Justice

Power and Democracy

A concern with democracy was the impetus for the post-World War II power debate. It then seemed that democracy had triumphed over fascism in the Western half of the world; at the same time, the ideological battle against communism was being conducted in the name of democracy. Democracy was, then, a crucial political and ideological value. And democracy made bold claims about power: power should not be located in the hands of one authoritarian leader or one ruling party. Power should be spread widely among the populace; ideally, it should be spread equally. In the real, non-ideal, world, equality of power might be impossible, but the distribution of power in a democracy should approximate as closely as possible the ideal of equality.

The standard-bearer for democracy was then (and still is) the United States. So it was a shock when The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills, was published in 1956. Mills argued that power was not widely spread in contemporary United States. His thesis was that power was monopolized by a small elite that consisted of the leaders of the military-industrial complex. Democracy could have some impact on the minor decisions, but it had none over the major ones, which were taken by the power elite, in their own interests. In a way, Mills revived the theory of the classical elitists (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels), who had argued some 50 years earlier that all societies had to be ruled by elites; the only question was which elites. But that, largely European, debate had not had much impact in the United States. Mills, an American writing about the United States, at the height of the cold war, was a different matter.

The response to Mills from within the newly emerging discipline of political science was two-pronged. A group of Marxists objected to Mills's failure to employ a class analysis; they argued that there was not an elite ruling the United States—there was a ruling class. The most tenacious of these writers was William Domhoff, who published a series of books to support this claim. But far more numerous and important were those who wanted to defend U.S. democracy against Mills's attack. And the most important of these was Robert Dahl, who, in a number of path-breaking articles and books, outlined a number of theses that have formed the basis for several different research agendas in subsequent decades.

One strand was that Dahl accepted some of the ideas of the classical elitists, but argued that nevertheless democracy was different from other political systems in that it consisted of a competition between elites—and a competition that was open to any interested group to join. Another strand was Dahl's argument that Mills and others had an insufficiently articulated understanding of the concept of power and that Mills's research was flawed because of his failure to understand this concept correctly. This applied some of the ideas of the prevailing philosophical school of conceptual analysis. Dahl's focus on the need for careful examination of the concept of power has led to a large literature on this topic; Dahl's work has been superseded, but that does not take away from his importance in initiating this line of work.

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