If we pause for a moment and consider the recent proliferation of material that takes empowerment as its subject matter, we are confronted with a bewildering choice of approaches. From starry-eyed proselytizers to hard-nosed critics, from devoted disciples to cynical nay-sayers, it seems that everyone has to take a position on empowerment now. Indeed, empowerment is bandied about so promiscuously these days that it is in danger of suffering from what the historian Edward Peters called "semantic atrophy"--i.e., a word gets used so often and in so many inappropriate situations that it tends to lose its usefulness, even when it could be most helpful. Because empowerment is such a prime candidate for this kind of rhetorical debasement, one might think that the world is crying out for a book that cuts through the mire to come up with a parsimonious definition so that we can all systematically work through its analytical implications. Wendt has taken up this challenge with alacrity, but, in doing so, he has turned it on its head by showing that developing one stable and universal definition of empowerment is probably impossible and certainly undesirable. In fact, there are any number of possible definitions of empowerment that are, to a greater or lesser extent, founded on some kind of paradox, hence the title of his book.
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