During my final two years as an undergrad, at San Francisco State College from 1963 to 1965, I first began to develop somewhat serious views about politics. I fancied myself a member of the New Left and read Ramparts magazine regularly. I also developed an attachment to the ideas of C. Wright Mills, a radical (for the time) sociologist whose books The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination, among others, had an enduring influence on my outlook. Mills was what became known in political science and political sociology as an elite theorist, and elite theory has always had strong appeal to me. Later on, when I became familiar with public choice theory, it seemed to me, as it still does, that a combination of elite theory, public choice, and the theory of ideology equips one with a valuable framework of analysis to organize ones thinking about politics. My recent post on Facebook about the Establishment in the USA clearly runs along such lines. In my teaching of contemporary political economy, I used to have the students read, along with other materials, an interesting text by the elite theorist Thomas R. Dye called Whos Running America?, which has gone through at least seven editions, each updating the previous one to take into account a new cast of characters. I recommend Dyes book especially for its empirical content, but his more conceptual statements about the workings of U.S. politics are also worthwhile. Libertarians of the Rothbardian wing will find elite theory to be pretty much right down their alley. I doubt that I will dispense with it any time soon in my own commentaries on historical and contemporary political economy.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 22:36:00 +0000
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