ABSTRACT
Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, within American political scholarship a desire developed to transform this discipline into a “true” science. The ambition to establish a more scientific scholarship was channeled during the 1940s into the emergence of behavioralism. This current swelled in the 1950s, becoming the dominant paradigm.1 It maintained its supremacy till the end of the 1960s, when it came under attack for political and epistemological reasons. While this period was relatively brief, it marks a watershed within political science that to this day has continued to set the tone for its practitioners. Therefore, the state of this discipline at present can only be appreciated from the perspective of the behavioralistic period (cf. Farr, Dryzek and Leonard 1995: 1 ff.). Likewise, one can only properly appreciate the work of Dahl and Lindblom in the context of the development of behavioralism.
