Because Richard Merelman was a Ph.D. student at Yale during the period that he writes about in this book, his project instantly arouses the suspicion, as he knows, that it stems more from personal than scholarly preoccupations. As a result, Pluralism at Yale is, if anything, excessively scholarly in its architecture and arguments. But regardless of where the motivation for his work ultimately comes from, Merelman's book exemplifies an unusual but eminently defensible, potentially illuminating mode of serious political science research. Ironically, its limitations come not from the fact that it centers on a remarkably in-depth study of a single political science department but from the ways it does not take that study far enough.

As his title indicates, Merelman's subject is pluralism, examined as what he calls a “legitimating discourse.” He defines “pluralism” as comprised of four premises. First, there exist “multiple, competing centers of power” (the “pluralist” premise). Second, policymakers react to pressures and problems much more than they initiate changes (the “reactive” premise). Third, political leaders are “tolerant coalition builders” (the “elite tolerance” premise). And fourth, these features produce neither deadlock nor radical upheavals, but rather “graduate, moderate,” incremental political reform (p. 18).

One could quarrel with this definition, particularly the insistence on the “reactive” and “tolerant” elements. Logically, pluralism might well be confined to the first, “pluralist” proposition. Merelman's interest, however, is not in what the idea of political pluralism logically requires. It is in how a certain community of self-defined pluralists talked, thought, wrote, and acted on pluralist precepts; and he may well be right that at Yale, this is how many talked, wrote, and perhaps thought and tried to act in the decade and a half that he examines.

Merelman's notion of a legitimating discourse is slightly more problematic, but only because he strives so hard to claim that it is something rarely studied. He defines such a discourse as a body of ideas, images, or practices that portrays a political regime as working the way its power holders say that it should work, thereby supporting their power (p. 9). He insists that this is different from kindred notions like “dominant ideology.” But he assigns to theories of dominant ideology a number of premises—such as “power holders are irrational,” ideologies always “mystify reality,” power holders completely “control” intellectuals, and more—that many analysts of dominant ideologies would not recognize (p. 10). The distinctiveness of his approach does not really arise from his concept of a legitimating discourse. It lies in his concern to examine pluralism not just as a set of ideas but as a key element in the lived experience of an actual human association, the Yale Political Science Department as it was from 1955 to 1970.

Candor requires me to note that I taught at Yale from 1980 to 2001, well after the more seminal era that Merelman examines, but with many of the figures he discusses still present as longtime colleagues and friends. But so far as I can judge, that experience simply helps me to know that Merelman, who examined departmental records and interviewed 129 Yale political scientists and former graduate students, largely gets his facts right. I have heard many of the stories he relates told somewhat differently, but given the inevitable varieties in perspectives and fallibilities in memories, all he recounts sounds plausible enough.

Still, why look so closely at one university academic department, and why Yale? In those years, initially under James Fesler's leadership, the Yale department rose from lowly depths to be widely rated as the top department in the nation. It did so largely through becoming known as the home of pluralist theoretical and empirical accounts of American politics, as embodied in the now-classic works of Robert Dahl, Charles (Ed) Lindblom, Robert Lane, Herbert Kaufman, and more, and in the books and articles written by the students they taught, Aaron Wildavsky, Nelson Polsby, Raymond Wolfinger, Bruce Russett, and others. In this period, Merelman suggests in a late chapter, academic textbooks and popular magazines like Time often portrayed American politics in pluralist terms; and the Yale pluralists articulated this legitimating strain in American political discourse at least as well and as influentially as any group one could name. And Merelman wants to look not just at texts but at a group or community espousing pluralism, because he believes that one can learn more about what pluralism or any legitimating discourse really means by seeing people trying to live according to that discourse. Still more boldly, he believes that the evolving content and the eventual partial weakening and discrediting of pluralism at Yale reflected “departmental dynamics,” what happened “within Yale,” as much as they did developments in the external world “outside” the windows of Yale's classrooms (pp. 146-47).

This is an intriguing hypothesis. It is indeed possible that one can fully understand a particular legitimating “discourse” or dominant ideology (sorry, Professor Merelman) only by examining what happens when people who profess it try, at least to some extent, to act according to it on a day-to-day basis. Methodologically, that possibility can only be explored through close study of a particular community. And again, if one has to choose a particular community to study pluralism as a legitimating discourse, there are few more obvious candidates than Yale political science in its original glory days.

So unlike, I suspect, many readers, I believe Merelman's project is fully justified intellectually. Yet I cannot unequivocally applaud it because Merelman's implementation of this intriguing enterprise is surprisingly narrow. His focus is almost exclusively on how the Yale pluralist professors dealt with one another in collegial relationships, and how they dealt with their graduate students. (And yes, it includes the famous story of how Karl Deutsch left the department in a huff over his depiction in Tell the Time to None, a fictionalized account of departmental life penned by Robert Lane's novelist wife, Helen). The basic account Merelman gives is that in their early excitement over emerging pluralist ideas, Yale professors lived (or, as he prefers, “performed”) pluralism in their teaching and collegial relationships rather successfully. But as time went by, inspiration faded and privileges grew. Many then failed to deal with the jarring new problems of the late 1960s, and the expectations of their junior colleagues and students, in true “pluralist” fashion. So pluralism ceased to “blossom” in their texts and in their lives, and it was by the early 1970s “dethroned at Yale” (pp. 99–102).

Merelman then goes on to argue that some Yale students nonetheless continued to affirm and sustain pluralist views in various forms, generally using “scientific” narratives, while others either never accepted them or came to reject them, often using “fictionlike” narratives (pp. 237–38). He casts this argument partly as refutation of those who believe that pluralism is simply “dead,” citing a 1997 essay I wrote as implying this claim (p. 186). For the record, then and now I agree with Merelman that pluralism as a political science theme “declined after 1970” (p. 103), without ever dying—sitting in New Haven when I wrote that essay, I did not suffer from that delusion!

I do not, however, think Merelman is right to say that defenders of pluralism write “scientific,” while critics write “fictionlike” narratives. For my money, James Scott's observations on peasants in Malaysia—or Merelman's own writings on political culture—are not less scientific than Arend Lijphart's consociational case studies or even Gary Jacobson's statistical studies of the role of money in campaigns. More generally, Merelman's quick closing sketches of alternatives to pluralism and his assessments of whether they or any form of pluralism can today serve as a legitimating discourse (answer: no) are too underdeveloped to be fully persuasive, or to provide a fitting conclusion to this interesting study.

Nonetheless, its largest shortcomings come earlier, as Merelman strives to document the growing failure of leading Yale faculty members to “perform” pluralism effectively. He shows how as the department grew, many junior faculty members came to experience departmental governance as not genuine democratic pluralism but as hierarchical, especially when the department had overhired in the late 1960s and had to cut back. But is it really so shocking that an academic department is more an aristocratic (or oligarchic) republic than a pluralist democracy? Merelman also shows that some graduate students with more conservative outlooks, and some with more radical views, felt disaffected and sometimes mistreated, though others with similar views did not. Those experiences do show some of the limits of the faculty in living up to pluralist ideals, but again, not pervasive hypocrisy. The author is strongest on showing how many, probably most, female graduate students in those years felt disrespected in the department, including some instances of sexual misconduct. Those patterns still echoed during my days there. But I should note that it is also true, however unexpected, that a not especially deferential feminist, Catherine MacKinnon, speaks positively of her time there (pp. 135–38, 168).

Yet after discussing these very pertinent issues, Merelman strangely fails to raise some of the most obvious limits to Yale pluralism in those years. Although he recounts how the faculty squeezed out cantankerous conservative theorist and National Review cofounder Willmoore Kendall in the mid-1950s, he has only one brief reference to Joseph Hamburger, a successor conservative theorist who regularly criticized his liberal pluralist colleagues as ideologically intolerant from the 1960s until his death in the 1990s. And although Merelman recognizes the role of pluralism as anticommunist ideology, he does not discuss departmental controversies over whether Marxists like Herbert Aptheker could be approved to teach even one seminar, much less whether any Marxists could be appointed to the faculty.

Most glaringly, Merelman is silent on the obvious but hardly trivial fact that in this pluralist heyday, although the graduate students were a slightly more diverse lot, the Yale Political Science Department had no female faculty members, no African American faculty members, no Latinos, only an unbroken sea of white men, mostly of northern European ancestry, with an overrepresentation of admittedly brilliant Scandinavians. As a performance of pluralism, this was not. And although there was no conscious bigotry (I did once hear a nervous senior faculty member accidentally refer to the department's first African American assistant professor, Philip White, as Philip Black), I can attest that despite genuine pluralist ideals, over the years change has not come more easily at Yale than in most of America.

Were there viable female and/or African American or Latino or Asian or Marxist or conservative candidates for faculty appointments from 1955 to 1970 who the pluralists considered, debated, and turned down? Merelman does not say, though at least some of his interviewees could have told him. This failure to explore the makeup of the faculty itself and its hiring processes greatly limits the persuasiveness of his central argument.

Again, he wants to suggest that as important as events in the external world—the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the War on Poverty, eventually the women's movement—were in challenging Yale pluralism, failures of internal performance did as much or even more to put pluralism on the path to decline in New Haven as the 1960s wore on. He seems to feel impelled to make this argument in order to vindicate his choice to focus on this relatively small sample of American political life.

Yet he might well have been able not only to sustain but to strengthen his case for his approach if he had cast his net a bit more widely; for I suspect the two factors he wants to compare were more tightly linked than Merelman conveys. It is hard to imagine how the visible embodiment of a traditional white male, largely Protestant hegemony within the department, during times when precisely those hierarchies were being assaulted outside it, with Yale faculty support, could have failed to foster growing consciousness of the limits of pluralism on the part of all involved, faculty and students alike. But was that indeed the case, and if so, how was it experienced, and how did it play out? Those are fascinating and possibly quite revealing questions that go unexplored here.

Hence, the ironic result. This valuable if idiosyncratic book succeeds in many ways in vindicating its startling decision to put one single department under a social scientific microscope. It falters largely because in the end, it does not look either closely enough or broadly enough to see all the glaring discrepancies in pluralism at Yale and in America that were then, and in many ways still are now, all too politically significant.