Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many

Samuel P. Huntington

Political Science Quarterly, Volume 89, Issue 1 (Mar., 1974), 1-26.

c 1974 The Academy of Political Science

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON

"In American social studies," Louis Hartz observed eighteen years ago, "we still live in the shadow of the Progressive era."1 The book in which he wrote these words played a major and, in some respects, decisive role in dissipating that shadow and moving the study of American society into the bright, warm, soothing sunlight of the consensus era. For a decade thereafter, the dominant image of American society among scholars and intellectuals was that formulated and expressed in the works of Boorstin, Hofstadter, Parsons, Potter, Bell, Lipset, Hartz himself, and many others. The consensus theory was the product of a new scholarly concern with what was "different" about American society and, indeed, "American civilization." The consensus theory marked not only a rejection of the earlier progressive paradigm of American politics. It also differed from, although it was not entirely incompatible with, the pluralistic model which, from the early decades of the century, had been the most popular paradigmatic child of the American political science profession. The progressive theory stressed class conflict; the pluralist model stressed the competition among a multi-

1 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. 27.

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Harvard University, and editor of the quarterly magazine, Foreign Policy. His books include The Soldier and the State, The Common Defense, Political Power: USA/USSR (with Z. Brzezinski), and Political Order in Changing Societies.

2 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

plicity of groups; and the consensus view, the absence of serious ideological or class conflict and the presence of a fundamental agreement on values. Could American politics best be understood in terms of one consensus, two classes, or many groups? Such was the issue dividing the paradigms.

Even in the 19505 the consensus theory had its critics,2 but the critics were themselves only additional evidence of its intellectual dominance. For they were in fact critics, and in scholarly debate to criticize a theory is to testify to its importance and perhaps to its persuasiveness. A paradigm is threatened not when it is criticized, but when it is ignored, when people find a different paradigm a more compelling and useful way of organizing their thoughts. In the rather turbulent latter half of the 196os, the criticism of the consensus model intensified, and there were frequent expressions of the need to move "beyond consensus" in interpreting American society and politics. But just what it was one was to move to remained rather vague. Did going beyond consensus mean going back to the progressive or pluralist models? If American politics were not thought of in terms of either the one, or the two, or the many, how could they be thought of? Did not these just about exhaust the possibilities? The purpose of this paper is to review the way in which these three paradigms developed, to analyze sketchily the advantages and disadvantages of each, to take a quick look at American politics in the perspective of comparative politics, and to suggest that the conflicts between ideals and institutions and among generations may provide alternative approaches to the tyranny of the one, the two, and the many in the study of American politics.

Class Conflict and Pluralism

The progressive theory to which Hartz referred was, of course, that reflected in the works of Beard, Parrington, J. Allen Smith, Turner, and other social scientists, primarily historians, at the turn of the century. The two key elements distinguishing the progressive approach were, first, a stress on the significance of economic interests, as distinguished from idealistic purposes, as the motive moving men in history, and second, the emphasis on the extent to which American history could be interpreted in terms of the clash

2 For the first major attack, see John Higham, "The Cult of the `American Consensus’: Homogenizing Our History," Commentary, 27 (February 1959), 93ff.

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 3

between two contenders for power: the popular party and the elite party. Over time the particular groups in this conflict might change, but the struggle itself continued The essence of the progressive paradigm was well summed up by Parrington in some notes which he wrote for but did not use in Main Currents in American Thought:

From the first we have been divided into two main parties. Names and battle cries and strategies have often changed repeatedly, but the broad party division has remained. On one side has been the party of the current aristocracy-of church, of gentry, of merchant, of slave holder, of manufacturer-and on the other the party of the commonalty-of farmer, villager, small tradesman, mechanic, proletariat. The one has persistently sought to check and limit the popular power, to keep the control of the government in the hands of the few in order to serve special interest, whereas the other has sought to augment the popular power, to make government more responsive to the will of the majority, to further the democratic rather than the republican ideal- let one discover this and new light is shed on our cultural tendencies.3

In stressing the continuing cleavage in American society between elite and mass, the progressive historians were, as Hartz noted, reacting in large part against the earlier "Patriotic" historians who had celebrated the unity of the country and the beneficence of its founders. They were also echoing a viewpoint which was not, however, unknown among the founders. What the progressives saw as parochial dialectic of American history, the federalists had earlier seen as a common characteristic of all societies. "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many," said Alexander Hamilton. "The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people." John Adams similarly argued that "The people, in all nations, are naturally divided into two sorts, the gentlemen and the simple men. . . . The great and perpetual distinction in civilized societies has been between the rich, who are few, and the poor, who are many."4 The difference between progressives and federalists, of course, lay in their evaluations of this conflict. For Hamilton the rich were good; for Adams both were bad (or, at least, could not be trusted); while for the progressives, of course, the poor were good. The federalists accepted the elite-mass division as an inevitable feature of any society, including American society, which was

3 Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 438.

4 Alexander Hamilton, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), I, p. 299; John Adams, Works (Boston: Little, Brown, ed. by Charles Francis Adams, 1850-56), VI, p. 185; IX, p. 570.

4 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

not in any way unique: "There is no special providence for Americans," as Adams said, "and their nature is the same with that of others." Governmental institutions, consequently, had to reflect this division. For the progressives, on the other hand, the division was bad because one of the parties was bad, and hence governmental institutions should promote the victory of the popular party over the elitist party. Until that victory was achieved, however, American history would be a continuing conflict between the good guys and the bad guys, and, as Hartz pointed out, one of the comforting aspects of the progressives’ theory was that it "always had an American hero available to match any American villain they found, a Jefferson for every Hamilton."5

At almost the same time that the new historians were setting forth the progressive paradigm, other scholars, primarily political scientists, were delineating a related but also different image of American politics. This pluralist paradigm stemmed from the coming of age of the new discipline of political science. The American science of politics, to use Bernard Crick’s challenging but accurate label, was fundamentally a product of the Progressive period in American history.6 Before the 1890s, the first steps had, of course, been taken toward a more systematic study of politics and government. American students had attended the German universities, absorbed the standards of scholarship and concepts of Staatswissenschaft, and returned home to attempt in some measure to duplicate and to apply them. John W. Burgess founded the Columbia School of Political Science in 1880; Johns Hopkins also developed a significant graduate program before the end of the century; Woolsey, Burgess, and Willoughby produced Political Science (1877), Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (1890), and The Nature of the State (1896). These and other studies were general, comparative, formalistic, and, in part, historical. This was, as it were, the period in which the preconditions for the scholarly takeoff of the science of politics were being laid.

That takeoff occurred during the first decade of the twentieth century. Political science as it developed during these years became realistic rather than formalistic, reformist rather than conservative,

5 Hartz, Liberal Tradition, p. 31.

6 When capitalized, Progressive refers to the intellectual and political currents generally dominant in the first decade of this century; when in lower case, it refers to the particular ideas and approaches of the "progressive" historians, especially Smith, Turner, Beard, and Parrington.

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 5

and parochial rather than comparative. The development of the discipline was one element in the Progressive movement. This takeoff involved, in the first place, a shift from a sympathy for conservatism to a commitment to reform. This change was reflected, in part, in the breaking away from the stress on moralism and natural law to a greater emphasis on a pragmatic approach to political life. "To call the roll of the distinguished social scientists of the Progressive era," Hofstadter has argued, "is to read a list of men prominent in their criticism of vested interests or in their support for reform causes. .. . "~ The means of promoting reform was the exposure of the inequities, vested interests, corruption, and attendant evils which were interwoven into the dominant pattern of political and social life. Hence the emphasis on realism-how people in politics actually behave-rather than upon the description and analysis of formal institutions. The student of politics, as Woodrow Wilson put it, "must frequent the Street, the counting-houses, the halls- yes and the lobbies-of legislatures." He must study "the life, not the texts, of constitutions."8 He must investigate his subject in much the way the superior journalist does.. He must, in short, become a muckraker, and that, indeed, was precisely what the American political scientist at the turn of the century did become. No clear line separated the journalistic muckraker from the scholarly one. In both, the emphasis was on the exposure of facts-facts which simply by virtue of their exposure would serve to generate demands for reform. "The documentation of the muckraking journalism and its alleged objectivity makes it only in style and published location different from the empirical studies in the city government that the sociologists and the new political scientists were beginning to interest themselves in. . . . Facts, once put before the people, would do their own work."9

In addition to being reformist and realistic, the political science of the first decade was also increasingly parochial. These were the years of the "`Americanization’ of Political Science," in which American scholars less frequently studied in Europe and less frequently read or used European sources: In 1896, for example, forty

7 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 154.

8 Quoted in Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1967), p. 32.

9 Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), p. 84.

6 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

percent of the books reviewed in the Political Science Quarterly were published in languages other than English; in 1915 and 1920, these figures had dropped to fourteen and four percent respectively. The proportion of references to foreign language sources in articles published in American political science journals similarly declined and American government supplanted comparative government as the most widely offered undergraduate course.10 The progressive historians, epitomized in Beard and Turner, were, of course, almost totally preoccupied with the American historical experience to the exclusion of any significant comparisons of it with Europe. American political scientists similarly became almost totally preoccupied with American politics; the reality which they studied was an American reality. As the "emerging political science," in Crick’s words, ". . . tried to become more scientific, it in fact became more parochial."11 The study of comparative politics in both Europe and America declined; in the United States the decline was more marked, but it was also associated with what can only be termed a more healthy emphasis on the realistic analysis of political behavior, which soon came to the fore in the Chicago work of Merriam, Gosnell, and Lasswell. "The narrow notion of science in politics concerned with the extension of `hard data’ techniques to trends in behavior was the American answer to European theory, but it remained almost exclusively concerned with American problems. There remains a paucity of materials using behavioral methods and dealing with governments and institutions of countries other than our own."12

The reformism, realism, and parochialism of American political science led eventually and naturally to a stress on the pluralistic character of American politics and the critical role of groups, particularly organized groups, in shaping the course of public life. The group approach received its most explicit formulation, of course, in Bentley’s Process of Government published in 1908. In Bentley the emphasis was analytical; it stressed the utility of the group concept as a category for political analysis. In others, the approach became more descriptive; the stress was on the multiplicity of groups as the distinguishing characteristic of American politics. The Amer-

10 Somit and Tanenhaus, American Political Science, pp. 61-62.

11 Crick, American Science of Politics, pp. 111-112.

12 David E. Apter, "Comparative Politics and Political Thought: Past Influences and Future Development," in Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, eds., Comparative Politics: A Reader (New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 730.

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 7

can pluralists were not, however, generally favorably disposed toward groups as were the English normative pluralists such as Laski and Cole. If anything, the thrust was in the opposite direction. If the progressive historians harked back to an inverted Hamilton, the pluralist political scientists harked back to a semi-inverted Madison. The group concept was hailed as a scientific and realistic category for analysis, but the role of groups in politics was seldom viewed as better than ambiguous and was often viewed as nefarious. The machinations of interest groups were exposed. The extent to which organized groups threatened the rights of the individual and the power of the majority was emphasized.

At times the analytical and descriptive elements of the model were tangled together. The usefulness of the group concept when applied to American politics often led to the assumption, not generally tested until much later, that it would be equally appropriate to the study of other polities, an assumption which could be far from the truth. "Had the disciples of Bentley," as Hartz observes, "tried to apply his analysis to the Dreyfus Affair as they did to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, they would hardly have found the procedure so easy.. . ."~ The pluralist political scientists were thus using a category of limited territorial applicability to analyze American politics, often implicitly assuming that that category and analysis could also be applied equally well to other political systems. The progressive historians, on the other hand, were using categories of much more general applicability (elite-mass; class) and implicitly assuming that they were useful and relevant to the analysis of the American political system.

The emergence of political science was thus part of a broad movement of Progressive reform in American intellectual and political life. The nature and focus of the discipline plus the critical role of the pluralist paradigm also reflected the extent to which political science in some measure was a substitute for political theory in America. The discipline’s empiricism and realism and the assumption that facts exposed became evils reformed were themselves evidence of the extent to which, despite the progressive and pluralist paradigms, there did indeed exist a consensus on basic political values. In its scope, sophistication, and general scholarly achievement, American political science soon easily exceeded the much more primitive levels which continued to prevail in Europe. American

8 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

political theory, on the other hand, remained as underdeveloped and primitive as European political science. Political theory is most likely to flourish where there is a need to rationalize some forms of authority and to invalidate others; it normally flourishes during periods of intense conflict and controversy over fundamental issues of political and social organization. If, however, there is a relatively broad-gauged consensus on basic political values, there is little need for political theory. There is, however, a need for an empirically oriented political science to analyze and to expose the extent to which political institutions and practices in the society are in fact congruent with its political values. This process of exposure, of establishing the gap between the ideal and reality, is also both a cause and a consequence of the low status which politics itself has in such a society. In this context, to study politics is almost necessarily to criticize it.

The Consensus on Consensus

Until World War II, the progressive paradigm was thus preeminent among historians and the pluralistic paradigm among political scientists. The years after World War II saw the rise of the consensus paradigm as an intellectual construct. It reflected a focus on issues which had been almost totally absent from the intellectual world prior to World War II: How unique is the American experience? How relevant is the American experience?

The consensus interpretation of American politics was a product of the absence of social revolution in the 1930s, the success of the New Deal, and the development of the cold war. If Hamilton was the devil figure for the progressive historians and Madison the patron saint of the pluralists, Tocqueville was, of course, prophet of the consensualists. The central thesis of the consensus argument was advanced in most blatant form in Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics (1953) and in its most sophisticated form in Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). The latter remains probably the most significant interpretation of the American experience written since World War II. Hartz’s analysis is outstanding among the consensus writings for three reasons.

First, while the consensus theorists were generally much more comparatively inclined than either the progressive or pluralist theorists, Hartz made the comparison with Europe the central theme of his analysis. He viewed the American experience from a European

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 9

vantage point and argued, persuasively, that from that vantage point the dualism which had been the central theme of the progressives shrank almost to insignificance. Unlike Europe, America lacked both feudalism and socialism. The controversies of American history were simply between different variants of liberalism. Subsequently, Hartz elaborated his concept of the "fragment" to view the United States not just in comparison with Europe but also in comparison with the other societies created by European colonization and settlement.14

Second, Hartz married Marx to Tocqueville. His basic categories of analysis were Marxist, much more explicitly so, indeed, than those of the progressives. Viewed in class terms, the United States, except in the South, had lacked an aristocracy; because of this, it also lacked a class-conscious proletariat. Instead, the middle class had from the first predominated; liberalism, the political philosophy of the middle class, had been unchallenged. In a brilliant manner, Hartz thus used Marxist categories to arrive at Tocquevillian conclusions. Hofstadter once called Calhoun "the Marx of the Master Class"; Hartz could equally well be described as "the Marx of the middle class."

Third, unlike many other consensus writers, Hartz also saw that consensus ~`as not simply a cause for celebration; it was an ambivalent legacy. The absence of class conflict might be a blessing, but it was gained at the price of liberalism turning in and shadow boxing against itself. Unchallenged liberalism became irrational liberalism. America’s "colossal liberal absolutism," Hartz concluded, "hampers creative action abroad by identifying the alien with the unintelligible, and it inspires hysteria at home by generating the anxiety that unintelligible things produce."15

Probably the most important contribution of the consensus theorists was to place the American experience in some form of comparative perspective. The issue of "American exceptionalism," of what is different or the same about American life and thought, was at the heart of this theory. As Marcus Cunliffe has argued, "the assumption that the Americans were, set apart from other peoples was taken almost axiomatic."16 In a sense, the consensus theorists took the dichotomy which the progressive historians saw within

14 Louis Hartz et al., The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964).

15 Hartz, Liberal Tradition, p. 285.

16 Marcus Cunliffe, "New World, Old World: The Historical Antithesis," to be published in Richard Rose, ed., Lessons from America (London: Macmillan, 1974).

10 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

American experience and transformed it into a dichotomy between America and Europe. America was defined as the antithesis of Europe; the theme was, of course, an old one which could be formulated in a variety of ways to serve a variety of purposes. In the years after World War II, the scope of the argument was also broadened to encompass not just the difference between America and Europe but the uniqueness of America with respect to all the rest of the world. Was the American Revolution a real revolution or something different from those of Europe, Asia, and Latin America? Was the United States the "first new nation" whose experience had parallels with and lessons for the new nations of the twentieth century? Could Americans transcend their limited experience to understand and to act effectively with people of other societies and cultures? If the American experience was unique, it was irrelevant to the rest of the world; if it was relevant, it could not be unique. The preoccupation with this set of issues implied that there was indeed something different about the United States. In how many other countries have scholars and intellectuals debated the historical experience of their society in terms of its uniqueness or relevance? The very fact that this issue was debated was, in some measure, evidence if not of American uniqueness at least of American hubris. Implicit in the argument for uniqueness was the assumption that no other society was as good as the United States; implicit in the argument for relevance was the assumption that every other society should be like the United States. Each side of the argument had its own form of national pride. Lost in the debate was the chastening possibility- which, I would suggest, was closer to actuality-that the United States could well be neither unique nor relevant.

The consensus interpretation of American politics was. elaborated and developed in a variety of ways by historians and sociologists. Within the historical fraternity, the progressives and their disciples had "pushed polarized conflict as a principle of historical interpretation so far that no one could go further in that direction without risking self-caricature."17 There was a need for a fresh start. While historians rode off in a variety of directions after abandoning the progressive interpretation, the major stream, insofar as there was one, clearly flowed from the springs of consensus.

17 Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. 439.

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 11

In sociology the "end of ideology" school plus the popularity of structural-functionalism, and equilibrium models all tended to parallel, supplement, and reinforce from other methodological directions the message of the consensus school.

Within the discipline of political science, consensus did not play quite the same role as it did within sociology and history. It did not lead to the displacement of the earlier pluralist paradigm; rather it led to its reformulation and redefinition in conservative rather than radical terms. In history, Hofstadter argues, the last two major works clearly in the progressive tradition were Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945) and Jensen’s The New Nation (1950). In political science, however, the main stream of pluralist analysis, which had flowered earlier in the writings of~Bent1ey, Merriam, Herring, Holcombe, and Schattschneider, was carried forward and given a new lease on life in the works of Key, Truman, Dahl, and many others. Earlier the "discovery" of pluralism in American politics had been "shocking" in that it meant that American/politics was not contained simply in the concepts of majority rule and individual rights. Organized groups, not popular majorities or individual citizens, were the hard reality of American politics. By the 195os, however, pluralism was redefined from a bad thing to a good thing: it was a way of dispersing power and of insuring (through cross-cutting cleavages) moderation in politics. In the first decade of the century, the pluralist paradigm had been born of the same impulse to exposure and reform which produced the progressive interpretation: Beard could be indulgent toward Bentley.18 In the 1950s, on the other hand, the pluralist interpretation became a corollary of the consensus model: Hartz could be indulgent toward Truman.19 Within the basic ideological concensus of American politics, the only conflicts which could’ take place were the relatively minor ones among interest groups over their marginal shares in the economic pie. The pluralist interpretation was used to defend American politics against the C. Wright

18 Beard praised Bentley for his efforts "to put politics on a basis of realism where it belongs" and for making "effective use of the idea of `group interests,’ as distinct from class interests in the Marxian sense." Political Science Quarterly, 23 (December 1908), 739-41, quoted in Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. 186n.

19 In Hartz’s words, "Bentley went deeper than Beard, for the free and easy play of pressure groups was a real characteristic of the American liberal world, inspired by the moral settlement which underlay it and hence obscured class lines." Liberal Tradition, p. 250.

12 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

Mills and Floyd Hunters who argued that power was concentrated at the national and local levels. Its political and ideological functions shifted from the exposure of the evils of American politics to the celebration of its virtues. In due course, of course, this pluralistic celebration itself came under attack with the familiar arguments, first, that not all sectors of the population are equally represented in the group process and hence the interaction of groups produces a skewed and biased result in public policy, and second, that there are public interests which transcend group interests and which do not receive appropriate recognition in the group process.20

Tests of Paradigmatic Usefulness

To be accepted and useful, a paradigm has to meet two tests. First, in one way or another it has to be meaningful and relevant; that is, it has to make sense to people in terms of what they see about them and what they feel they need. The progressive and then the pluralist paradigms met these tests during the reformist years of the early part of this century; the consensus and the redefined conservative pluralist paradigms met the tests in the cold war years of the midtwentieth century. During the late 196os and early 197os, domestic upheaval-racial conflict, student unrest, political controversy- combined with subsequent international detente to make consensus make less political sense than it did a decade earlier. Second, every paradigm also has to "make sense" in terms `of the historical and political experience it purports to explain. It cannot be way off the scholarly mark no matter how useful it may be politically and ideologically. More specifically, in terms of explaining the principal characteristics of politics in a society, a paradigm should do three things: (a) It should highlight some aspect of social reality; it should distinguish what is of critical importance in the political experience of the society from what is of peripheral significance. (b) It should be comparative; it should call attention to the principal similarities and differences between the politics of the society and those of other societies. ©) It should be dynamic, in the sense that it should account for change (and continuities) in the political experience of the society. As they have been developed by histo

20 See Henry S. Kariel, The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966); Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969).

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS I 13

rians, political scientists, and American civilizationists, the three paradigms we are considering differ considerably in the extent to which they meet these `criteria. The progressive paradigm makes somewhat more provision than the others for change: it is rooted in a theory of conflict which, like the Marxist class struggle, can be interpreted as looking forward to the progressive victory of one party over the other. On the other hand, the sandwiching of the complexity of American political struggle into a dualistic framework scarcely did justice to the complexity of that struggle, and the progressive theory had virtually nothing to say about the similarities and differences between American politics and other politics. The pluralist paradigm, on the other hand, came to grips with a critical reality of American politics, but had no theory of change (except in terms of the replacement of one interest group by another) and also shed little light on the comparisons and contrasts between American politics and that of other societies. Finally, the consensus theory was very much a product of an explicit comparison of the American experience with Europe, but it also had little to say about change and obviously failed to account for the conflict and violence which had taken place in American history. In this respect the Marxist categories of the consensus theory, at least as it was formulated by Hartz, became blinders. Implicitly it was assumed that the only real conflict was class conflict, and hence the absence of class conflict meant the presence of consensus. The United States, however, may well have had less class conflict but also more social and political violence than many European countries. "Americans," as Hofstadter neatly put it, "do not need ideological conflict to shed blood on a large scale." And, as Dahl has argued, the case can be made that the United States has experienced relatively severe conflict about once every twenty years.21

While the paradigms of the one, two, and the many may differ in their particular strengths and weaknesses, they also have one important characteristic in common. Each explains politics in terms of social structure. The decisive influence on the nature of American politics is held to be the nature of American society: it is not political values, or institutions, or practices, or the nature of development and change. It is whether American society can best be understood in terms of one consensus, two classes, or many groups.

21 Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, p. 461; Robert A. Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consent (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), p. 283ff.

14 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

The social structure also shapes the nature of the’ values, interests, and ideologies which are manifest in politics. There is a presumption of congruence between social unit and political outlook. The consensus is liberal; the classes are conservative and progressive; the groups are materialistically self-interested. In addition, the picture of society and hence of politics is, by and large, a static one. The progressive interpretation does hold open the possibility of the eventual victory of the popular party, but even with it and to a much greater extent with the consensus and pluralist schools, there is little provision for change. How will American society and politics in the future differ from what they have been in the past? At best, consensualists, progressives, and pluralists all suggest more of the same.

The Comparative Context of Modernization

For a good part of this century American political science was political science of America. The strand of parochialism which developed in the 189os remained strong; it coincided with the noncomparative, if not isolationist, inclinations of the progressive and pluralist paradigms. With a few exceptions comparative government (which, in any event, meant European government) was not at the center of the discipline. Even in the late 1930s, the two outstanding texts on comparative government were the products of two recent immigrants: Carl Friedrich and Herman Finer. After World War II, however, the expansion of American influence throughout the world created the environment and the impetus to develop foreign area studies programs and to attract political scientists to the analysis of what had been rather esoteric regions of the world. For political scientists, this work was originally and in larger part the study of foreign governments and then subsequently and in smaller part the study of comparative government. Comparative government, in turn, came to be defined as a subfield within the discipline distinct from American government, thus tending to separate the political science analysis of comparative politics from that of American politics.

This tendency was in some measure tempered by the fact that the study of comparative politics requires typologies for the classification of political systems. In the years after World War II, two such typologies successively played critical roles. The first, the distinction between constitutional and totalitarian regimes, was an

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 15

obvious product of World War II and the early cold war. It provided a neat way of collapsing two enemies, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, into one intellectual pigeonhole. It also brought the United States together in a single category with Western Europe, minimizing the differences in political institutions and practices between the two. In a sense, by stressing the similarities between America and Europe, these political science categories provided an intellectual rationale for post-World War II foreign policy.

In the late 195os the distinction between constitutionalism and totalitarianism in the study of comparative politics was supplemented and, in large part, supplanted by the distinction between modern and traditional societies and developed and underdeveloped political systems. "The field of comparative politics," as Lucian Pye observed, "has suddenly stopped being merely the study of the major European powers and has become the analysis of political development, one of the most youthful and vigorous subfields of the entire discipline of political science."22 As the central concerns in the study of comparative politics, modernization and political development provided a more or less common intellectual framework for analyzing and comparing the politics of Asian, African, and Latin American countries. In due course, they also were seen to provide a framework within which the earlier experience of Western Europe and North America might be compared with the contemporary experience of Third World countries. Political scientists studying developing countries developed concepts, hypotheses, and theoretical frameworks which could be applied back to the historical analysis of more familiar societies.

Inasmuch as the United States was clearly the most modern society in the world and inasmuch as, in many dimensions, it was also one of the most politically developed, did it not make great good sense to look at American politics in terms of a paradigm of modernization? Such a paradigm would clearly provide the basis for the comparative analysis of similarities and differences with other societies, as, for instance, in Lipset’s The First New Nation.23 It also clearly would provide a framework for analyzing continuity

22 Lucian W. Pye, "Advances and Frustrations in Comparative Politics," in Fred W. Riggs, ed., International Studies: Present Status and Future Prospects (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, Monograph no. 12, October 1971), p. 94.

23 Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963).

16 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

and change within American society. Why could we not learn a lot more about American politics by looking at it within a modernization framework and in comparison with the experience of other countries? The "modernization" and "political development" of America seemed to offer fertile fields for such scholarly exploration.

Alas, it has not exactly worked out that way. To the best of my knowledge only one recent volume had been written with this goal explicitly in mind, and that, Clinton Rossiter’s last book, The American Quest (1971),24 leaves one with the undeniable feeling that the concepts of modernization and the experience of America do not really fit together. The reason is a familiar one which flows in part from the valid insights of the consensus theory. The United States was in many critical senses "born modern" as well as "born equal." Consequently, it has not had to modernize in the way in which most European and Third World societies have had to, and hence the concepts and themes of modernization are not all that relevant to its history. In other societies, the critical issues have been whether, how, and under whose leadership modernization occurs, how the traditional elites take the leadership in the process or attempt to oppose it. The central feature is the conflict between old and new values, leaders, social forces. It is, however, precisely this sort of conflict which has, with one notable exception, been almost entirely absent from American history. It has generally lacked the tensions and traumas of modernization which have been central to the experience of other societies.

At its most fundamental level, modernization involves changes in human attitudes, which, in turn, requires conflicts within men and among men over traditional versus modern values. The modern syndrome of attitudes has perhaps been well summed up by Alex Inkeles in his "OM" (Overall Modernity) scale which includes: openness to innovation and change; wide-ranging interests and empathy; a tolerance of’ differences of opinion; present and future rather than past orientation; a belief in planning and organization; a sense of efficacy, that is, a belief that men can learn from and dominate their physical environment; a freedom from fatalism; an awareness of the dignity of others and a willingness to respect that dignity; a faith in science and technology; and a faith in

24 Clinton Rossiter, The American Quest, 1790-1860: An Emerging Nation in Search of Identity, Unity, and Modernity (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 17

distributive justice: to each according to his contribution or work.25 Traditional man would have just the opposite views. But the question then is: When were there traditional men in America? One cannot administer questionnaires to an eighteenth-century sample of Americans, but all the descriptions of American attitudes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries highlight precisely those attitudes which Inkeles has defined as modern. When Crevecoeur asks who is this American, this new man, the answer is Alex Inkeles’ "OM" man. The central problem of modernization, that of making men modern, was never much of a problem on these shores, and hence theories which see that as the central problem of development are of, only dubious relevance.26

What is true of man is also in large part true, as Hartz has argued, of society. And as I have pointed out elsewhere, because there were no traditional or feudal institutions to be overthrown, there was no need to create a modern system of government to carry out that purpose.27 Modernization theories are thus irrelevant because American society was born modern without having to be modernized and American government could be left as it was because its society was modern. The concept of modernization has, however, had a demonstrated usefulness in the analysis of the one segment of American society, the South, where there was something which could be called a fully developed traditional social order. The actors in Southern history clearly have their counterparts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and in twentieth-century Latin America. There is a land-owning aristocracy, commercial oligarchs, foreign capital, a poor peasantry, slaves, politicoeconomic entrepreneurs, and populist demagogues. (To understand Huey Long, as Arthur Schlesinger has said, think of him as a

25 Alex Inkeles, "The Modernization of Man," in Myron Weiner, ed., Modernization (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 138ff.; David Horton Smith and Alex Inkeles, "The OM Scale: A Comparative Socio-Psychological Measure of Individual Modernity," Sociometry, 29 (December 1966), 353ff.

26 That is, they are of limited relevance so far as understanding the American past is concerned. They may be considerably more useful in understanding the transition which appears to be taking place in America and some other affluent societies from industrialization to postindustrialism. The parallels of this transition with the earlier transition from agrarianism to industrialism are at times rather striking. See my "Postindustrial Politics: How Benign Will It Be?," Comparative Politics, 6 (January 1974), 163ff.

27 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 125ff.

18 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

Latin American populist dictator.)28 Modernization concepts illuminate Southern experience precisely because it is different from other American experience, and hence H. Douglas Price, Lester Salamon, and others have been able to analyze aspects of Southern development in much the same way as other social scientists have analyzed development in the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia.29

While the concept of modernization generally is not of much help in understanding American development, other more specific, functional concepts and theories may be drawn from the comparative study of political development and applied usefully to the American experience. There is, moreover, still the need to reintegrate American politics into comparative politics, which was where it was in the i88os, and from which it was dislodged by the parochialism of the Progressive movement.

The Conflict of Ideals vs. Institutions

The problem then remains: How to capture the valid elements of the unity, dualism, and diversity of the American experience embodied in the consensus, progressive, and pluralist paradigms and also take into account the changes and continuities within the American political system and the similarities and differences between that system and other systems? More fundamentally there is the whole question of the relation between socioeconomic interests and politics. All three familiar paradigms rested on the assumption that political behavior and political ideas were outgrowths of socioeconomic interests. That this is often and, indeed, generally

28 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 68: "At bottom, Huey Long resembled, not a Hitler or a Mussolini, but a Latin American dictator, a Vargas or a Perón. Louisiana was in many respects a colonial region, an underdeveloped area; its Creole traditions gave it an almost Latin American character. Like Vargas and Perón, Long was in revolt against economic colonialism, against the oligarchy, against the smug and antiquated past; like them, he stood in a muddled way for economic modernization and social justice; like them, he was most threatened by his own arrogance and cupidity, his weakness for soft living and his rage for personal power. And, like them, he could never stop."

29 See H. Douglas Price, "Southern Politics in the Sixties: Notes on Economic Development and Political Modernization" (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting, American Political Science Association, September 1964); Lester Salamon, "Protest, Politics, and Modernization in the American South: Mississippi as a ‘Developing Society’" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1972); and idem, "Leadership and Modernization: The Emerging Black Political Elite in the American South," Journal of Politics, 35 (August 1973), 615-646.

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 19

the case is clearly true. But the assumption of the correspondence between economic interests and political behavior-so dramatically reflected in their different ways in Beard, Bentley, and Hartz- also may leave much of politics unaccounted for.

This paper presents no paradigmatic panacea, but it does seem to make some sense to suggest at least two other lines of approach to American politics which may in some small way supplement those of the one, the two, and the many. The first involves the relation between political ideas and political institutions in the United States. All three familiar paradigms tend to minimize the autonomy of politics and particularly the independent role which political ideals may play as a stimulus, guide, and shaper of political action. They have generally, and correctly, assumed that political theory has been relatively underdeveloped in comparison with Europe. The highly systematized ideologies rooted in social classes have been notably absent from the American scene. But it is a mistake to move from this truth to the assumption that political ideals have played a less important role in the United States than in Europe. In fact just the reverse may’ be true. American politics has been characterized by less sophisticated political theory and more intense political beliefs than most other societies.

Political ideals have played a critical role in the American experience in two ways. First, more so than in any other major society apart from the Soviet Union, political ideas have been the source of national identity. In Europe political ideology and nationalism crossed each other. Ideologies expressed and shaped the interests of "horizontal" units, social classes, while nationalism, in its various manifestations, expressed and shaped the interests of "vertical" units, ethnic and linguistic communities. This produced a system of cross-cutting cleavages. In nineteenth-century Europe, it was not immediately clear who had more in common: two aristocrats (or two bourgeoisie or two socialists), one of whom was a Frenchman; or two Frenchmen, one of whom was an aristocrat (or bourgeois or socialist). This interplay between nationalism and ideology led each to be expressed in more extreme form but also meant that each exercised a restraining effect on the political manifestations of the other. In the United States, on the other hand, nationalism was defined in terms of a set of political beliefs, a political creed, which formulated in imprecise but highly meaningful fashion the basic ideals of the American way of life. From Crevecoeur to Tocqueville to Bryce to Myrdal to Brogan, foreign

20 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

observers, as well as domestic ones, have not failed to comment on this striking phenomenon. A society produced by immigration needed such a way of defining its identity just as much as a society produced by revolution. If it were not for the "American creed," what, indeed, would Americans have in common?

Political beliefs thus played a necessary and positive role with respect to national identity and integration. They reinforced American nationalism and yet also in some respects moderated it. In this respect there was an American consensus. The consensus theorists, however, often tended to emphasize the extent of consensus over the substance of the consensus. The substance of that consensus was basically liberal, egalitarian, individualistic, populist. In 1889 Bryce summed it up in words which Tocqueville might have used fifty years earlier and which Myrdal did, for all intents and purposes, use fifty years later. The key dogmas of American thinking, according to Bryce, were: (1) the individual has sacred rights; (2) the source of political power is the people; (3) all government is limited by law and the people; (4) local government is to be preferred to national government; (5) the majority is wiser than the minority; and (6) the less government the better.30 The distinctive thing about the substance of the liberal consensus or American creed was its antigovernmental character. Populism, individualism, egalitarianism formed the basis for a standing indictment of any political institutions including American ones. The political creed which formed the basis of national identity also was the threat to governmental legitimacy. The more intensely Americans committed themselves to their national political beliefs, the more hostile and cynical they became about their political institutions. The legitimacy of American government varied inversely with belief in American ideals.

The extent to which people take those ideals seriously changes from time to time and from group to group. Commitment to political beliefs will be particularly strong during periods of rapid social and economic change when the relations between social forces are changing, new groups are emerging on the scene, and old ones are fading. Certainly at times substantial groups of Americans have rededicated themselves to the creed, have been appalled at the gap between their ideals of how government should operate and the ways in which it actually does operate, and have made

30 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1891), I:417-418.

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 21

vigorous efforts to bring reality into conformity with the ideal. At other times, Americans have mouthed the rhetoric and clichés of the creed but have not been intensely concerned about the extent to which political practice measured up to these political ideals. Americans take pride in their governmental institutions only when they do not believe very deeply in American political ideals.

In this sense the dualism of American politics between American political ideals and American political institutions is rooted in the broad consensus on political ideas which has existed in America. This consensus has, in turn, furnished the basis for alternating periods of institutional stability, on the one hand, and ideological renewal, on the other. Until the present, the reaffirmation of American political ideals has taken place in four major historical instances: the Revolution against British imperial institutions; the Jacksonian movement against the undemocratic and elitist aspects of the established political and economic order; the struggle culminating in the Civil War to restrict and eventually to eliminate the "peculiar institution" of slavery in the South; and the Populist and Progressive movement at the turn of the century to impose limits on the emerging concentrations of corporate economic power. In these invocations, American ideals of equality, individualism, and popular sovereignty have been used for anti-imperial, antielitist, antislavery, and antibig-business purposes. The principal invokers of the creed have been the spokesmen for yeoman farmers and independent entrepreneurial and professional types. Their relative success in challenging hierarchical institutions has declined steadily with each successive invocation. British imperial rule was effectively eliminated in the 1770s and 1780s. The existing political and economic system was in large part, but not entirely, democratized in the 1820s and 1830s. In the 1860s and 1870s the legal basis of slavery was eliminated, but the social, economic, political, and even legal basis for a caste system in the South remained for almost another century. Finally, the PopulistProgressive effort to curtail and break up corporate power had, in many respects, the air of a movement reacting against the mainstream of historical development; it was a partial success at best.

Political ideas have thus had a role in America, albeit a purgative role which is not characteristic of other societies. In countries in which there are a variety of ideologies and belief systems, there are a variety of sources of challenge to governmental institutions but also almost invariably a variety of defenses for major institu

22 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

tions. Tradition and social structure furnish a basis for the legitimacy of some institutions, and particular ideologies and political theories can be utilized to legitimize individual institutions. Attacks on one set of institutions from the perspective of one ideology generate equally intense defenses of that institution from the perspective of other ideologies. In the United States, on the other hand, the consensus is basically antigovernmental. What justification is there for government, for hierarchy, discipline, secrecy, coercion, the suppression of the claims of individuals and groups, within the American context? In terms of American beliefs, government is supposed to be egalitarian, participatory, open, noncoercive, and responsive to the demands of individuals and groups. Yet no government can be these things in any wholehearted way and still remain a government.

The ideological challenge to American government thus comes not from abroad but from at home, not from the conspiracies of anarchists but from the idealism of liberals. To the extent that Americans become carried away by their political ideals, they are in danger of doing away with their political institutions. In this conflict and interaction between ideals and institutions, between the invocation of the former by some social forces for an attack on the latter, lies a critical dimension of American politics which reflects its consensual, dualistic, and pluralistic quality, distinguishes it from most other political systems, and throws some light on both the cyclical and secular trends in American political evolution.

The Conflict of Generations

American society has been distinguished by an unusual degree of consensus. It has also been characterized by an unusual amount of social and economic change. Change, however, usually involves conflict. How can large amounts of change coexist with large amounts of consensus? Part of the answer, of course, lies in the extent to which the opportunities for mobility and expansion have permitted social-economic change to be carried out apart from the political realm. `And another part of the picture concerns the relative preeminence of a type of group cleavage in America which is closely associated with the tensions between its political ideas and political institutions.

Conflict and change in Europe have normally been analyzed in

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 23

terms of the rise and fall of social classes. Class analysis clearly has some relevance to the American experience, but also considerably less than to the European experience. Much more important in America than in Europe has been the role of generations and generational differences. In this sense, one can argue that a consensus has existed in the United States and its fundamentals have remained relatively stable, but its particular manifestations in attitudinal outlooks and public priorities and policies have changed from one generation to another. In Great Britain, for instance, the middle-class ethos and the working-class ethos (including in each social values, life styles, political attitudes, and speech) are relative constants of the social structure. In the United States, on the other hand, classes are less sharply differentiated and generations more sharply differentiated than they are in Europe. This is true both in terms of the leading elements of particular age groups- those who articulate and express its values in literature, art, politics-and even, in a different way, for the mass of the public as a whole. The massive swings of public opinion from the progressivism of 1912 to the stand-pattism of 1920 to the reformism of 1932 clearly cut across class lines and, while the evidence is incondusive, are yet susceptible of interpretation in terms of generational changes. More recently, survey data have revealed marked differences in outlook among generations, which can, in varying degrees, be explained as much by the interaction and experiential theories- of generational differences as by the maturation theory.31

31 The maturation theory holds that intergenerational differences are the result of differing positions in the life cycle, and that each generation in effect repeats the cycle of earlier generations (e.g., each moves from youthful liberalism to elderly conservatism). The interaction theory holds that the outlook of a later generation is a reaction to that of the earlier generation (e.g., if one generation values economic success, the next generation will assign low priority to that value and instead pursue cultural achievement). The experiential theory holds that a generation is produced by a shared historical experience at a formative time in its development (late teens or early twenties) which shapes its outlook and distinguishes it from earlier and later age cohorts whose views were the product of different experiences (e.g., Munich and Pearl Harbor shaped the outlook of one American generation on foreign policy which remained dominant until an equally traumatic event-Vietnam-generated a different outlook in another generation). On the role of generations in political analysis, see Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations," Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 276322; Marvin Rintala, "A Generation in Politics: A Definition," Review of Politics, 25 (1963), 509-522; Norman B. Ryder, "The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change," American Sociological Review, 30 (1965), 509-522; Philip E. Converse, "Of Time and Partisan Stability," Comparative Political Studies, 2 (1969), 139-171; Neal E. Cutler, "Generation, Maturation, and Party Affiliation: A Cohort Analysis," Public Opinion Quarterly, 33 (1969-70), 583-588, and "Generational Analysis in Political Science" (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting, American Political Science Association, September 1971).

24 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

"Among democratic nations," Tocqueville argued, "each new generation is a new people."32 In some measure, American history is divisible into phases, or "peoples," which more or less coincide with different generations: the Founding Fathers; the new generation of Western political leaders which emerged in and after 1810; the generation focused on sectionalism and slavery which emerged in and after 1840; the post-Civil War generation of politician-plutocrats; the populist-Progressive generation; the stand-patters of the 1920s; the New Deal generation; and the cold war generation which emerged after World War II. During each phase, leaders sprang from a different age cohort and embodied a different set of values and’ policies which came to reflect a high degree of popular consensus. The major political struggles took place between the advance guard of the new generation and the rear guard of its predecessor. The extent to which conflict has been intergenerational also explains why conflict in the United States has so often had such a fleeting quality. By its very nature, intergenerational conflict tends to be intense but brief, as in due course the consensus of one generation supercedes that of the earlier generation.33 The shift in consensus pioneered by one generation, however, often means an abrupt and vicious turning on those associated with the consensus of the earlier generation. In the 1940s the Red scare and McCarthyism produced the capture of some Soviet spies, but also the pillorying of many well-meaning liberals of the New Deal generation as security risks and subversives. By 1970, the latter (in almost classic Soviet fashion) were being resur

32 Samuel P. Huntington, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 2, p. 62.

33 For a striking recent illustration of this point, see Graham Allison, "Cool It: The Foreign Policy of Young America," Foreign Policy, (Winter 1970-71), pp. 144-160. Allison contrasts ten "axioms of the postwar era" of foreign policy with their opposites which were the "axioms of elite young Americans" under thirty and argues that there is a fundamental generational difference on foreign policy. And, indeed, there was-for all of about five years in the 1960s. It is quite clear that an overwhelming consensus exists now among elite Americans in their fifties on the validity of Allison’s "axioms of young Americans."

PARADIGMS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 25

rected and rehabilitated as heroes and martyrs, while a new generation was, in turn, denouncing the foreign policy leaders of the intervening years as imperialists and war criminals.

The relevance of generations to American politics is also underscored by the extent to which various aspects of American experience have been interpreted in terms of cycles which normally approximate a generation in longevity: Schlesinger’s liberal and conservative tides, Klingberg’s introversion and extroversion moods, Burnham’s party realignments, and Harris’ oscillations in social mobility serve as examples.34 Has the history of any other modern society been so frequently interpreted in such generational cycles? In addition, of course, the generational notion has been explicitly applied to the differences between first, second, and third generation immigrants; to the nature of the leadership during the Revolution by Elkins and McKitrick; and to the populist-Progressive era by Hofstadter.35

Like classes, generations have objective and subjective existences. Objective existence exists in part simply from age differences, but also from the facts of generational interaction and differences in generational experience. Generational consciousness, however, is a rarer phenomenon and only such consciousness turns the generation from a categoric group into an interaction group and a meaningful political actor. Generational consciousness is not constant: some age cohorts in some places are much more conscious of themselves as a cohesive unit than are others. The generation as a source of political action is also one whose interests cannot normally be defined in familiar economic terms. The generation is an experiential and attitudinal group, not an economic interest group. And, as has been suggested, one of the most significant

34 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "The Tides of National Politics," Paths to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 89-103; Frank L. Klingberg, "The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy," World Politics, 4 (January 1952), 239-273; and Samuel P. Huntington, Military Intervention, Political Involvement, and the Unlessons of Vietnam (Chicago: Adlai E. Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, 1968); Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970); P. M. G. Harris, "The Social Origins of American Leaders: The Demographic Foundations," Perspectives in American History, 3 (1969), 159-344.

35 Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry (New York: William Morrow, 1943); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution," Political Science Quarterly, 76 (June 1961), 181-217; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 165-168.

26 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

differences which can exist between generations is precisely the extent to which they have serious commitments to American political ideals. In addition to the other phases and cycles in terms of which American history can be interpreted along generational lines, the cycle of political idealism and institutional stability clearly plays a major role.

Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many

Contrary to the implications of the consensus thesis, conflict has played a significant role in American political development. Contrary to the images of the pluralist and progressive paradigms, the most significant forms of conflict have not been simply between upper and lower classes or among economic interest groups. They have instead been the product of differing degrees of intensities of belief in American political ideals and of commitment to American political institutions. They have also reflected the differing experiences and priorities of successive generations. The predominant role of these types of conflict helps to differentiate American politics from those of other societies. It also helps to explain some of the patterns of continuity and change which have characterized American politics. In the development and refinement of other comparative, dynamic, and realistic concepts, of which these are only limited specific examples, new paradigms of American politics may eventually emerge which will be more illuminating, useful, and relevant than those of the one, the two, and the many.