces (or dimensions) of power: the first face (decision-making power — who wins on visible issues), the second face (agenda-setting power — who decides which issues are decided), and the third face (preference-shaping power — who shapes others’ perceptions of their own interests).

Key idea in this wiki

  • The three-dimensions framework is what power-mapping and stakeholder-analysis build on when sorting visible conflict from invisible preference-shaping: a campaign that maps only first-face power misses the agenda-setters and the preference-shapers; the Tectónica organising network treats the three-dimensions framework as the standard analytical tool for international-development power analysis [source: tectonica-organising-network].
  • Lukes’s three faces of power underwrites the wiki’s power-analysis concept as the diagnostic discipline that names which face the campaign is engaging.
  • The third face concept — that the most powerful actors in any system are those who shape others’ preferences without their awareness — is the analytical case for the wiki’s framing-and-narrative concept: any campaign that fails to shape the frame cedes the third face of power to the opponent.
  • The Lukes-Gaventa-VeneKlasen-Miller lineage (see thinkers/john-gaventa, thinkers/veneklasen-miller) is the wiki’s primary power-analysis lineage.

Why campaigners read him

Campaigners read Steven Lukes because Power: A Radical View (1974, expanded 2005) gives the power-analysis tradition its most-cited three-faces diagnostic: the first face (decision-making), the second face (agenda-setting), and the third face (preference-shaping) [source: tectonica-organising-network]. A campaign that maps only the first face misses the agenda-setters and the preference-shapers, who are usually the more powerful actors. The wiki uses Lukes in power-mapping as the analytical depth below the standard one-axis stakeholder map, in framing-and-narrative as the diagnostic for why the message’s frame matters at the preference-shaping layer. The wiki pairs Lukes with john-gaventa and veneklasen-miller as the three-thinker power-analysis canon.

Learn more

Open Questions

  • The three faces of power framework has been contested in political theory since 1974; the wiki treats it as a useful diagnostic rather than as a settled empirical claim.

Sources & verification

  • [power-a-radical-view](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary work, link-only
  • [lukes-power-3d](sourcing target — source page pending) — secondary reference

Last verified: 2026-07-03