Le pluralisme: une mise à mort ratée

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-279
Author(s):  
Jean Tournon

In The End of Liberalism, T. Lowi argues that interest-group liberalism, the public philosophy of the United States since the New Deal, is the result of the pluralist theory of political science. Lowi is against the new liberalism, which, according to him, is a system of “legalized privilege,” “shuts out the public,” and “impairs legitimacy.” In his efforts to eliminate this “neo-liberalism,” he has severely attacked the theory itself with a view to discredit it. But this article points out that some ideology which (a) glorifies organized groups while ignoring the unorganized ones, (b) believes in a natural harmony of their claims, and (c) invokes the public interest, has very little in common with the group theory of politics.Lowi's anathema also ignores the fact that the New Deal, in “parceling out” political power to minorities, has just followed an old pattern of American politics. Coming from a liberal, his suggestions of restoring the sovereignty of the majority, a moralistic rule of law, and the abstractions of citizenship are politically naïve today.

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dümmer Scheel

El artículo analiza la diplomacia pública del gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas centrándose en su opción por publicitar la pobreza nacional en el extranjero, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Se plantea que se trató de una estrategia inédita, que accedió a poner en riesgo el “prestigio nacional” con el fin de justificar ante la opinión pública estadounidense la necesidad de implementar las reformas contenidas en el Plan Sexenal. Aprovechando la inusual empatía hacia los pobres en tiempos del New Deal, se construyó una imagen específica de pobreza que fuera higiénica y redimible. Ésta, sin embargo, no generó consenso entre los mexicanos. This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, focusing on the administration’s decision to publicize the nation’s poverty internationally, especially in the United States. This study suggests that this was an unprecedented strategy, putting “national prestige” at risk in order to explain the importance of implementing the reforms contained in the Six Year Plan, in the face of public opinion in the United States. Taking advantage of the increased empathy felt towards the poor during the New Deal, a specific image of hygienic and redeemable poverty was constructed. However, this strategy did not generate agreement among Mexicans.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.


1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey E. Cohen

Between 1876 and 1917, government philosophy toward telephone regulation began moving away from laissez-faire and toward some kind of involvement in economic affairs. However, while some early studies of regulation suggest business hostility to that policy, AT&T actively sought regulation, jogging government and the public in that direction. But this study is not just a restatement of the interest-group-capture theory, as offered by such economists as Stigler or historians as Kolko. Regulation resulted from the convergence of interests of many affected players, including residential and business telephone subscribers, the independent telephone companies that competed with AT&T, and the state and federal governments, as well as AT&T. I employ a multiple interest theory to account for telephone regulation, but unlike other studies using such a framework, I suggest that government is an independent actor with impact on the final policy outcome, and not merely an arena where private interests battle for control over policy outcomes, as is so common among other multiple interest studies of regulation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL

ABSTRACTThis article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.


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