An experiential theory of attraction-based influence (unintended and intended)

This chapter offers an experiential theory for intended and unintended attraction-based influence within a milieu of international competition and cooperation in a fractured Kantian international comity where preservation requires a ceiling on violence. Stepping aside briefly from political and international relations paradigms of dominance, it investigates one of six identified ways of considering attraction-based influence - experience of Kantian faculties of mind (cognition, feeling, and desire) - seen in use of the term soft power. Faculties of mind are metaphorized as ‘heart’ and ‘mind’. Experiential responses to perceived constitutive and performative virtue and virtuosity are linked to factors of attraction. Unintended attraction-based influence is nominated as soft [power], power being problematized here. All power is influence but not all influence is power, power being intended influence as argued by Lasswell and Kaplan. The ‘City-on-the-Hill effect’, when free of agential activation, is mapped here in a causal chain parallel to one with agential activation. The two paths converge on individuals’ experience of feeling (satisfaction/dissatisfaction); cognition - understanding/judgement/reason (approval/disapproval); and desire (motivation to act). Mannheim’s term valence (positive, negative, neutral) is selected to judge experience of soft power and soft [power] in cooperative and competitive national and international theatres of soft power.