The Genealogy of American Pluralism: From Madison to Behavioralism

Author(s): John G. Gunnell

Source: International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique, Vol.
17, No. 3, Traditions in Pluralist Thought. Traditions de la pense pluraliste (Jul., 1996), pp.
253-265
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InternationalPolitical ScienceReview (1996), Vol. 17, No. 3, 253-265

The Genealogy of American Pluralism:

From Madison to Behavioralism

JOHN G. GUNNELL

ABSTRACT. Although the concept of pluralism is often equated with democ-

racy in the language of American political science, and in accounts of
contemporary trends toward democratization in other countries, both the
critique of pluralist theory that began in the 1960s and the early history
of the concept suggest the need to reflect on that equation. Pluralism is
a concept that often appears in the language of politics, but its systematic
meaning is largely a function of its use in talking about politics in the
discursive universe of political science. The genealogy of pluralism as a
descriptive and normative concept in American political science reveals a
great deal about both the evolution of the discipline and its understand-
ing of its relationship to politics.

The great task in the study of any form of social life is the
analysis of these groups.... When the groups are adequately
stated, everything is stated. -ARTHUR BENTLEY

The word "pluralists" may be properly applied to these inves-

tigators since they deal with the plurality of observed group
forms. -EARL LATHAM

John Dickinson, writing in the American Political Science Review in 1930, claimed that
"the transformation of aristocratic Germany into a stable republic under the presi-
dency of von Hindenburg is one of the spectacular miracles in the long story of
democratic advance" (1930: 286). This claim was based on the assumptions that a
theory of democracy could be derived from the practice of American politics and
that democracy could be defined in terms of pluralism and the process of group
conflict and compromise. The subsequent fate of Weimar led some to question this
equation, and throughout the 1960s, pluralism, as both an empirical and normative
theory in American political science, was subjected to a pervasive indigenous

0192-5121 96/03 253-13 ? 1996 International Political Science Association

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254 The Genealogyof AmericanPluralism

critique (Schattschneider, 1960; Wolin, 1960; McConnell, 1966; Lowi, 1969).

Mancur Olson, Jr., one of the critics, suggested that "it would be difficult to trace
exactly the development of the view that pressure groups are generally beneficial,
or at least benign" (1965). It is, however, the ancestry of this view to which this
article is devoted.
Understanding the evolution of the concept of pluralism reveals a great deal
about the main lines of the development of American political science and, conse-
quently, about the intellectual migration that has contributed to the constitution
of the discipline in other countries. Pluralism has been the dominant ideology of
democracy in twentieth-century American political science as well as one of the
discipline's central research programs. The contemporary emphasis on democracy
and democratization in Eastern Europe and other locations has also characteristi-
cally been articulated in pluralist terms but often with little reflection on the
problematic character of this image of democratic society in the United States.
Political studies in the United States during the nineteenth century were
centered around the concept of the state. This bias was most immediately a conse-
quence of the transplantation of German philosophy through the emigre Francis
Lieber, the founder of systematic political inquiry in the United States, and the
educational experiences of succeeding figures such as Theodore Woolsey and John
W. Burgess. The focus on the state, however, involved something that was not
always apparent in the juristic language of Austinian analysis and organic images
drawn from German historical philosophy.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a positive attitude was attached to the
concept of democracy, and the United States was conceived as a democratic repub-
lic. Democracy was basically understood in terms of limited government serving as
the agent of a community of individuals composing the nation-state. The search for
the state was a search for the people or the public entity that seemed essential for a
theory of popular sovereignty but that was not visible in an increasingly diverse and
fragmented society (Gunnell, 1990). By the beginning of the twentieth century, the
state remained the subject of political science, but the concept of the state was becom-
ing increasingly identified with the machinery and institutions of government.
The recession of the traditional theory of the state raised questions about the
nature of democracy, and it was accompanied by a growing, if often critical, focus
on groups and group interests as the moving forces in politics. These tendencies
were catalyzed by two complementary events. The first was the strong negative
reaction, after the onset of World War I, to the German philosophy that had
inspired the theory of the state. The second was the critique, largely represented
and initiated by the work of Harold Laski (1919, 1921), of the traditional or monist
conception of state sovereignty. This was the vehicle through which a conversation
about pluralism explicitly entered the discourse of political science (Gunnell, 1994).
Although there are grounds for suggesting that the theory of American politics had
been pluralist since TheFederalistPapers(Cooke, ed., 1961), the continuities are less
evident than often assumed.
The image of human nature and social reality that Madison and Hamilton evoked
challenged the idea of social homogeneity and public virtue on which traditional
republican theory had been predicated. In a world characterized by the pursuit of
self-interest and the existence of "factions and convulsions," a new theory and
science of government was required in order to prevent the failures that had charac-
terized past experiments in popular government. The basic problem, they argued,
was domestic faction springing from diverse social and economic interests. Madison's

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 JOHN G. GUNNELL 255

answer to this pathology was to find a cure for the disease by rendering it acute,
that is, to inhibit the power of factions that sought goals inimical to the aggregate
public good by extending their number and activity over a large territory.
While the idea of popular government had traditionally been identified with
majority rule, Madison's primary concern was with what he called a "majority
faction" which might gain control of the government. The effects of factions could,
however, be controlled socially and institutionally within a properly devised consti-
tutional structure. Representative government would in various ways, he claimed,
refine and consolidate interests, but the principal achievement of an extended
republic, as opposed to a small democracy, would be the proliferation of parties and
interests. It would be, in Madison's words, "a Republican remedy for the diseases
most incident to Republican government."
Although the people were designated as the ultimate font of power and
sovereignty, "people" referred basically to the sum of individuals and their aggre-
gated interests as expressed in factions and parties. Their role was not to govern,
and Madison claimed that what was novel about the new system was that it created
a "wholly popular" form of government, but one in which there was a "total exclu-
sion of the people in their collective capacity." The problem was to "first enable
the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control
itself" by "contriving the interior structure of government" to keep it in balance.
Liberty would be preserved by creating within government "opposite and rival inter-
ests," and ensuring that the interests and powers of the different branches
overlapped to ensure equilibrium through conflict and through shared functions.
This was to be complemented by social diversity.
In modern society, it was not only necessary, Madison argued, "to guard the
society against the oppression of rulers; but to guard one part of society against the
injustice of the other part." This could be achieved by "creating in the society so
many separate descriptions of citizens, as will render an unjust combination of a
majority of the whole, very improbable, if not impracticable .... Whilst all author-
ity . .will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be
broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of
individuals, or of the majority, will be in little danger from interested combinations
of the majority." The answer to liberty and the public good was ultimately "the
multiplicity of interests, and . .the multiplicity of sects."
Although Madison's theory would eventually be resurrected and presented as consis-
tent with later accounts of pluralism, it had minimal impact on the development of
democratic theory during the following century and a half. And while it is always tempt-
ing to make Tocqueville's Democracyin America (Mayer, ed., 1969), with its emphasis on
associations and decentralized government, part of the story of American pluralist
thought, there is little to suggest that Tocqueville had much to do with the character
and direction of the American conversation about pluralism-even though his analysis
may reveal a great deal about the nature, and problems, of pluralist society.
Tocqueville's model was based in part on the communes, guilds, and professional
corporations of medieval society, which he saw both as a check on central govern-
ment and as enclaves of freedom and proto-republican life which could, in the
modern era, take the form of the "voluntary association of the citizens." He saw
difficulties, however, in achieving public freedom of this kind in a large state, and
his recommendation was for a decentralized political order which, through the
creation of associations and local communities, would "multiply to an infinite extent
opportunities of acting in concert." He believed that this was manifest in the New

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256 The Genealogyof AmericanPluralism

England township and other municipal institutions. Even in America, however,

there were threats to the kind of public liberty that Tocqueville had in mind.
His overriding, and dramatically expressed, fear was that of the tendency in
democratic society toward a self-negating individualism and equality which left
individuals isolated and weak and "no longer bound together by ideas, but by inter-
ests." Much of what Tocqueville had in mind was the new spirit of commerce and
the pursuit of economic self-interest which, he believed, depoliticized society and
drew people away from public affairs and communal activity. Under these condi-
tions, the greatest danger to freedom was the authority of the "multitude" or major-
ity. The majority that Tocqueville feared was not a specific majority interest but a
mass public opinion. The principal answer, he believed, to the extremes of individ-
ualism and equality in America, and the anomic condition which they threatened
to create, was to continue to propagate public rather than social and economic
liberty. But he also saw benefit in the fact that there was a "habit of participation"
whereby "Americans of all ages, in all conditions, and all dispositions constantly
form associations."
Nineteenth-century American political scientists were not oblivious to the fact of
social and political pluralism, but they sought unity and a theory of democracy in
the idea of the state. And the Progressive realists of the early part of the twenti-
eth century, who perceived the proliferation of interests as inimical to the public
interest, embraced the institution of the state as a means of representing and effect-
ing the common good and democratic values. The state, however, began to lose
ground as an account of political reality.
Although often credited with being the seminal thinker in the American plural-
ist tradition, Arthur Bentley's The Processof Government(1908) had minimal direct
and immediate impact on the discourse of political science-and he never employed
the term "pluralism."Furthermore, his focus on groups was not quite as innovative
as often retrospectively implied. Bentley's work, however, was not unnoticed.
Charles Beard, for example, praised it, and although his analysis was more directly
informed by the theory of Columbia economist E.R.A. Seligman, Bentley, as well as
Seligman, could reasonably be construed as an influence on his EconomicInterpretation
of the Constitution(1913) and the thesis that what was really at work in the found-
ing was a conflict between economic interests. Bentley's analysis, however, was only
part of a transformation in the vision of political reality that took place after the
turn of the century as many social scientists, sharing in the Progressive muckrak-
ing spirit, rejected formalist and juristic studies, what Bentley called "soulstuff," in
favor of exposing realities of power and interest. Their concern was to awaken what
they believed was a latent democratic majority, and Bentley was distinctly part of
this tradition (Seidelman, 1985).
This dimension of his work was largely misunderstood and neglected (Kress, 1970;
Ward, 1984) as political scientists, by the end of the 1920s, were drawn toward his
vision of politics as group activity. Bentley argued that society was constituted by
interests manifest in group activity and that political groups were the most promi-
nent or closer to the "surface."Groups were defined largely in terms of their relation-
ship to other groups, and he rejected any natural or fixed classification of groups.
Bentley noted that "government" could be construed generically as equivalent to
politics or the interrelation and adjustment between groups, but, most narrowly, it
referred to a particular structure that performed certain functions. What Bentley
rejected was not so much the concept of the state as an institutional entity but the
idea of sovereignty, which he took to be metaphysical with no descriptive meaning.

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 JOHN G. GUNNELL 257

For Bentley, processes and relations of politics were largely matters of force and
pressure, and the constellation of groups and the existing equilibrium or order at
any point was the nature of society. Elements of government, such as the execu-
tive, the legislature, and the legal system were understood in terms of the interests
brought to bear on and expressed through them. The implications of this argument
for theories of popular government were apparent. Bentley claimed that the tradi-
tional ideas of the people ruling and the public interest were not really intelligible,
and that normative or formal distinctions between despotism and democracy were
of little use, since governments were always representative of the existing structure
of group interests. But he also made it clear that groups and interests were repre-
sented through the process of government. It would fall to Bentley's successors to
transform the description of what government represented into a theory of repre-
sentative government.
Although there was a growing sense that traditional notions of popular govern-
ment could not be sustained in the face of the new descriptions of how power was
exercised by various informal or nongovernmental organizations, what, in retro-
spect, might be called pluralism was still generally understood as a political pathol-
ogy. What Laski precipitated was largely a conversation that moved in the direction
of redeeming pluralism as a theory of democracy but in a manner that had little
resemblance to arguments such as that of The FederalistPapers.Laski's ideas were
in some respects quite similar to those of Tocqueville, but he gave no indication
that he was aware of the affinity.
In a series of works between 1917 and 1921, Laski not only criticized traditional
state theory and the monistic concept of sovereignty but also turned to pluralism
as both a "realistic" account of politics and as the basis of a new democratic theory.
Just as the idea of the state had been grounded in philosophical idealism and
metaphysical absolutism, Laski supported his account by turning to John Dewey's
pragmatism and to William James's image of a pluralistic universe in which the
whole was no more than its parts.
Laski argued that the state had no special moral authority and was only one of
a variety of associations and groups to which individuals belonged. Law and govern-
ment were grounded in nothing more than the opinion and tolerance of these
individuals and various associations ranging from churches to labor unions. Laski
believed that despite the dangers from economic autocracy, the United States with
its various levels of government and great variety of associations was in many ways
a model of pluralist politics, but he also both harked back to medieval images of
plural society and drew on modern ideas such as syndicalism and guild socialism.
Other voices such as that of Mary Parker Follett (1918) joined in articulating plural-
ism as a theory of group democracy, but the principal conversation centered around
Laski and the work of figures, such as Leon Duguit, John Neville Figgis, Frederic
William Maitland, and G.D.H. Cole, that he drew into the discussion.
There were few who quarreled directly with Laski's claim about the pluralistic
character of society or his rejection of the more metaphysical dimensions of tradi-
tional state theory. The concern was, first of all, the pragmatic one of how conflicts
between groups could be resolved unless the state possessed some special and
comprehensive authority, and, second, how, exactly, this added up to a theory of
popular government and liberal democracy. As a focused debate on these issues
emerged in the 1920s, the most comprehensive, vigorous, and sustained response
to Laski, as well as to the scientific realists, came from William Yandell Elliott at
Harvard (The PragmaticRevoltAgainstPolitics, 1928).

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258 The Genealogyof AmericanPluralism

Elliott agreed that the "whole structure of modern society is associational," but
he believed that the most important issue in modern political theory was that of
how much "autonomy" should be permitted to voluntaryassociations.Democratic
theory, he believed, required a sense of unity and right represented in the idea of
a political community and constitutional state, but this was being undermined by
pluralism, pragmatism, and a variety of contemporary theories and forms of polit-
ical practice at home and abroad including fascism and communism. He argued
that in both theory and practice, the group theory of politics threatened the ethic
of participation in a common moral and political life.
The fundamental problem, by the mid-1920s, was how to reconcile the facts of
group politics with the theory of liberal democracy or representative government,
but there was already some indication of the direction in which the conversation of
political science was moving. When Charles Merriam, who did so much to recon-
stitute the theory and practice of political science after World War I, reflected, in
1924, on "recent tendencies in political thought," the social features that he singled
out as characterizing the period all amounted to indications of greater pluralism.
And he saw one main line of theory as that initiated by the German Otto von
Gierke. This was the view of the state as a conglomerate of economic and profes-
sional groups rather than as a geographic and ethnic entity.
Merriam designated this as part of a "theory of 'political pluralism' " which
included not only Gierke's analysis of medieval society but also such contemporary
perspectives as those of syndicalism and guild socialism. He concluded that in
general "the pluralistic political theory may be looked upon as a rationalization of
actually existing and developing group solidarity, and in fact can be interpreted and
understood successfully in no other way" (Merriam, 1924: 29-30). For Merriam,
however, the concern was still one of overcoming diversity, exercising social control,
and pursuing democratic values through the medium of the state and public policy.
But in the same volume, Merriam's collaborator, the sociologist Harry Elmer
Barnes, offered a much more elaborate account of pluralism as both a description
of social reality and a theory of democratic society.
Barnes suggested that the theory of pluralism was the confluence of a number
of intellectual traditions. One was that represented in the ideas of Gierke and Laski.
Another was the work of the sociologist Albion Small, Bentley's teacher at Chicago,
who was responsible for bringing attention to European thinkers such as Gustav
Ratzenhofer. What all this amounted to, Barnes claimed, was a theory that held
that although the state and political institutions were "the highest manifestation
of association," they were the "product of a number of corporate groups." The
function of the state was that of "adjusting the relations of groups to each other
and to the state." The state could, Barnes argued, be construed as an "umpire"that
maintained order and prevented anarchy and undue exploitation (1924: 362-363).
Democracy was identified as a system in which "every interest group can express
itself and secure representation for itself in a fair and equitable manner." Barnes
claimed that this theory had created a crisis in the theory of democratic represen-
tation. Ideas based on geography or notions of a general will were myths, and
"representative institutions must be brought into harmony with the real purpose
and function of government" (1924: 377, 380-381).
By the mid-1920s, the idea of a rational and identifiable public as the bearer of
popular sovereignty had been badly eroded. This was represented in the work of
Walter Lippmann, who spoke of the "phantom public" (1925) and W.B. Munro, who
stressed the manner in which "all governments...are subject to the pressures of

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 JOHN G. GUNNELL 259

invisible influences" (1928: 1). The first major empirical study in political science
that can be construed as representing the group theory of politics was Peter
Odegard's account of the activity of the Anti-Saloon League in PressurePolitics
(1928). In this work, Odegard studiously avoided any discussion of the implications
of such a study for democratic theory. Within a short time, however, he concluded
that traditional parties could not adequately represent and that it was pressure
groups that aided in performing this function. "It is through such organizations that
the ordinary citizen finds true representation. Public opinion in any other sense
than organized group opinion is pretty much a phantom" (1930: 168).
It was, however, Pendelton Herring who, in his GroupRepresentation beforeCongress
(1929), took the decisive step, and, like Madison, once more transformed a disease
of democratic government into a theory of democracy.
Herring did not use the term pluralism in the original edition, but in a reissue,
at the height of the behavioral era (1967), he claimed that "the strong infrastruc-
ture provided by well-organized groups makes a pluralistic society a reality and a
representative system of government meaningful." He noted that the Progressive
movement had seen special interests as bad and had looked to a "somewhat disem-
bodied public opinion and nebulous public interest" (xi). Herring noted that his
acquaintance with Bentley's work had been minimal.
Since he originallyviewed his study as basically a descriptive account of an aspect of
how "groups,active, coherent, organized, are rising to places of increased importance
in the community,"he claimed that "the full significance of such a movement must be
left to the political theorist and the public" (xvii). Yet he did not altogether neglect the
normative implications. He noted that Laski and others had seen in group life a new
basis of democracy and a more representative and efficient form of government, and
what he was studying through his account of the recent expansion of groups and their
activity was, he suggested, nothing less than recent developments in "national repre-
sentation," a new idea of representation and of how "publicopinion" is expressed.
By 1930, Dickinson was representative of those who took an even more explicit
position. He claimed that democracy was in place and working despite appearances
to the contrary and that the time had come to ask anew "what political democracy
means." This required, he claimed, getting away from traditional democratic "theol-
ogy" and its "dogma," such as the idea of the will of the people, as well as attempts
to put such articles of faith into practice. "The only opinion, the only will, which
exists is the opinion, the will, of special groups." The legislature, he claimed, was
really a forum for interest groups, and government in general should be conceived
as an "arbitrator" (Dickinson, 1930: 287, 291).
Herring also soon became more pointed in his equation between the American
political process and democracy. He argued that "the public interest cannot be given
concrete expression except through the compromise of special claims and demands
finally effected. Special interests cannot be banished from the picture, since they
are the parts that make the whole" (1933: 917). His ultimate statement was just
prior to World War II in The Politics of Democracy (1940). Here he claimed that, along
with party integration and governmental accountability, political rationality was to
be found in the conflict and adjustment between interest groups. Democracy was
not a matter of theology and creeds, but the practice of tolerance and compromise.
He stated that he "would defend the myth of the public interest because by its very
vagueness it permits the freest interplay of group interests. .. .The dominant combi-
nation at any one time can claim that its program expresses the public interest"
(1940: 424-425).

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260 The Genealogyof AmericanPluralism

During the 1930s, there were mutually reinforcing empirical studies of group
activity and accounts of the new image of democracy which were contrasted with
totalitarianism. Democracy embodied diversity and compromise and was repre-
sented in American institutions and political behavior (Gunnell, 1993). By the early
1940s, a political scientist reviewing the, by then, extensive literature on pressure
groups concluded that such groups were "the modern expression of democracy by
the people and for the people" (Dillon, 1942: 481). When David Truman wrote his
classic account of group politics (1951) and harked back to Bentley as a "bench-
mark," it was a return to the idea of the group as a framework for political analy-
sis, but it also provided an image of American politics on which a theory of group
democracy could be predicated.
Truman set out to provide a general systematic account of groups and particu-
larly of the role of pressure groups or, as he preferred to call them, "interest
groups," in American government. Although he drew on a wide range of literature,
his aim was to transcend the persistent propensity to treat them as a "pathology."
Although he argued that groups were an essential part of any society and had always
been central to the practice and theory of American politics, they had assumed an
even larger place in modern life. He admitted that there might be reason for
concern about the role of groups in a democratic political order, but it was first
necessary to grasp accurately their actual operation in the governmental process.
Truman concluded that this process could not be understood apart from the
behavior of groups and particularly those that he called "organized and potential
interest groups" (1951: 502). The former had become as much a part of the polit-
ical system as parties and the formal constitutional institutions, and the latter, or
"unorganized"elements, represented an "ideological consensus" which determined
the "rules of the game." Although Truman did not deny that there could be a
"pathogenic" danger in group activity, his work was devoted primarily to describ-
ing and explaining how groups functioned in representative government, and he
made it clear that his study was intended in part to demonstrate not only that there
was no inclusive public interest but there need not be one.
His assessment was that government was a center of "interest-based" power to
which groups sought "access" and thereby produced government decisions. As long
as there were numerous points of access and reasonable opportunities for group
articulation, the process worked reasonably well. Balance or equilibrium was facil-
itated by checks and balances provided by "multiple or overlapping membership"
and by the limits produced by consensus. "It is thus multiple memberships in poten-
tial groups based on widely held and accepted interests that serve as a balance
wheel in a going political system like that of the United States" (1951: 514).
Truman's analysis of stability within representative government was in many
respects a conscious attempt to rearticulate the Madisonian image.
Earl Latham's work, published a year later, was more explicitly an attempt both
to endorse theoretically the emerging empirical pluralist theory and to disengage
it from its normative background-what he called an "analytical" rather than a
"philosophic" pluralism (1952: 9). But at a point at which political science was still
attempting to explain and defend its image of democracy, this distinction was diffi-
cult to maintain.
Robert Dahl's earliest work did not indicate any distinct attachment to the
normative pluralist tradition. On the contrary, what he addressed was the difficulty
of achieving rational foreign policy in the context of contemporary mass society
"where decisions are arrived at as a result of bargaining among a great variety of

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 JOHN G. GUNNELL 261

different groups" (1950: 261-262). But by the time of his collaboration with Charles
Lindblom in the early 1950s, he had joined a chorus of arguments about the
American political and economic system as one of self-correcting "countervailing
powers" (Galbraith, 1952). Dahl and Lindblom argued that the best approximation
of democracy, defined as equality and majority rule, was a process called
"polyarchy" whereby power was distributed among small groups. Much like
Madison, they concluded that "polyarchy, not democracy, is the actual solution" to
the problem of maintaining popular government (1953: 273, 275-276).
Their underlying contrast models were the United States and Russia, and they
described the former as representing a political process whereby leaders were forced
to compete for support. Such a system, however, required "social indoctrination and
habituation" as well as agreement on the rules of the game by all participants. But
this was not simply a matter of the structure and process of government. Again,
like Madison, they stressed that polyarchy "requires a considerable degree of social
pluralism," and, they claimed, it was the failure to grasp this that led utopians like
Rousseau astray. The conclusion was that "social pluralism was so great in the
United States that, combined with the constitutional structure, the extent of
bargaining among diverse social groups in making government policy is a dominant
feature of our political system"-nothing less than a "social separation of powers"
(1953: 302, 307-308).
One of the most pivotal entries in the discourse of American pluralism was Dahl's
A Prefaceto DemocraticTheory(1956). This was the first attempt to articulate fully
the incipient normative account of democracy that was emerging in the group
account of American politics. Dahl, however, both eschewed any extended discus-
sion of group theory and had not yet fully appropriated the concept of pluralism,
which does not significantly appear in this account of "polyarchal" polities. A
peculiarity of this work was Dahl's interpretation of Madison as not stressing the
need for social pluralism.
Dahl wished to avoid Madison's focus on constitutional structures, which he
considered "trivial"and unnecessary to prevent tyranny, and to emphasize, instead,
"social variables" as the basis of polyarchy. Both the interaction of interest groups
and the constraining matrix of the crucial "underlying consensus" of social values
were so important that more visible everyday politics could be considered as "merely
the chaff." Despite his claim that he was employing a "descriptive method," he
equated the idea of democracy with the theory inherent in what he called the opera-
tion of the "American hybrid" (1956: 22, 132, 135). He opposed this theory to the
"maximizing" emphasis of other theories of democracy and distinguished it from
both classic democracy and dictatorship. Dahl argued that majorities, in different
ways the principal concern of the Madisonian and populist theories of democracy,
were not really the issue.
Noting the work of Bentley, Truman, and Latham, Dahl claimed that "we can
only distinguish groups of various types and sizes, all seeking in various ways to
advance their goals, usually at the expense, at least in part, of others." Majorities,
Dahl claimed, were really neither a problem nor a possibility. The real stuff of
politics was "minorities ruling" or "government by minorities" with the acquies-
cence or indifference of a numerical or "apathetic majority," but this, he claimed,
was far from minority rule in the traditional sense. The process was one of "endless
bargaining" and the "steady appeasement of relatively small groups" but one in
which, along with elections, there was "a high probability that an active and legit-
imate group in the population can make itself heard effectively at some crucial

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262 The Genealogyof AmericanPluralism

stage in the process of decision" and that government would be responsive (1956:
131-132, 145, 150).
Dahl's principal quarrel with Madison was that the latter "underestimates the
importance of the inherent social checks and balances existing in every pluralistic
society" (1956: 22). Such a conclusion, however, is hardly evident in Madison's work,
but Dahl's critique of "populist" democracy is even more elusive. It was not really
identified with any distinct theory or practice but rather was offered as an analyt-
ical construct defined in terms of maximizing popular sovereignty and political
equality. Dahl found this too narrow a set of goals.
By the time that Dahl wrote WhoGoverns?(1961), the concept of polyarchy had,
for the moment, given way to pluralism in his work. This book can be reasonably
construed as an attempt to validate empirically his theory of democracy, but the
purpose was also to undercut, by a study of New Haven, the idea, advanced by
Pareto, Mosca, and, more recently, C. Wright Mills (1956) and other sociologists
such as Floyd Hunter (1953), that behind the facade of politics is always an
economic elite as well as the idea that American politics could be conceived as a
mass society manipulated by remote leaders. It was also designed to demonstrate
once again that democracy need not be conceived along populist participatory
lines.
By 1960, the old images of pressure politics as a democratic pathology that
Truman had attempted to counter had been joined by a new wave of criticism
which, unlike the arguments of the ruling elite and stratification theorists, aimed
once again less at challenging the reality of pluralism than criticizing its conse-
quences for both politics and the political dimension of life. But the idea of a
general theory of groups was gaining ground despite its detractors. The publication
of successive editions of Bentley's book had culminated in a Festschrift(1957) in
which the political science contributor suggested that group theory would do for
political science what supply and demand theory had done for economics, since
"values are authoritatively allocated in society through the process of the conflict
of groups" (Hagan, 1957: 110).
Some of those, such as Odegard, who had contributed to the creation of the group
paradigm, did not appear to grasp fully the terms of the contemporary discussion.
Odegard took issue with some of the premises of the literature that ran from
Bentley to Latham. The group idea was, he claimed, hardly new. It was part of a
tradition of political theory that ran from Plato to Marx. Current theories were, at
best, ambiguous about key concepts such as group and equilibrium, but even more
problematical, he argued, was the failure to make room for the individual, values,
and other factors in the process of democratic government. In its present form,
group theory, he concluded, had "all but banished reason, knowledge, and intelli-
gence from the governmental process" in its pursuit of the absolution of what had
formerly been called "invisible government" (1958: 699).
In 1960, the AmericanPoliticalScienceReviewpublished four articles on Bentley and
group theory, three of which were in a symposium on "Bentley Revisited." Although
one person defended the approach and argued for building on Bentley's work, the
others attacked the theory as parochial, a methodological failure, and a conserva-
tive "sanctification of the actual" (Hale, 1960: 957). In some respects these discus-
sions were, in the end, less concerned with Bentley, Truman, and group theory than
with more general issues regarding the possibility of a science of politics. This
discursive current was not exactly that which carried Dahl's work, even though they
belonged to the same stream.

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 JOHN G. GUNNELL 263

Dahl had already challenged the "ruling elite model" (1958), and now he argued
that in New Haven, there had been a long historical development from rule by a
hierarchial patrician oligarchy to a "pluralist system" of "noncumulative" and
"dispersed inequalities" which, in its operation, was the best approximation of a
stable "democratic system." Dahl clearly wished to extrapolate from New Haven to
a more general claim about American politics. He asked, "Who, then, rules in a
pluralist democracy?" and the answer, essentially, was no one in particular (1961:
85-86). Different issues brought into action different groups and aggregations of
interests. The catalyst, however, of both stability and instability, was a "political
stratum," leaders working within the constraints of a consensus on the rules of the
game, while "most citizens are not engaged very much in politics." Dahl empha-
sized what he called the "myth" of the "primacy of politics" and of the "concern of
citizens with the life of the democratic polis" (1961: 281-282, 311). Many, by the
1960s, were willing neither to accept this image of democracy nor to embrace this
account of politics.
In the same year that Dahl published his study of New Haven, Henry Kariel
described what he called the "decline of American pluralism" by which he meant
the emergence of large "power blocs" that had in turn given rise to a "new public
order" and overshadowed the "conglomeration of little groups" and "voluntary
associations" which had been identified with "Americanism" (1961: 2). Pluralism,
Kariel argued, had "defined a state without a government" and had assumed a
situation in which there was a "plurality of voluntary associations so guided by an
unseen procedure that their interaction constituted the public good." Kariel
argued that the "theory of pluralism under conditions of large-scale technology
conflicts with the principles of constitutional democracy" and must give way to a
more egalitarian society that would be achieved in part by state intervention (1961:
2, 4, 68).
Kariel's book was part of the beginning of a decade of criticism of the theory
and practice of pluralism. Associates of Dahl such as Nelson Polsby continued to
pursue the form and substance of the "pluralist alternative" in their account of
community power and to criticize the stratificationists. Polsby (1963) more explic-
itly tried to link this approach to a tradition that began with Madison and
Tocqueville and ran through the work of Herring, Truman, and V.O. Key.
Lindblom also saw his work as completing the "unfinished business of pluralist
thought" in a tradition that included Figgis, Maitland, Laski, Bentley, Latham,
Herring, and Truman, and he argued that this amounted to demonstrating how
"people can coordinate with each other without anyone's coordinating them,
without a dominant common purpose, and without rules that fully prescribe their
relations to each other" (1965: 3, 12).
As the pluralist image of American politics and society reached its zenith (e.g.,
Price, 1965; Galbraith, 1967; Pennock and Chapman, 1969), so did the criticism of
this range of doctrines (Kelso, 1978). Increasingly, however, it was less the account
of pluralism as representing social and political reality that came under attack than
its status as a theory of democracy and the alleged pathological implications of the
practice of pluralist politics. There are many ways to explain the intense debate
about pluralism that marked this period, but whatever the immediate influences
may have been, both within and outside the discipline and profession, it is neces-
sary to recognize the extent to which the controversy and the basic terms of the
discussion were sedimented in the conceptual repertoire of the field. These
arguments were a perpetuation of a basic dialectic between different images of

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264 The Genealogyof AmericanPluralism

political reality and democracy that had long been indigenous to American politi-
cal studies.

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Biographical Note
JOHN G. GUNNELLis a professor of political science at the State University of New
York at Albany, where he teaches political theory and the history and philosophy
of political science. His most recent book is Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy
of an American Vocation (1993). ADDRESS:College of Public Affairs and Policy, SUNY
at Albany, Albany, NY 12222, USA.

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