ABSTRACT
Politics, Economics, and Welfare (1953) is perhaps the most ambitious book that Dahl and Lindblom have written in their entire career. Moreover, George Von der Muhll considers it “in some respects the most creative book Dahl ever wrote” and looking back (from the mid-1970s) on the postwar social and political sciences, he concludes: “one can find few analytic schemata as comprehensive in scope, as systematically elaborated in detail, and as searchingly applied to societal processes” (1977: 1076). Consequently, one could almost read Politics, Economics, and Welfare as an encyclopedia of all that was known about social organization in 1953. In view of this aspect, it also provides, in conjunction with Congress and Foreign Policy, a convenient vantage point from which to analyze what progress we have made over the past five or six decades in our knowledge about politics, policy, and government.
