Neo-Pluralism

Abstract

We noted in Chapter 2 that conventional pluralist writers still accord a central role to representative government and group politics, and in Chapter 3 that mainstream economists continue to discuss economic systems in terms of a basically nineteenth-century conceptual apparatus. However, a small but influential group of major liberal thinkers has responded in a much more critical way to the onslaught on pluralist orthodoxy mounted by elite theory, Marxism and the new right. Many of these authors, such as Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, Albert Hirschman, and John Galbraith, contributed importantly to conventional pluralist thought in the 1950s and early 1960s. But since this period, their thinking has moved into new pathways and addressed more fundamental questions about the development of advanced industrial societies.