Conclusion

Pluralism is in many ways a remarkable perspective. At one level it is not a coherent theory but contains a variety of approaches, methods, and epistemologies. Despite the myriad forms of pluralism, most pluralists share a number of assumptions.

The primary assumption is that groups rather than individuals are crucial to understanding of politics. Second, the role of the state needs to be limited. Third, groups can be an alternative to the state as a mechanism of collective organization and the production of collective goods. Fourth, in opposition to Marxists and elitists, in liberal societies there is a dispersal of power and there is some separation between economic and political power, and between different spheres of government.

A common problem that pluralists fall prey to is that they fail to prob- lematize the state. This is ironic as pluralism is derived from a fear of an over-powerful state and the belief that strong associations are necessary to limit the power of the state. Nevertheless, many pluralists from the early English pluralists through the American pluralists to the multiculturalists, see the state as a benign organization. Because of their focus on groups, and the often implicit assumption that the state is a neutral arena for groups, they fail to take the state seriously and to examine how it contains considerable power that often is not used for benign ends or distributed evenly between groups. Whilst some of the neo-pluralist work began to think seriously about state power, the work on social capital, radical democracy, and multiculturalism fails to tackle the issue of state power. Governance focuses specifically on the nature of the contemporary state but elides the issue of state power.

Nevertheless, despite a century of criticism, pluralism has remarkable resilience and is perhaps in a stronger position the other classical state theories.

There are two explanations of pluralism continuing strength. First, as a normative theory it is tremendously appealing to liberals and radicals, and to conservatives. Who would oppose diversity, the protection of groups rights and the distribution of power? It does accord with our sense of what a liberal democracy should be like; tolerant, diverse and responsive to the demands of a range of groups. What better solution to social ills than building networks of trust? Second, pluralism has been willing and able to respond to its critics and to changing realities. Consequently, we have seen continual adaptation in pluralist thought. Pluralism as an approach shares much with its analysis. There has been no attempt to define a single pluralist theory and as we have seen in this chapter there are numerous theories that can be loosely placed within the category of pluralism. Consequently, pluralism has been able to respond rapidly to criticism, changing realities and new debates in social science. It is an interesting commentary on pluralism that it continues to influence many of the current debates in political science, whilst at the same time drawing on many of the themes raised by the English and American pluralists of the early twentieth century.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jean Grugel and Dave Richards for their comments on this chapter.

Conclusion

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