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Chapter 9 - Recent Changes in the Shape of Power
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- By Stanley Aronowitz, University of New York
- Edited by Guy Oakes
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- Book:
- The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 17 June 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2016, pp 191-206
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
When C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite was published in 1956 the prevailing academic position on the structure of political power was described as “pluralism.” Many political scientists and sociologists acknowledged that economic power had become highly concentrated during the twentieth century. But the prevailing wisdom was that the economic and political spheres were largely autonomous; at most, large industrial corporations were included among the welter of influence groups seeking to influence Congress, the agencies of the executive branch and state governments, but under no circumstances was the United States dominated by a ruling class or a coalition of fairly complementary interests. Best articulated in Robert Dahl's Who Governs? (1961), power in the United States is dispersed among a plethora of interest groups. On specific issues, one or more groups may exercise dominant influence, but Dahl denied that in general a national power structure exists. Mills did not dispute the “vector analysis” of power but insisted that it operated chiefly at the local level. He argued that the chief function of the American state is to implement foreign policy. In the Cold War era, social reform must compete with the imperatives of permanent war that demand that the preponderance of taxes be devoted to maintaining a large military equipped with technologically advanced weapons and a large number of military bases in Western Europe, surrounding Eastern Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia. These regions were viewed by a highly concentrated power elite as radical or revolutionary threats to US and European security. Mills also disputed the prevailing liberal Democratic claim that America could afford both guns and butter, a major theme of Adlai Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign.
Needless to say, Mills's theory of economic and political power more than dissented from the prevailing pluralist thesis. It contradicted it and offered a comprehensive alternative that, while not ignoring the validity of plural struggles for incremental domestic social reform, argued that America's global interests both drove state policy and limited the effectiveness of liberal democratic politics. Indeed, Mills claimed that there was no democracy at the national level. First he placed the top officers of the largest corporations as a crucial component of a power elite. He also argued for the concept of a coalition of power that dominates the key elements of national policy.
13 - Against the liberal state: ACT-UP and the emergence of postmodern politics
- Linda Nicholson, Steven Seidman
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- Book:
- Social Postmodernism
- Published online:
- 29 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 14 September 1995, pp 357-383
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- Chapter
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Summary
The election of Rudolph Giuliani as New York city's first Republican mayor in more than twenty years challenged a number of political assumptions that had solidified into myths in the city's political culture. Among them, none was more significant than the idea (vigorously promoted by the person Giuliani defeated, Mayor David Dinkins) that, despite Staten Island and Queens's fabled conservatism, New York remained, indeed, a gorgeous mosaic of different ethnicities, races, and sexual orientations, the sum of which added up to one of the last liberal outposts in the midst of an increasingly rightward drift of the national polity. Even though Giuliani was a Republican and a militant champion of the now hegemonic doctrine that the chief role of government was to insure law and order by pursuing an unrelenting war on crime, his other political priorities were carefully disguised during the 1993 mayoral campaign as they had been in his unsuccessful bid of 1989. The political spin doctors assured us after his narrow victory over Dinkins – the city's first African-American mayor – that, beneath his conservative exterior, Giuliani was really a “Rockefeller” Republican, a designation that marked him as a softie, committed to the provision of social welfare and public goods even as he might be tough on crime. After all, who could deny that Rockefeller's administration of New York state government followed the broad pattern established by welfare liberalism during the 1930s and 1940s? Rockefeller's one great crime initiative, mandatory sentencing for drug dealers and drug users, and his order to brutally suppress the famous Attica uprising of 1969 were not, in any case, partisan political gestures.