Individual development and Anglo-American pluralism

Autor: Avigail I. Eisenberg
Rok vydání: 1996
Předmět:
Zdroj: Social Science Information. 35:363-387
ISSN: 1461-7412
0539-0184
DOI: 10.1177/053901896035002011
Popis: Political pluralism is often portrayed as a theory about interest-group competition, which was developed primarily by post-war American political scientists. This conventional view is mistaken. This analysis examines the ways in which advocates of political pluralism have handled the theme of individual development. In the first part, a distinction is drawn between two dimensions of group power. In the second part, this distinction is used to examine how four different pluralists conceive the relation between self-development and pluralist politics. The first three theorists, John Dewey, Harold Laski and Mary Parker Follett, are scholars whose contributions to the pluralist tradition rarely figure accurately in contemporary accounts of the doctrine. The fourth pluralist, Robert Dahl, offers a more familiar rendition. Even Dahl's theory contains insights that help to establish a pluralist account of self-development. The concluding section considers briefly some lessons relevant to contemporary debates that might be drawn from pluralism's account of self-development.
Databáze: OpenAIRE