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Politics, Markets and Rationalistic Imbroglios

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

L. L. Wade
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Extract

A muddy pool, it is said, can pretend to any depth, an observation applicable to much of the revisionist liberalism now widespread in the academy. Unable for ideological or prudential reasons to accept, say, a conservative, classically liberal, or Marxist critique of modern society, but increasingly uncomfortable with the failure, as it is viewed, of bourgeois democracy, neoliberal system-builders have sought a synthesis of the “best” elements of socialist economics (yielding equality) and market relations (efficiency) within a “genuinely” democratic framework. The publication of Charles E. Lindblom's Politics and Markets is as an important auspice of this trend. Recipient of the American Political Science Association's most prestigious book award and laudatory comment in the journals of opinion, the volume has also sparked reaction in business circles, as in the Mobil Oil advertisement which took issue with Lindblom's analysis of big business' “privileged position” in the governance of the world's polyarchies (i.e., the “crippled” democracies of North America, Western Europe, Japan and related systems).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , April 1982 , pp. 187 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1982

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References

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2 Hyperbolic blurbs adorning the paperback version are illustrative: a “great book, certain to be one of the most influential written by a political scientist in the last quarter century,” according to Everett C. Ladd; “An important book, a genuinely enlightening book” wrote Michael Walzer in the New York Review of Books; “Few books have as much to teach us as this one” asserted Robert L. Heilbroner in the New York Times Book Review; “I'll gladly place this volume on the same shelf as Veblen, Schumpeter, and Keynes” effused Robert Lekachman in The New Republic. Not all political scientists have had unqualified praise; see Anderson, Charles W., “The Political Economy of Charles E. Lindblom,” American Political Science Review, 72 (11 1978), 1012–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Oppenheimer, Joe A., “Small Steps for Political Economy,” World Politics, 33 (10 1980), 121–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And economists, interestingly, have been less culpable: see, “Three Reviews of Charles E. Lindblom,” by Solo, Robert, Fusfeld, Daniel R. and Buchanan, James, Journal of Economic Issues, 13 (03 1979), 207–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 This is not to say that Lindblom, Key, and Schattschneider are necessarily correct. As one important study of the limits of business power noted: “We have found objection not so much to our findings as to the fact that our findings might be correct. There are those who would prefer that the facts we report not be so” (Bauer, R. A., Pool, I. de Sola and Dexter, L. A., American Business and Public Policy [New York, 1963], p. 484)Google Scholar.

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