• In terms of content, we will be studying work done in the social sciences, particularly political science, about the structure of power in the United States—in particular, whether the United States is dominated by a power elite or is instead a democracy, where all views get heard fairly equally.  Researchers who believe there is such a power elite are called "elitists".  (Note the terminological confusion that can arise from the term, "elitist".   "Elitist" researchers don't believe that there should be a power elite, nor do they believe that the elites that exist are better than other people, nor do they say that they are an elite themselves among researchers.)  Those who believe the United States is some sort of democracy have come to be called "pluralists".  (The term "pluralist" also needs clarification.   I am using it to denote all researchers who believe the United States is a democracy, even though the most accurate meaning of the term is, "researchers who believe that the U.S. political system looks like that described by Robert Dahl, particularly in his works Who Governs? and Polyarchy." )  The empirical debate between these two positions goes back at least a century in various forms.  While the debate tends to focus on American politics, which is why this course is counted in the American subfield, the issues of a power elite apply to all countries and to the international system as well.
• The normative debate about what views ought to be heard or about how we ought to hear views—this debate goes back much longer than that.  These days the debate is focused around how to define democracy.  What is democracy?  Virtually every country, including the harshest dictatorships, claims to be democratic;  does it have any definition at all?  Another way to approach this question, a way without the terminological and historical baggage associated with the specific term "democracy", is:  "What sort of political system should we aspire to, regardless of whether we currently have it?"  This is a central concern of political science, and one you should be becoming familiar with.
• A third goal of this course is to answer the question, "What is political science?"  One way to approach this question is to look at what people who call themselves "political scientists" actually do.  The texts we read will give some idea of that, and I'll talk some about the history of political science as a field.  We will also be hearing from other professors in the department.  Another way to approach the question is to figure out somehow what political scientists ought to be doing.  I'll be asking the other faculty to talk about that also, i.e., to talk about what they believe political science ought to be.
• One important issue within political science is whether it is in fact a science.  Until the 1960s, most departments were departments of "government".  So we also want to ask in this course, is political science a science?  To answer that, we need to know what a science is in the first place.  How can we recognize if something is a science?  Can a field be a science if it studies normative issues—questions of value, questions about what ought to be?  (And if not, why haven't we kicked the subfield of political theory out of the profession?)   In political science can we separate empirical questions of what is from normative questions about what ought to be?  If we can't, how can we handle the relationship between them in at least a logical (even if not precisely "scientific") way?
• My final goal in this course is to show you something of the dialectical nature of research.  As we will see, social science thought has swung back and forth many times between pluralism and elitism.  The lesson we need to draw from that is that knowledge—certainly not social scientific knowledge—is never a finished product.  This is an important lesson for us in all our lives, because it says that knowledge is rarely (and I believe never) absolute:  we can seek knowledge and achieve some understanding without having to prove perfection.

• Floyd Hunter (1953).  Community Power Structure:  A Study of Decision Makers.  Durham, NC:  University of North Carolina Press.
• C. Wright Mills (1956/2000).  The Power Elite.  New York: Oxford University Press.
• Robert Dahl (1961).  Who Governs?  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• John Gaventa (1982).  Power and Powerlessness.  Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
• Alan Cantwell Jr. (1993).  Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot.  Los Angeles:  Aries Rising Press.

SIX KEY QUESTIONS

1. What is the author's specific claim (and conclusion)?  What is his claim (very likely only an implicit claim) about the general structure of power in the United States?
2. What is the author's evidence for this specific claim?  What is his evidence for the more general claim?
3. How does the author connect the evidence and his claim?  In  other words, what is his argument?
4. This may be part of the previous question, but we'll look at it separately:   what is the author's method of obtaining this evidence, and is this method scientific (clearly stated;  objective;  reliable;  reproducible) and appropriate to the study requirements?
5. Is the author's logic really logical?  In other words, how powerfully does the evidence compel the reader to believe the conclusion?  (Be sure to make this judgment independent of whether you believe the conclusion.  In other words, the author's argument can be flawed even if you believe his conclusion is correct.)  If not, why not?  What's the hole (or holes) in the argument?
6. What is the author's conception of democracy (or of the system toward which we should aspire)?  (This may not always be clear, especially for elitist pieces, which often define democracy only by negation, i.e., "This pattern that I've found isn't democratic.")  How does this conception relate to and/or clarify previous conceptions we have studied?

Disability statement  |  Incompletes & extensions  |  Attendance  |  Respect

I am committed to being your firm ally in your education. I'm interested in you, not just your talents as a political analyst.  Lots of things happen to students outside of school that nevertheless affect their ability to learn and perform. And so I know that every student, without exception, has always done the best s/he could, if all the circumstances are taken into account.  This includes you.  Therefore, if you have trouble figuring out what to study, or if you study hard and get a bad grade on an exam or assignment anyway, or things simply aren't going well in your life, come and talk to me. Please don't just suffer in silence!

Please note that some sets of readings appear in a block that spans two or three specific class days. Unless otherwise indicated, all the readings are due for the first day, though we might not get around to discussing them until subsequent days.

WK	DAY	CLASS PREPARATION	CLASS CONTENT
1	9/3	Essay assignment handed out in class	Introduction Syllabus Grading Honors Program
2	9/8	Essay assignment due at beginning of class Read:  James Madison (1787)  Federalist #10 Read:  Edmund Burke (1789).  Selections from Reflections on the Revolution in France ¶¶ 55-59 ¶¶ 92-99 ¶¶ 100-102 ¶¶ 151-158, 164-165	Naive democracy:  pure representative democracy;  the democracy of elementary-school civics.  The politics of homo politicus:  rational (self-interested, educated, goal-driven) actors. Fear of mobocracy (Madison).  As you read Federalist #10, ask yourself what "faction" the author is in fact worried about. The natural aristocracy (Burke).
	9/10	Read:  Charles Beard (1913).  An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.  [RTF] [MS Word] [HTML] Ch. 5 "The Economic Interests of the Members of the Convention" Ch. 6 "The Constitution as an Economic Document" Ch. 10 "The Economics of the Vote on the Constitution" "Conclusions" (appears after [or at the end of] Ch. 11) Related reading:  Forrest McDonald has written two works that call Beard's conclusions into question: Forrest McDonald (1958).  We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. Forrest McDonald (1965/1979).  E. Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790	Tying in to Federalist #10:  Charles Beard's quasi-conspiracy theory.  Beard argues that the provisions of the Constitution were deliberately designed by its property-owning authors, who were seeking to protect various sorts of property they owned.  This thesis was historical orthodoxy for some decades, but recent historiography has called it into question.
3	9/15	Read:  Alan Cantwell, Jr. (1993).  Queer Blood:  The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot.  As you read this, remember to ask yourself (and be prepared to answer) the six key questions.  You might also enjoy taking a peek at: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory http://www.ctrl.org/graphicHome/CTRLhome.html http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14873 ["Top 20 Conspiracy Theories"]	Naive elitism:  conspiracy theory
	9/17		Conspiracy theory
4	9/22	Read:  xx	xx
	9/24	Read:  one of the following works (mentioned by Truman 1971:501n2): Harvey Fergusson (1947). People and Power. NY: William Morrow & Co. P.101. J. H. Spigelman (1946). The Protection of Society. Harper’s Magazine (July). P.6. Stuart Chase (1945). Democracy under Pressure: Special interests vs. the Public Welfare. NY: The Twentieth Century Fund. P.8. Robert C. Angell (1941). The Integration of American Society. NY: McGraw-Hill. Robert A. Brady (1943). Business as a System of Power. NY: Columbia University Press. John Maurice Clark (1948). Alternative to Serfdom. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Read:  Robert Merton (1957).  [The Latent Functions of the Machine].  Pp.124-136 in Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. This selection is one section of the chapter, “Manifest and Latent Functions” (pp.114-138).  The chapter is worth reading in its entirety, but I'm only requiring pp.124-136.  [On 2-hour reserve]	Special interest group elitism.  The similar concern about the rise of mass political parties and machine politics.
5	9/29	Read:  David B. Truman (19xx).  The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. Preface Chapter 1 (“The Alleged Mischiefs of Faction”) Chapter 2 (“Groups and Society”) Chapter 3 (“Groups and Government: Introduction”, esp. noticing the Table on p.58 and the middle ¶ on p.65) Chapter 4 (“Group Origins and Political Orientation”, pp.66-86, 98-99, 104-108) Chapter 16 (“Group Politics and Representative Democracy”, noticing Truman’s sanguine view of American democracy).	David Truman's theory of democracy through group representation and competition.
	10/1	Slack class
6	10/6	Reading:  Floyd Hunter (1953).  Community Power Structure:  A Study of Decision Makers.  Durham, NC:  University of North Carolina Press. Related reading:  Clarence N. Stone (1989).  Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946-1988 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press) [This follows up, refines, and to some extent modifies the conclusions of Hunter (1953).  Stone's work represents still another form of elitist theory, known as "regime theory".]	The reputational method:  Hunter's Atlanta elite
	10/8	Exam 1 available online after class.  Be sure to prepare it using the standard format.	More on Hunter
7	10/13	Exam 1 due at beginning of class Read:  C. Wright Mills (1956/2000).  The Power Elite Related reading: G. William Domhoff (1968) “The Power Elite and Its Critics” in G. William Domhoff & Hoyt B. Ballard C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (Boston: Beacon Press), pp.251-278 Robert L. Heilbroner (1970) “The Power Structure” Chapter 14 of his Between Capitalism and Socialism: Essays in Political Economics (NY: Vintage Books), pp.247-257	The positional method:  Mills's national elite
	10/15		More on Mills
8	10/20	Read:  Robert Dahl (1961).  Who Governs? Related reading:  Robert Dahl (1963).  Modern Political Analysis.  Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice Hall.	The decisional method:  Dahl's image of a pluralist New Haven
	10/22	Slack class
9	10/27		More on Dahl and pluralism
	10/29		More on Dahl and pluralism
A SLIGHTLY IRONIC INTERMISSION For the past 40 years pluralism has been the dominant theory of American democracy.  It is a subtle theory, very difficult to attack, because rather than opposing the various elitist theories, it subverts them.  It grants the existence of power elites, and yet argues that they are under control, even if the masses don't lift a finger to control them.  Why are they under control?—well, here the pluralists turn the elitist's argument against them.  Elitists believe that the masses are controlled by nondecisionmaking stemming from anticipated reactions, but pluralism simply replies that the same thing can be said about the masses' control over the elite.  Why can't the elite worry about the reactions of the masses and be controlled thereby?  Who's to say in any objective way whose control is the greater? Because it has been so dominant, pluralism has come under attack from many directions.   An overview of these attacks, at least the early ones, is found in David Ricci's (1971) excellent essays, “Pluralism Opposed: The Critique of Method” and “Pluralism Opposed: The Critique of Tolerance”, Chapters 9 and 10 of his Community Power and Democratic Theory: The Logic of Political Analysis (NY: Random House). We now take up these attacks, both the ones Ricci cites and more recent ones.  Note that these are a new type of elitist theories.  Up until now we have been studying elitist theories that concentrate on the power of specific elite actors.  From now on, however, we will be studying elitist theories that concentrate on broader forces that are not located in any specific elite but that make our system undemocratic nevertheless.  These theories hold that elite power is exercised not directly, overtly, and publicly but instead through controlling various aspects of the conflict. Nevertheless,  note that these new elitist theories have philosophical problems.   Remember my earlier demand for objective evidence disproving pluralism.  The problem is that once the pluralists have hidden the question of power inside people's perceptions, then any elitist objections have to delve into the subjective.  And once they make their arguments on the basis of subjective experience, elitists can be painted as sore losers, refusing to accept that the American people's refuse to choose the elitists' left-wing policies.  The new elitist theories try various ways to meet this challenge.  You can judge whether they are successful.
10	11/3	Reading: Peter Bachrach & Morton Baratz (1962) "The Two Faces of Power" American Political Science Review 56(4, December):947-952 Peter Bachrach & Morton Baratz (1963) "Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework" American Political Science Review 57(3, September):641-651 Related reading: Raymond Wolfinger (1971).  Nondecisions and the Study of Local Politics.  American Political Science Review 65(4, December):1063-1080.  [Argues that Bachrach & Baratz's concept of nondecisions cannot be measured.] Raymond Wolfinger (1971).  Rejoinder to Frey’s "Comment".  ibid:1102-1104.  [Ditto] Clarence N. Stone (1986?).  Preemptive Power: Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure Reconsidered.   (ms.)  [Held in Chilton's office] Matthew A. Crenson (1971).  The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in the Cities.  Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.  See esp. pp.1-5 & 184. [folder of various reviews of Crenson 1971] [Held in Chilton's office] E. E. Schattschneider (1960).  The Semi-Sovereign People.  Hinsdale, IL: Dryden. Chapter 1 “The Contagiousness of Conflict” Chapter 4 “The Displacement of Conflicts”	Elite control through agenda-setting:  non-decisions and anticipated reactions. In the "related readings", the Wolfinger pieces try to argue that nondecisionmaking is unmeasurable, because there's no way to distinguish between a nondecision and an agenda item that doesn't come up because it's a rotten idea.  Or to be more precise, the distinction is a normative one, not an empirical one, so that B&B are simply complaining that their radical agenda isn't being implemented. The book by Matthew Crenson tries to meet this objection by arguing that issues of air pollution should (by any standard) have been at least raised in severely polluted cities like Gary, Indiana, and so the fact that they were not raised at all is evidence that nondecisionmaking is a real process. Elite control through control of the scope of conflict:  Schattschneider's "mobilization of bias"
	11/5	Slack class
11	11/10	Read: Herbert Marcuse (1965).  Repressive Tolerance.  Pp.81-117 in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., & Herbert Marcuse (eds) A Critique of Pure Tolerance.  Boston: Beacon Press. Assignment: Start work on the Kilbourne essay assignment	Elite control through framing issues. Kilbourne video:  Jean Kilbourne (1987).  Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.   (VC 1769)
	11/12	Kilbourne essay assignment due at beginning of class	Continued discussion of elite control via control over how issues are framed
12	11/17	Reading: Marilyn Frye (1983) "To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality" in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press), pp.152-174  [As you read this wor George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) Chapters 1-3 of Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Sharon Rampton (1998). “Let them eat nutri-cake: Merriam-Webster thinks our 'biosolids' don't stink.” [How the word biosolid became a dictionary term.] Harper's Magazine 297(1782, Nov):48. Leslie Savan (1999) “Decoding the new MTV-speak [Fuller Explanation Department]” The New Yorker (March 29):45-46 “Kurds to Live By” (1999) Harper’s Magazine (November):24 Nancy Fraser (1986) “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity” Praxis International 5(4, January):425-429, esp. p. 425 Walker Gibson and William Lutz (1991) Doublespeak: A Brief History, Definition, and Bibliography, with a List of Award Winners, 1974-1990 (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE Concept Paper No. 2) [You can see more examples of doublespeak via the NCTE web site: http://www.ncte.org/]	Elite control through control of our understanding of issues. Catherine Ishino talk?
	11/19	Reading:  John Gaventa (1982) Power and Powerlessness (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press) Related reading:  Walter G. Runciman (1969.  False Consciousness.  Philosophy 44(4):303-313.	Elite control through the control of our understanding of our wants and needs (i.e., through "false consciousness") The concept of false consciousness has the same sort of philosophical problems as that of nondecisions.  If you don't agree with me, is that because you're suffering from false consciousness, or simply because my idea is idiotic?  How can we tell the difference?  Doesn't it just come down to a subjective judgment?
13	11/24
	11/26	Term paper writing day;  no class
14	12/1	Term papers due at beginning of class Reading: Marilyn Frye (1983).  Oppression.  Pp.1-16 in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory.  Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.  [As you read this important work, see if you can answer the questions found here.] Paul Sweezy (1956).  Power Elite or Ruling Class?  Monthly Review 8(5, September):138-150. Jürgen Habermas (1976).  Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power.  Pp. 171-187 in Philosophical-Political Profiles.  Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Thomas McCarthy (1992).  The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School.  Pp.121-148 in Thomas E. Wartenberg (ed).  Rethinking Power.  Albany, NY: SUNY.	Elitism without elites:  The above theories all talk about different ways an elite can exercise power, but must there be any coherent “elite” at all?  A major problem with elitist theories is that the people identified as members of an elite don't see themselves in that way.  Rather, they see themselves as Dahl does:  surrounded by forces, including "slack power" and "countervailing elites", that prevent them from simply doing whatever they want.  Far from seeing themselves as a member of a coherent elite, then, they may see themselves as simply one fish in a very large pond—a bigger-than-average fish, maybe, but still only one out of many.  They may also see their actions as being good—actions that the unwashed masses aren't able to understand, or maybe a legitimate defense against the masses' envy.  (As we have already discussed, this is James Madison's theme in Federalist #10 .)
	12/3	Slack class
15	12/9		More on elitism without elites
	12/11		Student evaluations Even more on elitism without elites Review of the course and final exam
Dec 17 (Wed), 2:00-3:55:  Final exam
Dec 22 (Mon), 12:00:  Grades and an annotated version of the final exam are posted by noon today.

• How to do citations correctly, i.e., to prevent plagiarism and related academic offenses
• How to evaluate WWW material
• Decoding my editorial marks on your papers and exams
  • Exam #1
• Term paper
• Final Exam

FOOTNOTES

*Information about me: I am an Associate Professor of Political Science. My professional research interests are in the intersection of social science and moral philosophy, i.e., in the role of moral beliefs within social dynamics. This makes me particularly concerned with political philosophy and political theory, and you'll accordingly find this course to contain a healthy dose of theory. I concentrate primarily upon European political theory, within which primarily postmodern theory, within which primarily Frankfurt School / Critical Theory work, within which Jürgen Habermas, within which Discourse Ethics. I have written a number of works in this area: "A Second Moment of Discourse Ethics" (1998), Defining Political Development (1988), and Grounding Political Development (1991), and, with Shawn Rosenberg and Dana Ward, Political Reasoning and Cognition: A Piagetian View (1988). I'm currently at work on a book, Ways of Relating.  You can find my vita and, perhaps more relevant, my philosophy of teaching hanging off my web site.