<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: valuable supplemental text?
Review: I've been out of college for several years, yet I would expect that many political-science courses still include some reference to various debates over "pluralism" as a theory of how the American system of politics works. Pluralism in the form Weber has in mind was classically formulated in the writings of Robert Dahl in the 1960s. The general model came under immediate attack from both the right and the left. The left thought the model was actually an idealization of the way decisions are made in the U.S. which is (they charged) more elitist and class-based than Dahl's books made it out to be. Many scholars to Dahl's right complained that he assumes a post-New-Deal world, with a wide-ranging regulatory system in place, and only wants to study how a plurality of interest groups influences that system. He thus forecloses by assumption what is for some of his critics the crucial question whether that system should exist in the first place, whether it should not in fact be dismantled. Such arguments over pluralism were getting a little passe when I took undergrad poli-sci courses in the late 1970s, but they were still considered important enough to require coverage. If that is still the case, then this will be a valuable book. An interesting group of environmental issues and detailed coverage of how decisions are made, leads Weber to some updating of the old Dahlian model.
<< 1 >>
| 
