The Post-Behavioral Revolution in Community Power: A Brief Note from a Frontier of Research

Now that American political science is safely launched into its post-behavioral era, the study of community power has at long last been pried loose from the suffocating embrace of a mode of thought sometimes referred to as “pluralist.” This is liberating for pluralist and antipluralist alike; the former can no longer be sneered at for embodying or expressing or fomenting “conventional wisdom.” Indeed, on some campuses, it takes quite a lot of courage, not to say eccentricity, to harbor, let alone utter, a vagrant pluralist thought. Anti-pluralists are faced with the golden opportunity of themselves offering explanations of social and political behavior. Already, in fact, little tendrils of creativity are sprouting up, like the spring's first dandelions through the cracks of a disused sidewalk. It is, I think, too much to think of these as more than preliminary attempts at establishing a fresh new Consciousness of things political. And so it is not my thought to subject any of the major propositions that have so recently emerged to the increasingly irrelevant tests of outmoded paradigms, such as obedience to rules of logic, agreement with the preponderance of evidence, accuracy and contextual aptness of citation to earlier work, and so forth.