| “Imagining
the American Polity is a vivid and engaging study of the discourse
of pluralist democracy in the history of political science. It tracks
the varieties of twentieth-century pluralism out of debates over
‘the state’ and convincingly demonstrates the genealogical
ties that bind Laski and the Progressive Era to the behavioral revolutionaries
of the fifties to today’s multiculturalists. There is nothing
quite like it in the literature on democratic theory, much less
on the history of political science that John Gunnell has already
done so much to advance.” —James Farr, University of
Minnesota
Americans
have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as
a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding
they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy
are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as
a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic
discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to
this ongoing dialogue, thereby playing a significant role in political
education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American
democracy.
Using
the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed
for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of
conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved,
from its focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state
through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the
1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s up
to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence
yet again in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political
scientists have grappled with a fundamental paradox about popular
sovereignty: whether democracy requires a people and a national
democratic community or whether the requisites of democracy can
be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with
the design of certain institutional mechanisms.
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