Imagining the American polity

About this book

"Using the distinctive "internalist" approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved, from its focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence yet again in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental paradox about popular sovereignty: whether democracy requires a people and a national democratic community or whether the requisites of democracy can be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms."--BOOK JACKET.