ABSTRACT
Besides being criticized for giving scant attention to the participatory ideals underlying the concept of democracy, in the 1960s the pluralists were also criticized for how they defined “power” and subjected it to empirical research. In their opponents’ eyes, the pluralists misjudged fundamental power structures and inequalities of power and were intolerably naive about the egalitarian and democratic caliber of contemporary society. This criticism was actually an outgrowth of the polemic discourse between the elitists and pluralists that had begun directly after the war. In Chapter 7 I have already treated Dahl’s reservations about the idea that there is only one ruling elite. I went on to reflect upon the empirical research on public decision making that Dahl conducted in New Haven at the end of the 1950s. Through that research, Dahl substantiated his assumptions about the distribution of power in a pluralist society, assumptions that he had worked out in A Preface to Democratic Theory.
