Suchergebnisse

The members of the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy
were not of one mind about any of the subjects they took up—and this
is one reason, among many, that it was the most vibrant and
stimulating professional collaboration I have had the privilege to
be part of. It would be presumptuous of me to speak for anyone but
myself in explaining and justifying the Task Force's work. And yet,
there does seem to me at least one note of common explanation
required up front. All the members of the Task Force, I am certain,
saw their work as only the beginning of a
discussion within the discipline—and, indeed, more broadly—about the
relationship between inequality and contemporary American
governance. Although we hoped to showcase and integrate the best
existing research and theory, our main goal was to spark new
questions, new research, new thinking, and new debates. And judging
from this forum, as well as from the recent scholarship showcased in
Larry Bartels's (2006) and Kay Schlozman's (2006) essays, we
have.

This note questions both some of the premises and some of the conclusions of Theodore J. Lowi's diagnosis, in the March 1992 American Political Science Review, of the state of the political science discipline. Since I am given a prominent, if undeserved role, in his analysis of historical trends, perhaps I may be pardoned if it begins by refuting that part of his argument.Surely one should feel great (and devilish) delight at learning that one has exercised diabolical influence over the shaping of political science. Alas, I am wholly lacking in the power that Professor Lowi attributes to me in his paper. Alas also, if I were armed, my gun was not aimed in the direction he supposes it was. I am not at all in sympathy with the Third American Government whose (confused) economics-based ideology he presumes I created, as anyone will recognize who has read the foreword to the recent re-issue of the Simon-Smithburg-Thompson textbook, Public Administration, or the earlier work, Administrative Behavior (AB), or the more recent Reason in Human Affairs. Are these books written so obscurely that Professor Lowi could not see that the rationality celebrated in them (if any rationality is celebrated at all) is a weak, muddled, bounded rationality that is rejected out of hand by the economists who espouse public choice and neoclassical laissez-faire theory?