A muddy pool, it is said, can pretend to any depth, an observation applicable to much of the revisionist liberalism now widespread in the academy. Unable for ideological or prudential reasons to accept, say, a conservative, classically liberal, or Marxist critique of modern society, but increasingly uncomfortable with the failure, as it is viewed, of bourgeois democracy, neoliberal system-builders have sought a synthesis of the “best” elements of socialist economics (yielding equality) and market relations (efficiency) within a “genuinely” democratic framework. The publication of Charles E. Lindblom's Politics and Markets is as an important auspice of this trend. Recipient of the American Political Science Association's most prestigious book award and laudatory comment in the journals of opinion, the volume has also sparked reaction in business circles, as in the Mobil Oil advertisement which took issue with Lindblom's analysis of big business' “privileged position” in the governance of the world's polyarchies (i.e., the “crippled” democracies of North America, Western Europe, Japan and related systems).
Concept of the political culture in the light of contemporary political science discussions
