Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust

In 1986, the historian William Leuchtenburg, a former member of a faculty workshop at Columbia University, founded in 1945 and calling itself the Seminar on the State, delivered a presidential address to the Organization of American Historians on “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America.” Leuchtenburg promoted ‘the state’ as the best available analytical and historical object historians might use to revive political history, then in the doldrums, having lost its commanding position in the discipline.¹ A half-decade later, he penned a brief memoir in which he recalled his move to Columbia in 1952. “I had hardly arrived,” he recollected, “… when I was invited to join a faculty seminar. Its members included my colleague in history, Richard Hofstadter, but it was chaired by a political scientist, David Truman, … and was called significantly, The State…. We felt ourselves to be part of one community.”²

“And was called significantly, The State.” Read against standard histories of political science, history, and sociology, there is something odd about this exercise of memory, especially how it underscored the Seminar’s name. After all, the members of the Seminar on the State and the larger group of leading postwar students of American politics in the disciplines of which they were a part usually are remembered for having refused to place the state at the center of their work. Indeed, the word ‘state’ rarely appears in their texts, much as it had not made an appearance a quarter-millennium earlier in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. The papers and topics Columbia’s Seminar discussed lend superficial credence to the view that the use of the term ‘state’ in its title might merely have been an anachronistic conceit. Seymour Martin Lipset considered social mobility; George Stigler, anti-trust policy; Daniel Bell, communism in American unions; Nathan Glazer, Jewish political behavior; Richard Hofstadter, the neglect of ethnicity in American historical writing; and William T. R. Fox, “The Impact of the Study of the Behavioral Sciences on Political Science and the Study of Inter-National Relations.” Leuchtenburg himself presented an essay called “Problems of Writing New Political History in Light of New Theoretical and Methodological Developments in the Behavioral Sciences.” With the possible exception of C. Wright Mills, a radical sociologist who self-consciously grounded his work in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century social theory dealing with modern states, the seminar’s members rarely announced themselves to be students of this subject, whether understood in traditional constitutional terms, or in Marxist terms as a capitalist state, or in Weberian terms as a highly autonomous administrative state. But it is just this jarring juxtaposition of name and subjects by the Columbia group that should prepare us to be surprised.

Nation states claim exclusive sovereignty over a given territory and its population. They possess a distinctive ensemble of institutions, and justify their monopoly of coercion by deploying narratives to explain why their claims to rule are legitimate. How they exercise their sovereignty, which institutions they deploy, and how they justify their rule are the distinguishing, and contested, hallmarks of stateness.³ What makes a liberal state distinctive is how its legal codes, institutions, and normative stories are oriented to protect citizens against arbitrary rule, enforce juridical equality among included members of the polity, and ensure that the boundaries of the state are permeable to the preferences, values, beliefs, and interests of participants in political life. A historical, analytical, and moral lament for the demise of such states lies at the center of The Great Trans formation and The Origins of Totalitarianism.⁴ Both books share in the ironic view that excessive skepticism about the modern state by nineteenth-century liberals who feared its predatory tendencies helped undermine the prerequisites for an effective liberal political order. At issue in the postwar reconstruction, therefore, was whether it could be possible to discover a proper balance between overweening and insufficient political authority.

Polanyi identified the liberal state in England as the progenitor of the first effective framework for market economies, arguing that it had been the inability of this and other such states to bring about effective public policies to ensure the economic security of their populations while permitting markets to operate efficiently that had helped doom such regimes, opening the door to totalitarian alternatives. Arendt characterized the collapse of most European constitutional democracies, especially after their imperialist adventures, as having been marked by “the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation,” thus making it possible to render stateless those who did not fit within a strong national design. Minorities now could be extruded, denied citizenship, and placed “outside the pale of law.”⁵ Unrecognized and unprotected, members of these groups, especially the Continent’s Jews, had lost far more than their legal standing or their identities as, say, Hungarian or German or Austrian citizens, but, most important, their protected access to the Rights of Man; for without membership in a state, such standards, she argued, become both abstract and meaningless, and radical evil marked by human superfluity and homelessness, can triumph:⁶

An effective liberal state thus is the necessary, if hardly the sufficient, condition for a decent social, economic, and political life. In the absence of such a state, the table of institutions mediating, and protecting, relations linking states and their citizens cannot be set. Without such a state, an authentic plurality of interests and cultures promoted by political representation is supplanted by anti-liberal movements organizing masses on the basis of total, often unthinking, loyalty to national identities, causes, and regimes. In these circumstances, totalitarian elites make mobs out of the mass population who join with them to claim “to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man.”⁷ The new illiberal polity is a state only in appearance, for at its core is not the set of routines, codes, or institutions that comprise a genuine state, but a party-movement and its myths. At the heart of such pseudo-states lie camps, terror, and secret police.

In the doleful context of such transformations, the United States stood out for the durability of its liberal regime. “With all its shortcomings,” Arendt remarked, “America … knows less of the modern psychology of masses than perhaps any country in the world.” Only in the United States, Polanyi observed, had the state constructed a “moat around labor and land, wider than any Europe had known.”⁸ Probing the character, durability, and elasticity of the American case to better understand how to cope with the widespread collapse of the pillars of liberal civilization on terms that might still secure human freedom thus became a pressing task for the political studies enlightenment. Such inquiries, however, demanded detailed knowledge of the United States and analytical tools neither Polanyi nor Arendt possessed. In a useful division of labor, the task of making sense of the globe’s largest and most successful liberal state was undertaken by historians and social scientists who specialized in American politics and its liberal state, set in comparative perspective and charged by apprehension about its capacities and its fate.

Two principal convictions braced this effort to understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime: the uncontested status of the basic contours of the country’s liberal order, and its exposed position. “Americans of all national origins, classes, regions, creeds, and colors, have something in common,” Gunnar Myrdal asserted at the outset of his great study of the Negro problem and American Democracy, “a social ethos, a political creed. … a humanistic liberalism developing out of the epoch of Enlightenment” that, at once, is under challenge and stress by far more than an imperfection since, as he put it, the country’s racial patterns of domination are “an integral part of, or a special phase of, the whole complex of problems in the larger American civilization.”⁹ The same year that Harold Lasswell published a study of liberal democracy and public opinion, arguing, in effect that democracy is justice, understood as “respect for human dignity pursued by majority rule,” he published a deep dystopian warning that not just the totalitarian regimes but those with liberal polities like the United States risked becoming a ‘garrison state’ in which “the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society,” displacing “specialists on bargaining,” thus rendering nugatory the actions of legislatures, the main site of liberal representation.¹⁰

Most famously, this recurring combination of assurance about the country’s liberal hegemony and disquiet about the tradition’s qualities and safety was articulated in Louis Hartz’s historical account of The Liberal Tradition in America. He argued that the most important underlying force in American history, the standing and power of its political liberalism, had been constituted by the nonappearance of feudalism on American soil. By contrast to the embattled standing of liberalism in Europe, he claimed, in the United States this tradition is fixed and, in its innocence and safety, also dogmatic, even absolutist, in character. As a country without the fissures of class that struggles about feudalism had generated in Europe, the United States now had little room for fundamental conflict, competing ideologies, or moments of genuine self-reflection. There has been a good deal of visible conflict in American politics, but this noise can mislead us about its range and intensity. In the main, adversaries are distinguished by only relatively modest differences as they disagree about a comparatively narrow range of options. Lacking an adversary, he argued, the contractual, individualist, constitutional liberalism identified most closely with John Locke enjoyed free sway in the United States and possessed the power to snuff out non-and anti-liberal impulses of various kinds. Hartz admired this security but did not celebrate these uncontested limits on discourse and choice since the consequence of the hegemony of political liberalism, he believed, was a dangerous level of provincialism in a hazardous world. “Can a people ‘born equal’ ever understand peoples elsewhere that have to become so? Can it ever understand itself?”¹¹

In the second half of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, two groups of multidisciplinary scholars—members of Columbia University’s Seminar on the State and founders of modern policy studies teaching at Yale—led efforts by the political studies enlightenment to grapple with the qualities and insecurities of American liberalism by focusing on the environment, composition, processes, and policies of the country’s state. As the ‘wing’ of the political studies enlightenment specializing in the United States, they differed in many respects from the Europe-oriented students of the origins of dark times. Unlike Polanyi and Arendt, who never entered their adopted country’s academic mainstream despite appointments at Columbia, the New School, and the University of Chicago, Richard Hofstadter, David Truman, Harold Lasswell, Robert Dahl, and Charles Lindblom, the figures on whom I primarily concentrate, defined the very center of studies of American history and American politics at midcentury. Though contemporaries of Polanyi and Arendt (some were acquaintances), their tacit knowledge, empirical sensibilities, systematic research methods, limpid language, and American networks distinguished them as a group apart. Uncomfortable with philosophical abstraction, they preferred observation and induction. Also interested in reaching wider publics, they primarily addressed the research and teaching communities in their own fields. Thus, by contrast to their Europe-born colleagues, their work could seem parochial. Writing in an American idiom, addressing American audiences, deploying American literatures, and seeking to influence American understandings, their scholarship was enclosed to a far greater degree within the milieu of the United States. Their references, moreover, to the subjects Polanyi and Arendt frontally addressed, including the holocaust, total war, and totalitarianism, were more indirect, widely spaced, often elliptical.

Notwithstanding, the U.S.-focused members of the political studies enlightenment shared key sensibilities and ambitions, even some analytical propositions with Polanyi, Arendt, and other émigré scholars who had sought to understand the origins of dark times. Writing during the second half of the 1950s, the journalist and sociologist Daniel Bell, a member of the Columbia Seminar, reflected on the political mood of the postwar period, especially the welcome fall by American scholars and activists “from a singular innocence about politics.” Faced with depredation in the West on an unprecedented scale, they now were compelled to reconcile this desolation with the more mundane, civil politics of the United States where divergent issues and interests were reconciled and provisionally adjudicated inside a “‘liberal culture,’ receptive to ideas, critical in its outlook and encouraging of … dissent.”¹² To address these challenges and probe these questions, the Columbia and Yale groups sought to identify how the liberal state actually worked in order to better fortify its standing, deepen its capacity for self-examination, and improve its engagement with democracy. They were motivated to create political knowledge after the catastrophic and illiberal decades of devastation in order to discern means to guard and secure the best features of the West’s patrimony. Their empirical scholarship assessed the globe’s most assuredly liberal regime as soberly as Arendt and Polanyi had probed European politics, and they were equally concerned for liberalism’s fate in a world of predators. Like the more explicitly philosophical and comparative members of the political studies enlightenment, the American group aimed to create scientifically credible but usable political knowledge.¹³

This chapter appraises their work. I first examine the Seminar on the State, underscoring the creative field tension stipulated by the its named purpose and the largely behavioral means of its member’s enterprise. Focusing mainly on the contributions offered by Hofstadter, troubled by his discipline’s innocence and by the skewed and insufficient content of American liberalism, and Truman, haunted by Weimar’s fate and looming challenges based on deep inequality, I show how each, the leading historian and political scientist, respectively, of the postwar generation, wanted to accomplish no less than a vast reorientation of his field to create new forms of analysis appropriate to the challenges at hand. Common to both was a fierce commitment not only to a liberal political order but also to the value of civility and the rules within which conflicts could be permitted to appear without jeopardizing the dominant but vulnerable liberal regime. I then turn to Lasswell, Dahl, and Lindblom to assess the origins, and purposes, of modern policy studies. Lasswell and Dahl are ‘hinge’ figures. Like Truman, they determined the boundaries and content of postwar political science. Lasswell’s scholarship on elites, political psychology, rhetoric, power, and decisions, and Dahl’s on political parties, Congress and foreign policy, and democratic theory offered landmark contributions that serve as the backdrop to the manner in which they sought to create a normatively oriented yet scientifically capable set of tools with which to discern and orient public policymaking at a time of unprecedented emergency. At stake was how to link the values of Enlightenment to effective action without an undue sacrifice of liberty. Lasswell and Dahl were concerned, one might even say rightly obsessed, with the darkest possibilities imposed, as they wrote, by the Cold War and nuclear weapons. Both, too, developed analytical and programmatic statements (Dahl, with Charles Lindblom, an economist who had written on the role of unions as a threat to market-oriented capitalism and who later became celebrated for a reciprocal treatment of the distorting powers of business¹⁴) that could redefine what it meant to plan in a liberal political and economic order.

For all the differences in subjects, style, and manner that distinguish the highly individual writings of these scholars, they plaited a thick braid of ideas to which Polanyi and Arendt also could subscribe. In reviewing these achievements, I identify two misconceptions and a glaring omission. The first misunderstanding falls in the domain of intellectual history. This period is commonly thought to be a barren one for studies of the state. In standard chronologies, this moment corresponds to the disappearance of the state as a self-conscious concept and as an object of analysis in political studies. “Among contemporary social scientists,” the young political scientist Frederick Mundell Watkins wrote in 1934, “it is a virtually unquestioned assumption that the state forms the basic concept of political science.” His little book, The State as a Concept of Political Science counseled his colleagues to abandon the state to favor, instead, behavioral studies of action and power. Writing in 1968 as the author of the entry on “The State” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Watkins declared victory. The idea that political science begins and ends with the state, he announced, “no longer corresponds … to the theory and practice of contemporary political scientists.” In this chronology, the moment of the political studies enlightenment corresponds to the disappearance of the state as a self-conscious concept and as an object of analysis in political studies. This view is wrong.

Unfortunately, the idea that the state was displaced as an object of analysis by behaviorism and thus exiled into political theory has become a truism. So, too, is the cognate understanding that the state has been recovered as an object of analysis only since the early to middle 1970s by scholars dissatisfied with the complacency and intellectual blinders of mainstream political science, sociology, and history and with the inability of these disciplines to anticipate or explain political turmoil.¹⁵

This perspective gained institutional force and legitimacy when the Social Science Research Council created a new research committee devoted to the theme ‘States and Social Structures’ in 1982.¹⁶ The key word was ‘state.’ Utilizing the behavioral revolution in the social sciences as our target, the Committee urged an effort to revive studies focusing on the modern state’s goals and capacities. Concurrently, though quite separately, another research orientation centered mainly in France, though with affinities to some strands of postbehavioral thinking in the United States, likewise sought to rescue studies of the state from the apparent innocence and superficiality of simple behaviorism as Jacques Donzelot and especially Michel Foucault, among others, began to publish studies of stateness which treated the state as the site of social power deployed to control civil society by constraining and governing mass populations. In the past two decades, each of these tendencies has secured considerable followings in the American academy. Nourished by the energy of large cohorts of graduate students and young scholars, each has broadened its scope and deepened its intellectual range.¹⁷ The state, in short, has been brought back in, but based on a mistaken premise since the key figures in the political studies enlightenment after the Second World War did place the state at the center of their scholarship, and they did so despite wide differences in style and subject as aspects of a single, coherent, powerful analytical agenda.

My revisionist intellectual history underscoring the tight linkage between studies of behavior, policy, and the state by members of the political studies enlightenment is not offered, however, simply as a corrective to defective histories of ideas. Scholarship about the state by the political studies enlightenment generation, I have come to see, is superior in important respects to the more recent neostatist effort which, rather credulously, has assumed that the stronger the state the greater the prospects for human welfare, and to efforts by Foucault and his followers to rethink the modern state in ways that unduly endanger its Enlightenment foundations.

In 1986, the Middle East specialist Leonard Binder, then at the University of Chicago, scolded the Social Science Research Council group seeking to ‘bring the state back in’ for having failed to connect analyses of the state to normative issues, especially to liberalism’s values and goals. From a premise that “the original if not the chief problem of politics is the necessity of the state,” Binder wrote that¹⁸

Making the problem of the state into “an internal contradiction” and “a logical problem,” I believe, is precisely what political studies enlightenment work on the state tried to accomplish. If this reading is persuasive, it would be perilous to ignore their patrimony or to overlook their sensibility that history and social science “practiced by mature minds,” as Richard Hofstadter put the point, “forces us not only to be aware of complexity but of defeat and failure.”¹⁹

The second misunderstanding believes the distance between speculative, semi-philosophical, brooding texts like Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and systematic, doggedly empirical, social science treatises like David Truman’s book, The Governmental Process,²⁰ both published in 1951, to be so great that they inhabit separate universes. Not only does such a division impoverish our intellectual resources, but it also misapprehends what both sought to achieve in common despite their considerable differences in subject, style, and method. After all, their efforts, and those by other members of the political studies enlightenment, to come to terms with desolation and the modern state were similarly motivated and substantively complementary. We should learn to read them, and works like theirs, together.

The members of the political studies enlightenment who addressed the state overcame the stylized and limited ‘American’ and ‘European’ idioms characteristic of scholarship at the time they were writing. Often, the contrast between these two modes was so great that even when scholars shared subjects and concerns they could not communicate effectively, at least not without a great deal of translation. European scholars working on the sociology of knowledge, for example, Robert Merton observed in 1949, evinced an interest in structures of knowledge, ideas, and doctrines, focusing on their affinity to positions in the social structure, while Americans studying public opinion and communications focused on aggregates of information and mass belief, paying special attention to establishing the facts and probing them reliably. “The European variant with its large purposes,” he observed, “almost disdains to establish the very facts it purports to explain.” Conversely, “the American variant, with its small vision, focuses so much on the establishment of fact that it considers only occasionally the theoretical pertinence of the facts, once established.. .. The American talks about .. . more trivial matters in an empirically rigorous fashion.”²¹ By contrast, work by members of the political studies enlightenment, ranging from Arendt, arguably its most ‘European’ member, to Truman, arguably the most ‘American,’ declined these options. From Arendt to Truman, the political studies enlightenment situated rigorous, tightly reasoned social science inside theoretically organized macroscopic stories about large-scale patterns of structures and ideas.

If Arendt was concerned to understand Europe’s descent into barbarism, Truman was anxious to prevent such a collapse in the United States. The concluding chapter of The Governmental Process, his landmark study of interest groups in American democracy, cautions about what he called “morbific politics,” the archaic term first used in the seventeenth century to connote that which either is diseased or causes disease. “The existence of a going polity,” he advised, “testifies to [its] present effectiveness … but it does not justify the projection of a present equilibrium into the indefinite future.” Clearly bearing in mind the collapse of Weimar and Hitler’s accession, Truman cautioned his American readers that “No political system is proof against decay and dissolution.”²² Liberal political systems, too, can break down when stark inequality in society comes to be married to insufficient or ineffective means of mass participation in regular politics. Weak links to the state can combine to erode faith in the character and legitimacy of the state and make the population vulnerable to mobilization by demagogues who question the basic and essential neutrality of the state.

Truman geared The Governmental Process, a study of interest groups in American politics, to understand how group politics and representative democracy could be made legitimate and stable, capable of holding its own against totalitarian options. Drawing on social anthropology, social psychology, and the work of early-twentieth-century American and English pluralist thinkers, most notably Arthur Bentley, he sought to make the group—which he understood as a unit of individuals in interaction with each other—rather than the individual alone or society as a whole the main unit of political analysis. Organized in four sections—“groups in the political process,” “group organization and problems of leadership,” “the tactics of influence,” and a conclusion on “group politics and representative democracy”—Truman’s book was written, much like the work of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century English New Liberals such as T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse, to thicken liberalism by making its social analysis more realistic by becoming less simply individualistic. Arguing that the absence of “a consistent conception of the political role of interest groups, their functions, and the ways in which their powers are exercised” had been the result of the hegemony of nineteenth-century individualism, Truman sought to build a more realistic and capable political science in tune with his organizational age. Anticipating future work focusing on impediments to collective action, he identified various mechanisms to overcome these barriers, noting that “Among other influences greatly facilitating group formation are such major national efforts as a war mobilization or a collective attack upon problems of industrial depression. In recruiting the national resources for such emergency, the Government stimulates interaction throughout the nation.”²³ Most important, he projected these moves in order to watch over the security of America’s liberal regime by grounding a defense against a Weimar-style breakdown in a realistic account of what actually happens inside American politics, the globe’s most important liberal, anti-totalitarian regime.

Indeed, it was Weimar’s mix of the characteristics Juan Linz has identified as common to the end of democracy in numerous settings that not only haunted Truman and his colleagues but also underpinned virtually all the topics their Seminar on the State considered. These included, “unsolvable problems, a disloyal opposition ready to exploit them to challenge the regime, the decay of democratic authenticity among the regime-supporting parties and the loss of efficacy, effectiveness (particularly in the face of violence), and ultimately of legitimacy [that led] to a generalized atmosphere of tension, a widespread feeling that something has to be done … reflected in widespread politicization.”²⁴

Weimar, as well as its collapse and replacement by Nazi rule, Hannah Arendt, of course, had experienced first-hand. Like such fellow refugee scholars as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirscheimer, who attended Columbia’s Seminar on the State, Arendt understood that Weimar had posed the question of whether and how a liberal democratic state can coexist with a fractured society and with social movements seeking to transcend them. Totalitarianism, she grasped, could not simply be dismissed as reprehensible, for both fascism and bolshevism offered up attractive, even exhilarating, alternatives to political liberalism under conditions of duress. Further, bolshevism’s class state and nazism’s racial state produced many new winners, and justified their advance with hypnotic rhetoric and ideology and by deploying policies of militarized economic mobilization which, in the context of capitalism’s more general collapse, seemed to work.

Read this way, Arendt and Truman shared a common normative concern for the breakdown of liberal democratic regimes. They shared even more, an institutional analytic with which they sought to elaborate propositions about the linkages connecting citizens and the state that best could resist totalitarian racist and violent prospect.

When Arendt is read by empirically oriented political scientists, they tend to be so mesmerized by the speculative sweep of her argumentation and by her Heideggerian style that they usually miss her analytical motivation and intellectual underpinnings. They also fail to see, as I have noted, that she elaborated a good many specific ‘social science’ propositions about institutions, mechanisms, and behavior which she embedded as motoring causal mechanisms inside her attractively underdetermined configuration of the macro-situation. Often masked by her own language, which reflected her distaste for the conventional boundaries and style of hyper-positivist social science, Arendt in fact performed like a very good political scientist of comparative politics, elaborating claims and hypotheses which function, we have seen, as links connecting the elements she identified as the building-blocks of modern times to actual history in specific times and places.

When we read Arendt this way, we can see why and how David Truman’s Governmental Process is the proverbial coin’s tail to Arendt’s head. She was keen to understand how modern constitutional liberal regimes and party systems had collapsed to produce totalitarianism. Meshing an underdetermined historical-structural account with specific propositions about behavior and institutions, she sought to secure a usable past to make a nontotalitarian future possible. Truman, by contrast, directed his attention inside the liberal state threatened from without to focus far less on its macroscopic constellation than on specific behavior and institutions within its ken. Arendt worried about whether and how the modern liberal state could survive in the face of totalitarianism in an era marked by catastrophe. So, too, did Truman.

The omission I seek to rectify follows from these misconceptions. The postwar generation understood, and showed how, the modern state provides the cord by which the Enlightenment and desolation are tethered, yet virtually no one today interested in the origins, history, character, institutions, activities, policies, personnel, lawfulness, legitimacy, and fate of modern sovereign states draws from the well of resources furnished by these members of the political studies enlightenment. This self-denial constitutes a missed opportunity to modify, shade, or offset the proclivity in the various neo-Weberian, neo-Marxist, and Foucauldian strands of work on the state in play today to underwrite the Enlightenment too innocently or traduce it unmercifully. We, too, could benefit from a new seminar focusing on the questions that concerned the seminar that gathered a half-century ago about the character and security of liberal states and their abilities to advance pluralism while coping with its perils; picking up where it left off: with the attempt to create a realistic, nonmetaphysical, institutional, and behavioral understanding of the practices and vulnerabilities of such states, all the while refusing to distinguish too tightly between scientific and normative analysis.

The Seminar on the State was founded at Columbia University in 1945 as the successor to a short-lived Seminar on Bureaucracy.²⁵ In its first year, the discussion of bureaucracy continued, focusing on similarities and differences in bureaucratic forms and behavior in the United States, Nazi Germany, and the USSR. What is striking in reading the minutes is the robust role played by the dialogue between Merton and Franz Neumann, and how small was the gap in their sensibilities, questions, and concerns. Neumann, who had recently published Behemoth, the best extant study at the time on the Third Reich,²⁶ set the agenda at an early session by distinguishing three sets of issues: bureaucracy as institution; bureaucracy as a site of behavior; and bureaucracy and the problem of power. These foci—institutions, behavior, and power—remained the centerpiece issues for the next decade, setting American-style behavioral inquiry in the context of large-scale analysis of regimes and institutions central to the kind of inquiry written by Europeans like Neumann.²⁷ Merton similarly called for theories of the middle range; less abstract than grand theory, focused on particular subjects, committed to the consolidation of hypotheses and empirical claims, and capable of grounding comparative and normative evaluations.²⁸

The first chair of the new Seminar, the political scientist Arthur Macmahon, a New Dealer, a specialist in public administration and American federalism, and a student of German affairs, explained to the Committee on Instruction in December 1946, that the meetings serve “as a clearing house of ideas…. Those in attendance,” he wrote, “have included Brebner (History), Gellhorn (Law), Goldfrank (Mrs. Wittfogel, anthropologist), Macmahon (Public Law and Government), Merton (sociology), Mills (Sociology) Neumann (School of International Affairs), Schiller (Law), Solomon (substituting for Lynd in Sociology), Wittfogel (Director, Chinese History Project).” In addition to this early group, the Seminar’s fluctuating membership in its first decade included political scientists Richard Neustadt, Herbert Deane, Julian Franklin, William T.R. Fox, David Truman, and Gabriel Almond (the latter visiting from Princeton); sociologists Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset; historians Walter Metzger, Peter Gay, and Richard Hofstadter. Substantively, their discussions covered a very wide range, as topics included civil-military relations, the impact of public policy on social mobility, the role of labor movements in capitalist countries, discussion of the structure of political parties, congressional voting behavior, social movements, theoretical models for the study of Communism, assessments of the American presidency, polling on McCarthyism, the role of elites in shaping public opinion, the psychological underpinnings of various forms of political ideology, the history of academic freedom, scholarship on the authoritarian personality, class analysis and the American Constitution, and leadership and image-making. There also were a good many discussions of new ideas and methodologies in social science, including considerations of the work of visitors like Harold Lasswell and local members, including Lipset, Hofstadter, and Almond.

The minutes record easy movement from discussions of social theory, as, say, in the work of Roberto Michels or Gaetano Mosca, to statistical methods appropriate to probe recent events, to big regime questions concerning liberalism and totalitarianism. The various papers and books written by members of the group tended either to consider the historical and empirical requisites of a successful liberal regime across the swath of American history or define a particular domain of American political life like interest group politics, public opinion, or the policy process and probe these to better understand how key elements of the linkage between civil society and the state, the centerpiece of normative liberal theory at least since Locke, actually work in the United States. Further, each assessed these sites and processes for their contributions to the health and security of American liberal democracy.

Social science and history as fixed by Neumann, Merton, and their Seminar colleagues were marked by engaged social knowledge, and motivated by foreboding about threats to the liberal democratic polity. Throughout, the deliberations and debates in the group were charged by anxiety, concerned for the stability and capacity of liberal democracy in the United States.²⁹ Distressed by the implications of the defeated fascist model, by the vitality of communism abroad (and to a far lesser extent at home), by the growth of a strident authoritarian right-wing populism, and by the uncertain qualities of mass political participation, members of the Seminar sought to bolster and refresh political liberalism by harnessing their values to a theory-driven and realist notion of science, one, they believed, that required more than one disciplinary revolution.

They also searched for sustenance for such realism outside their disciplines’ credulous and meliorist lineage. At Columbia, many were influenced by the noted critic and Professor of English, Lionel Trilling.³⁰ His critique of socialist realism in the humanities appealed for an “active literature,” geared to deepen and thicken American liberalism to recall it “to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” To this end, Trilling also had sought a new realism, including a realism of human personality and motivation, turning for these purposes to Proust and to Freud, among others, an orientation that stands out in this period amongst the Seminar on the State participants especially in work by Hofstadter on the right wing in America and on the dangerous aspects of populist reform.³¹

History, Hofstadter believed, must recommit to the challenge of deepening while defending the Enlightenment by extending its reach into the social sciences, projecting that “the next generation may see the development of a somewhat new historical genre, which will be a mixture of history and the social sciences,” a development that would make scholars better prepared to “cope with certain insistent macroscopic questions … with wars and social upheavals, with the great turning points in human experience, still tantalizingly unexplained or half-explained, still controversial.”³² Only in this way, he believed, could American liberalism be reformulated and toughened. In parallel moves, Daniel Bell, looking to questions of status anxiety, David Truman, looking to understand group behavior, and Gabriel Almond, looking to comprehend the attractions of communism, turned to social psychology, anthropology, and sociological theory for intellectual provisions.³³

By the mid–1950s, the program underwritten by members of Columbia’s Seminar on the State had made very considerable advances in connecting the conceptualization of political problems to empirical theory and systematic research methods. Thus when David Truman delivered his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1965 he had good reason to celebrate this history of scholarly regeneration and underscore the achievements accomplished in the postwar period.³⁴ After all, he and his colleagues had carried through the project of creating a political science and a political history concerned with the dangers of mass politics and the terms of political participation based on the conviction the country needed analytical history, sociology, and political science if it were to secure its liberal regime against external and internal adversaries.

In his retrospective, Truman asserted the claim that something new and distinctive had happened in the discipline during the previous two decades. His lecture assessed the attributes of postwar political science by deploying Thomas Kuhn’s then fresh concept of the paradigm³⁵ to contrast “the restless searching that has marked the field since 1945” to the earlier discipline. Truman made a persuasive case for an epistemological break inside what ordinarily is considered the single period of the behavioral revolution. From the 1880s through the 1930s, he claimed, both the initial abstract formalism of political science and the subsequent turn to behavioralism had shared the optimistic, reformist faith characteristic of the Progressive era’s innocent version of Enlightenment. Subsequent catastrophes mocked this vision. Even when up to date methodologically, political science had come to seem old-fashioned, even beside the point. In consequence, Truman argued, members of his own generation (“whether as professionals or as citizens”) had come to doubt the “uncritical optimism” of this inheritance which bordered on the ridiculous in the face of the challenge posed by totalitarianism’s “open and effective repudiation of the expectations and practices that underlay the implicit agreements of the profession.” Further, Truman observed, the transplantation of academic scholars to Washington during the New Deal and Second World War and from Europe to American shores had dislodged their parochialism.

Truman was devastating about the generation of his teachers (taking care to exempt his own ‘Chicago School’ instructors as heralds of the postwar revolution). They had lacked a concern “with political systems as such, including the American system, which amounted in most cases to taking their properties and requirements for granted”; they had possessed “an unexamined and mostly implicit conception of political change and development that was blandly optimistic and unreflectively reformist”; they had neglected theory and, with it, had deployed “a conception of ‘science’ that rarely went beyond raw empiricism;” and they had failed to place the American case inside “an effective comparative method.”³⁶ By contrast, he claimed post–1945 political science no longer took the properties of the American political system for granted; and it effectively deployed theory, guided by comparison and a realistic political psychology, to better understand the promise and perils of political change.

This new discipline, Truman made clear, was defined by the conjunction of two elements that previously had been kept apart. The first of these was “a recommitment to science in the broad sense.” By this he meant a positivist orientation that could move the work of the discipline “cumulatively toward explanation, toward establishing relations of dependence between events and conditions” by aspiring “to explanations of classes of events … subject to the controls of empirical evidence and with sufficient systematic power at least to place its findings beyond complete invalidation by the day’s events.”³⁷ But, he insisted, empirical studies must not be disinterested. Political science is a science of moral purpose and choice. Calling for a revival of the study of political thought as more than a polite gesture, Truman sought to incorporate its ethical and normative impulses as integral aspects of the discipline. Political scientists must not stop with description, however accurate, he urged, but learn to marshal their emergent empirical and predictive capacities to clarify and assess the “probable consequences of proposals and events for the system and for the values implicit in it.”³⁸

This combination was deployed by the archetypal landmark works of the period to self-consciously advance this program; not least Truman’s own Governmental Process. Cool in tone, realist in orientation, and behavioral in epistemology, the book sought to build bulwarks against what he described portentously as “the possibilities of revolution and decay”³⁹ by describing how interest representation actually works and by identifying the institutional and ideological conditions required to keep American democracy stable and secure. Like other major works written from the later 1940s and the 1950s, including such later books as Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory and V.O. Key’s Public Opinion and American Democracy,⁴⁰ Truman and his colleagues sought to show how various naive elements of prewar political science had restricted the discipline’s ability to protect liberal democracy against the challenges of other regime types.

In parallel fashion, Richard Hofstadter, the star historian of the Columbia Seminar, insisted by way of an account of “The Founding Fathers” that the country badly needed another “Age of Realism,” one also marked by an appreciation for how the dark side of human possibility might be restrained less by virtue than by effective analysis and capable institutional design.⁴¹ A critic of the liberal tradition without infirming its validity⁴² and made anxious by “the rudderless and demoralized state of American liberalism,” he concluded The American Political Tradition, a series of sardonic, reappraising, anti-heroic portrait essays, the majority about presidents, published in 1948, by warning that it “would be fatal to rest content with [a] belief in personal benevolence, personal arrangements, the sufficiency of good intentions, and month-to-month improvisation.”⁴³

Like Truman, Hofstadter sought to transcend the innocence that marked pre-Second World War historical inquiry.⁴⁴ Much as Truman thought pre–1945 political science to have been too ingenuous despite the discipline’s methodological advances, Hofstadter brought into question the patrimony of the Progressive historians Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, and Vernon Par-rington whose focus on conflict he thought simple and parochial.⁴⁵ Writing from the left, Hofstadter nonetheless thought it important to correct their reverence for individual striving, small farming, and entrepreneurial competitive business which he judged vastly inadequate for the complex, urbanized, and tragic world he inhabited. “Those of us who grew up during the Great Depression and the Second World War,” he recollected, “could no longer share the simple faith of the Progressive writers in the sufficiency of American liberalism. We found ourselves living in a more complex and terrifying world.”⁴⁶ A meaningful liberalism, he insisted, must be shadowed by apprehension and capable of an understanding of interests, tradition, and psychology and confront the country’s liberal consensus without complacency.

Recoiling from the kind of absolutism displayed by totalitarian thinkers and regimes and from that exhibited at home by evangelicalism and reformers who were moral crusaders, Hofstadter insisted that enlightened liberalism also must be capable of grappling with ambiguity and the impact of a pluralistic and differentiated milieu on its character and fate. Further, rather than focusing on how Americans disagree, Hofstadter thought it important to grasp how what they share can limit, and thus make more vulnerable, the country’s liberal regime. Even reformers, he insisted, had been contained within a rather cramped set of possibilities, especially with respect to property rights. Thus, writing about what he called a “democracy of cupidity,” he observed that the “fierceness of political struggles has often been misleading; for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise.” No alternative conception existed, he worried, despite the need at a time “the traditional ground is shifting under our feet.”⁴⁷ “The highest pitch of understanding,” he cautioned, “… is not likely to emerge in a climate of opinion where intense self-examination has not yet begun.”⁴⁸

Hofstadter, whose historical contributions took an exploratory form, rich in suggestive hypotheses, was particularly concerned to secure political liberalism in circumstances where “pastoral legends” had been overcome by “the complexities of modern American life.” Like Hartz, he was especially keen to understand how the left could invigorate political debate and incorporate new groups into the polity in a setting that had truncated its reach and imagination. “The side of the left in American political history,” he noted,⁴⁹

Ascribing these limitations to “failings in the liberal tradition,” he worried that they had produced “a certain proneness to fits of moral crusading” potentially harmful to the best features of the ‘liberal’ dimensions of the liberal state. Now, “having been at last torn from … habitual security,” the country no longer can enjoy “an innocence and relaxation now that totalitarianism has emerged.”⁵⁰

Although this period is sometimes remembered for self-satisfied social science and well-pleased consensus history, neither Hofstadter nor Truman, nor, for that matter, any of their Seminar on the State colleagues, was a contented apologist.⁵¹ “A democratic society,” Hofstadter wrote, “can more safely be over-critical than over-indulgent of its institutions and leaders.”⁵² Rather, the members of this group and the larger political studies enlightenment soberly appreciated the American political system’s positive attributes but they never produced unqualified endorsements. At the hub of their work lay the understanding that liberal democracies risk breakdown unless political participation is anchored by effective, legitimate institutions. Individuals and groups do not and should not meekly go away between elections. Rather, they should be expected to express their dissatisfactions and fight for their interests. But these efforts could come to threaten liberal values if political participation were not managed and canalized in the zone between the state and civil society by appropriate institutional arrangements. “Consensus,” Hofstadter wrote, “to be effective, must be a matter of behavior as well as thought, of institutions as well as theories.”⁵³ Specifically, he and his colleagues thought it critical to deploy political institutions to produce publics rather than masses, a theme that appeared with particular force in the work of C. Wright Mills.⁵⁴ “In the absence of standardized means of participation,” Truman cautioned in the concluding chapter of The Governmental Process, “movements of the fascist type” threaten to develop, especially under conditions of significant inequality.⁵⁵

For these reasons, the members of the Seminar on the State sought to connect the lineage of basic questions about governance to a new science of political behavior and institutional design. This would be theory about the modern state of a new kind, neither exclusively “ethical in character” or solely “an attempt to describe the actual world,”⁵⁶ but both. More than an epistemological location, the new political science thus would make a substantive commitment to liberal and democratic theory and to the value of a polity based on reason and plurality at the intersection of institutions and behavior. Focusing on The Governmental Process, Truman’s classic study of interest groups, we can see how the near-absence of the term ‘state’ in his writing as well as in the work of his Seminar colleagues must not be allowed to mislead us, for the state was present as a constitutive element in their books and articles in four key dimensions.

First, the Seminar on the State grasped the task of liberal guardianship. Throughout, their work was charged by anxiety for the fate of enlightened liberalism, not by complacency. Possessing few illusions about the irreducibly violent core all modern states possess, they sought to defend both civil society and the liberal state against brutality-prone totalitarianism. They rightly understood, as had Hannah Arendt, that the liberalism of Locke, the liberalism they believed to be at the heart of the American model’s alternative to totalitarianism, is more statist in key respects than totalitarianism. At issue in the battle between liberalism and totalitarianism was not whether the modern sovereign state—a state jealous of its sovereign prerogatives, organized in a distinctive ensemble of institutions, inclusive and coercive in its reach, and differentiated from other institutional sites—should exist as much as who would control or tame it and for what purposes. The political liberalism with which Truman, Hofstadter, and their colleagues identified sought to hedge and contain the sovereign state, not do away with it. Modern totalitarianism, these scholars knew, also aimed to hold the reins of the state, but differently, by using the instruments of antiliberal ideologies and mass movements.

“The great political task now as in the past,” Truman concluded, “is to perpetuate a viable system.” To this end, like Hofstadter who had focused on political leadership, he believed that a political class of politicians, leaders of interest groups, journalists, academics, and others engaged actively in political influence, were required to play a pivotal role. “In the future as in the past, they will provide the answer to the ancient question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Guardianship will emerge out of the affiliations of the guardians.” This was a task of obligation and accountability.⁵⁷

Second, as liberal democrats and as institutionalists, the members of the Seminar on the State also committed themselves to a particular kind and level of theory. Unlike their disciplinary antecedents in history and political science, they insisted on the requirement of theory. “The non-theoretical bias of the earlier agreement within the discipline,” Truman observed, “thrust the study of political thought out of the mainstream and retained it largely as a gesture toward polite learning.” This “philistinism” was worse than regrettable. It had narrowed the discipline and had cut it off from the succor work on political regimes from Aristotle through Locke and Mill could provide.⁵⁸

More than an epistemological location, the approach to the state by the ‘American’ variant of the political studies enlightenment made a substantive commitment to liberal and democratic theory at the intersection of institutions and behavior. Taking the largest, constitutional regime rules for granted as stable givens, they sought to understand the systematic mutual impact of institutional arrangements on behavior and behavior on institutions in directing political participation and shaping political norms. Constitutional arrangements usher individuals and groups into the political process; once there, these patterning plans become permissive but are not determinative. Accordingly, political scientists must attend to the junction located between these grand regime features and political action, a space filled by institutions understood both as congeries of rules and as formal organizations.⁵⁹

Third, their concern for the security and continuity of liberal political regimes and their assumption of a custodial role directed their work to the state as the site of political representation. The notion of representation, the political theorist Hannah Pitkin has pointed out, connotes making present inside the state the preferences, perspectives, and interests of members of civil society which otherwise would be absent.⁶⁰ It invites social and cultural plurality to come inside the confines of the state. It is oriented to securing the gains to liberty that come with the separation of the state from civil society without paying the price of a wholly autonomous state.

Rather than imagine a singular public or a fragmented mass, Truman insisted on the segmentation of the population into groups sharing similar views about specific matters under consideration. “The public is always specific to a particular situation or issue.” Such publics seek influence through organization. The main vehicle is the interest group, which he understood not in terms of a priori categories such as those of class or gender but in terms of behavior and interaction. “An interest group,” he wrote, “is a shared-attitude group that makes certain claims upon other groups in the society. If and when it makes its claims through or upon any of the institutions of government, it becomes a political interest group.” Truman’s liberal democracy is an arena for the competitive play of these groups, not for the discovery of a common public interest. What keeps this system stable is the mechanism of overlapping memberships. The population does not divide along fixed lines. The system comes to be moderated because individuals are not wholly absorbed into any specific group and because they usually belong to multiple groups. They have compound identities, a complex array of interests, and many pathways and different degrees of participation.⁶¹

This institutionalized competition of minorities, however, leaves the liberal regime vulnerable, Truman observed, because it is not self-equilibrating. Its stability requires two additional conditions: broadly shared values about the rules of the political game, especially civil liberties, and actors sufficiently committed to these values and the institutional arrangements which embed them. Legitimate norms and institutions are Truman’s necessary conditions for a steadfast and legitimate polity. He insisted that the institutional mechanism of overlapping membership on which he relied cannot cushion the political order at times of crisis caused by “disturbance in established relationships” unless the liberal rules of the game are widely supported by the population as a whole.⁶² But this condition, he cautioned, cannot be taken for granted. Mass support for the values of liberal democracy is not a given. The population may be mobilized by demagogues to become an illiberal mass; or it may withdraw its support from liberal norms at key moments of change and stress.

Fourth, this approach to the state might be called transactional because it is concerned with the institutions which pattern exchanges between the state and civil society in liberal regimes such as voting and elections, public opinion and interest group activity, journalism and communications, just the subjects the Seminar on the State regularly considered. Writing from this perspective, Truman made the ways in which interactive groups sharing political dispositions and interests intersected with the national state via public opinion, elections, and especially the legislative process the hub of his analysis of American democracy. “The activities of political interest groups,” he noted, “imply controversy and conflict, the essence of politics,” but inside a representative regime these conflicts can be contained because political institutions embody and operate by well-supported, legitimate, liberal rules of the game. By contrast to the constitutional democracies that had collapsed in interwar Europe, in the United States he expected “such changes as occur in the basic relationships that characterize the American governmental process will be gradual, slight, and almost imperceptible.” As a result, “confidence in gradual adaptation assumes that the system will not so operate as to produce domestic or international disasters that will result in its being completely discredited.” Still, he felt compelled to add, “Of this there can be no certainty.”⁶³

Quite clearly, the Seminar on the State did not abandon the state as its object. What its members did think, though, is that the liberal state is studied best in these distinct aspects rather than as a single, jumbo concept. Such a covering term—The State—they believed, is far too bulky as an instrument to parse and understand politics inside a liberal regime, like the American, marked by highly differentiated institutions and complex terms of transaction between the state and its citizens. By making the study of the state realistic and behavioral, inside an institutional frame, the Seminar helped demystify the state as an inclusive normative and metaphysical construct signifying common, collective interests transcending particularity. Its members pursued this task by showing how rules and institutions rather than unitary interests or a singular political culture could serve to integrate their diverse and fractious country.

The Columbia Seminar primarily probed two sets of questions: how liberal assumptions, institutions, and rules structure and limit the contours of American politics, and how citizens and their leaders shape the political process through their participation in interest groups, elections, political parties, and expressions of opinion. Lasswell, Dahl, and Lindblom undertook a complementary task, one that required the invention of a new historical, contextual, problem-solving, multi-method orientation to public policy that they wished to deploy to reinforce the soundness and steadiness of the country’s liberal state. They understood that any simple model characterizing benevolent actors who search in disinterested fashion for effective policy instruments in order to govern in the public interest is hopelessly sanguine. Seeking to build bulwarks to counter illiberal alternatives via policy studies as part of the period’s larger systematic effort to protect and defend the offspring of the Enlightenment, they treated the activities of government to regulate the economy and society as causes, not just as effects.

The scholarship they produced can be distinguished from prior efforts to analyze and recommend public policies by its broader scope and terms of reference, and by its more pointed motivation. When Lasswell retrospectively summed up “the policy orientation of political science” in 1967 at India’s Patna University in 1967, he identified the two acts practiced by policy scientists—“understanding the policy process itself” and “locating and feeding knowledge … into the policy process”—as central aspects of what, referring to the Enlightenment, he called “the recovery of a great tradition rather than … a radical deviation from it.” Policy studies, he continued, should advance the values of enlightened reason and secular control to defend liberal democracy against predacious adversaries. Public policy studies and liberal democracy, he stressed, are mutually dependent; for just as “the non-dogmatic, exploratory, systematic study of policy,” he wrote, “evidently depends in our day on the continuation of a society whose structure is effectively pluralistic,” so, he also believed, liberal democracy itself must be buttressed by systematic studies of public policy.⁶⁴ Likewise, Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom insisted that the choice of particular social techniques to underpin rational social action to make policy to solve problems should be guided, and evaluated, by the contributions they make to the achievement of the key Enlightenment values they enumerated as “freedom, rationality, subjective equality, security, progress, and appropriate inclusion.”⁶⁵

The idea of a policy science, one reviewer of Lasswell’s work observed, “is not a new one.”⁶⁶ In part, of course, this suggestion is compelling. Policy is a congested term. Its etymology links it to civil administration and government, to citizenship, to refinement and polish, to registers and record-keeping, to the regulation of internal order. In modern usage, public policy refers to the confluence of two elements: the ‘policing’ activities of governments and the creation of knowledge about these mechanisms of transaction.

The very existence of public policy in these modern senses can be traced to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century post-feudal Europe when the accumulation and concentration of sovereignty by national territorial states distinguished these forms of rule from their medieval predecessors by claiming unique authority within their borders and by recognizing boundaries demarcating other state units. This consolidation of sovereignty to particular kinds of increasingly centralized units produced a standardization of laws, coinage, taxation, language, and responsibility for security, all of which were requisites for systematic public policy. A corollary process was a growing set of structural separations within national boundaries distinguishing the realms of sovereignty, property, and civil society. With this unprecedented differentiation, states could not simply impose their will despotically. Instead, they had to create and deploy policies to transact and coordinate with other, ‘private,’ powerholders. State-society relations became more reciprocal, and public policy came to be synonymous with the outputs of governments seeking to act within and regulate this increasingly complex environment.

Producers of modern policy knowledge were those intellectuals who came to understand and manage these new sets of transaction. Such policy intellectuals, after Machiavelli, created a modern science of government with two main ends: to point rulers toward more effective transactions among the state, economy, and civil society, and to police, educate, and civilize the population in order to improve its character and render it more rational and governable.

The late-eighteenth-century democratic revolutions in Europe and North America, nineteenth-century industrialization under market capitalist auspices, and the creation of new institutions for the invention and dissemination of knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the modern, discipline-based, research university, vastly altered the scale and complexity of policy activities by sovereign states as well as the provenance, scientific character, and organization of policy knowledge.

To be sure, there have been very different configurations of policy practices and ideas over the course of the past half-millennium, including, in the twentieth century, totalitarian ones. Lasswell and his colleagues sought to rescue and advance those policy options that value modernity’s divisions among state, economy, and society as the first guarantor of liberty and rest on a bedrock of toleration and citizen rights which are not contingent on the give and take of day to day politics. Enlightened public policy they understood to be a distinctive subset of modern public policy.

Before the development of systematic social science, the pride of place in social analysis had belonged to the moral sciences entwined with classical political economy. Over the course of the nineteenth century, into the twentieth, this integrated social knowledge was replaced by professionalized, discipline-based attempts to grapple with the specific tensions inherent in the elaboration of markets and citizenship in liberal societies. The central issue was how to shape the state’s interventions to make markets function effectively and to make their distributional effects tolerable. From the perspective of transactions between states and citizens, at issue was the balance between freedom and domination.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the gentlemen generalist historians and lawyers who had produced policy knowledge had become archaic figures. These “all-rounders” were steadily supplanted, on the one side, by academic scholars in specialized social sciences, and, on the other side, by a growing body of policy specialists who claimed knowledge that both drew upon and crossed over the boundaries that divided the social sciences. Labor experts, social workers, organizers of social surveys, public administration specialists, reformers concerned with social policy, and intellectuals within social movements and political parties—both inside and outside the administrative apparatuses of states—tried to come to grips with the intensification of the ‘social problem’ inherent in interactions among states, citizens, and markets. These policy intellectuals were a novel and distinctive breed. Their main orientation was not to the social science disciplines as such; nor were they amateur seekers after a science of legislation in the manner of their mid-nineteenth-century predecessors. Generalists continued to lead the civil service and go for careers in politics and journalism; but increasingly, the choices they had to make were defined for them by the specialist policy intellectuals who adopted the language of public administration and social engineering. The central concern of these policy intellectuals was how to build a state capable of dealing with the unintegrated poor and the challenges of increasingly assertive working classes both as economic actors and as weakly incorporated citizens. They sought to provide the state not only with institutional prescriptions, but also with instrumental tools such as labor statistics to contribute to the management of these tensions and demands.

In the face of the thirty-year crisis confronting western civilization following the outbreak of the First World War, this policy legacy, however powerful, Lasswell and his colleagues believed, had become woefully inadequate, for a radically new situation was at hand. We have already seen how, in 1941, Lasswell had identified a new form of rule, the ‘garrison state,’ cutting across the liberal-totalitarian antinomy. The maturation of total war as a concept after the First World War, he feared, utterly had transformed not just the technology of war fare and the mobilization of production and propaganda, but the very character of the state itself, even in liberal democracies. “With the socialization of danger as a permanent characteristic of modern violence the nation becomes one unified technical enterprise.” In such circumstances, he anguished, “what democratic values can be preserved, and how?”⁶⁷

A year later, the lawyer and sociologist David Riesman took up this theme by considering “civil liberties in a period of transition.” The traditional distinction between normal and special times had become obsolete. “It is unrealistic,” he cautioned, “to rely on sharp distinctions between war and peace to test the limits of civil liberty” for “today, it is ‘peace’ which is anomalous, not war.” He presciently predicted “that after this war (which may last for many years), it is most unlikely that we can, or even if we can that we will want to, return to ‘normalcy’.” Liberalism must be rethought in this context of permanent uncertainty and mobilization to discover by way of “affirmative governmental action … where an aggressive public policy might substitute new liberties for the vanishing liberty of atomistic individuals.” Like the Seminar scholars who, likewise, were haunted by Weimar’s collapse, Riesman concluded with a charged warning about fascism in America: “Like a flood, it begins in general erosions of traditional beliefs, in the ideological dust storms of long ago, in little rivulets of lies, not caught by the authorized channels.”⁶⁸

Facing these pressures, the inventors of modern policy studies in the period following the Second World War shared a keen sense of responsibility not only for the fate of the United States, but for liberal democracy more generally. Concluding their extended consideration of the instruments of policymaking in liberal democracies, Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom appended a postscript that asserted the continuing appeal and viability of the faith of “Western man … in his capacity for controlling his environment through observation and reason.” Classical liberalism embracing the goals of “rational control over governments through democracy and rational control over ‘economic’ affairs through capitalism,” and classical socialism, holding “that man’s rational control over both government and ‘economic’ affairs could be vastly strengthened by governmentalizing economic affairs,” had both been found wanting in the emergency decades since the Second World War. “But the core that is identical to both,” which “seems to us to be a threefold belief in the desirability of extending freedom as far as it is possible to do so, in accepting the equal value of each individual in his claim to freedom, and in the possibility of achieving progress in extending freedom and equality through man’s capacity for rational calculation and control,” is still valid. Writing in italics, they underscored how “A central assumption of this book is that, despite all that has happened, the central core of belief is still viable.”⁶⁹ In its service lie the means to make policy they sought to identify over the course of the prior 500 pages.

They, and Lasswell, put particular emphasis on future policy ventures in the United States in pursuit of these ends because only there, at war’s end, was there sufficient human capital and enough open political space to convene and advance the task of discovering policy instruments which could sustain a worthy political realm. “It will be recalled,” Lasswell observed, “that so far as Europe was concerned the social sciences were among the casualties of the first World War, of the subsequent rise of Nazism in Germany and of the devastation wrought by World War II. The great French initiatives in the social sciences, associated with the name Durkheim, for instance, suffered gravely. The maturing social science of Germany, exemplified in the work of Max Weber … emigrated to the United States where a relatively open and productive society was able to provide a congenial environment.”⁷⁰

The kind of policy studies advocated by these scholars thus abjured a relativism of values. Grounded firmly in the Enlightenment, it sought to advance inquiry that could discover scientific means to promote desired ends. In the first period of his work in the 1930s at the University of Chicago devoted to advancing a new behavioral science of politics, Lasswell had distinguished radically between science and norms. Opening Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How, probably his best-known and widest-read book, he defined the “study of politics [as] the study of influence and the influential. The science of politics states conditions; the philosophy of politics justifies preferences. This book, restricted to political analysis, declares no preferences. It states conditions.”⁷¹

In an insightful review of Lasswell’s writing, David Easton took note of how, over time, and certainly by the late 1940s, Lasswell had relinquished this radical distinction between facts and norms. “In the first phase he was reluctant as a social scientist to state that he preferred one political system or set of goals to another. In the second phase, on the contrary, he believes passionately that the social sciences are doomed to sterility unless they accept the contemporary challenge and say something about our ultimate social objectives.” In the first, prewar, period, Lasswell “was concerned solely with the development of a purely scientific, objective science of politics. Adhering to the Weberian tradition, he maintained that values lay beyond the margin of the social scientist qua scientist.”⁷² In his quest for a realistic political science during this term, Lasswell primarily focused on elites and power and directed his efforts to show how the marxist faith that class divisions could ultimately be transcended is an impossible utopia. Even more, basing his observations on Europe as well as the United States, he thought it to be the case that the imperative of elitist hierarchies ruled out the realistic possibility of democracy based on majority rule. Guided by the intellectual program of Pareto, he increasingly focused on studies of the composition and behavior of elites of various kinds. Indifferent to liberal and democratic values, he thus was able to ignore the tacit illiberal implications of his orientation and research designs which conceded as fact just that which Mannheim, Arendt, Polanyi most feared: a division of society into an effective governing elite and an atomized mass, often subject to the manipulation of symbols and mechanisms of persuasion.⁷³

During and just after the Second World War, as he came to terms with the period’s desolation, Lasswell’s views underwent a sea change. His writing came to lose some of its detached, scientific aura. Now he was cautioning that it had become “painfully obvious that the whole trend of history can change and freedom and mobility can be wiped out,” and “a vigorous reappraisal of … doctrine” was imperative. With a scarcity, under such conditions, of “intellectual resources of high quality,” challenges to the liberal tradition had become especially pressing, and a new conscious organization of inquiry to promote and protect liberal democracy had become the central project of the day.⁷⁴

Writing in these charged circumstances, Lasswell’s turn was marked by two simultaneous shifts. Rather than assume an elite-mass model as a given, he now understood that its very existence was what is most at stake in the study of power; hence he turned from the study of elites and their tools to the study of decisions, leaving open the nature and scope of the relevant participants. Liberal democracy now was put on an agenda of possibilities where, earlier, it had been set aside, at least implicitly, as hopelessly naive. At issue was what Truman had called the governmental process: “It is evident,” Lasswell now insisted, “that we cannot properly decide whether democratic government prevails in a given nation until we have examined the nature of the process by which the most influential decisions are made.”⁷⁵ Later, of course, it was Dahl, in Who Governs?, who made just this focus on decisions the central hallmark of his study of power in New Haven.⁷⁶

Concomitantly, Lasswell now was able to inquire not only about who ruled but also how citizens can come to control and limit what their rulers do, including the public policies they choose to adopt. If, in his early work, the people had been excluded a priori from power, now he celebrated democratic prospects, observing that “Democratic leadership is selected from a broad base and remains dependent upon the active support of the entire community. With few exceptions,” he added, in a rather pollyanish turn, “every adult is eligible to have as much of a hand with the decision-making process as he wants and for which he is successful in winning the assent of his fellow citizens.” In a stunning turnabout, he concluded that “the elite of democracy (‘the ruling class’) is society-wide.”⁷⁷

He then stated his values—“the progressive transformation of human society into a free man’s commonwealth”—and oriented policy studies to achieve their realization by “providing a rational basis for the expansion of democratic science and policy,” which he described “as part of the enlightenment process in society … designed to free mankind of suicidal illusions about the ‘inevitability’ of freedom by catastrophe.”⁷⁸ By the late 1940s, Lasswell was counseling how a “developing science of democracy” must learn to “integrate science, morals, and politics,” a far cry from his earlier value-free approach and one much closer to that of Karl Mannheim, who edited the series in England in which Lasswell published The Analysis of Political Behaviour.⁷⁹ “The developing science of democracy, within which he placed the study of public policy, he wrote,⁸⁰

It was just this double-barreled substantive change and normative widening that underpinned Lasswell’s turn to the policy sciences as instruments to guard and extend the tradition of enlightenment. His own shifts in attention and emphasis signified that he believed it was possible, indeed necessary, to simultaneously open new paths to the study of political behavior and to the study of policy, with both in service to enlightened liberal democracy.⁸¹ Addressing the American Political Science Association as its President, in 1956, he would issue a call for his colleagues to reject “passivity” and “bear upon [their] puny shoulders the burden of culpability for the situation of the world today.” The main tasks for political science could not escape the necessity of disciplined and engaged work on public policy to advance preferred values. Identifying the main job as that of clarifying those normative purposes and “originating policy alternatives by means of which goal values can be maximized,” he called for studies of the liberal state to provide “a true center of integration where normative and descriptive frames of reference are simultaneously and continuously applied to the consideration of the policy issues confronting the body politic as a whole over the near, middle, and distant ranges of time.”⁸²

Across the divide between his work before and after the shocks of the Second World War, Lasswell was concerned with challenges to the survival of western constitutional democracy and liberal values, including defective personality structures, self-defeating symbolism, modern propaganda, and the rise of elites of skill, including elites expert in force. Well before his frontal engagement with desolation, he had been aware of the fragility of liberal states, having seen fascist movements and regimes first-hand in visits to Germany, Italy, and France in the 1920s, and never quite as confident as most of his American colleagues at the time in the future of liberal democracy. But now, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, these concerns had become preoccupations. If there were answers and remedies, he counseled, these must lie in powerful and reflexive studies of public policy.

In 1951, Lasswell and Daniel Lerner published the fruits of a major conference supported by the Carnegie Corporation that convened a who’s who of American social science, including Kenneth Arrow, Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, and Clyde Kluckhohn, to review and codify gains made by the policy sciences during and after the Second World War “in order to cope with the gigantic crises of our time.”⁸³ Lasswell’s agenda-setting essay, “The Policy Orientation,” opened the collection these scholars produced. Situating the new challenges to policy squarely in the context of “the consequences of depression and war,” and “the continuing crisis of national security,” by which he meant far more than geopolitical conflict with the Soviet Union, Lasswell advanced the significance of a multidisciplinary effort based in the social sciences to advance rationality and improve human choice. Substantively, he promoted a problem-centered focus on “fundamental problems,” located on a higher and more demanding plane than mere technical adjustments to social insurance, health policy, and the like. Normatively, he endeavored to advance liberal democracy’s prospects by making the clarification of value goals central to policy analysis, citing as a central instance “the mistreatment of Negroes and other colored peoples” and, citing Myrdal’s American Dilemma, also supported by the Carnegie Foundation, as exemplary. Analytically, he sought to join two levels of analysis: methods focusing on choice, especially decision-theory drawn both from micro-economics and cognitive psychology, deployed in tandem with an appreciation and deep concern for history, context, and “the institutional pattern from which we are moving and the pattern toward which we are going,” in order to advance speculative and probabilistic models, a goal he herded under the umbrella he called “developmental constructs.” Policy sciences braiding these elements, Lasswell argued, could improve “the rationality of the policy process” and become “relevant to the policy problems of a given period.” He defined these quandaries as issues on the scale of depression, war, and America’s racial divide, problems more fundamental than mere “topical issues of the moment.”⁸⁴ All in all, he counseled, we should “think of the policy sciences as the disciplines concerned with explaining the policy-making and policy-executing process, and with locating data and providing interpretations which are relevant to the policy problems of a given period.”⁸⁵

These issues, he understood, could not be confined inside the welfare state narrowly conceived or limited to domestic policy questions. National security and individual freedom, the title he had used for a book published the prior year during some of the hottest moments of the Cold War, now were inextricably entwined, like it or not. Modern liberalism and socialism, each of which Lasswell considered aspects of what he called “a vast struggle to unfetter the individual from the bonds of preceding status forms of society,” had become vulnerable to the globe’s dramatic escalation of violence, brutality, and insecurity. “As matters stand today,” he wrote,⁸⁶

Commissioned by the Committee for Economic Development, a relatively progressive think-tank venture founded in 1942 by leading figures in business concerned about levels of employment after the war, the book defined its “central problem” as “how to maintain a proper balance between national security and individual freedom in a continuing crisis of national defense.” Asking how the crisis could be endured “with the least loss of fundamental freedoms,” Lasswell identified civilian supremacy, freedom of information, civil liberties, and a free economy as the principles of national security he wished to secure in the face of atomic weapons, higher defense spending, more centralized and secretive government, a growing atmosphere of suspicion, and a decline in the capacity of the press, public opinion, political parties, courts, civilian agencies, and especially Congress.⁸⁷ “Our aim, he insisted, must be “to prevent successful aggression by a totalitarian dictatorship without becoming transformed in the process into a garrison prison.”⁸⁸

A very similar set of concerns helped bring Robert Dahl to the arena of policy studies. His early work, including a wry consideration of the choices taken to operationalize democratic socialism by the postwar Labour Party government in Britain and a tough-minded contrast between the requirements of democratic and Marxist conceptions of political parties, probed, in effect, whether the liberal and socialist traditions could be compatible.⁸⁹ But his first papers also included a review of two decades of prior work in public administration where, sounding much like Lasswell, Dahl averred that a pure science of administration is not possible in human affairs because “science as such is not concerned with the discovery or elucidation of normative values,” nor can science “construct a bridge across the great gap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’.”⁹⁰

Soon, in his first book, he turned, again much like Lasswell, to the problem of the public control of foreign affairs at a time when “crisis is normal.” More particularly, he wished to know whether Congress, the most important liberal democratic institution in American public life, possessed adequate and appropriate abilities to govern and make thoughtful policy, quickly when needed, as an effective partner for the executive branch. Guided explicitly by the values of rational decisionmaking and responsiveness to public wishes, he focused on the forces that affected the opinion of influential members of Congress, the competence members possess, and their role in making foreign and defense policy. The most basic changes he advocated were aimed at equipping Congress to be an effective and representative policymaking body when dealing with subjects where the President and executive branch controlled key information and expertise. “In an age of total war,” he concluded only three options were possible: “a frank dictatorship of the modern type” on the Politburo model, extensive executive discretion, thus putting ‘democracy’ in inverted commas, or a genuinely collaborative arrangement. If this option cannot be achieved, he cautioned, Congress “must inescapably become more and more the democratic shadow of the first alternative.”⁹¹ Shortly thereafter, Dahl was the senior author of a report on the domestic control of atomic energy, urgently calling for more attention to this question by fellow social scientists, who had ceded the relevant ground to the scientific community and governmental decisions, often cloaked in undue secrecy.⁹²

In this period, Charles Lindblom, a young Yale economist soon to be his coauthor, was grappling, skeptically, with the implications of the market-disturbing qualities of trade unions for the efficient operation of markets, thus threatening to disturb effective policymaking regarding the tradeoff of inflation and unemployment because their monopolistic capacities implied a distortion of market allocations. Sounding not a little like Polanyi in assessing how social democratic interventions, of which he broadly approved, had been destructive to European economic systems in the 1920s, Lindblom calculated that union power after the Second World War, if not effectively controlled either by unions themselves or by others, could impede the ability of modern capitalism to generate jobs and growth.⁹³ Presenting this argument as a “diagnosis” rather than a preference, he opened with a Preface in which he not only declared himself a liberal rather than a conservative, but also implied that his findings had more radical implications. “I am not pamphleteering that a ‘bad’ unionism is destroying a ‘good’ competitive system,” he wrote. “The obvious virtues of unionism and the equally obvious deficiencies of competition preclude so naive an interpretation of the conflict.”⁹⁴ Precisely because unionism is a form of (largely desirable) power, it should not be confused with an instrument that directly produces the public interest of social betterment. “Its usefulness,” he concluded, “depends upon public policy,” yet, as he cautioned, “intelligent public policy is immensely more difficult to achieve in the face of this conflict than otherwise.”⁹⁵

“Depends on public policy” is a phrase that Lasswell, Dahl, and Lindblom all had come to endorse. Such a view, though, invited many more questions than, perforce, could be answered at the time. Dahl and Lindblom’s immense collaborative work, Politics, Economics, and Welfare, published in 1953, was the period’s most systematic search for answers. The anxieties and goals both Dahl and Lindblom brought to this search for a new way to study public policy thus was grounded in their apprehensive, normatively oriented, social science and the puzzles it had revealed. Though much Lasswell’s junior, their concern for the fate of the liberal political tradition and torment about how a liberal regime can best respond to totalitarian challenges also underlay their sense of the exigency for policy studies that could deploy an arsenal of effective techniques to advance desired values.

This program, Dahl and Lindblom advised, required a self-conscious enhancement of “social techniques and rational social action” within the liberal polity with which to effectively confront the “grand alternatives and the ‘ism’s.”⁹⁶ Liberal democracy currently lacked such a body of knowledge, and thus was unduly vulnerable and restricted in its scope of effective action. Dahl had underscored just this absence when, in 1950, he reviewed Karl Mannheim’s posthumously published essays on democratic planning.⁹⁷ Though he shared Mannheim’s “sympathy for democratic politics,” “tolerance for the pluralism of democratic societies,” and his “humanistic faith in the possibilities of democratic control over social development,” Dahl thought Mannheim’s strong preference for effective public capacity to shape socially important outcomes could not possibly be realized by exhortation and unsystematic flashes of insight unless some key problems he had considered only insufficiently were addressed.

The first was too high a level of generality. Mannheim had stated that he offered “no blueprints,” only a “general vision.” Not enough, said Dahl. Neither statements of goals nor loose descriptions of techniques bordering on truisms are sufficient. Nor, for that matter, was Mannheim’s call for interdisciplinary collaboration. By whom, Dahl wanted to know, and for what ends? A second problem was even more basic. Statements of value, Dahl insisted, invited, but could not substitute for, the contribution of systematic social science. Goals and techniques cannot be reduced one to the other; neither should one be substituted for the other. Policy studies must be both normative and scientific, he agreed, but not by eliding their differences or the field of tension they define together.

Growing out of a course Dahl and Lindblom had taught about ‘planning’ at Yale over a six year period, Politics, Economics, and Welfare represented a systematic effort to address these issues and thus move well beyond Mannheim to construct a genuine policy science that could protect the Enlightenment and guard liberal democracy. Their treatise pressed the development of a theoretically driven marriage between economics and politics to produce a fresh, policy-capable, political economy to guide choice in vexing and complex circumstances by connecting particular social techniques and organizational forms to “possibilities for rational action, for planning, for reform—in short, for solving problems.” This mid-level site of action they thought to be superior either to simple individual-level studies of rationality or to grand ideological discourses that they considered too abstract and permissive to serve as useful guides to practical policy decisions. Like other liberals, they were suspicious of grand narratives. Unlike other liberals, they did not think liberalism on its own, without elaboration, could possess sufficient resources to guide key decisions about public policy.

Seeking to know the impact of utilizing alternative instruments to rationally plan and direct public policy, they sought to accomplish two large goals: first, to show in detail how policy techniques are vital for the achievement of cherished values like freedom, democracy, and equality, and, second, to get inside major institutional sites, including the price system and contemporary democracy, and inside basic social processes, including organizational hierarchy and bargaining, in order to be able to elaborate their significance for these values. Put differently, they sought to develop and place a combination of ethical and positive theory within the space of governance.

This orientation to policy, especially its famous emphasis on incrementalism and learning, has been understood by followers and critics alike who stress that it represented an effort to replace politics by technique and ideology by method. This is a serious misreading. Dahl and Lindblom intended no substitution. Quite the reverse. They projected a focus on means rather than ideology or content to strengthen the institutions and deepen the capacities of decisionmakers within liberal democracies in order to underwrite “still viable” Enlightenment values. They grasped that this body of commitments “is a kind of act of faith” under difficult circumstances; but they also affirmed that a realistic analysis of social processes in western liberal democracies lent support to their belief these values in fact still could be secured.⁹⁸

The view that there is a tradeoff between policy studies focusing on nitty gritty processes and substance and large normative goals is as false as the common understanding that David Truman and the other members of the Seminar on the State had replaced the state by attention to the political process. Like these colleagues, Dahl and Lindblom sought to thicken liberalism and its state. Rather than treat the liberal state whole, as a single macrostructure, they were concerned to attend to its interior content, its organization, and its processes in order to make it viable, effective, and worthy of legitimate mass support. Their policy theory thus was geared to provide underpinnings in the political process both for the Enlightenment commitments they cherished and for the type of political regime they believed to be best-equipped to advance them. Discerningly, C. Wright Mills understood both that Politics, Economics, and Welfare had “gone considerably beyond” Mannheim’s writing on planning and that its attempt to ask how the society’s most important values “that derive from the humanist strain of the Western society” could be made “widely and securely available” had produced “in fact, an insurgent’s book, a technical handbook for latter-day reformers.”⁹⁹

The Brookings Lectures of 1955 were devoted to ‘research frontiers in politics and government.’ Herbert Simon addressed recent advances in organization theory; Richard Snyder spoke about the impact and potential of game theory; Paul David considered electoral realignments. David Truman chose to review ‘the impact on political science of the revolution in the behavioral sciences,’ while Robert Dahl, focusing on public policy, examined ‘hierarchy, democracy, and bargaining in politics and economics.’¹⁰⁰

Truman’s text is most noteworthy not for its genuine appreciation of the contributions made to political studies by important advances in research techniques, especially the maturation of the sample survey, lab and field experimentation, and content analysis, but for its cautionary stance about the importation from other disciplines of theory based on empirical verification. Most theory in the behavioral sciences either had been “concerned with individual behavior or with action in small, face-to-face groups” or with “explanation of a wide range of not specifically relevant to any particular institutional context,” whether in organization theory, communication theory, or in high-level systems of abstract formulations, most notably the then regnant effort by Talcott Parsons to produce a general theory of action.

Though not without impact in his discipline, such approaches, Truman cautioned, cannot simply be imported or projected into the sphere of political science. The political institutions of the modern state, including the institutions that link the state to its citizens in a broadly liberal polity, cannot, indeed must not, lose their specificity to a quest for more general theory, like that of Parsons. Further, since much that goes on in the behavioral sciences is “individual or at least non-institutional” in character, acts of importation risk losing the specificity of the subject matter that gives life to the study of politics and the state, so much so that “one risks ceasing to be a political scientist” unless the scholar remembers to take “into account the factors peculiar to the institution that he is studying.” Warning against “an incautious attempt merely to project” the new behavioral techniques of research “into the realm of governmental institutions,” he concluded with a strong plea to build a political science that refuses to choose between political behavior and state-oriented institutional analysis, all the while insisting that technique not overwhelm the selection of political issues to study and the theory to be developed or applied. “It would be a pity if political science were to adopt the position of the inebriated gentleman who, having lost his watch in a dark alley while making his way home in the small hours of the night, insisted on searching for it near the lamp post on the main street because there was more light there.”¹⁰¹

In a complementary lecture, Dahl recalled his listeners to the urgent tasks of policy studies. While stressing the importance of simplified models, conceptual abstractions, and analytically guided applications of such processes as bargaining and hierarchical relations, he insisted that we not lose sight of the purposes underpinning the systematic study of public policy. Focusing on problems of power and participation for liberal democracy, he called for better, more realistic understanding of how relatively modest levels of political participation could be made both effective and consistent with real checks on what political elites are free to do. He insisted that the time horizons of students of policy be stretched, and that, most important, the scholarship of social scientists and historians engaged with policy be made to confront “the great gap between the actual policy choices made in Western societies over the past century and a body of social theory that sought to analyze these choices in terms of mutually exclusive grand alternatives.” If liberal polities were to prosper, this space had to be filled with guided social knowledge tempered by moral purpose, not just by policy analysts but by students of politics more generally. He closed the lecture with a homily. “This task is, at base, a moral task, for it is founded, ultimately on some belief, incoherent as it may be, that certain ends are preferable to other ends, at least in that time and that place and that situation.”¹⁰²

Three years later, Dahl, who by then had published his landmark Preface to Democratic Theory,¹⁰³ enunciated what may be read as an epigraph for the sensibilities of his period’s extended seminar on the state, insisting on the value of a charged relationship between political thought and empirical research, between state-centered macroscopic inquiry and realistic studies of political behavior, and between facts and norms. “It would be easy to kill off political theory altogether in the name of empiricism and rigor,” he commented. “But to do so would be of no service to the intellectual community.” Referring to the big issues of statebuilding, political regimes, and statecraft of the kind that occupied not only Arendt and Polanyi but also many of his colleagues in the academic mainstream in the postwar years, Dahl noted that while “political macroanalysis suffers from certain inherent difficulties … we cannot afford to abandon it.” Without embedding systematic studies of process, behavior, power, and decision within this level of analysis, that of the state, he warned, “the social sciences will move haltingly on, concerned often with a meticulous observation of the trivial, and political theory will take up permanent cohabitation with literary criticism.”¹⁰⁴

1. William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Pertinence of Political History; Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” The journal of American History 73 (December 1986).

2. William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” History and Politics Newsletter 2 (Fall 1991); 6–7.

3. A suggestive elaboration of these points is J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (July 1968).

4. This was not an unfamiliar theme in this period, especially in light of the supra-national commitments of the Third Reich, the USSR, and still-extant European colonialism. For a contemporaneous discussion, see W. Friedmann, The Crisis of the National State (London: Macmillan & Company, 1943).

5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951), pp. 275, 277.

6. Arendt, Origins, pp. 299–300, 302.

7. Arendt, Origins, p. 336.

8. Arendt, Origins, p. 316; Polanyi, Transformation, p. 202.

9. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), vol. 1, pp. 3, 8, lxxvii.

10. Harold Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” American journal of Sociology 46 (January 1941): 455. The characterization of his views on democracy is drawn from David Easton, “Harold Lasswell: Policy Scientist for a Democratic Society,” The journal of Politics 12 (August 1950): 455.

11. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, 1955), p. 309. Earlier versions of the argument appeared in Louis Hartz, “American Political Thought and the American Revolution,” American Political Science Review 46 (June 1952), and Louis Hartz, “The White Tradition in Europe and America,” American Political Science Review 46 (December 1952). His deep concern about the lack of cosmopolitanism in the American liberal tradition and the dangers it posed as the country engaged with a heterogeneous globe was a theme to which he returned in Louis Hartz, “The Coming of Age in America,” American Political Science Review 51 (June 1957).

12. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960), pp. 307, 308, 314. Bell wrote these words in an appraisal of the political mood of the 1940s that pivoted on the writing of Dwight Macdonald and the journal, Politics, he edited from 1944 to 1949. In 1968, when these forty-two issues were reprinted, Hannah Arendt wrote the Introduction where she, too, self-identified as a radical searching for the root of things, thus echoing the remark of the young Marx. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” Politics, volume 1,1944 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. iii.

13. This challenge has remained especially central to the work of Charles Lindblom. See, for example, his 1979 book, written with David K. Cohen, Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem-Solving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); and his Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

14. Charles Lindblom, Unions and Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949); Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

15. These, certainly, were the convictions I carried in my head when I earned a doctorate in history in the late 1960s and took up a post as an assistant professor of political science at Columbia in 1969. I identified with, indeed was excited by, what I then believed to be that moment’s self-conscious efforts to restore the state to the core of political analysis. For a jaundiced view of this effort, arguing, in effect, that with the exception of a brief moment in early-twentieth-century pluralism, American political scientists never abandoned the notion of a sovereign state, possessing a great deal of autonomy, in transaction with the economy, civil society, and other states, see Gabriel A. Almond, “The Return to the State,” American Political Science Review 82 (September 1988).

16. Peter Evans, Albert Hirschman, Peter Katzenstein, Stephen Krasner, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, and I were its founding members.

17. There have been many offspring. A subgroup in political science, for example, calling itself American Political Development, forcefully has advanced historical and institutionalist efforts to understand the country’s central state. Another instance is the venture advanced largely in Foucauldian terms to understand the particularities of the postcolonial state.

18. Leonard Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (January 1986): 4–5.

19. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 466.

20. David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951).

21. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), pp. 443–444.

22. Truman, Governmental Process, pp. 516, 524.

23. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 55.

24. Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 75.

25. For access to the minutes of these meetings and especially those of the Seminar on the State, on which I draw below, I thank the late Aaron Warner. The Seminar on Bureaucracy, though technically the precursor, tended to discuss texts and historical developments at some remove from current events. Gathering from early October 1944 to January 1945, among the topics it considered were Ptolemaic bureaucracy and standardization in ancient China. In doing so, however, members set these questions in the context of recent scholarship by Max Weber, John Dewey, and Harold Laski. Robert Merton and Arthur Macmahon, who attended regularly and soon became leaders of the successor Seminar on the State, habitually turned many of these discussions in the direction of contemporary issues.

26. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942). An important collection of his writings is Franz Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State. Edited with a Preface by Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957).

27. For a discussion by Neumann of the impact of the influx of European scholars into the social sciences in the United States, see Franz L. Neumann, “The Social Sciences,” in Franz L. Neumann, et al., The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). Two other notable essays in this volume are Paul Tillich’s “The Conquest of Theological Provincialism,” and Erwin Panofsky’s “The History of Art.” On this subject, also see Hans Speier, “The Social Conditions of the Intellectual Exile,” in Speier, Social Order and the Risks of War: Papers in Political Sociology (New York: George Stewart Publishers, 1953); H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); and Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930’ to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983).

28. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949).

29. These concerns, of course, were not limited to the Columbia setting. Other leading scholars, like the political sociologist William Kornhauser who feared the consequences of what he thought to be the growing atomization of America’s population into an undifferentiated mass vulnerable to mobilization by undemocratic and demagogic elites, and like Samuel Stouffer and other students of public opinion who discovered very weak popular support for civil liberties, also took up just these themes. William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959); Samuel Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties. (New York: Doubleday, 1955). David Truman favorably reviewed Kornhauser’s book, saluting his building “upon a set of analytical discriminations that permit coming to grips with the problem of mass society without lapsing into misguided complacency or embracing a more beguiling romantic pessimism.” Kornhauser, he noted, had combined the aristocratic critique of Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, and Walter Lippmann with what he described as the more democratic version of Hannah Arendt. David B. Truman, review of Kornhauser, Political Science Quarterly 75 (December 1960): 591, 592.

30. About the “major debt” to Trilling owed by Hofstadter and Mills, see Richard Gillam, “Richard Hofstadter, C. Wright Mills, and ‘the Critical Ideal’,” American Scholar 47 (Winter 1977–8): 84.

31. For a thoughtful reading of this impulse, see Benjamin DeMott, “Rediscovering Complexity,” The Atlantic Monthly, (September 1988). He observed that “Robert Merton, Richard Hofstadter, and Lionel Trilling (a sociologist, a historian, and a littérateur) were well known to one another; occupied the same base, Columbia University; attained commanding reputations in their respective professions at early ages; and shared an unexpressed yet momentous goal: emancipating American liberalism from naiveté.” (p. 68). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 1, 8, 243, 256; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 284, vii; Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” in Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1955); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955).

32. Richard Hofstadter, “History and the Social Sciences,” in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 370.

33. Bell, End of Ideology; Gabriel A. Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). Hofstadter averred that the scholarly ideal he wished to pursue was “that sympathetic and yet somewhat alien and detached appreciation of basic emotional commitments that anthropologists bring to simpler peoples.” Hofstadter, “History,” p. 363. This stance allowed Hofstadter both to be ‘detached’ yet engaged as a political intellectual grappling with key issues of his times. The impact of psychological work by Freud, Adler, and Adorno on Hofstadter “was exerted on Hofstadter largely through the mediation of men in other fields,” especially Karl Mannheim and Harold Lasswell. Daniel Walker Howe and Peter Elliot Finn, “Richard Hofstadter: The Ironies of an American Historian,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (February 1974): 8. David Truman commented on behavioral work “at the borderland of psychology, sociology, and anthropology” in his 1955 Brookings Lecture, “The Impact on Political Science of the Revolution in the Behavioral Sciences,” in Stephen K. Bailey, et al., Research Frontiers in Politics and Government: Brookings Lectures, 1955 (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1955), p. 211.

34. David B. Truman, “Disillusion and Regeneration: The Quest for a Discipline,” American Political Science Review 59 (December 1965).

35. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

36. Truman, “Disillusion and Regeneration,” p. 866.

37. Truman, “Disillusion and Regeneration,” p. 872.

38. Truman, “Disillusion and Regeneration,” p. 873.

39. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 516.

40. Truman, Governmental Process; Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); and V. O. Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1961).

41. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), chapter 1.

42. In this dual stance, Hofstadter anticipated the critical history of liberalism Hartz later produced. Hofstadter wrote a favorable review of Hartz’s American Liberal Tradition for the New York Times Book Review, “Without Feudalism,” February 27, 1955, p. 34.

43. Hofstadter, Tradition, pp. vii, 352. From one vantage, the book, as Elkins and McKitrick note, “had at the outset no grand design.” After he had written a small number of essays, an editor at Knopf solicited more, enough to make a book, and then encouraged him to add an introduction. So “the book simply grew.” But underneath it lay a strong intellectual marxisant substructure suspicious of bourgeois capitalism’s impositions on the range and character of political choices as well as an affinity for the approach and values Karl Mannheim had announced in Ideology and Utopia, a theme to which I return more generally in this book’s concluding chapter. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “Richard Hofstadter: A Progress,” in Elkins and McKitrick, The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 308; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936 [1929]).

44. “To describe the young Hofstadter as a passionate revolutionary would be wrong; to underestimate the intensity of his Marxist conviction or the degree of his disillusion would be no less mistaken.” Daniel Joseph Singal, “Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984). An undergraduate radical at Buffalo in the 1930s who later joined the graduate student unit of the Communist party at Columbia University, Hofstadter became disillusioned and left the Party before the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Later, he would identify himself as a “radical liberal,” a realistic critic of liberalism but from the inside. Lawrence Cremin has observed that “Hofstadter’s central purpose in writing history … was to reformulate American liberalism so that it might stand more honestly and effectively.” Susan Stout Baker, Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 89–90, 141–143; Newsweek, July 6, 1970, p. 19; Lawrence A. Cremin, Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970): A Biographical Memoir (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Education, 1972), p. 8. Cremin rightly stressed Hofstadter’s fierce commitment to free inquiry and liberal education, a subject about which he wrote quite a lot. See Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); Richard Hoftstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); and Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1963).

45. This break was later described by Hofstadter as “parricidal.” Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. 299. For an earlier consideration, see Richard Hofstadter, “Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea,” American Quarterly 2 (Autumn 1950). A useful discussion can be found in Charles Crowe, “The Emergence of Progressive History,” journal of the History of Ideas 28 (January-March 1966), which summarizes the main themes of the work of these historians as including a pragmatic orientation seeking to navigate between a simple empiricism and grand abstraction, the reduction of ideas to secondary status, presentism, epistemological relativism, a focus on economic and geographic variables, and a presentist emphasis on the social and moral utility of history. Crowe observed, anticipating Hofstadter, that “the violent and tragic events of this generation” have made the Progressive version of history seem “increasingly superficial and inadequate.” (p. 123)

46. Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. xv.

47. Hofstadter, Tradition, p. viii. This challenge to the progressive view of history was not pressed hard here by Hofstadter. Rather, as John Higham has observed, “He delivered it as a casual afterthought to a narrative revealing a fascinating variety of political types” that, read together, underscored not so much the uniformity as the shortcomings of the American liberal political tradition. John Higham, with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 213.

48. Richard Hofstadter, “Charles Beard and the Constitution,” in Howard K. Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).

49. Hofstadter, Reform, p. 10.

50. Hofstadter, Reform, pp. 15, 328, 22.

51. “Hofstadter’s writing never degenerated,” his student, Eric Foner, observed, “into the uncritical celebration of the American experience that characterized much ‘consensus’ writing.” Eric Foner, “The Education of Richard Hofstadter,” The Nation, May 4, 1992, p. 601. Similarly, writing about The American Political Tradition, Richard Gillam observed that “in an unpublished portion of his introduction” Hofstadter observed that “the possibility of a split between ‘officialdom’ and ‘the people’ is ‘particularly dangerous in the modern era of corporate capital, international tension, centralized communications, and skilled propaganda. Perhaps never in history has there been a more compelling need for constant critical evaluation of those who hold power. One of the best guides to such evaluation is a cold appraisal of those who have held power in the past’.” Gillam, “Hofstadter,” p. 76. For a critical, on target, discussion of consensus history, see John Higham, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’: Homogenizing Our History,” Commentary 27 (February 1959). Describing how “classes have turned into myths, sections have lost their solidity, ideologies have vaporized into climates of opinion,” and the “phrase ‘the American experience has become an incantation,” he asked, pointedly, “How did this larcenous seizure of pragmatic attitudes for the sake of a conservative historiography come about?” (pp. 93, 95). Higham, though, wrongly herded Hofstadter, along with Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, whom he rightly placed there, under this umbrella. A fine overview of Hofstadter’s intellectual life is provided by Paula Fass, “Richard Hofstadter,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 17 (Detroit: 1983).

52. Hofstadter, Tradition, p. xi.

53. Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. 457.

54. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

55. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 522.

56. Dahl, Preface, p. l.

57. Truman, Governmental Process, pp. 524, 535.

58. Truman, “Disillusion and Regeneration,” p. 873.

59. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 522.

60. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

61. Truman, Governmental Process, pp. 219, 37.

62. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 511.

63. Truman, Governmental Process, pp. 502–503, 506, 512, 534, 535, 524.

64. Harold Lasswell, The Policy Orientation of Political Science (Agra; Lakshmi Narain Agarwal), 1971, p. 7.

65. Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York; Harper, 1953), p. 28. In a footnote, they record that the values they enumerate are affiliated with “a list by Harold D. Lasswell, Power and Personality. W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1948.” (p. 28)

66. Paul Kecskemett, “The ‘Policy Sciences’; Aspiration and Outlook,” World Politics 4 (July 1952); 520.

67. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” pp. 459, 467. The applicability of Lasswell’s model to the American case has been controversial. There are important Lasswellian strands in the argument developed by C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), which places the military as one of three institutions whose leaders are at the pinnacle of American power. For influential critiques of Lasswell and Mills, respectively, see Aaron Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United States Become a Garrison State?,” International Security 16 (Spring 1992); and Daniel Bell, “Is There a Ruling Class in America? The Power Elite Reconsidered,” in Bell, The End of Ideology.

68. David Riesman, “Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition,” in Carl J. Friedrich and Edward S. Mason, eds., Public Policy 4 (1942): 47, 46, 45, 51, 93, 90, 96.

69. Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, pp. 511–526.

70. Lasswell, Policy Orientation, p. 7.

71. Harold Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When How (New York; McGraw Hill, 1936), p. 3.

72. Easton, “Lasswell,” pp. 451, 459. In addition to Easton’s fine overview, I also have been influenced in my reading of Lasswell by Richard M. Merelman, “Harold Lasswell’s Political World; Weak Tea for Hard Times,” British Journal of Political Science 11 (October 1981). The ‘weak tea’ in his title refers to Lasswell’s policy science; with this characterization I disagree, as will be clear below.

73. This view can be found as early as Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York; Knopf, 1927); and Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (New York; Viking, 196° [193°]).

74. Harold D. Lasswell, “‘Inevitable’ War; A Problem in the Control of Long-Range Expectations,” World Politics 2 (October 1949); 29, 25.

75. Harold Lasswell, Democracy Through Public Opinion (Menasha, Wisconsin; George Banta Publishing, 1941), p. 11.

76. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven; Yale University Press), 1961.

77. Harold Lasswell, Power and Personality (New York; Norton, 1948), pp. 109–110.

78. Lasswell, Power and Personality, pp. 222, 221, 217.

79. Harold Lasswell, The Analysis of Political Behavior: An WEmpirical Approach (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner, 1947), p. 1.

80. Lasswell, Political Behaviour, p. 1.

81. This “transformation in Lasswell’s frame of reference,” Easton has observed, “transcends in its significance the personal meaning it may have for him alone or even the importance it may have for contributing to a new approach to the empirical study of political power.” Easton, “Lasswell,” pp. 475–476.

82. Harold Lasswell, “The Political Science of Science: An Inquiry into the Possible Reconciliation of Mastery and Freedom,” American Political Science Review 50 (December 1956): 968, 965, 972, 978, 979.

83. Harold Dwight Lasswell and Daniel Lerner, eds., The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Methods (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 7.

84. Harold Lasswell, “The Policy Orientation,” in Lasswell and Lerner, pp. 3–15.

85. Lasswell, “Policy Orientation,” p. 14.

86. Harold Dwight Lasswell, National Security and Individual Freedom (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950), p. 49.

87. Lasswell, National Security, pp. 23–49.

88. Lasswell, National Security, p. 49.

89. Robert A. Dahl, “Workers’ Control of Industry and the British Labour Party,” American Political Science Review 41 (October 1947); Robert A. Dahl, “Marxism and Free Parties,” journal of Politics 10 (November 1948).

90. Robert A. Dahl, “The Science of Public Administration: Three Problems,” Public Administration Review 7 (Winter 1947): 2, 4. Much the same point was made by Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1947), chapter 2.

91. Robert A. Dahl, Congress and Foreign Policy (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 241, 263, 264.

92. Robert A. Dahl and Ralph S. Brown, Jr., Domestic Control of Atomic Energy (New York: Social Science Research Council, Bulletin Number 8, 1951).

93. Lindblom, Unions. Earlier versions of the argument appeared as Charles E. Lindblom, “’Bargaining Power’ in Price and Wage Determination,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 62 (May 1948), and Charles E. Lindblom, “The Union as a Monopoly,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 62 (November 1948).

94. Lindblom, Unions, p. v.

95. Lindblom, Unions, vi. Just as his own book was coming into print, Lindblom wrote a largely laudatory review of C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: Americas Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948) for the American Sociological Review 14 (June 1949). Mills, while writing what might be thought of as a collective biography of the new generation of labor leaders, had announced that they “are now the strategic elite in American society.” (Mills, p. 391) Lindblom thought this book “should receive the great public attention given to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, a less scholarly and less original work.” (p. 432) Unlike most economists who thought they were in possession of far superior tools than political scientists, Lindblom based his collaboration with Dahl not only on mutual personal regard but also on a balanced view of their two disciplines. Writing four years after the publication of their book, he expressed a belief “that political scientists would more accurately value their own discipline if they better understood what little reason economists had for self-satisfaction.” Charles E. Lindblom, “In Praise of Political Science,” World Politics 9 (January 1957): 252.

96. Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, p. 3.

97. Karl Mannheim, Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). Dahl’s review appeared in the American Sociological Review 15 (December 1950).

98. Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, pp. 516–517.

99. C. Wright Mills’ review appeared in the American Sociological Review, 4 (August 1954): 495, 496. Although Mills announced the book had produced “better sociology than is generally available nowadays,” some economists were less sure about the contributions to their discipline. William Baumol, for example, criticized its taxonomic bent, and its failure to systematically utilize social choice theory or his own work on public goods. William J. Baumol, “Economic Theory and the Political Scientist,” World Politics 6 (January 1954).

100. Bailey, et al., Research Frontiers. The remaining three lectures were by Stephen Bailey on legislative studies, Alfred de Grazia on electoral behavior, and Malcolm Moos on the nominating process.

101. Truman,“Behavioral Sciences,” In Bailey, et al., Frontiers, pp. 223, 224, 230, 227.

102. Robert A. Dahl, “Hierarchy, Democracy, and Bargaining in Politics and Economics,” in Bailey, et al., Frontiers, pp. 67, 69.

103. Dahl, Preface. “Democratic theory,” he wrote, “is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a relatively high degree of control over leaders.” (p. 3)

104. Robert A. Dahl, “Political Theory: Truth and Consequences,” World Politics, 11 (October 1958): 102, 98.