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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
Now that American political science is safely launched into its post-behavioral era, the study of community power has at long last been pried loose from the suffocating embrace of a mode of thought sometimes referred to as “pluralist.” This is liberating for pluralist and antipluralist alike; the former can no longer be sneered at for embodying or expressing or fomenting “conventional wisdom.” Indeed, on some campuses, it takes quite a lot of courage, not to say eccentricity, to harbor, let alone utter, a vagrant pluralist thought. Anti-pluralists are faced with the golden opportunity of themselves offering explanations of social and political behavior. Already, in fact, little tendrils of creativity are sprouting up, like the spring's first dandelions through the cracks of a disused sidewalk. It is, I think, too much to think of these as more than preliminary attempts at establishing a fresh new Consciousness of things political. And so it is not my thought to subject any of the major propositions that have so recently emerged to the increasingly irrelevant tests of outmoded paradigms, such as obedience to rules of logic, agreement with the preponderance of evidence, accuracy and contextual aptness of citation to earlier work, and so forth.
1 The most significant scientific demonstration of this fact is, of course, Easton, David, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” The American Political Science Review 63 (December, 1969) pp. 1051–1061.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 This Consciousness, numbered 3½, is not unlike one or two of those descried in the Reich, Second (Charles, the first being Wilhelm), The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar passim.
3 This concept was first announced by Kuhn, Thomas S. in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar In some quarters astute use of this idea has successfully replaced empirical demonstration in social scientific discourse.
4 Pluralism, as Shin'ya Ono points out, cannot be challenged on a purely empirical basis. It is an ingenious theory. To be sure we can point out certain tendencies in American society that seem to contradict its optimistic conclusions, but as long as we remain within the framework of purely “empirical” and “descriptive” analysis, we can never clarify the fundamental limitations of this general conception.
Ono, Shin'ya, “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” in McCoy, Charles A. and Playford, John, editors, Apolitical Politics (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967) pp. 104–105.Google Scholar
5 “Mlddletown has, therefore, at present what amounts to a reigning royal family. The power of this family has become so great as to differentiate the city today somewhat from cities with a more diffuse type of control. If, however, one views the Middletown pattern as simply concentrating and personalizing the type of control which control of capital gives to the business group in our culture, the Mlddletown situation may be viewed as epitomizing the American business-class control system … The business class in Middletown runs the city. The nucleus of business-class control is the X family. What the web of X wires looked like in 1935 may be seen from the following necessarily incomplete pattern of activities….”
Robert, S. and Lynd, Helen Merrell, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1937) pp. 77–78.Google Scholar
6 “In summary, it can be said that the upper classes together with the upper middle class, dominate the high control offices. They have a proportion of these offices far out of keeping with their representation in the general population.”
Lloyd Warner, W. and Lunt, Paul S., The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941) p. 372.Google Scholar
7 “The ‘little fellows’ are continually moved to perform their proper tasks by those above them. The roles defined for the understructure of power personnel are carefully defined in keeping with the larger interests. Their movements are carefully stimulated and watched at all times ta see that their various functions are performed… Each of these professions also has a role to play in the community activities consistent with its economic or professional role. Such roles do not ordinarily include policy-making.”
Hunter, Floyd, Community Power Structure (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953) pp. 108–109.Google Scholar
8 “The political system of New Haven is characterized by the presence of two sharply contrasting groups of citizens. The great body of citizens use their political resources at a low level; a tiny body of professionals within the political stratum use their political resources at a high level. Most citizens acquire little skill in politics; professionals acquire a great deal. Most citizens exert little direct and immediate influence on the decisions of public officials; professionals exert much more.”
Dahl, Robert A., Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) p. 305.Google Scholar
“Although leadership is diffused in Oberlin, the outcomes of community decisions are not merely random occurrences but fall instead into a rather well-defined pattern. From inspection of the leaders in the cases we have described, it appears that a rather broad coalition of interests, though its members occasionally disagree and suffer defeats, has been victorious on most issues of importance. This combination of the Co-op, some college people, out-of-town businessmen, and Negro leaders has, for the sake of convenience, been called ‘the planners.’”
Wildavsky, Aaron, Leadership in a Small Town (Totowa, N.J.: The Bedminster Press, 1964) pp. 267–268.Google Scholar
“… [I]t seems intuitively obvious that power is distributed unequally in society. But this … merely invites us to state the shape and durability of the inequality.”
Polsby, Nelson W., Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) p. 104.Google Scholar
9 Domhoff, G.William, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967) p. 5.Google Scholar
10 Christian Bay, with his usual acuity, has identified one probable such motive:
Freedom of speech and related freedoms have a strong appeal to most intellectuals, many of whom may become staunch conservatives because they believe in preserving their liberal democracy.
Bay, Christian, “Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Some Behavioral Literature,” American Political Science Review, Vol. LIX#1, March 1965 (reprinted in McCoy & Playford, op. cit., p. 24.Google Scholar
11 Deutsch, Jan G., “Neutrality, Legitimacy, and the Supreme Court: Some Intersections Between Law and Political Science,” Stanford Law Review 20, January 1968, p. 251.Google Scholar
12 Domhoff, op. cit., p. 144.
13 As Parenti discerns:
The Democratic party regulars were viewed as either indifferent or unsympathetic to ghetto needs. On the few occasions when they showed themselves responsive to the poor, it was in the performance of petty favors. They might “look into” a complaint by a mother that her welfare checks were not arriving, but they would not challenge some of the more demeaning and punitive features of the welfare system nor the conditions that fostered it. They might find a municipal job for a faithful precinct worker, but they would not advance proposals leading to a fundamental attack on ghetto unemployment. They might procure an apartment for a family but they would not ask the landlord, who himself was often a party contributor, to making (sic) house improvements, nor would they think of challenging his right to charge exorbitant rents.
Parenti, Michael, “Power and Pluralism: A View from the Bottom,” Journal of Politics 32, August 1970, p. 525 (fn 43).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Ibid., p. 513.
15 Ibid., p. 525.
16 On this point we have the cogent testimony of a leading Congressional scholar:
Political discourse is full of such words as “reasonable,” “responsible,” etc. Most American political scientists, for example, seem to view the risk-taking of the Kennedy response at the time of the so-called missile crisis as, in some sense, “reasonable.” Similarly, the policy of a dominant elite, such as the policy of the war in Vietnam with its maiming and destruction, is viewed as “reasonable” by most political scientists, at least in the sense implied by the statement “reasonable men can disagree.” What would it mean, though, to call it “unreasonable,” that is, to indicate one's belief that the paradigm on which it is based is substantially without foundation in the empirical world? Few of us would hesitate, in the classroom, to view the Nazi image of the world as “unreasonable”; is it anything more than parochial attachment to the United States which prevents a similar recognition in the case of Vietnam?
Levinson, Sanford, “On ‘Teaching’ Political ‘Science’”, in Power and Community, Green, Philip and Levinson, Sanford, eds. (N.Y.: Random House, 1970) p. 71.Google Scholar
17 For the urban blacks of Newark who had the temerity to fight city hall, there exists the world of the rulers and the world of the ruled, and whether or not the first world is composed of a monolithic elite or of intramurally competing groups does not alter the fact that the blacks find themselves inhabiting the second. What impresses them and what might impress us is that the visible agents of the ruling world, a “plurality of actors and interests” — vehicle and transit authorities, the landlords and reality (sic) investors, the mayor, the City Council, the political machines, the courts, and the police — displayed a remarkable capacity to move in the same direction against some rather modest lower-class claims.
Parenti, op. cit., p. 519.
18 Of course, any elementary methods text will reveal that mere correlation may demonstrate a relationship running in either direction, but this is something much more impressive, dealing as it does with causality. See, for example, Anderson, Theodore R. and Zeldltch, Morris Jr., A Basic Course in Statistics 2nd edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1968) pp. 126–132.Google Scholar
19 Bachrach, Peter and Baratz, Morton S., “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review LVI, December 1962.Google Scholar
20 Or, as Deutsch says:
The important question, then, the question that Dahl never asks in connection with, for example, the power of the citizens' action commission, is whether that commission failed to assert itself because it was powerless or because, given the program as proposed by the mayor, it was indifferent to further modifications. The inquiry is whether the commission's failure to oppose the mayor's proposals represents an index of powerlessness or can be explained, rather, by the hypothesis that the mayor never proposed to the commission anything that he thought that body might reject, if the latter hypothesis is true, and the mayor would in fact have formulated different proposals had he thought the commission would accept them, who then holds power in New Haven?
Op. cit., p. 251.