Domhoff, G. William (1936-)

G. William Domhoff is a research professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published many books and articles dealing with the power structure in the United States. A leading power elitist and neo-Marxist analyst of power, he has been highly influential in urban studies and sociological studies of power in the United States.

His first best-selling book, Who Rules America? (published in 1967), is a detailed description and analysis of the links between political elites in business, politics, and the military in the United States. Five further editions under the title Who Rules America Now? were published between 1983 and [Page 202]2009, updating the list of elites and their links. The argument of the books is that class and corporate finance dominate U.S. politics, though Domhoff also offers some hope that activists can operate within a democracy to break the class structure and offer a better future.

Domhoff argues that the structure of U.S. society is dominated by class and capitalism. The neo Marxist line is that the structure of capitalist society provides easier access for businesspeople into the political system, but he is not a determinist in any sense. Rather, he sees the power structure operating through personal and social networks that enable the elite to dominate. He does see these elites as competing, largely through the two-party system, but at the end of the day that struggle is simply for which circles will dominate U.S. politics, and not for any distributional struggle that will benefit the U.S. people as a whole.

Domhoff argues that although the democratic system allows ordinary people to have a route into the political process, access is much easier for the wealthy. The relative costs of taking part in politics are lower and they have links through personal networks. He believes that the facts of class domination are overshadowed in most academic writing because analysts concentrate far too much on institutional processes and do not examine outcomes to the extent they should. That the outcomes benefit the rich so much demonstrates their domination.

In 1978, Domhoff published Who Really Rules?, a reexamination of the materials that Robert Dahl and his associates collected in writing their classic Who Governs? Here Domhoff argues that, rather than supporting a pluralist view of power in New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl and his associates had actually collected material demonstrating elite dominance.

Domhoff has also been closely associated with the growth machine or growth coalition argument that urban politics is dominated by development and that development is skewed toward exchange-value rather than use-value and, hence, benefits capitalists rather than local people.