Robert Dahl

Forgot to write a word about Robert Dahl who passed away.  He was considered a liberal voice in the American political science field.  But to show you my estrangement from the field from early on (as I wrongly associated radical academic, Hanna Batatu at the American political science department in my college days, with American political science).  As you know, C.Wright Mills wrote his book the Power Elite, which generated a log of controversy in US academia. The book had an influence on me and Mills (who died early) was an independent Marxist scholar.  But American political science (liberal and conservatives alike) freaked out and went about to discredit him.  Dahl (and THREE OF HIS STUDENTS INCLUDING Nelson Polsby who became professor at Berkeley) wrote books to refute the thesis of Mills, but they selected the little town of New Haven, Connecticut for their research example, as it can be extrapolated on the whole US.  That was the idea behind the book Who Governs, which introduced the pluralist (and US-self serving) model.