Luke Ford

Michael Gedaliah Kammen (October 25, 1936 – November 29, 2013) ranks among the central figures in late twentieth-century American historiography and counts as a founder of the modern study of American cultural history. Across a career of nearly half a century at Cornell University, he reshaped the study of national identity by tracing how history, memory, politics, law, art, popular entertainment, and public ritual converge to form national consciousness. His scholarship helped install historical memory as a major field of inquiry, and it demonstrated that the stories a people tell about themselves carry as much historical weight as the events those stories recall.

Kammen worked at a moment when the discipline expanded past its older concentration on presidents, wars, parties, and formal institutions. Trained as a political and intellectual historian, he became an early and influential investigator of the symbolic side of American life. He examined constitutions, monuments, museums, holidays, commemorations, architecture, paintings, popular entertainment, and collective memory with the same seriousness historians had long reserved for legislation and elections. His governing claim held that American culture resists explanation through politics or economics alone. To understand the country, a historian must also study how Americans remember their past, invent their traditions, celebrate their national myths, and reconcile, or fail to reconcile, the contradictions at the heart of their society.

Early life and education

Kammen was born in Rochester, New York, on October 25, 1936. He passed much of his childhood in the Washington, D.C., area, and his attachment to American history took shape amid the monuments, archives, and political culture of the capital.

He entered George Washington University and earned an A.B. with distinction in 1958. He then moved to Harvard University, where he took an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1964. At Harvard he studied under Bernard Bailyn (1922–2020), whose account of the ideological origins of the American Revolution shaped a generation of scholars and helped redirect the field toward the recovery of political belief.

Bailyn’s influence runs through Kammen’s career. Both men cared about ideas, political culture, and the intellectual foundations of American society. Kammen, though, moved past his mentor’s concentration on formal political thought. He carried historical inquiry into territory that earlier scholars had treated as marginal: public memory, popular taste, artistic controversy, and the cultural uses of the past.

Cornell University

In 1965, soon after he completed his doctorate, Kammen joined the history faculty at Cornell University, and he stayed there for the rest of his life.

He rose quickly. In 1973 he became Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture. He chaired the History Department from 1974 to 1976 and directed the Society for the Humanities from 1977 to 1980. Cornell served as more than an employer. It became the institutional center of his intellectual life. Across nearly fifty years he taught thousands of students and supervised roughly two dozen doctoral dissertations. Colleagues described him as generous with younger scholars, curious about emerging fields, and ready to engage historians who worked far outside his own specialties.

Many prominent academics withdraw from undergraduate teaching as their reputations grow. Kammen did the opposite and stayed devoted to the classroom. His courses drew large enrollments, above all those on American myths, national identity, and cultural memory, and students recalled his lectures for their breadth, their humor, and their capacity to link parts of American life that seemed to share no common ground. He retired in 2008 and became professor emeritus. He returned to teaching in the fall of 2013, shortly before his death.

Colonial America and the early scholarship

Kammen’s first scholarship addressed colonial America and the relationship between Britain and its North American colonies. His early books include A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (1968) and Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (1970). Both studies examined the political structures and economic arrangements that governed the empire before the Revolution. He followed them with Colonial New York: A History (1975), which remains a standing contribution to the history of colonial society.

These works established Kammen as a serious historian of early America. They also disclose the wider interests that came later. Even here he cared less about formal institutions in isolation than about the cultural assumptions and political convictions that held those institutions together.

People of Paradox

Kammen reached national prominence with People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972), which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for History and became an influential interpretation of American culture for the rest of the century.

Kammen argued that contradiction defines American civilization. Americans honor equality and hierarchy at once, liberty and order, the individual and the community, idealism and material gain, local autonomy and national union. He treated these contradictions not as defects to be corrected but as a source of creative energy, and he held that American culture draws much of its force from the coexistence of values that pull against each other. The argument set the theme for much of his later work. He returned again and again to the tension between consensus and conflict, unity and diversity, continuity and change.

Constitutional culture

Kammen made a lasting contribution through his study of constitutional culture. In A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986), he traced the place of the Constitution in American public life. He declined to treat the document as a legal text alone and examined its career as a cultural symbol. He argued that Americans came to invest the Constitution with sacred standing, and that its authority rested not on judicial interpretation alone but also on civic ritual, public commemoration, schooling, and national myth. The book won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize and stands among the important studies of the Constitution’s standing in American culture.

Memory and the invention of tradition

Kammen’s most durable contribution came through his study of collective memory. His landmark book, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), examined how Americans build and rebuild their sense of the past. He argued that traditions seldom arrive as fixed inheritances. People revise, reinvent, and adapt them to meet present needs. Americans remember certain events, heroes, and symbols and neglect others, so historical memory functions not as a record of the past but as a continuing act of cultural creation.

The field now called memory studies counts among the most active areas of historical scholarship. Many scholars contributed to its rise, and Mystic Chords of Memory serves as a foundational text that helped establish the field within American historiography.

Public history and historical consciousness

Kammen’s interest in memory carried him into public history. He studied museums, historical societies, commemorations, monuments, heritage tourism, and the ways ordinary citizens meet the past outside the university. A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (1978), Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (1987), and In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (1997) examined the relationship between professional historians and popular historical understanding. He held that professional scholarship is essential and that history belongs to the public and should remain accessible beyond the academy.

That commitment linked him to the world of state and local history. His wife, Carol Koyen Kammen, became a respected local historian and public-history advocate. Each pursued an independent career, and both shared an interest in how communities preserve and interpret their own pasts.

Art, culture, and public controversy

Kammen kept challenging the boundary between elite culture and popular culture. In American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999), he traced shifting cultural standards and aesthetic judgment. His biography The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (1996) studied Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970), the critic who fought to legitimize popular culture as a subject of serious attention.

Late in his career Kammen turned toward visual culture. In Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (2006), he investigated fights over artistic censorship, public funding, museum exhibitions, and offensive imagery, and he showed how disputes over art expose deeper political and social conflict. Arguments about paintings, sculptures, photographs, and monuments often become arguments about national identity. His study of the painter Robert Gwathmey (1903–1988), Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (1999), belongs to the same line of inquiry. Across these books the old theme of paradox holds. Conflicts over culture reflect the broader tensions that occupied him throughout his life.

An extraordinary range

Few historians have written across as many fields. His major books include A Rope of Sand (1968), Empire and Interest (1970), People of Paradox (1972), Colonial New York (1975), A Season of Youth (1978), A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1986), Selvages and Biases (1987), Mystic Chords of Memory (1991), Contested Values: Democracy and Diversity in American Culture (1995), The Lively Arts (1996), In the Past Lane (1997), American Culture, American Tastes (1999), Robert Gwathmey (1999), A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004), Visual Shock (2006), and Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (2010). In all he wrote or edited more than three dozen books, published over 165 scholarly essays, produced hundreds of book reviews, and delivered roughly 240 invited lectures.

Recognition and personal life

Kammen’s work drew wide recognition. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize for History (1973), the Francis Parkman Prize (1986), the Henry Adams Prize (1986), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, several major fellowships, and the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2009). The 2009 award stands among the highest honors in the profession and recognized a lifetime of achievement.

On February 26, 1961, Kammen married Carol Koyen Kammen, and the marriage lasted more than fifty years. They had two sons who built distinguished academic careers of their own. Daniel M. Kammen became a leading scholar of energy policy and sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley. Douglas Anton Kammen became a scholar of Southeast Asian politics and history and joined the National University of Singapore. Three grandchildren completed the family. Friends and colleagues remembered Kammen for his humor, his kindness, his generosity, and his appetite for ideas as much as for his scholarship.

Legacy

Michael Kammen helped redefine what historians study and how they study it. He showed that constitutions, monuments, holidays, museums, paintings, popular entertainment, and public memory belong to serious historical inquiry, and he bridged political history and cultural history, elite institutions and popular taste, scholarly rigor and public engagement. He held a middle position between the older political historians and the more theoretical cultural critics, stayed committed to empirical research, and welcomed new questions about symbols, memory, and identity. His influence continues through the historians who study public memory, constitutional culture, heritage, commemoration, and national identity.

The American Association for State and Local History established the Michael Kammen Award to honor outstanding contributions to state and local history, a fitting tribute to a scholar who spent his career showing that history lives not only in archives and classrooms but also in the memories, traditions, and cultural practices of ordinary people. More than most American historians of his generation, Kammen lit the relationship between history and memory. His central insight held that nations endure not through governments and institutions alone but through stories, symbols, traditions, and shared understandings of the past, and through those investigations he helped Americans grasp how they came to imagine themselves as a people.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof builds his argument around a flattering story he says intellectuals tell themselves: the world’s problems come from misunderstanding. People are biased, ignorant, gullible, misinformed, and the intellectual, whose trade is understanding, becomes the one who can fix them. Pinsof rejects the story. People understand their incentives fine. What looks like error is strategy. Partisans hate because they compete over the coercive apparatus of the state. Stereotypes track reality. The cynical truth gets coded as icky, so intellectuals perform idealism and reach for the kinder explanation. The trick, he says, is to confuse stated motives with actual motives, to read a mission statement as a goal. Judge people by what they claim to want and they look like failures. Judge them by what they pursue, status, allies, moral standing, resources others lack, control of the state, and they look rational, because they are.

Turn this on Kammen, and two of his signature ideas come under pressure.

Start with paradox. Kammen builds People of Paradox on the claim that Americans hold contradictory values at once. Equality and hierarchy. Liberty and order. The individual and the community. He treats the contradiction as real and as a source of creative energy. Pinsof’s read drains the puzzle. There is no contradiction at the level of motive, only at the level of stated principle. A man invokes equality when equality serves him and hierarchy when hierarchy serves him. He praises local autonomy when the locals are his and national power when the nation is his to direct. The values do not fight in his head. They sit in his toolkit, and he reaches for whichever one pays. What Kammen calls paradox, Pinsof calls people serving interests behind a screen of principle. The mystery exists only if you take the stated values as the thing to explain. Drop that assumption and the paradox goes.

Kammen comes closer to Pinsof on memory. Mystic Chords of Memory shows that traditions are not fixed inheritances. People revise them, reinvent them, fit them to present needs. Pinsof grants most of this. People do manufacture their past. Where the two part is the why. Kammen routes the manufacture through cultural need, national self-understanding, the work a society does to hold itself together. Pinsof routes it through status and coalition. A group remembers what it pays to remember. It honors the dead who flatter the living and forgets the dead who indict them. The selection is no failure of accuracy and no noble act of collective meaning. It is savvy. So Kammen names the deed and flinches at the motive. He sees that the past gets built. He will not say it gets built to win.

The reading bites hardest on the Constitution. In A Machine That Would Go of Itself, Kammen shows Americans investing the document with sacred standing, surrounding it with ritual, commemoration, and civic faith. He treats the reverence as the thing to study. Pinsof asks what the reverence does. A sacred value, on his account, is a coalition marker and a weapon. You raise the Constitution to holy standing because holiness puts your reading of it past argument and shames the rival who reads it differently. The fights Kammen describes, over what the document means and who gets to say so, are the fights Pinsof predicts: zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state, dressed in sacred language so the winner looks pious and the loser looks profane. Kammen records the civic faith with affection. Pinsof reads the same faith as a club.

Kammen half-sees the construction Pinsof insists on, which makes him a softer target than the bias-correctors and divide-bridgers Pinsof skewers. The misunderstanding myth has a quiet version that still fits. The historian who decodes a nation’s memory becomes the man who understands the nation better than the nation does. The generosity, the warmth, the talk of history belonging to the public, all of it seats a man at the head of the table he is setting. Saying the past belongs to everyone is a fine way to keep the keys. And the field of memory studies, which Kammen helped found, runs on collecting the public’s distortions of its own past, the academic cousin of Pinsof’s misunderstanding-collecting, with one difference Kammen never quite states. The distortions are not mistakes. The public remembers what it has an incentive to remember.

Pinsof also reads the tone. The reach for paradox over competition, for creative tension over plain interest, for civic faith over coalitional weaponry, is the move of a man who knows that cynicism reads as mean in the seminar room. The warm account is the safe account. It signals that the author is a sweetie, and it works. The kinder story about American memory is also the more publishable one, the one that wins the Pulitzer and the named chair and the lifetime award, because the people handing out those honors prefer to hear that a nation’s myths are creative rather than that they are weapons.

Kammen looked harder at construction than most historians of his day and got most of the way to the savvy view. He saw that Americans build their past, sacralize their charter, and choose their heroes. He stopped one move short. He gave the building a kind motive. Pinsof finishes the move. People do not misunderstand their history. They use it. The selective memory, the invented tradition, the sacred Constitution, the creative paradox, none of it is a puzzle for a wiser interpreter to solve. It is a savvy animal doing what pays. On Pinsof’s reading, the only thing Kammen misunderstood is that there was anything to understand.

What the Dead Are For: Michael Kammen’s Hero System

In the fall of 2013 an old man returns to a classroom at Cornell he had left five years before. He is dying. The students do not know it. He stands at the front of the room and teaches what he has taught for almost half a century, how a people keeps its dead alive, and a few weeks later he is one of the dead himself.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) gives us the frame to read that scene. In The Denial of Death he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear it, and that culture is the shared project built to make the death bearable. A hero system, in Becker’s sense, is a set of rules a society offers for earning significance that outlasts the body. Raise a cathedral. Father a line. Write a book. Die for the flag. Each is a way of saying the grave is not the end of me. Becker’s claim is that almost everything a man calls meaning is a bid for symbolic immortality, made against a terror he keeps out of sight.

Kammen spent his career on the technology of that bid. His sacred value is memory. Not memory as a faculty of the brain, but memory as the thing a people does with its dead. He studied monuments, holidays, commemorations, sacred charters, and reburials, and he treated all of it as one subject: how the living arrange the dead so the living can go on. Digging Up the Dead is a history of Americans exhuming and reinterring their famous corpses, moving the bones to better ground, and it reads now as the most honest title he ever chose. The man was always digging up the dead.

Here is where the standard hero-system essay stops, with the protagonist’s sacred value named and a rival or two lined up against it. Kammen asks for more, because his value will not behave like the others. Memory is not one sacred value beside courage or purity or freedom. Memory is the ground all the other systems stand on, since every hero system finally turns on some arrangement of the dead. So the right way to see Kammen is to walk the rooms where his one word breaks into many, and to watch the same word mean things that cannot be reconciled.

Walk into a Family History Center on a weekday morning. Fluorescent light, gray carpet, a retired man in a white shirt with a lanyard, a screen where a microfilm reader used to sit. He has traced a great-great-grandmother to a parish register in Denmark, a woman who died unbaptized in the faith he holds, and this week the temple work was done in her name. “We don’t lose anybody,” he says. For him memory seals the dead into an eternal family, and the work of recovering a name is the work of salvation. The past is a rescue operation that never closes. To remember is to redeem.

Cross the country to a meditation hall. A bell, a row of cushions, a teacher with a shaved head and a borrowed robe. Here the project runs the other way. The dead are not to be recovered. The self is not to be preserved. “You are not the story you keep telling,” the teacher says, and he means it as good news. The hero in this system earns his immortality by dissolving the very self that craves to persist, by loosening the grip of memory until the chain of clinging breaks. To remember, here, is to suffer. The heroic act is to let go.

Stand in a town square between two people who will not look at each other. A bronze cavalryman on a granite base. On a folding chair beside it an older White woman with a thermos. Across the grass a young Black man with a clipboard. She says her great-grandfather rode with the man on the horse, that the statue holds his courage and his name, and that you do not tear down a man’s grandfather. The young man says his own great-grandmother was held as property three blocks from where the bronze stands, and that the statue tells her she still is. The same metal. Two hero systems that share a square and nothing else. One remembers to honor a lineage. One remembers to indict a crime. Each calls the other’s memory a lie, and each is a complete account of what the dead are for.

Drive to an office with kombucha on tap and a founder in a fleece vest. On the wall, a chart of biomarkers. He has a cryonics contract and a shelf of compounds and no patience for any of this. “Memory is a backup of a system you let crash,” he says. “I’m not backing it up. I’m keeping it running.” He wants to beat death the literal way, in the body, in the cell, and he finds the monument and the prayer and the family seal grotesque, consolation prizes handed out to people who surrendered. The past is friction. Only the future is sacred. To him the historian is a curator of defeat.

Then a sanctuary on the holiest evening of the Jewish year. White robes, a worn prayer book, a wall of small plaques with bulbs that light on the anniversary of a death. The cantor leads the memorial service and the room stands and the names are read. “We do not invent this,” he says. “We are commanded to remember.” His system inverts Kammen’s most famous claim. Kammen argued that traditions are made and remade to serve the present. The cantor holds that the duty to remember comes from outside the present, handed down and binding, and that the day he treats it as his own invention is the day it dies. For him memory is covenant. To forget is to break faith with God and with the dead at once.

Five rooms, one word, no agreement. The Mormon redeems the dead, the monk releases them, the woman honors them, the young man arraigns them, the founder discards them, the cantor obeys them. Each man is a hero on his own terms and a fool on everyone else’s. That is the part the cynic misses and the part Becker saw. The systems are not arguments about a fact. They are rival answers to the one terror, and a man cannot stand inside more than one of them at a time.

Kammen could stand in the doorway of every room. That is his hero system, and it is a strange one. He does not seal the dead or release them or honor or arraign them. He maps the others doing it. His relation to memory is the scholar’s relation, one step back from every altar, and his bid for significance is to be the man who understood the bids. He named the field. He wrote the books that taught a generation to see the monument and the holiday and the reburial as one subject. Mystic Chords of Memory and A Machine That Would Go of Itself are field maps of other people’s immortality, drawn by a man who claimed no plot on any of the grounds he charted.

Kammen won the immortality he catalogued. The Pulitzer, the named chair, the lifetime award from his profession, and then the cleanest stroke of all: the American Association for State and Local History created a prize and put his name on it, so that the student of how communities honor their dead became a thing communities use to honor their dead. He spent a career on reburial and joined the honored corpses he had studied. The man who explained the monument got a monument. His own system offered him one form of life past the grave, the scholar’s form, to be remembered as the one who explained remembering, and the profession granted it.

Go back to the classroom in the fall of 2013. The old man does not give the students an answer, because his system has no answer, only the map. He hands them the question instead, which is the only thing a teacher can leave that outlives him. He dies in November. The course runs on in other hands. The dead historian becomes a name on a reading list and a prize and a shelf of books, which is to say he becomes exactly what he studied, a piece of memory that the living arrange so the living can go on.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

If Mearsheimer is right, Kammen becomes Mearsheimer’s witness, and a better one than Mearsheimer found for himself. Mearsheimer needs a transmission belt, some engine that carries the value infusion into the long childhood and binds the grown man to his group. He gestures at family and society and leaves the machinery dark. Kammen spent fifty years lighting it. The holidays, the monuments, the schoolroom myth, the civic ritual, the sacred charter read aloud, all of it is the value infusion at work, and Mystic Chords of Memory reads as a field manual for how a nation loads its young before the young can answer back. Kammen thought he was writing cultural history. On Mearsheimer’s reading he was charting the socialization that beats reason, the force Mearsheimer asserts and Kammen documents.

The second consequence cuts at Kammen’s signature idea. People of Paradox holds that Americans balance liberty against order, the individual against the community, and draw creative energy from the tension. Mearsheimer denies the balance. The social and national side comes first because survival requires it. The individualist side is a late ideology, thin and recent, laid over a deep tribal floor. So the paradox is a hierarchy wearing the mask of a balance. Americans do not hold liberty and community as equals in permanent suspension. They run on community and tell themselves a story about liberty, and when the two collide the nation takes what it needs and the individual yields. Kammen’s tension is real as a story Americans tell. As an account of what holds the country together it sets a thin thing beside a deep thing and calls them partners.

The third consequence reaches Kammen’s constructivism. He argued that traditions are made and remade to serve the present, and the liberal mind hears in that a kind of freedom, the past as clay the living rework. Mearsheimer narrows the freedom hard. If the value infusion lands in childhood before reason wakes, then a man does not select his nation’s myths the way he selects an argument. The myths arrive first and build the man who later imagines he is choosing. Kammen is right that traditions change. He overstates how much of the change is chosen, because the chooser is already a product of the tradition he proposes to revise. The hand that reworks the clay was shaped by the clay.

The fourth consequence turns on the author. Kammen stood one step back from every American myth and mapped it with the scholar’s distance, and he trusted that distance. Mearsheimer takes the distance away. No one stands outside the value infusion, the historian least of all, because the historian was a child once too. Kammen’s frame, pluralist, ironic, sure that traditions are constructed and so revisable, is the creed of his own tribe, the postwar American research university in the human-rights era Moyn describes. That creed was infused in him before his reason matured, by graduate seminars and disciplinary honors and the moral climate of his guild. The man who taught a generation that every tradition is invented sat inside an invented tradition he could not name, the liberal academy’s faith that reason and evidence float free of the group that trains them. On Mearsheimer’s anthropology that faith is the deepest socialization of all, the one its holders read as the absence of socialization.

The last consequence is the largest. Kammen studied the American argument over memory, the fights over which heroes, which holidays, which reading of the charter, the revisions and the contests and the pluralism, and he found there an open and creative culture forever remaking itself. Mearsheimer says he studied the weather and missed the climate. The argument over which myths is loud and visible and endless. The truth beneath it never changes. Americans contest the content of the binding and never the binding. No faction proposes to live unbound by any shared past, because a people cannot survive that way, and survival is the floor under everything Mearsheimer describes. Kammen’s catalog of the contests is accurate and his sense of their meaning is liberal. The contests are surface motion on a tribal sea that does not move. He gave fifty years to the variety of American memory, and the one thing his frame could not let him see is that the binding is not optional, not balanced against the free individual, not chosen in adulthood by reasoning men, but the price a social animal pays to go on living in a group.

If Mearsheimer is right, Kammen keeps his data and loses his framing. The monuments and the mystic chords and the sacred Constitution stay exactly where he put them, and they stop meaning what he thought. They are not the creative play of a free and pluralist people. They are the value infusion by which a tribe makes its young its own before the young can reason, and Kammen, who saw the infusion more clearly than almost any historian of his century, read it as freedom because freedom was the myth his own tribe had infused in him.

The Consecrated Heretic: Michael Kammen and the Boundary of History

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) gives us a way to read a scholarly life as a trajectory through a field. A field is a structured space of positions where players compete for a particular kind of capital and for the authority to say what the game is. Cultural capital is the competence and the credential a man carries. Symbolic capital is the recognition others grant him, the honor that lets his word land as authoritative. Habitus is the set of dispositions a life lays down in him, his feel for the game. Consecration is the act by which an institution turns a man’s capital into legitimate authority, a rite that announces: this one is real. The highest stake in a field is never winning a single round. It is the power to redraw the boundary, to rule what counts as the game and what falls outside it. Kammen’s career is a clean case of every part of this.

Start with habitus. A boy grows up in the Washington capital among monuments, federal buildings, and the staged memory of a nation, and the dispositions of that childhood settle into him before he chooses anything. He takes his first degree at George Washington University, in the same city. The objects he will later rule into history, the monument, the commemoration, the sacred charter, are the furniture of the world that formed him. His feel for which subjects will repay study is habitus reading the field before the field knows its own next move.

The doctorate is a rite of institution. At Harvard, Kammen studies under Bailyn, and the lineage hands down more than method. It hands down consecrated authority, the inherited capital of a master whose own standing the field already honors. A degree from that house, under that man, certifies the student as a legitimate heir. Kammen enters the field carrying capital he did not earn from scratch, the way an heir enters a market already holding shares.

Then conversion. The Pulitzer for People of Paradox, the Newton C. Farr chair at Cornell, the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at the close the American Historical Association’s award for a lifetime of distinction. Each is a consecration. Each converts work into recognition and recognition into the authority to define what good work is. The capital compounds, and by the middle of his career Kammen no longer plays for position. He plays for the boundary.

Kammen spends his standing to widen the field, ruling monuments, museums, holidays, popular entertainment, and ordinary taste into legitimate history. The expansion looks like an argument that won on its merits. On Bourdieu’s account it won on capital. The field hears the redraw as a founding rather than as a heresy because the orthodoxy had already crowned the man proposing it. A junior scholar who urged the same expansion would read as a crank with no feel for the discipline. Kammen urging it reads as a discipline finding its future. The difference is not the argument. The difference is the volume of consecrated capital standing behind the same words. The avant-garde a field accepts is the one it has already honored, and Kammen is the consecrated heretic, the man licensed to break the rule because the rule-keepers made him one of their own first.

The erasing of the line between elite and popular looks like a leveling, and it is the opposite. In Distinction Bourdieu reads taste as a marker of position, the way refined judgment sorts people by rank. The scholar who takes comic strips and museum fights and the four seasons in American life as serious objects performs a sovereign and capacious taste, the bearing of a man so secure in his cultural capital that he can study the popular without any fear of falling. The Lively Arts, American Culture, American Tastes, and Visual Shock are not descents from the high ground. They are the high ground rebuilt one floor up. Kammen does not abolish the hierarchy of taste. He relocates it to the place where he stands, the meta-position of the historian who can see all tastes as data. To study popular taste from a named chair is to consecrate yourself as the one who grants the popular its legitimacy, which is the most refined distinction of all.

His insistence that history belongs to the public reads as humility, the professor stepping down from the tower. Bourdieu reads it as a position-taking inside the academy, not a step out of it. The man who speaks for the public draws the authority of the public to himself while keeping his chair, his prizes, and his graduate students. He takes a stand against the territorial, jargon-bound, narrowly professional historian, and the stand is a move in the same game those historians play, made from a stronger square. The world of state and local history, the public-history wing his wife helped lead, gives him a second base of capital, a flank that the narrow academic struggle cannot reach. The historian who throws open the gate is still the man who holds the keys, and holding the keys is the position.

Founding a subfield is the largest accumulation a scholar can manage, larger than any single book, because the founder sets the positions later players must occupy and becomes the reference whose citation grants them entry. Kammen helped found the study of memory in American history, which makes him a consecrating authority, a man whose name in a footnote admits a newcomer to the conversation. The American Association for State and Local History then placed his name on a prize. That is a rite of institution, and it perpetuates his consecrating power past his death. Symbolic capital reaches its most durable form when it stops depending on the man and becomes an instrument the field uses to consecrate others. Kammen, dead, still confers legitimacy every year the award is given.

The player believes in the game. The stakes feel real to him because the dispositions that make him a player are the same ones that make the stakes feel real, and the sincere belief that the work is a disinterested search for truth is precisely what makes a man effective at the work. Kammen believed monuments were worth the study and believed history belonged to everyone. The belief is the engine, not a cover for one. The cultural field pays its highest symbolic profit to the player who appears to want nothing from it, so the disinterest is the investment. Kammen looked like the historian who walked away from the academy’s small game for the public’s large one. On Bourdieu’s reading he never walked away. The move that looked like leaving the field was the field’s own logic carried to its finish, performed by a man with the capital to perform it and the habitus to mean every word.

The Set

Place the set first. It lives in the seminar rooms and faculty clubs of a small number of universities, Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Princeton and Berkeley and, in Kammen’s case, Cornell, across the decades that run from the early sixties to the turn of the century. It gathers once a year at the convention of the American Historical Association and again at the Organization of American Historians, in hotel ballrooms where the job interviews happen in bedrooms and the reputations get made and broken at the receptions. Its elders set the air Kammen breathed. Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) at Columbia, Daniel Boorstin (1914–2004) at Chicago and then the Library of Congress, Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), Perry Miller (1905–1963) and Oscar Handlin (1915–2009) at Harvard, C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) and Edmund Morgan (1916–2013) at Yale, John Higham (1920–2003) and David Brion Davis (1927–2019). These men taught that America had a character large enough to hold a single ambitious book, and that writing the book was the highest thing a historian could do.

Kammen comes up through the most consecrated line of all. He takes his doctorate at Harvard under Bailyn, and the house Bailyn built turns out a generation of early-Americanists who become his peers and rivals: Gordon Wood (1933–2026), who won the Pulitzer for the radicalism of the Revolution and trained two generations at Brown, Pauline Maier (1938–2013) on the Declaration, Jack P. Greene (b. 1931) on the colonial constitution. Kammen begins there, in colonial agents and mercantile politics, and then turns toward memory, which carries him into a wider world. At Cornell his circle is Walter LaFeber (1933–2021), the diplomatic historian whose lectures filled the largest hall on campus, Mary Beth Norton (b. 1943) in women’s and colonial history, Dominick LaCapra (b. 1939) in intellectual history and theory, and, in the public-history world next door, his wife Carol Kammen, the local historian.

Ask what the set values and you get a clear answer. It honors the synthesizer. The figure these people admire reads everything in a field, masters the archive past any rival’s ability to catch him out, and produces the long interpretive book that reorganizes how everyone else sees the subject. He writes prose a scholar respects and a literate citizen can follow. He wins the large prize. He trains students who carry his questions forward and cite him at the head of their own books. He serves the guild, edits the journal, sits on the committee, runs the association. The life the set treats as great is the life that ends with a shelf of synthetic books, a named prize, a line of students, and a method that outlives the man. Generosity to the young is a real virtue in this world and a shrewd investment at once, because the students are the part of a scholar that keeps working after he stops.

The status games run on recognition handed out by a small number of people who decide what counts. The Pulitzer, the Bancroft, the Parkman, the Henry Adams. The named chair. The presidency of the AHA or the OAH. Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The editorship of the American Historical Review or the Journal of American History, which lets a man decide what gets reviewed and by whom. And above the prizes, the crossover, the review essay in the New York Review of Books or the front of the New York Times Book Review, which carries a scholar’s name out of the guild and into the country. The currency is not money. The currency is the regard of the few hundred people whose regard the set agrees to count, and the feuds are fought in print, in the long review that runs three pages and lands its worst blow with a single adjective.

The deepest game of all is the fight over what counts as real history, and it splits the set down the middle. On one side stand the top-down men, the political and intellectual and cultural historians who study founders, constitutions, presidents, and the national mind. On the other side, the new social historians who came up in the sixties saying the story belonged to the crowd, the sailor, the slave, the millworker, the farm wife. Jesse Lemisch (1936–2018) called for history from the bottom up and called the consensus historians servants of power to their faces. Herbert Gutman (1928–1985) rebuilt the history of the working class, Eugene Genovese (1930–2012) the world the slaves made, Howard Zinn wrote the people’s history that sold by the million, and behind them all stood the Englishman E. P. Thompson and, in early-modern Europe, Natalie Zemon Davis (1928–2023). The fight was about honor and about who would hold the chairs. Kammen rode the seam. He took ordinary memory and popular taste seriously, which bowed to the bottom-up insurgents, and he kept the synthetic ambition and the civil manner of the top-down elders, which kept him in their company. He found a subject that let him belong to both camps and answer to neither.

That subject pulled him into a second circle, the one that studies how nations make their pasts. The Frenchman Pierre Nora (1931–2025) built the seven volumes on the sites of French memory. David Lowenthal (1923–2018) wrote that the past is a foreign country and spent his life on the line between history and heritage, where heritage is what a people selects from its past to feel good about itself. Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) and Terence Ranger (1929–2015) edited the volume that taught everyone the phrase invention of tradition. Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) gave them the imagined community. In the American wing, John Bodnar (b. 1944) studied public memory and commemoration, Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007) surveyed how ordinary Americans actually use the past, Jay Winter (b. 1945) wrote the memory of the Great War, and David Blight (b. 1949) showed how the nation remembered its Civil War by forgetting the freed slave. These scholars agree on a discovery, that the shared past is made and remade, and they police one fault line among themselves without end, the line between disciplined history and self-serving memory.

The normative claims, the oughts the set enforces, follow from the values. A historian ought to read the whole literature before he writes a word. He ought to master the archive and never let a rival catch him in an error of fact, because an error of fact is the one wound from which a reputation does not recover. He ought to write for the scholar and the citizen at once and treat the refusal to do either as a failure. He ought to avoid presentism, the reading of the past through the wants of the present, and he ought to avoid antiquarianism, the loving of the past for its own dust. He ought to serve the guild and mentor the young. He ought to guard the autonomy of history against the politician who wants a usable past and against the market that wants a flattering one. And he ought to study the founding and the Constitution with seriousness, neither debunking them as fraud nor worshipping them as scripture.

The essentialist claims, the things the set treats as given rather than made, sit underneath all of it and carry a quiet irony. The elders believed America had a real and distinctive character, that one could speak of the American mind and the American people as things that exist. They believed a craft-trained historian could reach a disciplined objectivity, a view earned by method and standing above mere opinion. They believed the archive holds a knowable past and that evidence settles questions. Lowenthal drew a firm border between history, which is disciplined, and heritage, which is self-serving, and treated the border as real. And the whole set treated the nation as a durable subject worth a lifetime. The irony is plain. A set that taught the world that traditions are invented and memory is constructed held its own craft, its own archive, and the nation it studied to be no inventions at all but solid ground.

The moral grammar shows in the praise words and the blame words. To praise a book the set reaches for magisterial, learned, judicious, humane, capacious, synthetic, definitive. To bury one it reaches for thin, tendentious, presentist, reductive, antiquarian, polemical, ideological. From the guild side, popularizing is an insult. From the public-history side, ivory-tower is the answer. The cardinal sin for the professional is the factual error and the special plea. The cardinal sin charged against the professional is irrelevance and contempt for the ordinary reader. The test that governs the whole grammar is civility. A man fights by reviewing the book, not by denouncing the author, and the sixties insurgents broke that rule on purpose because they thought the civility was a way of protecting power. The break came into the open in the public fights of the nineties, the cancelled Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1995 and the war over the National History Standards that Gary Nash (1933–2021) helped write, when the guild’s civil manner met the country’s heat and the professionals learned that the public would not sit still to be corrected. Eric Foner (b. 1943) at Columbia carried the argument that the past is always contested ground.

Kammen sat in the middle of every circle and quarreled openly with none. He took memory and popular taste seriously enough to satisfy the insurgents and kept the synthesis, the prizes, and the good manners that kept the elders close. He won the Pulitzer, helped found the study of American memory, trained his students, served his profession, and left a prize with his name on it. The set’s faith, which was his faith, held that the well-made book and the well-trained student outlast the man who made them, and that the republic is served by a people that gets its own past right.

The Voice

Kammen writes like a man who cannot bear to leave an example out, and his master figure is paradox, working at three levels at once: the title, the thesis, and the sentence. He opens by asking how the land of the future acquired a past, and the question is built on a pair of opposites, which is how his mind moves. He reaches for the doubled term and the balanced antithesis. A reviewer found his subject in the tensions of memory and modernism, populism and elitism, and the ambiguities and dualisms of a nation devoted to both past and future. The antithesis is not decoration. It is the shape of his thought, and it earned him the title the Professor of Paradox.
The diction is learned and Latinate, thick with abstract nouns. Tension, dualism, ambiguity, transformation, tradition. He prefers the noun that names a condition to the verb that shows an act, which gives the prose its weight and its slowness both.
The build is accumulative. He is a lumper, not a splitter. He piles instance on instance until the reader feels the whole culture pressing down. One book runs from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, from the origins of Independence Day to the Vietnam memorial, from the Daughters of the American Revolution to immigrant associations, and another sets The Simpsons beside jigsaw puzzles, Andy Warhol, and the Book-of-the-Month Club, with theorists like Raymond Williams (1921-1988) and Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) supplying the frame. A reader called one of the books an Encyclopedia Americana in narrative form, which is praise and warning at once.
The wit runs underneath rather than on top, dry and allusive. The New York Times found the style idiosyncratic and laced with wit. He loves the borrowed phrase, and the titles are where the bookish, playful, collecting side of him shows plainest. A Machine That Would Go of Itself lifts a line from James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) on the framers’ hope for a self-running Constitution. Mystic Chords of Memory takes the plea from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Selvages and Biases puns on the weave of cloth. In the Past Lane puns on the fast one. He collects phrases the way he collects examples.
The method carries a cost, the one every synthesizer pays. The prose is dense, and a reviewer warned that the uninitiated reader might find it hard going, the argument at times more theoretical than the examples require. The catalog can swallow the claim. When every page offers ten instances, the thesis hides under its own evidence, and the antithesis, used on every other page, settles into a tic. The same reach that makes him authoritative makes him long.
The speaking manner matched the page. His lectures filled large rooms, and students remembered the breadth, the wit, and the knack for tying together things that seemed to share nothing. That is the same mind, the one that sets the opera broadcast next to the theme park and the gossip column next to the poem. He connects. The pleasure of reading him and of hearing him is the pleasure of watching a man who has read everything find the thread from one odd corner of American life to another.

The Four Questions

1. What coalition does he depend on for status and income.

The money comes from a chain of institutions. The Cornell salary and the named chair. The trade and university presses, Knopf above all, that paid for the synthetic books. The fellowship apparatus, Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the learned societies, that bought him the years to write them. The lecture circuit, two hundred and forty invitations across a career, each with a fee and a flattering introduction. The status comes from a narrower body: the prize juries that gave him the Pulitzer and the Parkman and the Adams, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, the major journals, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the working network of elite-university historians whose regard he needed and returned. A second base sat in the public-history and local-history world, the American Association for State and Local History and the circle his wife helped lead, which later put his name on a prize. The deepest part is easy to miss. He depended on the guild agreeing that memory, commemoration, and popular taste were serious history, because that agreement was the ground his whole career stood on. He helped assemble the coalition that then paid and honored him.

2. Who does he risk angering if he speaks plainly.

His own guild, first. If he said that the academic study of memory is itself a usable past, that the professor selects and arranges the national story to serve the professoriate exactly as the amateur does to serve the town, he would knock out the floor under his own authority. The public-history and heritage world, second. If he called the historic village a theme park and the patriotic society a memory club and the founding documents a set of instruments, he would lose the affectionate access that let him study them and would insult the public that funds and visits them. The two culture-war camps, third. When the Smithsonian fight and the national history standards turned hot in the nineties, a plain verdict for either side would have cost him the civil, centrist seat that let him belong to the top-down elders and the bottom-up insurgents at once. His position required him not to choose, and not choosing in public is its own discipline.

3. Who benefits if his framing wins.

The professionals collect first. If memory and commemoration and popular culture are legitimate history, the field swells, the chairs multiply, the dissertations and journals and the new subfield arrive, and the men who certified the expansion become the certified experts on a domain the public cares about. Kammen benefits most of all, as founder and as the name in the footnote that admits a newcomer. The museums and archives and historical societies benefit, because his framing rules their work serious and fundable. The constructivist claim, that tradition is invented and the past is made, benefits whoever wants to revise the inherited national story, which in his decades meant the challengers to the old consensus. And the liberal academy keeps its seat as the disinterested referee who sees all memories as data and stands above the partisans who hold them. The losers are the people for whom the past is received and not up for revision, the traditionalist and the believer, who hear in invention of tradition a solvent poured on the thing that binds them.

4. What truths would cost him his position.

That his own objectivity is a professional convention with interests behind it, not a view from nowhere, and that the craft-trained distance he trusted is the guild’s house style rather than a window onto the real. That ruling memory and popular culture into history enlarged his guild’s domain and his own income as much as it found anything true. That history belongs to the public is a line that keeps the gate while seeming to open it, since the professionals cede no actual authority. That the border his world patrols between disciplined history and self-serving heritage, the line David Lowenthal drew so firmly, is partly a status fence, and that academic history is heritage with credentials. And the largest one, the cost of a verdict. If he said the nation’s binding myths are basically true and worth keeping, he would have stood with the conservatives and lost rank in a liberal academy. If he said they are instruments of power, he would have lost the public-history world and the centrist seat. So he held the two readings in suspension, called the suspension paradox, and made a career of the refusal to land. The paradox was real in the country. It was also the exact shape his coalition required him to keep.

Robert Alan Dahl (1915-2014) stands among the architects of modern political science and among the central figures in twentieth-century democratic theory. Across a career at Yale University that ran for more than six decades, he moved the study of democracy away from a largely philosophical enterprise and toward a systematic empirical discipline, and he supplied much of the conceptual vocabulary, pluralism, polyarchy, contestation, inclusiveness, through which scholars came to describe political life. His early work taught a generation to see democracy as competition among groups rather than the expression of a single collective will, and his later work pressed those same democrats to reckon with the constitutional and economic limits of the institutions they defended.

He was born on December 17, 1915, in Inwood, Iowa, the son of a physician whose financial troubles during the interwar years carried the family north to Skagway, in what was then the remote American territory of Alaska. Dahl passed much of his youth in that small frontier town, a setting whose social and economic life bore little resemblance to the urban centers that dominated national politics. He grew up in a working-class home, took summer jobs on the railroad, and watched ordinary citizens absorb the shocks of economic forces they could not control. The experience marked him. A concern with political equality and with the political weight of concentrated wealth runs through his scholarship from the dissertation to the final books, and it traces back in part to what he saw in Skagway.

Dahl took his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington in 1936 and then entered Yale, where he completed his doctorate in political science in 1940. His dissertation, “Socialist Programs and Democratic Politics: An Analysis,” already carried the themes that organized the work to come. The young Dahl rejected both centralized state socialism and concentrated corporate capitalism, and he worried that either form of massed power might erode democratic self-government. Before and during the early years of the Second World War he worked in Washington, serving in several New Deal and wartime agencies, among them the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of Price Administration, and the War Production Board. Government from the inside, with its compromises and its administrative friction, became part of his education.

The war shaped him further. He served in the United States Army as a reconnaissance platoon leader in the 71st Infantry Regiment of the 44th Infantry Division, and from late 1944 his unit fought through some of the final campaigns of the European theater. He fought along the Maginot Line, crossed the Rhine in March 1945, and advanced across the Danube in April 1945 as Allied armies pushed into Germany. He received the Bronze Star. After Germany surrendered, the Army assigned him to aspects of de-Nazification, including work on the German banking system. The war hardened his commitment to democratic institutions, and at the same time it convinced him that democracy could not be studied as an ideal alone. It had to be understood as a working system that operates under real conditions, with all the imperfection that implies.

Dahl returned to Yale after the war and spent nearly his entire academic life there, rising to Sterling Professor of Political Science, among the university’s highest distinctions. He became a central figure in the behavioral revolution that reshaped the discipline during the 1950s and 1960s. Where earlier scholarship leaned on constitutional texts, historical narrative, and normative philosophy, the behavioralists sought systematic evidence about how political actors behave and how institutions function. Dahl helped fix a model of scholarship that joined rigorous theory to careful observation, and his influence reached the discipline through generations of students and colleagues who carried his methods into every subfield.

His first sustained statement came in Politics, Economics, and Welfare (1953), written with his Yale colleague Charles E. Lindblom (1917-2018). The book tried to hold democratic governance, economic efficiency, and social welfare within a single frame. The collaboration mattered well beyond the volume. Lindblom remained among Dahl’s closest intellectual partners for decades, and together the two men laid much of the groundwork for modern pluralist theory. The partnership also charts the movement in Dahl’s thought, because Lindblom’s later writing pressed harder and harder on the structural advantages that business enjoys within capitalist societies, and those arguments helped pull Dahl toward a more critical reading of economic power than the one he held when he was young.

In A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) Dahl set out his first major theoretical position. He challenged the older picture of democracy as the expression of a unified general will and argued that modern democracies operate through competition among diverse interests and groups. Democracy, on this account, is a process through which competing interests bargain, negotiate, and compromise, not the voice of a single collective purpose. The book marks the turn away from idealized democratic theory and toward a realistic account of how popular government actually proceeds.

His 1957 essay “The Concept of Power” became among the most cited articles in the social sciences. Dahl proposed a spare definition: A holds power over B to the degree that A can get B to do what B otherwise would not do. The force of the formulation lay in its method as much as its wording. Dahl wanted power to be observable and measurable, so he turned attention away from speculation about hidden domination and toward identifiable decisions and traceable outcomes. The move set off a major argument in postwar social science. Critics charged that the conception was too narrow, and the sharpest challenge came from the political theorist Steven Lukes (b. 1941), who held that Dahl had captured only one face of power, the visible making of decisions. Lukes and allied scholars added further dimensions. The first concerned agenda control, the capacity of powerful actors to keep issues from ever reaching public debate. The second concerned the shaping of belief, the capacity of power to form preferences and perceptions so thoroughly that people fail to recognize their own subordination. The debate ran for decades. Dahl never accepted every part of the multidimensional critique, yet over time he conceded that power often works through channels less visible than the formal decision.

His best-known book, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (1961), studied political life in New Haven, Connecticut. Many intellectuals of the period held that American democracy lay in the hands of a cohesive ruling elite, a thesis the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) had advanced in The Power Elite. Dahl reached a different conclusion. After working through a long series of local controversies, elections, and policy fights, he found no single group that held consistent control across all issues. Power instead appeared dispersed among competing organizations: business leaders, labor unions, civic associations, elected officials, and activists. This finding became the empirical foundation of pluralist theory. Pluralism holds that democratic stability arises not from equal influence among citizens but from the absence of any group able to dominate every sphere of public life. Multiple centers of power check one another, and that competition opens space for participation while it blocks permanent domination. For many years Who Governs? served as the defining statement of democratic pluralism.

His most durable contribution arrived in Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (1971). Dahl argued that democracy, taken strictly, is an unattainable ideal, since no large political system satisfies every democratic principle in full. Rather than call existing regimes democracies, he introduced polyarchy as the name for real-world systems that approximate the democratic ideal. A polyarchy carries a set of institutional features: elected officials, free and fair elections, broad suffrage, the right to seek office, freedom of expression, alternative sources of information, freedom of association, and institutional guarantees for opposition. More important than the list was the way Dahl made democracy operational. He held that regimes vary along two axes. One is inclusiveness, or participation, the share of citizens entitled to take part in political life. The other is public contestation, or liberalization, the extent to which opposition, competition, criticism, and dissent are permitted. By placing countries along these two dimensions, Dahl built a frame for understanding democratic development across history and across cases. Nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, showed high contestation alongside limited participation, since the vote remained restricted; a modern polyarchy requires high levels of both. The frame became foundational for comparative politics and for the study of democratization.

In Size and Democracy (1973), written with Edward R. Tufte (b. 1942), Dahl confronted what he took to be a permanent dilemma of popular government. Small political units permit real participation, since individuals can shape decisions and stay close to those who hold office. Large units command the administrative capacity that complex problems demand, the capacity to handle defense, regulation, infrastructure, and the management of an economy. The two goods pull against each other. As a system grows larger and more capable, the influence of any single citizen shrinks; as a system grows smaller and more participatory, its power to meet large challenges falls away. Dahl treated this tension as unavoidable. Democracy, he held, requires a balance between participation and effectiveness rather than the maximizing of either value on its own.

Though readers often associate Dahl with a confident pluralism, his later writing grew more doubtful about the capacity of existing institutions to deliver real political equality. Lindblom shaped that turn. In Politics and Markets (1977) Lindblom argued that business holds a privileged place in capitalist societies because governments depend on private investment, employment, and growth, so policymakers face constant pressure to accommodate corporate interests. Dahl came to accept the argument. His concern with economic inequality had always been present, visible in the dissertation and never absent for long, but he became more and more persuaded that large disparities of wealth threaten the equality democracy promises. That concern reached its fullest treatment in A Preface to Economic Democracy (1985), where he examined worker ownership, workplace democracy, and alternative forms of economic organization.

Many scholars regard Democracy and Its Critics (1989) as his masterwork. The book gathers decades of research and reflection into a comprehensive defense of democratic government. Dahl weighs the cases for guardianship, technocracy, and authoritarian rule and concludes that democracy remains superior despite its flaws. The work also sets out what came to be called the criteria of the democratic process: effective participation, voting equality, enlightened understanding, control of the agenda, and the inclusion of adults. These standards became fixed reference points in democratic theory.

In How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2001) Dahl turned an unusually frank democratic audit on the American constitutional order. He declined to treat the Constitution as a sacred text and measured it against democratic principles. His criticisms gathered around several features. The Senate grants equal representation to states regardless of population, which hands outsized weight to residents of small states. The Electoral College allows a candidate to take the presidency while losing the national popular vote. Judicial review places significant policy authority in the hands of unelected judges. And the broader separation-of-powers design multiplies the points at which a determined minority can block what a majority prefers. Dahl did not reject constitutional government. He argued that many arrangements inherited from the eighteenth century are hard to defend by modern democratic standards.

In his last major works, above all On Political Equality (2006), Dahl returned to the question that had held him from the start. Can political equality survive extreme economic inequality? He feared that concentrated wealth turns into disproportionate political influence through campaign finance, lobbying, ownership of media, and the power to set the agenda. The late writing thus reaches back to the earliest, and the continuity across more than sixty years is striking: the same worry that animated a young man in Skagway and a graduate student writing on socialism still drove the work of a scholar in his nineties.

Beyond his own books, Dahl helped defend free expression within the university. He took part in the work that produced Yale’s Woodward Report of 1975, among the most consequential American statements on academic freedom, which held that a university’s central obligation is the protection of free inquiry and free expression even when speech is controversial or gives offense.

Dahl married Mary Louise Bartlett in 1940, and the marriage lasted until her death in 1970. In 1973 he married Ann Sale, who remained his partner until his death. He had five children and kept strong family ties throughout his life. His memoir, After the Gold Rush: Growing Up in Skagway (2005), looked back with warmth on the Alaskan childhood that formed his political outlook.

Honors came to him in nearly every form the discipline offers. He served as president of the American Political Science Association and won election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. He held Guggenheim Fellowships and appointments at leading research institutes. In 1995 he became the first recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize, often described as the closest thing political science has to a Nobel. Both Who Governs? and Democracy and Its Critics received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.

Dahl died on February 5, 2014, at the age of ninety-eight. His influence endures. Scholarship on democratization, representation, political equality, constitutional design, and democratic legitimacy still works within frames he helped build, and in 2016 the American Political Science Association established the Robert A. Dahl Award to honor outstanding work on democracy and democratization by emerging scholars. His career joined realism to idealism in a way that resists easy summary. He never gave up the conviction that democracy is the best form of government available to men, and he never agreed to romanticize the institutions that carry its name. He moved from the study of a single American city to the audit of an entire constitutional system, and from optimism about pluralist competition to a sober concern with economic and structural power. Through every shift a single question held fast: how can a political system preserve real equality among its citizens while it meets the immense organizational demands of modern life? More than any other political scientist of his century, Robert Dahl gave that question its concepts, its methods, and its standards, and supplied much of the language in which it continues to be asked.

Polyarchy as Containment: Sheldon Wolin on Robert Dahl

Two men hold the standing quarrel at the center of postwar democratic theory, and they want opposite things from the word democracy. Dahl wants to make it a science. He measures regimes, ranks them, names the real-world approximations polyarchy, and traces how power disperses among groups. Wolin denies that democracy holds still long enough to be measured. For him democracy is an event, not a regime, and the apparatus Dahl builds to study it is the same apparatus that contains it. Wolin never granted that the empirical theory of democracy described democracy at all. He thought it described the thing that had replaced democracy and kept its name.

Start with method, because Wolin starts there. His 1969 essay “Political Theory as a Vocation” answers the movement Dahl led and personified, the behavioral revolution that Dahl had crowned in his own 1961 essay as a successful protest grown into a monument. Wolin gives that movement a name he means as an indictment: methodism. The methodist elevates technique above substance and trains a community to trust the technique. The apprentice learns to see only what the method registers and to discount what it cannot reach. Vision goes first, then judgment, then the tacit feel for political life that no questionnaire recovers. What survives is a guild that polices its own procedures and mistakes the values of the research community for knowledge of the world. Dahl reads the same revolution as maturity, the discipline at last growing rigorous. Wolin reads it as the surrender of the theorist’s vocation, the trading of the contemplative tradition for a craft that measures because it has stopped thinking about ends.

The disagreement about method opens onto the larger one. Wolin draws a line between the political and politics. The political names the moments when a people attends to its common fate and acts on what it holds in common. Politics names the routine contest for advantage inside settled institutions, the bargaining and the vote-counting and the brokerage among organized interests. Polyarchy delivers abundant politics and almost no political. Dahl’s New Haven, the city of Who Governs?, runs on politics in this sense. Business leaders, unions, mayors, and civic groups push and trade across a long series of decisions, and no group wins everything. Dahl finds dispersal and calls it health. Wolin looks at the same city and finds a population managed by its organizations, busy with politics and shut out of the political, never once gathered as a demos deciding the shape of its shared life.

The decisive move is Dahl’s, and Wolin turns it inside out. Dahl argues that democracy in full is unattainable, that no large system satisfies every democratic standard, and that the honest course is to describe the approximations and study them under a new name. Polyarchy is that name. Through Wolin the move reads as the naming of a cage. The institutions Dahl catalogs as the marks of polyarchy, the elections and the legal opposition and the free press and the freedom of association, are the very containers that keep the demos from acting. Constitutionalism routes popular energy into channels that exhaust it. The administrative state absorbs decision into expertise. The corporate economy sets the terms before any vote is cast. Dahl treats these arrangements as the scaffolding of a workable democracy. Wolin treats them as the architecture of containment, and treats Dahl’s whole science as the cartography of the cage, careful, accurate, and blind to what the cage is for.

This is why Wolin calls democracy fugitive. Democracy, on his account, is not a form of government and not a stable arrangement of offices. It is an episodic eruption, the demos breaking through to rule and then receding, alive in the town meeting and the strike and the mass movement and the uprising, and gone again once the institutions reassert their hold. The state form exists to prevent the recurrence. Set Dahl’s two axes against this and the gap opens fully. Dahl ranks regimes by inclusiveness, how wide the franchise runs, and by contestation, how much opposition the system tolerates. Both axes measure the settings of the container. Neither registers the demos in the act of ruling, because that act keeps no permanent address and shows up on no scale built to grade institutions. Dahl measures how open the cage is. Wolin watches for the moments the cage fails.

Wolin pressed the argument to its hardest form late, in Democracy Incorporated. There he describes the political absorbed by the economy and the great organization until the citizen shrinks into a spectator and a consumer. Elections continue. Mobilization dies. He gives the condition a deliberately jarring name, inverted totalitarianism, a managed democracy that keeps the outward forms and hollows the substance, ruling through demobilization rather than terror. Dahl’s late work arrives at the rim of this argument without crossing it. In A Preface to Economic Democracy and On Political Equality Dahl grows alarmed that concentrated wealth turns into disproportionate political weight through campaign finance, lobbying, ownership of media, and the power to set the agenda. He sees the economic force that corrodes political equality. He keeps faith that the polyarchal frame can be reformed to contain it, that worker ownership or campaign rules or a more honest constitution might restore the balance. Wolin holds that the frame is the corrosion’s own instrument, and that asking polyarchy to cure what polyarchy was built to administer mistakes the disease for the physician.

Dahl is owed a reply, and the reply is strong. He might answer that Wolin offers eruptions and memory in place of institutions, that fugitive democracy protects no one on an ordinary Tuesday, and that a theory built on the rare moment leaves the citizen defenseless on every other day. Polyarchy, poor as Wolin finds it, hands a real dissenter a real press, a real vote, a real right to organize, and a real chance to turn the government out at the next election. Wolin’s demos, gathered and sovereign and then dispersed, ends when it disperses in the same concentrated power Dahl spent sixty years mapping, and the man with a grievance and no institution has nowhere to take it. The strike recedes. The court remains. Dahl built his science to give that man the court. Against the charge that he domesticated democracy, Dahl can say he made it survivable, and that survivable democracy beats a heroic democracy that arrives once a generation and leaves the losers to the victors.

That answer holds, and it marks the limit of the frame. Wolin gives you a powerful account of what polyarchy costs and a thin account of what to build the morning after the demos goes home. Dahl gives you the working system and treats its containment as the price of working at all. The confrontation yields its most when the two readings sit side by side over the same facts. Dahl looks at New Haven and sees power dispersed enough that no faction rules outright. Wolin looks at New Haven and sees a people busy enough that it never rules at all. Dahl asks how a large society preserves equality among its citizens while it carries the organizational load of modern life. Wolin asks whether a society that carries that load can still let its people govern, and answers that the load is the governing’s defeat. Read alone, Dahl tells you how the system runs. Read against him, Wolin tells you what the running costs, and forces the science of democracy to say out loud the thing its measurements leave unmeasured: who acts, and who only chooses among the actors others have arranged.

Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), and Robert Michels (1876-1936)

Dahl built his career on a single denial. The people never rule, said a long line of hard-eyed Europeans, and an organized few always do. Dahl spent forty years answering them with evidence, and the answer made his name. Turn the line back on him and the question sharpens into the one his admirers prefer to leave closed: did Dahl find power dispersed in New Haven, or did he miss the oligarchy because his method counted only the power he had already decided to look for?

The tradition he answered runs through three men. Gaetano Mosca holds that every society divides into two classes, a ruling minority and a ruled majority, and that the minority rules because it organizes while the majority stays scattered. Power flows to the organized. The minority then covers its rule with what Mosca calls the political formula, the legitimating story a society tells about why its rulers rule, divine right in one age and the will of the people in another. Vilfredo Pareto reads the same fact through psychology and calls it the circulation of elites. History for Pareto is a graveyard of aristocracies. One governing elite decays and another rises, the foxes who rule by cunning giving way to the lions who rule by force and back again, while the mass below never governs at all. Democracy, in this reading, is a derivation, one of the rationalizing tales an elite tells to dress its dominance as consent.

Robert Michels studied the German Social Democrats and the trade unions, the organizations on earth most committed to mass equality and internal democracy, and he found them run by a stratum of full-time officials who controlled the records, the meetings, the funds, and the press, and who held their places against a membership too busy, too grateful, and too unschooled to displace them. From this he drew the iron law of oligarchy. Organization breeds rule by the few. Not from bad faith, and not from any defect in the cause, but from the requirements of running anything large: specialization, expertise, paid leadership, control of information, and the apathy of a mass that wants its affairs handled. The party built to bring democracy to society cannot practice democracy in its own hall. If the iron law holds, Dahl’s project is dead before it starts, because the dispersal he reports is the surface play of factions inside a ruling stratum that the law guarantees.

Pluralism is the reply to Michels. In A Preface to Democratic Theory and then in Who Governs? Dahl denies the iron law on the ground, in a real American city, across real decisions. And he sets the rules of evidence first. His 1958 essay “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model” lays them down. To show that an elite rules, you must name the group, identify the political decisions where its preferences clash with others, and demonstrate that its preferences regularly prevail. A reputation for power is not power. A seat at the top of a social register is not a record of victories. Floyd Hunter (1912-1992) had asked Atlanta informants who held power and reported a cohesive business elite, and Dahl threw the method out: it measured talk about power, not the exercise of it. The honest student watches who wins when actors collide over a key issue, and in New Haven Dahl watched and found different winners on different issues, business leaders prevailing on redevelopment, educators and parents on the schools, party men on nominations, no faction carrying every field.

The elite theorists answer that the test is built to produce its verdict. Define power as victory in observable conflict over issues already on the agenda, and you have ruled out the deepest exercise of power before you start, the power to keep issues off the agenda, to shape what counts as a key question, to set the slate of choices the contestants then fight over. Michels supplies the ground: where the mass is apathetic and the few are organized, the many may contend over the questions the few permit while the few decide which questions reach the room. Mosca supplies the reading: the groups Dahl watches trading wins are factions within and around the political class, and the rotation of advantage among them leaves the ruled exactly where they sat. Pareto supplies the warning: a parade of competing leaders is the circulation of elites wearing the costume of self-government, and the analyst who counts the costume changes and calls the result popular rule has been fooled by a derivation.

C. Wright Mills carries the European tradition into Dahl’s own decade and his own country. The Power Elite describes a unified command at the top of three interlocking orders, the corporate, the military, and the executive, men who share schools and clubs and origins and who move among the three hierarchies as one class. Below them Mills grants a middle level of balancing and brokerage, the give-and-take of organized groups in Congress and the press, and below that a fragmented mass with no purchase on the decisions that govern its life. Mills concedes pluralism at the middle and denies it at the summit. Set this beside Who Governs? and the charge writes itself. Dahl studied a middle-sized city’s middle-level traffic, the schools and the nominations and the downtown projects, and generalized the bargaining he found there into an account of the whole, choosing a site and a set of issues where pluralism was bound to surface and mistaking the visible middle for the structure entire.

G. William Domhoff makes the charge concrete, and this is the reflexive payoff. He went back to New Haven, to Dahl’s own city and Dahl’s own cases, and read them again. Who Really Rules? returns to the redevelopment program under Mayor Richard C. Lee (1916-2003), the signature achievement Dahl had treated as proof of an elected leader assembling shifting coalitions. Domhoff finds the downtown business interests and the Citizens Action Commission setting the terms inside which Lee and everyone else then maneuvered. The redevelopment agenda, on this account, came from national real estate and business pressures and from a local growth coalition, and the bargaining Dahl recorded ran within a frame those interests had already built. Dahl studied who won the games. Domhoff argues he never asked who laid out the field. The most cited community-power study in the discipline, restudied by a patient adversary, reads as oligarchy hiding behind an active mayor.

Dahl is owed his defense, and the defense is real. The elite hypothesis, stated loosely, cannot be killed. Any city where no elite is seen to rule can be explained as a city where the elite rules unseen, and a theory that converts every absence of evidence into confirmation has stopped being a theory and become a faith. The reputational studies did measure reputation, and reputation and power come apart often enough to matter to anyone who wants the truth rather than the satisfying story. New Haven did turn out mayors, did carry real opposition, did show one set of actors losing where another won, and a model that calls all of this a costume owes an account of what evidence might ever count against it. Dahl asked for that account and rarely got one. He also bent over time, granting in later years that power runs through channels quieter than the open clash of decisions, which concedes the elite theorists their best point without conceding their conclusion.

So the confrontation turns, as these confrontations do, on the meaning of power and on where the analyst agrees to look. Count visible victories in declared conflicts and you find pluralism, because you have defined power as the thing pluralism displays. Look for the hand that sets the agenda and screens the alternatives and you find an organized minority, because you have defined power as the thing oligarchy displays. Each method carries its finding in its design. The sting for Dahl runs deeper than for most, because power was his subject and elites were the rivals he made his name refuting. The discipline’s foremost student of who governs may have settled the question by choosing, before he entered the field, the single form of power his instruments could register, and calling the rest of it reputation.

The Crown No One Wears: Robert Dahl and the Hero System of Equality

A boy works the White Pass line out of Skagway in the summers, loading freight in a territory where the law is thin and the weather decides things. His father is a doctor whose money has failed, and the boy learns early what a small man looks like when a force he cannot see reaches down and rearranges his life. The mine closes. The price falls. The bank in some far city calls a note. The frontier town keeps its rough equalities, every man sweating the same grade, and it keeps its hard lesson too, that out beyond the pass sit powers that move whole families the way the tide moves gravel. The boy carries both lessons north and south for the rest of his life. He becomes the political scientist who insists, against a long line of men who knew better, that the small man has standing, that power can be watched and weighed and answered, and that no one in a free country gets to sit on a throne the rest must serve.

Ernest Becker gives us the tool to read such a life from the inside. Man knows he dies, and the knowledge is more than he can hold, so culture hands him a hero system, a set of rules for earning significance and a kind of durability past the grave. One man earns it through sons, another through a faith that promises the soul outlasts the body, another through a work that strangers will use after he is gone. The hero system tells a man what is sacred, what confers worth, and what a life adds up to. He clings to it because the alternative is the void, and he turns savage toward anyone whose different system suggests his own might be a tale he told himself to keep from looking down.

Dahl’s hero system is democracy, and the sacred word at its center is equality. Read him through Becker and the word stops being a slogan and becomes a wager about death itself. Every other hero system on offer promises a man that he might be singular, chosen, lifted above the herd into significance. The saint, the conqueror, the founder, the genius, each is told there is a way to be more than one of the many. Democracy tells a man the opposite. It asks him to accept equal standing with the grocer and the drunk and the fool, to give up the dream of the crown, and it offers in exchange a smaller and stranger heroism, the dignity of helping to author a common life that no single will commands. Dahl spends sixty years making that exchange look honorable instead of like a defeat. His sacred value is the renunciation of specialness, equally required of all, and his life’s labor is to prove the renunciation buys something real.

This is the new ground, the thing the tenth hero-system essay can still surprise you with. Most immortality projects promise the hero a throne. Dahl’s promises that no one shall have one, and he builds his own monument out of certifying that monuments of that kind are forbidden. He becomes the priest of dispersed significance, the man who earns lasting fame by teaching that lasting domination is unavailable to anyone, and the paradox runs all the way down. He wants the demos to author its life, and he knows the demos cannot be a hero in Becker’s old sense, cannot be chosen or singular, can only be the many holding equal coin. So he invents a vocabulary that lets the many feel like more than the herd without letting any one of them become the king. Polyarchy is the name he gives the arrangement. His two axes, how many may take part and how freely they may oppose, are the ruler he holds against every regime to ask whether it lets the small man keep his standing or strips it away. The concept is his contribution, and the contribution is his coin. He will be remembered, this enemy of being remembered above one’s fellows, for the careful proof that no one deserves to be.

The terror under the project is specific, not abstract, and Skagway and the war supply it. Dahl crosses the Rhine in March 1945 with a reconnaissance platoon and crosses the Danube in April as the Reich falls, and when the shooting stops the Army sets him to taking apart the German banking system, unwinding the money behind the worst concentration of power the century produced. He has now seen, with his own eyes and not in a book, what the unanswered crown does to the small man, the boy from Skagway grown into a soldier picking through the ledgers of a state that swallowed its citizens whole. His sacred value hardens here. Equality is no longer a preference. It is the wall against the thing he watched, the standing that lets a man say no to the power that would otherwise rearrange him like gravel. And the men who tell him the wall cannot hold become, for the rest of his life, the enemies of his immortality project, because they say the project is a lie.

They are formidable, those men, and Dahl knows it. A line of cold European realists holds that the people never rule, that an organized few always do, that equality is a costume power wears to the dance. To concede them is not to lose an argument. It is to learn that the boy from Skagway was a fool, that the wall is paint, that the renunciation he asked of every man bought nothing and the crown sits on someone’s head no matter what the citizens believe. So Dahl fights them on method with a heat that puzzles readers who think the question dry. He demands that power be shown, not assumed, that a ruling few be caught prevailing in real fights over real decisions before anyone calls them rulers. Becker tells us why the heat is there. The realists are not proposing a rival theory to Dahl. They are proposing his death. A man defends his hero system the way he defends his life, because to him they are the same.

Set his sacred words beside other men’s and watch them come apart, because the words mean what the hero system needs them to mean and nothing more.

Take equality. To Dahl it is the equal standing of citizens, watchable in votes and decisions and recourse. To a Carthusian in his cell it is real and total and has nothing to do with the polling place. The monk rises for the night office in a cold choir, the prior and the newest novice singing the same psalms in the same dark, and the equality he believes in is the equality of souls before God, leveled by death and judgment, indifferent to who governs New Haven or anywhere else. Political standing is dust to him. His heroism is to empty himself, his immortality literal and promised, and a man who spent his life measuring regimes has, by the monk’s reckoning, polished the brass on a sinking ship.

Take power. To Dahl it is one man getting another to do what he otherwise would not, and he wants it caught in the act, in daylight, in a decision. To a chess grandmaster the word means nothing of the kind. Across the board the sacred thing is truth, the one correct line that holds against any defense, and power is the clarity to see it and the nerve to play it. Equality is an insult here. The pieces are not equal and the players are not equal and the whole point is the ruthless sorting of better from worse. The grandmaster’s immortality is a game annotated for two hundred years, his name on a brilliancy that students replay long after his bones are gone, and he earns it by being singular in the one way Dahl spent his life denying anyone the right to be.

Take the people. To Dahl the people are the demos, the body of equal citizens whose standing he guards. To a startup founder in a glass room the people are users, and they vote with adoption, and the market is the only ballot he respects. “We are not running a democracy,” he tells the room, and means it as a virtue. The sacred to him is the exceptional builder, the asymmetric bet, the product that scales past every gatekeeper. He wants to change the world and he wants his name on the thing that does it, and equal standing among the many strikes him as the drag that mediocrity puts on vision. His immortality is the company that outlives him. Dahl’s renunciation, to him, is the creed of people who could not build.

Take the same word again and carry it to a high pasture, where a Maasai elder counts his wealth in cattle and his standing in his age-set and the sons who will hold the herd when he is dust. The vote is a foreign noise to him. Power lives in the rains, the bride-price, the seniority a man earns by living, and the ancestors who watch. His immortality is the line continuing, the cattle passing down, his name spoken at the fire. Dahl’s careful regime types describe a world the elder has no reason to enter, and the equality Dahl made sacred has no place where worth comes by lineage and age and the size of one’s herd.

Take power once more to a bedside. A hospice nurse works the night shift, and she sees what Becker says we spend our hero systems hiding from, the actual leaving, hour by hour. To her the only equality is the one the monk named, all men equal before the dark, and she has watched the rich man and the poor man arrive at the same narrow gate with the same fear. Power is the thing being peeled away in front of her. Her heroism is presence, the small mercy, the hand held, and she earns no monument and wants none. She would find Dahl’s life decent and beside the point. The standing he fought for ends, every time, in her ward.

And take the people to a parade deck, where a career Marine first sergeant dresses a line of recruits and means to make them one thing out of many. Equality is poison to him, operationally. The sacred is the chain of command, the unit, the colors that go back two centuries, the willingness to die for the man on your left. “Nobody here is equal,” he says, walking the line, “you earn your place.” His immortality is the name cut into the memorial wall and the unit that fights on after him. Dahl’s dispersed power, his protected opposition, his bargaining among groups, describes the civilian world the first sergeant defends and does not for one moment want to live inside.

Seven men, seven coins, and the words equality and power and the people change their faces each time they pass from hand to hand. This is Becker’s point pressed hard. There is no neutral throne from which one of these systems judges the rest. Dahl’s is one among many, not the floor beneath them. He treats political equality as the sacred thing every reasonable man must want, and the monk and the grandmaster and the founder and the elder and the nurse and the first sergeant each look up from a different altar and do not want it, or want it to mean something he never meant.

The old man knew the wall might be paint. In his last decades Dahl grew afraid that wealth buys the standing he had labored to guarantee, that concentrated money turns into concentrated voice and the equal citizen finds his ballot outweighed before he casts it. The fear is the realists’ point returning in his own mouth, the enemy half admitted at the end. A smaller man recants. Dahl does the thing the keeper of a hero system does when the doubt comes for him in the dark. He does not let go. He tries to mend the wall, to imagine an economy that disperses power the way he had claimed politics already did, holding the vital lie with open eyes because the alternative is to tell the boy from Skagway that the throne was always occupied and the renunciation bought nothing.

He dies on February 5, 2014, at ninety-eight, and the profession does for him the one thing his whole creed forbids. It singles him out. It puts his name on an award and hands it down the generations, a crown for the man who taught that no one wears one. Becker would not call this hypocrisy. He would call it the last proof of the thesis. Even the priest of the equal man needed his coin against the dark, and the discipline, loving him, paid it in the only currency a scholar’s hero system knows, the name that outlives the body, cut into the record where the small man, at last, is permanently large.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Two pictures of man sit at the bottom of two careers. Dahl’s man is a citizen with preferences of his own, formed by interest and reason, carrying many partial loyalties he bargains among, equal to his neighbor, and fit to be placed on a single grid that measures every regime on earth by how much standing it grants him. Mearsheimer’s man is born into a group that pours its values into him before he can think, tribal at the root, bound to his fellows tightly enough to die for them, and ruled far more by inborn sentiment and socialization than by the reason he flatters himself he runs on. Mearsheimer drew his picture to explain why liberal great powers wreck themselves abroad, but the picture is a claim about human nature, not foreign policy, and it cuts at the domestic theorist as cleanly as at the crusading diplomat. If the tribal animal is the real one, the citizen Dahl spent sixty years arming does not exist as described, and the science built to register his preferences has been recording something it never understood.

Begin with the unit. Dahl aggregates. The individual and the group are his data, their preferences the inputs his democratic process registers and weighs. He takes the preferences as given, as the citizen’s own, the thing the system exists to honor. Mearsheimer denies the premise at the source. A man’s preferences are not his own raw material; they are the output of a long childhood spent under intense socialization, an enormous value infusion laid down before his critical faculties wake, sitting atop innate sentiments he never chose. By the time he can reason, his society has already decided most of what he will want. So the apparatus that registers preferences and calls the sum the will of the citizens is measuring the echo of the group and crediting it to the individual. Dahl thinks he counts free choices. Mearsheimer says he counts the residue of socialization wearing the mask of choice.

This guts the citizen Dahl needs most. Among the criteria of the democratic process Dahl set down in Democracy and Its Critics stands enlightened understanding, the citizen who grasps his interests and reasons toward them. The whole defense of popular rule leans on that reasoning man, because if he cannot understand his own stake the case for letting him decide goes thin. Mearsheimer ranks reason last of the three sources of preference, below sentiment and below socialization, and the ranking is not a flourish. It means the deliberating citizen of democratic theory does little of the deliberating credited to him. He ratifies, mostly, what his group infused before he could weigh anything, and the thin top layer of reasoning rides on a thick base Dahl never theorized and his instruments never reach. Enlightened understanding describes the surface of a man whose depths were settled by his people.

Then the load-bearing beam of the pluralist account, the one that did the real work in Who Governs?, the crosscutting cleavage. Pluralism held that a free society moderates its conflicts because a man belongs to many groups at once, his church and his union and his neighborhood and his trade pulling him in directions that overlap and cancel, so that no single attachment commands him and his loyalties stay partial, negotiable, cool enough to bargain. New Haven worked, on Dahl’s reading, because the Italian and the Pole and the Yankee shared enough crosscutting memberships that none of them fought to the end. Mearsheimer reads the same man and finds the partial loyalty a fair-weather pattern, not the structure. Group attachment runs deep, prior, and capable of overriding the rest, and when threat arrives the deep unit reasserts itself and the crosscutting memberships fall away like coats in a fire. Pluralism mistook a temporary cooling of tribalism for its cure. The bargaining Dahl recorded happened in the calm. Mearsheimer asks what happens when the calm breaks, and answers that the tribe comes back, and that a theory built on the calm has no account of the thing that ends it.

Now the grid, and here the indictment reaches Dahl’s signature achievement. The two axes, inclusiveness and contestation, lie flat across Britain and India and the United States and the whole record of regimes, one scale for all of human political life, polyarchy the shared destination every society approximates from its own distance. The grid assumes a single animal everywhere, the same demos under every flag, wanting the same standing, measurable by the same yardstick. This is liberal universalism in scholarly dress, the conviction that every man on the planet carries the same set of rights and the same democratic aspiration, and Mearsheimer treats that conviction as the central delusion. There is no universal demos. There are peoples, plural, bound to particular places and particular sacred attachments, and the nation is the deep political unit, not humanity and not the rights-bearing individual. The democratic process criteria are the values of one civilization, prized by the liberal West and projected outward as the standard for all, and a man laying them over every society as a neutral ruler has confused the preferences his own group infused in him for the measure of mankind. Dahl ranks the world on a scale he believes is universal and Mearsheimer never chose.

The deepest consequence concerns where polyarchy gets its fuel, and Dahl never asks the question because his apparatus cannot frame it. A polyarchy needs a people willing to lose. The defeated party must accept the count, go home, and try again next time rather than reach for the rifle, and this acceptance is the daily miracle on which the whole arrangement rests. Dahl assumes it. His two axes measure how widely men may take part and how freely they may oppose, and neither axis asks whether there is a single we to be equal members of in the first place. Mearsheimer supplies the missing source. The loser accepts the count because he and the winner are one people, bound by a national attachment older and stronger than the contest between them, and the binding is the work of the very tribalism Dahl’s individualism cannot name. Where the binding holds, polyarchy runs, and Dahl credits his institutions for a cohesion that nationalism delivered. Where the binding fails, in the deeply divided society, in the multiethnic state with two peoples and no shared we, polyarchy fails too, and it fails not because participation is low or opposition forbidden but because there is no single people for whom equal standing means anything. The crosscutting-cleavage optimism collapses at the exact point where the cleavage is the tribe.

This rewrites Dahl’s late fear. In his last books he grew afraid that concentrated wealth buys political voice and corrodes the equality he had guarded, and he watched the money. Mearsheimer’s anthropology points to a different and older corrosion, the return of the group, the people sorting back into peoples, the partial loyalties pluralism counted on hardening into the deep attachments that override the bargain. If man is tribal at the root, the threat to a polyarchy is less the rich man outweighing the poor man’s ballot than the dissolution of the we that made both ballots count as the same currency. Dahl trained his eye on the wrong wall. The danger his theory could not see was the one his theory most depended on never arriving, the reassertion of the tribe over the citizen, and he had no instrument pointed at it because his picture of man had no tribe in it to watch.

Dahl is owed his reply. The crosscutting loyalties of New Haven were real and did moderate conflict across generations, not for a single calm afternoon, and the empirical record shows partial allegiance operating across decades much as pluralism described, which is more than Mearsheimer’s fair-weather dismissal allows. The protection of opposition, the heart of polyarchy, is precisely the institutional answer to tribal capture, the arrangement that keeps any one group from permanent rule and gives the losing tribe a path back to power that does not run through the rifle. And Mearsheimer’s anthropology, pressed to the wall, explains too much. If reason ranks last and socialization infuses everything, then Mearsheimer’s own realism is the value infusion of Mearsheimer’s own group, and the man who says reason cannot escape its tribe has written a book asking us to reason our way out of liberalism. The strong socialization claim saws at the branch it sits on. Dahl’s wager is that the long childhood can be a democratic childhood, that institutions can socialize a reasoning and equal citizen on top of the tribal base, that the value infusion can carry liberal norms as readily as tribal ones. Mearsheimer says the base wins in the end. Dahl says the base can be cultivated. Neither holds the last word.

But the burden the frame lays on Dahl stands whatever he answers. He built a science of how the citizens decide and never asked where the citizens came from, never asked what makes a crowd of individuals into a single people capable of losing an election without breaking the country. He assumed the we and studied the vote. Mearsheimer says the we is the prior achievement, the work of the tribe and the nation, and that the vote runs on a fuel the science of the vote neither measures nor explains. If Mearsheimer is right, Dahl gave us an exact account of the machinery of a house and no account at all of the ground it stands on, and the ground, not the machinery, is what gives way.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof says intellectuals blame the world’s troubles on misunderstanding, on bias and tribalism and bad information, because the charge crowns them the world’s saviors, the people whose trade is understanding and who therefore hold the cure. The cynical truth, on Pinsof’s account, is that there is little to misunderstand. Men grasp what it pays them to grasp. Stupidity is strategic. The biases are savvy. Partisans hate each other because they fight over the coercive power of the state, not because they forgot to check their evidence, and the intellectual who offers to fix all this by raising consciousness is running his own status play while calling it a rescue.

Dahl threw out the picture of democracy as a people reasoning its way to a general will. In A Preface to Democratic Theory he denied that politics aims at a single shared purpose waiting to be discovered once confusion clears. Democracy, he said, is competition among interests, bargaining and trading and blocking, men pursuing what they want against other men pursuing what they want. That is Pinsof’s own picture. No misunderstanding to correct, no consensus to reach, just self-interested actors in a contest. And the institution Dahl prized most, the protected opposition that defines a polyarchy, assumes the worst about motive, not the best. You guard the right to oppose because you trust no group with permanent power, because every winner would press his advantage to the wall if the losers could not regroup and fight again. This is the design of a man who expects men to grab, not a man who expects them to see the light. On the question of motive Dahl is closer to Pinsof than the intellectuals Pinsof flays, and Pinsof, scanning the field for an ally, ought to find one here.

Now the other half, where the myth lives. Among the criteria Dahl set for the democratic process in Democracy and Its Critics stands enlightened understanding, the citizen who comprehends his interests and reasons toward them, whom the system should equip with the information to do so. The criterion is the misunderstanding myth in its purest civic dress. It assumes the citizen wants to understand and that better understanding makes for better democracy, that the defects of popular rule trace to a deficit the right institutions might fill. Pinsof denies the premise at the root. The voter has no incentive to be unbiased and every incentive to parrot his tribe’s line, because parroting it wins him standing among the people whose regard he needs, and his so-called bias is the savvy output of a man who understands his social marketplace far better than the professor who wants to enlighten him. Dahl’s enlightened citizen does not exist. Pinsof’s citizen does, and he is rational in precisely the respect Dahl filed under ignorance.

Judge Dahl by his stated goal and he is a disinterested scientist measuring regimes and defending political equality without fear or favor. Judge him by the actual goal, in Pinsof’s sense, the thing the work did rather than the thing the work announced, and a second account appears. The pluralist finding, that power in America disperses and no elite rules, was the status-enhancing opinion of a coalition that needed to believe it, postwar liberalism telling itself its society was open while the cynics on the left said it was owned. Dahl gave that coalition its science. The work conferred standing on him, the discipline’s foremost certifier that the system worked, and it derogated his rivals, the elite theorists and the Marxists, whom he cast as naive or as peddlers of an untestable hunch. Pinsof’s line fits without forcing. Dahl understood what he had an incentive to understand, and he had a powerful incentive to understand New Haven as proof that the ordinary man held his standing.

Read his great quarrel through the frame and the genteel surface drops away. Dahl said his fight with the ruling-elite model was a fight about method, that the elite hypothesis could not be tested unless someone showed an elite prevailing in real conflicts over real decisions, and that reputation for power was not power. Pinsof reads no methodological disagreement and no mutual misunderstanding between careful men. He reads zero-sum competition over a coercive apparatus, the academy’s version, the contest to decide whose map of American power becomes the official one. Dahl and his opponents fought dirty in the muffled way scholars fight dirty, each charging the other with the sin most damaging in the guild, unfalsifiability on one side and naivety on the other, and each denying he was doing coalition work because the denial is a weapon in the work. The dispute about evidence was the mission statement. The fight over who owned the public answer to the question who governs was the deed.

Even Dahl’s late turn bends to the frame. In A Preface to Economic Democracy and On Political Equality the old man grew afraid that concentrated wealth buys political voice and hollows out the equality he had guarded, and he reached for remedies, worker ownership, rules on money, an economy reshaped to disperse power as he had once claimed politics already did. Pinsof would grant the diagnosis and bury the cure. The rich understand what they are doing. The outspent understand they are outspent. No party here labors under a confusion that a reform or a civics lesson might lift. There is a contest over the state, and the side with more resources tends to win it, and the intellectual who proposes to fix the result by spreading understanding has mistaken a contest for a misunderstanding one last time. Dahl, on this reading, spent his final decades studying the hole and sketching ladders for people who climbed down into it on purpose.

Dahl might say that pluralism already is the cynical, interest-based theory Pinsof claims to be missing in the field, that he never blamed political conflict on confusion, that he built the protection of opposition precisely because he assumed men grab and no grabber can be trusted with the keys. The charge of naive uplift fits the enlightened-understanding criterion and almost nothing else in him, and a fair reader keeps the realist Dahl and discounts the schoolmaster. Then the harder reply, the one that catches Pinsof in his own net. If every stated motive masks an actual motive, and if cynicism is icky and so the cynic must be performing too, then Pinsof’s essay is a status-enhancing, rival-derogating coalition move like any other, the savvy man signaling that he alone sees through the marks, which buys him standing among readers who prize seeing through things. Pinsof half concedes this. He says cynics correlate with assholes and that we all signal to look like sweeties, which means his cynicism is his own coin in his own marketplace. Apply the frame to its author and it levels him onto Dahl’s plane. The man who exposes the hole is selling tickets to the viewing. Both are understanding what it pays them to understand.

So the two end closer than either would like. Dahl built an institution on the premise that men pursue their interests and cannot be trusted with permanent power, which is most of what Pinsof says is true about the animal. Pinsof denies that the institution does anything but rename the fight, and Dahl might grant that the fight is permanent and answer that renaming it, channeling it, giving the loser a path back that does not run through blood, is the only honest thing a theorist can do once he admits there is no misunderstanding to fix. Protected opposition enlightens no one. It keeps the defeated alive to compete again. Read that way, Dahl arrives where Pinsof arrives, at a politics of incurable self-interest, and builds the one structure that takes the diagnosis seriously instead of promising a cure. The difference shrinks to this. Pinsof says the world does not want to be saved and stops there, having sold the insight. Dahl agreed that it could not be saved and asked, all the same, how it might be kept from devouring the losers. One studied the hole. The other, knowing it for a hole, built a railing.

The Set

Picture the milieu at its noon, somewhere around 1960. A man can drive up the hill above Stanford to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a low ranch of studies built with Ford Foundation money in 1954, and there, on a fellowship year with no teaching and no telephone, he can sit among the people remaking the study of man. Dahl came early. So did most of the others who matter to this story. The Center was the secular cloister of a movement that believed it had at last turned politics into a science, and the movement had a homeland at Yale, a creed, a vocabulary, a roster of saints and a roster of devils, and a confidence that reads now as the confidence of men who think the future has already voted for them.

The Yale core formed around Dahl. Charles E. Lindblom (1917-2018) sat closest, the economist’s mind beside the political scientist’s, the two of them having written Politics, Economics, and Welfare and gone on to define the temper of the place, Lindblom adding the doctrine of incrementalism, the science of muddling through, the small adjusting step against the grand plan. Robert E. Lane (1917-2017) worked the political mind of the ordinary man, sitting with New Haven householders to learn how a plumber or a clerk reasons about power, and he produced the warmest evidence the pluralists had that the common citizen was no fool. Edward R. Tufte (b. 1942) came as the quantitative talent and joined Dahl on the problem of size. Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) presided from the Law School as the elder behavioral patriarch, the man who had asked who gets what, when, and how, who had married Freud to politics and dreamed of policy sciences run by trained observers, and whose presence told the young that their science had a lineage. Later the comparativists arrived, Juan Linz (1926-2013) with his anatomy of how democracies break and authoritarian regimes hold, David Apter (1924-2010) and Joseph LaPalombara (b. 1925) with the modernization of new states. And below the professors stood the students who would carry New Haven into the next generation, Nelson Polsby (1934-2007) and Raymond Wolfinger (1931-2015), trained to study who prevails in concrete decisions and dispatched to defend the master’s method against all comers.

Beyond New Haven lay the wider behavioral nation. The pluralist creed had a founding text older than Who Governs?, David B. Truman’s (1913-2003) The Governmental Process, which made the interest group the unit of American politics, and a still older ancestor in Pendleton Herring (1903-2004), who had defended the group struggle as healthy and gone on to run the Social Science Research Council. V.O. Key Jr. (1908-1963) at Harvard bridged the old study of parties and the new study of opinion and lent the movement a scholar everyone admired. The survey wing came in two houses. At Columbia, Paul Lazarsfeld (1901-1976) and Bernard Berelson (1912-1979) had turned the election into a data set, watching how voters decide and finding the two-step flow of influence. At Michigan, Angus Campbell (1910-1980), Philip Converse (1928-2014), Warren Miller (1924-1999), and Donald Stokes (1927-1997) built The American Voter and the great national surveys, and Converse delivered the finding that haunted the set, that most citizens hold no coherent belief system at all. The comparativists Gabriel Almond (1911-2002) and Sidney Verba (1932-2019) carried pluralism abroad in The Civic Culture, ranking nations by whether their people held the temperate, participant attitudes a stable democracy needs. Heinz Eulau (1915-2004) wrote the movement’s testament, a small book on the behavioral persuasion, so the troops would know what they believed. And off to the side, building a rival rigor, William H. Riker (1920-1993) at Rochester preached that mathematics and the theory of games, not the survey and the case study, were the road to a true science of politics.

A mood hung over all of it, supplied by the consensus sociologists. Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006) tied democracy to prosperity and a broad middle and warned that the lower orders carried an authoritarian streak. Daniel Bell (1919-2011) announced the end of ideology, the exhaustion of the old passions, the arrival of a politics of technical adjustment among reasonable men. Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) at Harvard furnished the high theory of a society that hangs together by shared values and returns to balance after every shock. The set breathed this air. It told them their country had passed beyond the age of fanatics into the age of the bargain.

What did they value. Science first, and the word carried the weight of a faith. They wanted political study to leave behind the law book and the constitution and the wise essay and become a real empirical discipline, cumulative like physics, built of testable propositions about how men behave. They prized the observable. They prized the operational definition, the one that tells you what to measure. They prized disinterest, the pose of the dispassionate observer who reports the world rather than scolds it, and they drew a bright line between fact and value and stood on the fact side of it as on higher ground. Beneath the science they valued an open society, a politics of dispersed power and moderate competition, and they believed, with the quiet conviction of men who had beaten fascism and were facing down Stalin, that American pluralism was the living answer to the century’s horrors.

Their hero system, the thing that conferred significance and a kind of durability among them, was the lasting contribution to knowledge, the concept that enters the literature and acquires a name. Dahl gave them polyarchy and the two axes. Truman gave them the group process, Converse the belief system, Almond and Verba the civic culture, Lindblom the muddling through. To coin such a thing and watch it spread through the journals was to win the only immortality a scientist’s world offers. Around the concept clustered the marks of arrival. The named chair, the Sterling Professorship that Dahl held. Election to the National Academy of Sciences, a coup that thrilled the whole movement because it ranked a student of politics among the chemists and the physicists. The presidency of the American Political Science Association, which Dahl took in the mid-sixties. The fellowship year at the Center on the hill. The school of students who carry your method into their own careers and cite you for life. These were the trophies, and the men competed for them with the seriousness of men who knew the trophies were all that survives.

The status games ran along sharp lines. The first and deepest divided the behavioralists from the traditionalists, the old guard of institutional and legal and historical scholars whom the young scientists regarded as charming antiques, pre-scientific, impressionistic, unable to test a single claim. Dahl himself wrote the movement’s victory lap, the essay calling behavioralism a successful protest that had grown into a monument, and the word protest tells you how the set saw its own rise, as the rebellion of rigor against complacency. The second game was method as caste. To command the survey, the regression, the game-theoretic proof was to hold rank, and the Michigan men, the Columbia men, the Rochester men, and the Yale decisional men each pressed the claim that their technique cut deepest. The third game was money and the gates that guard it. The Social Science Research Council ran a Committee on Political Behavior that decided which questions counted, the Ford Foundation’s behavioral program decided which projects ate, and a seat on the committee or a grant from the program conferred standing the way a benefice once did. The journals finished the order. To publish in the American Political Science Review, to found a journal like World Politics, to officer the association, marked a man as central rather than provincial. And the diction policed the whole field. Praise meant a study was rigorous, systematic, empirical, testable, operational. Contempt meant it was normative, ideological, polemical, anecdotal, soft. A young scholar learned the words the way a novice learns which fork to use, and a single charge of having smuggled in his values could cost him a season’s standing.

Under the neutral pose lay a thick bed of normative claims the set could not name in its own grammar. They held that American democracy was sound and self-correcting, that power dispersed enough to keep any faction from ruling outright, that the system was open to the patient and the organized. They held that moderation and bargaining and the small adjusting step were good and that mass passion and ideology were the enemy, and the enemy had faces, the brownshirt and the commissar, fresh in memory. From this fear came the most notorious doctrine of the set, the half-celebration of apathy. Berelson’s voting studies and Lipset’s sociology and the temper of the civic-culture project all carried a buried suggestion that a democracy runs better when not everyone storms in, that the indifference of the uninformed is a cushion against the mob, that a measure of nonparticipation keeps the system cool. They would not put it baldly. The grammar forbade preaching. But the claim was there, that the open society is safest when the wrong people stay home, and a later generation would never forgive them for it.

Their picture of the human animal, the essentialist floor, held a few fixed beams. Man is an interest-bearer, and his preferences are taken as given, the data the system exists to register rather than to question or improve. Behavior is the real evidence, what men do where you can watch them, not what a constitution says they ought to do or a philosopher says is good. The mass public is cognitively thin, holding scraps and slogans rather than reasoned positions, which Converse turned into a finding and the set turned into a reason to trust the trained few more than the untrained many. And politics is an equilibrium of forces, a balance of pressures that returns toward rest, a picture borrowed from the economics next door and the physics they envied.

The moral grammar tied it together. The supreme sin was to be unscientific, and its synonyms, normative and ideological and impressionistic, were thrown like stones. The supreme virtue was rigor, and to be called value-free was the highest compliment a man could earn. The governing drama was the protest, the young scientists as liberators throwing off a stuffy and credulous old regime, and the story flattered everyone who told it. Yet the deepest feature of the grammar was the fact-value distinction itself, because it let the set moralize while swearing it did not. A scholar could rank the nations of the earth by how closely they approached the open society, could treat dispersed power as health and concentrated passion as disease, could build a whole comparative science around a liberal ideal, and could call the entire enterprise description. The line between fact and value was the device that hid the values in plain sight, and the set leaned on it so hard that it stopped noticing the weight.

The enemies define the set as surely as the friends, because a milieu shows its face most clearly to the people who hate it. From Chicago, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) charged that a value-free science of politics was a contradiction and a danger, a study that could describe tyranny but never condemn it, and his students made the case concrete in Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, Herbert Storing (1928-1977) and Walter Berns (1919-2015) among them, taking apart the behavioralists one by one, Dahl and Lasswell included. From Berkeley, Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015) and John Schaar (1928-2011) attacked the worship of method as the death of political wisdom and answered the Straussian volume in kind. From the left, C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) and Floyd Hunter (1912-1992) said the dispersed power the set kept finding was a fairy tale that hid a ruling class. And from inside the house came the loyal critics who would not leave but would not stay quiet, Theodore Lowi (1931-2017) charging that the group politics the set adored had curdled into the capture of the state by the organized, and Carole Pateman (b. 1940) charging that the celebration of apathy had betrayed democracy’s first promise, that the people should rule themselves. The set met all of them with the same move, the demand for evidence, the question of whether the charge could be operationalized and tested, and the move was both a real standard and a shield.

At its noon the behavioral nation believed it had done two things at once, made the study of politics a science and proved that the open society was the natural home of free men. The belief held the neutral pose over a liberal faith, and the two could not be pulled apart, because the faith chose what the science looked for and the science dressed the faith as fact. Dahl was the purest figure the set produced, the man whose careful measurement of a single city became the discipline’s proof that the ordinary man kept his standing, and the man whose late doubt, the fear that wealth might buy the voice his theory had promised was free, opened the first crack in the confidence of the whole milieu. The next generation walked through that crack and did not look back. But for one long bright season the men on the hill above Stanford thought they had settled the oldest question in the world, and they had the chairs and the prizes and the journals to prove it.

The Voice

Dahl writes like a man who distrusts eloquence and trusts a clear question. The signature gesture, the one that opens half his books, is to take a grand contested word and refuse to use it until he has said what he means by it. Democracy gets broken into criteria. Power gets a spare, almost arid definition built on one agent moving another. Polyarchy gets coined because the everyday word carries too much fog. He disaggregates before he argues. He enumerates. The five criteria of the democratic process, the institutional marks of a polyarchy, the two axes of inclusiveness and contestation, all of it comes in numbered sets, and the listing is both his method and his tic. He thinks in distinctions and he lets you watch him draw them.
The voice is judicious to the point of caution. He qualifies almost every strong claim, reaches for to some degree and more or less and approximately, and resists the absolute the way other men resist temptation. The prose enacts the theory. If full democracy is an ideal no real system reaches, then the honest writer never says a thing is achieved, only that it comes closer or falls further, and Dahl’s hedging is the grammar of that conviction. He is the opposite of the prophet. He sounds like a man weighing rather than a man announcing.
He titles by question and answers by visible steps. Who Governs? How Democratic Is the American Constitution? After the Revolution? He poses the problem, lays out the possible answers, sets a standard of evidence or logic, walks through it, and arrives at a conclusion he marks as provisional. He shows his work. Nothing is asserted that he has not tried to earn a paragraph earlier, and he tells you where the argument is still soft. The structure is almost engineered, transparent enough that a student can follow the joints, and that legibility is a democratic choice as much as a stylistic one. A man who thinks the people should rule writes so the people can read him. His late books, On Democracy above all, read like patient teaching, short chapters, plain sentences, direct address to a reader he treats as a fellow reasoner.
His rhetoric works by deflation and civility. He brings the high ideal down to the ground, the general will exposed as a myth, the Constitution audited like any other human contrivance, the ruling-elite hypothesis sent back for lack of testable evidence. He punctures, but with regret rather than relish, because he wants the ideal and refuses to pretend it has arrived. And he disarms his opponents by conceding their strongest point first. The method essays against Mills and the elite theorists open by granting what is powerful in the rival view, then answer it, so that Dahl always seems the most fair-minded man at the table. Reasonableness is his weapon and his brand. He wins by appearing to want nothing but to be careful.
The plainness is deliberate and it sets him apart from his own milieu. Set his sentences beside Parsons and the contrast is total, the one turgid with system, the other clear enough to quote to an undergraduate. Dahl belongs to the line of clear American expository prose, not the Germanic theory-speak, and the austere power definition is memorable for its bareness, not its music. He distrusts the purple line. The flatness is a creed, the dispassionate observer declining to emote.
Yet a moral earnestness leaks through the neutral surface, and it grows as he ages. Early Dahl, in A Preface to Democratic Theory and Who Governs?, carries the cool confidence of the young scientist who has caught the elite theorists in a methodological error. Late Dahl, worrying that wealth buys the voice his theory promised was free, writes plainer and warmer and more openly troubled, the sentences shorter, the address more personal, the Skagway democrat audible under the careful professor. The man who spent a career refusing to overclaim ends by claiming, quietly, that something has gone wrong, and the change in the prose is the change in the man.
By the accounts of those who knew him he spoke as he wrote, soft, courtly, mild, generous to students and to rivals, never the podium-pounder. The civility was not decoration. It was the argument continued by other means, the reasonable man making reasonableness itself the case.

The Four Questions

1. What coalition do they depend on for status and income.
2. Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly.
3. Who benefits if their framing wins.
4. What truths would cost them their position.

The coalition. Dahl drew his status and his living from four overlapping bodies, and they reinforced one another. First, the academic profession of political science, and above all the behavioral movement he led, which made him its central figure and paid him in citations, the Sterling chair, the APSA presidency, and election to the National Academy. Second, the foundation and council apparatus that built that movement, the Ford money and the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Political Behavior, which decided what counted as a fundable question and ran the grants and fellowships that were the coin of the realm. Third, Yale and the elite-university network that housed and ranked him. Fourth, the educated liberal public that bought the textbooks, On Democracy and A Preface to Democratic Theory among them, and wanted a confident, scientific account that American democracy works. His income was salary and royalties. His status was the prestige economy of chairs, prizes, and assigned reading. Both ran through postwar liberalism.
Speaking plainly, the people he risked angering shifted across his life, and the shift is the tell. Early, plain speech cost him almost nothing, because the men he attacked were outside his coalition. To say the ruling-elite model failed the test of evidence pleased his own side and wounded only Mills, the Marxists, and the reputational school. Late, plain speech grew expensive, because the truths he reached for cut toward his own coalition. To audit the Constitution as he did in How Democratic Is the American Constitution? angered the patriotic-constitutional public and the reverers of the Founders. To argue in A Preface to Economic Democracy that concentrated wealth corrupts political equality, and to flirt with worker ownership, unsettled the corporate-liberal donor class whose self-image was the open society his science had certified, and it carried a faint socialist odor his Cold War colleagues had spent careers avoiding. He could afford the bill only because he had already banked the maximum status. A man speaks plainly from the Sterling chair more cheaply than a man speaks plainly to earn one.
If his framing wins, the chief beneficiary is the existing order. Pluralism and polyarchy say American power disperses, the system is open, and the loser of any fight can organize and win the next one, which tells the discontented to stay in the game rather than go to the barricades. The framing is reformist, not revolutionary, so it stabilizes incumbents and answers the radical charge that an elite rules by classing that charge as untestable. Cold War liberalism gains a scientific certificate that the West is the free society against the closed one. The behavioral discipline gains validation for the whole enterprise and the careers built on the decisional method. Organized interest groups gain a theory that both describes and quietly blesses their bargaining as the substance of democracy. When the framing later widens into polyarchy as a universal yardstick, the Western democracies gain the top of the ranking and the warrant for promoting their model abroad. The losers are the men who said power was concentrated, whose case the framing defines as naive. Late, when his framing turned toward economic inequality, the beneficiary turned with it, toward labor and the egalitarian left.
The truths that would cost him his position are the ones that unmake the work the position rests on, and these he conceded only in part, never in full. That his decisional method was built to find pluralism, since defining power as victory in visible fights over issues already on the agenda screens out the deepest power, the setting of the agenda and the shaping of what men want, so that New Haven looked open because his instrument could register nothing else. That Domhoff read New Haven right and Dahl mistook a mayor’s coordination of a business agenda for popular control, which would unmake Who Governs? from inside. That his value-free science carried a liberal value-load, the Straussian charge, so that he found dispersal partly because finding it paid in standing and fit his coalition’s need to believe. That the iron law might hold after all, that organized minorities always rule, which is the wager his whole life denied. He bent toward the first of these late, granting that power runs through quieter channels than open decisions. He never crossed the line, and the reason sits in the four questions taken together. He could attack the Constitution and the rich from his chair without losing the chair. He could not say the study that built the chair had answered its question by choosing in advance the only power it could see, because that sentence dissolves the chair and the man in it. The truths he could afford he spoke. The truth that would have cost him everything he approached, circled, and left standing.

A man stands on the steps of the Maury County courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, and sings a warning. Behind him the building holds two centuries of the town’s law. In 1927 a mob took Henry Choate (accused a raping a 16yo girl) from a cell inside that same building and hanged him from the second-floor balcony. Jason Aldean (b. 1977) did not know this when his director picked the spot. He said later he liked it because it sat five minutes from his home and was where he went each year to get his car tags. The not-knowing belongs to the song. A man can stand on holy ground and not read what blood made it holy.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives the frame for what the man on the steps is doing. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil Becker argues that man alone among the animals knows he dies, and that he cannot live inside that knowledge, so every culture builds a screen against it. Becker calls the screen a hero system. A hero system tells a man what a life well spent looks like, what earns him a place that death cannot cancel, and who threatens that place. It answers the one question that presses on a creature who knows his end. How do I count, and how do I last.

The small town in the song is a complete hero system. It offers a man continuance. The same families hold the same land. The square keeps its shape. The church keeps its dead in a yard where the names repeat down the stones, and a boy can find his own surname there and know the ground will keep his. A man in such a town earns significance the oldest way, by being known. He cannot act unseen, and he cannot vanish unmourned. The town watches him into the grave and then tends the grave. Against the terror Becker describes, of erasure, of a death the world does not notice, the small town makes a promise the city cannot make. You will not disappear here.

The song carries three sacred objects, and each one reads as policy to outsiders and as relic to the man inside.

There is the inherited gun. The verse about not surrendering it runs hotter than any argument about crime statistics might explain, and Becker tells us why. The grandfather’s gun is a symbol of permanence handed down through hands. It says the line holds, the name holds, the dead grandfather still stands guard through the grandson. To take the gun is to cut the cord to the dead. A man argues about a tool. He does not argue about a relic. He guards it.

There is the flag, and the burning of it offends in a way that property damage does not, because the flag is the town’s claim to outlast its members written large across the nation. Burn it and you tell the man his immortality vehicle is cloth.

And there is the threat at the center, the line that gives the song its title and its menace. Try that here. Becker says every hero system draws a boundary between the sacred inside and the profaned outside, and stations the hero at the line. The threat is the liturgy of that line. It names the boundary more than it names any act. It announces that here, unlike there, a man is watched, owed, and remembered, and so a stranger who comes to break the order will find the order has hands. The city in the song is the place where a man knocks down an old woman, melts into a crowd that never learned his name, and is gone. The threat promises the singer’s deepest horror, the vanishing, comes to no one here, for good or for ill.

Now take a single word from the song and run it through other hero systems, and watch it fill with different blood each time.

Take neighbor. Aldean answered the racism charge by saying the song meant the home he grew up in, where people took care of each other across every difference, because they were neighbors and that came first. He meant it. For the man inside the small-town hero system, a neighbor is the one down the road who brings his truck when the barn burns and his gun when the trouble comes. Proximity and permanence make the bond. You owe him because he is near, and will stay near, and his children will know your children.

A Trappist monk at a monastery in Kentucky uses the same word and means almost the reverse. For him the neighbor is any man at all, the stranger most of all, because Christ hides in the one you do not know, and the duty rises with the distance, not with the nearness. He keeps no gun for the man down the road. He keeps a cell and a vow and prays for the men who will never learn his name. His hero system promises continuance through eternity rather than through a tended grave, and so it can let the body go in a way the small town cannot.

A founder in San Francisco says neighbor and the word has thinned to a contact, a node in a network worth growing. The warmth has migrated to the word community, which now names a customer list and a brand. His immortality vehicle is the company that might scale past his lifetime and the wealth that might buy his name onto a building. Proximity earns him nothing. He has never met the people below him in the same tower.

A Lakota man on the Pine Ridge reservation hears neighbor and reaches past it to a word his hero system puts at the center, the relative, the web of kin and land that holds a man and that the reservation both preserves and mocks. His sacred ground was taken and his dead lie under it, and the small-town promise, that the land will keep your name, reads to him as the boast of the men who broke that promise to his grandfather.

Take the policeman, since that is where the song split the country. In the chorus the patrol car is the near edge of the sacred order, driven by a man who went to the same high school, who knows whose boy is whose, who is less the state than the town wearing a badge. Safe, in this hero system, means the cousin in the cruiser knows the troublemaker by sight. For a mother in the Cedar-Riverside towers of Minneapolis who carried her children out of Mogadishu, the uniform reads the other way. The man in it might be the last face her nephew saw. Safe, for her, means the cruiser does not slow down. The blue light blesses one hero system and threatens another. Neither woman nor singer is confused about the word safe. Each means it with full weight. The word sits inside a different account of where the death comes from.

Take fight. A Marine home from Helmand hears the line and feels the pull, then fills it with his own meaning. A fight has rules of engagement, runs through a chain of command, and is waged for the man on his left more than for any flag, and the flag he served means something heavier and more bruised to him than to the man who has only saluted it. A shop steward on the Glasgow docks hears try that here and thinks of the picket line, where the boundary guards solidarity rather than property, and the fight is the strike. A widow in a Sicilian hill town hears it and thinks of the vendetta, where the thing kept clean is the family name, paid for in blood across three generations, and where the law of the carabinieri is the outsider’s law, not hers. Each of them might sing the chorus and mean a war the others would not recognize.

In Escape from Evil Becker argues that man does not only build a screen against death. He also tries to scrub evil out of the world, and the scrubbing makes more evil, because the readiest way to feel clean is to find a creature to load the dirt onto and drive him out. The town that hanged accused rapist Henry Choate in 1927 was running that rite. It cast a Black teenager as the carrier of its terror and killed him to feel whole and safe and lasting. The courthouse held the judge’s law and the mob’s law in one set of walls, because both are a town keeping itself clean, and the town did not always feel where the one ended and the other began.

Turn the frame on the men who rose against the song. A Princeton historian, Kevin Kruse (b. 1972), wrote that the song calls for people who are not the law to deal out violence against people who broke no law, and that this is not order at all but its opposite. A writer at NPR traced the long line of country songs that paint the city as the home of crime and color and the country as the home of peace and Whiteness. A Tennessee legislator, Justin Jones (b. 1995), called it a vile racist song. These men keep a sacred order too. Theirs is the lawful, procedural, multiracial republic, and its profanation is the lynching ghost, the sundown town, the mob on the courthouse steps. They station themselves at the boundary of that republic. They name a carrier of the evil and move to drive him out, and this time the carrier is Aldean. When CMT pulled the video four days in, the network ran the old pattern with new tools, and the inner promise held steady. Remove the unclean thing and the order stands.

What the frame shows is the shared inner motion under acts of wildly different weight, the certainty on each side that it guards the human thing against the barbarian, and the need on each side for a carrier to expel. The worst fights in history run between two parties each sure it defends civilization. That certainty, more than malice, does the killing.

The man on the courthouse steps and the men at their keyboards both believe they hold the line for the species, and both are right that something real is being defended. The small town defends a grave that will be tended and a name that will not be lost. The republic defends a law that the strong cannot bend against the weak. Each is a screen against the same dark, and each calls the other the dark.

Aldean told a radio show the courthouse was a matter of convenience, and told CBS he does not run a hundred years of background on a place before he films there, and that in the South a man might struggle to find an old courthouse with no racial blood in its past. He stood on the spot where a town once kept itself clean by killing a boy charged with rape, and he sang about a town keeping itself clean, and he did not know. Most men do not know what their ground is made of.