On structural power

This article engages Rainer Forst’s account of structural power, as elaborated in Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification. Its central claim is that structural power works, not only through what Forst calls ‘justificatory narratives’, but also through institutionalized and objectified social norms. When norms are institutionalized, they define incentive structures, which people internalize as motivational systems. When they are objectified, they produce intersubjectively shared, practical know-how, which people learn corporeally. Forst’s commitment to a cognitivist account of power limits his capacity to explain structural power, since social structures work, not just through, but also around human cognition.