International Relations scholars are certain about two facts: power is the defining concept of the discipline and there is no consensus about what that concept means. One explanation for this problematic state of the field is that most International Relations scholars freight their analyses of power with hidden assumptions about time. Temporality is an essential component of political analysis, as a burgeoning literature has begun to explore. This paper argues that there are two latent presumptions about time that fundamentally affect how scholars conceptualize power in world politics. First, scholars are rarely explicit in defining the temporal scope of their key causal processes. The longer the implicit temporal scope, the more expansive their definition and operationalization of power can be. Second, there is considerable variation of beliefs about the temporal returns to power: does exercising or accumulating power generate positive or negative feedback effects over time? Relying on canonical works in the field, this paper examines the hidden assumptions that different paradigms make about power and time. Illuminating these assumptions clarifies the root of cross-paradigmatic disagreements about international politics and suggests some interesting pathways for future theoretical and empirical work.

国际关系学者对以下两个事实有把握：权力是该学科的定义概念，而对该概念的含义尚无共识。对这一领域存在问题的一种解释是，大多数国际关系学者将对权力的分析都带有对时间的隐藏假设。随着新兴文学的开始探索，临时性是政治分析的重要组成部分。本文认为，关于时间的两个潜在推论从根本上影响学者们如何在世界政治中概念化权力。首先，学者很少明确定义其关键因果过程的时间范围。隐含的时间范围越长，它们对权力的定义和可操作性就越广泛。第二，关于暂时的权力回报，人们的信念有很大不同：行使或积累权力会随着时间的推移产生正面或负面的反馈作用吗？依靠该领域的经典著作，本文研究了不同范式关于力量和时间的隐藏假设。阐明这些假设可以澄清关于国际政治的跨范式分歧的根源，并为未来的理论和实证研究提供一些有趣的途径。