Pluralism has been one of the most dominant frameworks for understanding politics in mainstream political science.

It has influenced much of the thinking on the nature of the relationship between the government and civil society from the late nineteenth century until the present day. Modes of pluralist thinking have influenced many subfields of political science, including pressure groups, political theory, multiculturalism, public administration and discourse theory.

Despite it influential position, there are a number of issues that arise when attempting to outline the pluralist theory of the state. First, there is no agreement on what constitutes pluralism. Pluralism is conceptualized in numerous ways across the fields of political science, international relations and political theory. As Nichols (1975:1) points out:

The principal causes of confusion has been the fact that the term has been used by separate groups of thinkers who have rarely attempted to relate their particular use of the term to its other usages.

In addition, pluralism can be linked to a range of ideological thought including that of anarchists, socialists, Whigs and Conservatives (see Laborde 2000; Hirst 1994).

Second, pluralism pays little attention to the nature of the state and even less to state theory. Because of its roots in English empiricism and American pragmatism, pluralism is curiously non-theoretical. Jordan (1990: 286) points out that ‘pluralism has been an under explicit theory’. Ironically, the basis of pluralist theory is a critique of the state. However, pluralism, in most manifestations, has a benign view of both the existing state in democratic society and the future potential of the state as a mechanism for political organization.

an assumption of absolute truth and that social facts can be discovered through investigation (as well as a methodological individualism which opposes the notion of group identities). Because of its diversity and theoretical naivety, there is a consequent lack of clarity or consistency in pluralist state theory. In addition, as in many theories, there is a continual elision between normative and explanatory theory.

The chapter begins by examining the historical roots of pluralism and then examines the bifurcation of pluralisms into the American and English schools. It will examine the growing dominance of US pluralism and discuss how the focus on the US shaped the pluralist understanding of the state and how the normative element of pluralism prevented any conception of the state in the West as other than a liberal and representative institution. The chapter will then outline the growing criticisms of pluralist theory and the attempts by a range of political scientists to defend a pluralist tradition, despite empirical and conceptual challenges. Finally, the chapter discusses the reinvigoration of pluralist thought from the unlikely sources of postmod­ernism, radical democracy, governance and multiculturalism, and highlights how thinkers from different epistemological positions have developed some of the themes of traditional pluralism such as diversity, the limits of the political and the need to constrain the role of the state. The chapter will illustrate that whilst the state is a core feature of pluralists concerns, they actually pay little attention to the nature of the state. The state is problematic for pluralists because they fail to see it as an independent source of political power.