News

Pluralism’s Ringmaster: Robert Dahl, 1915-2014

February 13, 2014 3132

Robert A. DahlAlthough he wrote that “politics is a sideshow in the great circus of life,” Robert Dahl was one of the ringmasters in the academic Big Top. Dahl, who died on Feb. 5 at age 98, had been dubbed the “dean of American political scientists” and “the premier democratic theorist of our time.” He’s perhaps best known—and likely will be long remembered–through his seminal book, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City.

In that book, he outlined the idea that America government, while not genuinely democratic, was at least pluralistic in its collection of interest groups with at least some share of the political pie.

The books remains an influential introduction to U.S. politics, even if—as Dahl himself acknowledged—it’s imperfect, not universally loved and a little yellow around the edges. Harvard’s Jennifer Hochschild, in an appreciation of Dahl published last week in the Washington Post, wrote:

I teach Who Governs? as the first book in my favorite course, on “Power in American Society.” The smart and assertive students love to tear into it, showing how it is naïve, incomplete, outdated, complacent.  But the careful readers among them come to see that Dahl anticipated most of their objections and answered them, and they discover how difficult it is to refute his core arguments that a reasonably well functioning political system can give everyone the opportunity to have at least a little political impact.

Robert Alan Dahl was born in Iowa, although—Yale and its home of New Haven. Connecticut aside–he’s best connected with Skagway, Alaska, where he grew up and later wrote a memoir about. (Skagways’s other claim to political fame — Sarah Palin’s early childhood there.) An undergrad at the University of Washington, he earned a doctorate at Yale in 1940. While he could have sat out World War II as a bureaucrat, he instead joined the Army and saw combat as a first lieutenant in the infantry, earning a Bronze Star in the process.

After the war he returned to teach at Yale, and never left. A rising academic star in the infant field of political science during  the 1950s, he broke wide in 1961 with the publication of Who Governs?, which dealt with the wide expanse of American politics by going deep into the experiences of New Haven.  “… [I]t probably is not too much to say that this volume will become a landmark of American political science even though it deals ostensibly with one city during a relatively brief period of time,” reviewer Duane Lockard predicted in a 1962 review in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

His writing continued to exert considerable influence on political science throughout his career and into retirement, through an enormous body of articles and books such as 1989’s Democracy and Its Critics and 2002’s How Democratic is the American Constitution? His appreciation of the democratic impulse—always a bane for his leftist interpreters—rarely blinded the one-time union organizer from recognizing the many bugs in the American algorithm:

I, for one, am inclined to think that compared with the political systems of the other advanced democratic countries, ours is among the most opaque, complex, confusing, and difficult to understand.

Dahl received honors sufficient for several bookcases, including the debut John Skytte Prize for Political Science and two fellowships each with the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. He served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1967 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among many others.


Related Articles

Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: The Grandfather of Behavioral Economics
News
March 27, 2024

Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: The Grandfather of Behavioral Economics

Read Now
A Community Call: Spotlight on Women’s Safety in the Music Industry 
Insights
March 22, 2024

A Community Call: Spotlight on Women’s Safety in the Music Industry 

Read Now
2024 Holberg Prize Goes to Political Theorist Achille Mbembe
News
March 14, 2024

2024 Holberg Prize Goes to Political Theorist Achille Mbembe

Read Now
Charles V. Hamilton, 1929-2023: The Philosopher Behind ‘Black Power’
Career
March 5, 2024

Charles V. Hamilton, 1929-2023: The Philosopher Behind ‘Black Power’

Read Now
New Feminist Newsletter The Evidence Makes Research on Gender Inequality Widely Accessible

New Feminist Newsletter The Evidence Makes Research on Gender Inequality Widely Accessible

Gloria Media, with support from Sage, has launched The Evidence, a feminist newsletter that covers what you need to know about gender […]

Read Now
Did the Mainstream Make the Far-Right Mainstream?

Did the Mainstream Make the Far-Right Mainstream?

The processes of mainstreaming and normalization of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far right.

Read Now
Contemporary Politics Focus of March Webinar Series

Contemporary Politics Focus of March Webinar Series

This March, the Sage Politics team launches its first Politics Webinar Week. These webinars are free to access and will be delivered by contemporary politics experts —drawn from Sage’s team of authors and editors— who range from practitioners to instructors.

Read Now
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments