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Politics Beyond The End of Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Mark P. Petracca
Mark P. Petracca*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

The End of Liberalism is an ambitious, engaging, and intellectually provocative work even if it is also occasionally ambiguous, ahistorical, assuming, and utopian. This work attempts to build a theory of the modern American political regime which captures its complexity, inherent contradictions, institutional dilemmas, and self-destructive public philosophy. Since America has yet to abandon the politics and public philosophy of interest group liberalism, Theodore Lowi's (1969 and 1979) polemic remains a useful and now comfortable perch from which to observe the continuing crisis of public authority and shout appropriate epitaphs. There is little doubt that The End of Liberalism continues to stimulate, define, and inform intellectual and political debate in America 20 years after its initial publication.

There are two ironies about The End of Liberalism which are now apparent two decades after its publication. First, if Lowi's work had been completely successful in laying to rest the demon of interest group liberalism and its spiritual compatriots, we might not be assessing the longevity and influence of this work two decades later.

Type
Features
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 566 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Preceding Lowi were notable attacks by Bernstein (1959), Schattschneider (1960), Kariel (1961), and McConnell (1966).

2. For example, the 1969 edition of The End of Liberalism started out with 40 citations as reported in the Social Science Citation Index in 1971 and rose to a high of 69 citations by 1975. Since the release of the second edition in 1979 the combined citations for both works has reached a high of 74 in 1981 and has not dipped below 44 since the early 1970s.

3. The answer is Butler, David and Stokes, Donald E., Political Change in Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969).Google Scholar

4. Of course, other scholars remind us that discretion may be inevitable if not essential.

5. At the 1990 Western Political Science Association meetings, Lowi responded to a question about where he stood on the question of self-interest by conceding that “We are a society based on greed, we simply call it the pursuit of happiness. That is the essence of liberalism” (March 23, 1990).

6. For a further discussion of these issues, see Petracca (1990).

7. For an alternative attack on Lowi's juridical democracy and legal formalism, see Brand (1988).