Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many

TLDR: The consensus theory as mentioned in this paper was the product of a new scholarly concern with what was "different" about American society and, indeed, "American civilization." The consensus theory marked not only a rejection of the earlier progressive paradigm of American politics but also differed from, although it was not entirely incompatible with, the pluralistic model which, from the early decades of the century, had been the most popular paradigmatic child of the American political science profession.

Abstract: "In American social studies," Louis Hartz observed eighteen years ago, "we still live in the shadow of the Progressive era."1 The book in which he wrote these words played a major and, in some respects, decisive role in dissipating that shadow and moving the study of American society into the bright, warm, soothing sunlight of the consensus era. For a decade thereafter, the dominant image of American society among scholars and intellectuals was that formulated and expressed in the works of Boorstin, Hofstadter, Parsons, Potter, Bell, Lipset, Hartz himself, and many others. The consensus theory was the product of a new scholarly concern with what was "different" about American society and, indeed, "American civilization." The consensus theory marked not only a rejection of the earlier progressive paradigm of American politics. It also differed from, although it was not entirely incompatible with, the pluralistic model which, from the early decades of the century, had been the most popular paradigmatic child of the American political science profession. The progressive theory stressed class conflict; the pluralist model stressed the competition among a multi-