Government( 1908 ), were turned on British politics the results were puzzling.
While pressure groups were seen, to the dismay of many, toXourish in American
politics, they were commonly believed to be negligible in Great Britain. It is,
therefore, understandable that in 1956 the American Political Science Review
should give page one billing to a paper of mine asserting that ‘‘if we had a way
of measuring power we should probably Wnd that pressure groups are more
powerful in Britain than in the United States... numerous, massive, well-organ-
ized, and highly eVective.’’
Some of my colleagues have said that I discovered British pressure groups. That
is not quite correct. But it is true that I was theWrst to show where and how they
operated. This revelation resulted from the commonsense hypothesis once put into
words by V. O. Key: ‘‘Where power is, there the pressure will be applied.’’ In Britain
this did not mean the legislature, since there that body is substantially under the
control of the executive. It was, therefore, in the corridors of Whitehall in the daily
contacts of ministers and civil servants that one found the representatives of the
great economic and social interests of the nation.... As I worked out the structure
of the postwar British polity, these interconnections appeared so well developed as
to constitute a veritable institution of functional representation, serving as an
eVective instrument of the government’s management of the economy. Something
more than group pressure was at work.
Nor was group theory adequate when applied to certain basic features of
American politics. I recall the attempt of some of us young instructors to make it
work as an explanation of familiar nationwide traits. ‘‘Shall we say then,’’ sarcas-
tically asked our authority on constitutional law, ‘‘that the general hostility to
homicide means that alongside the farmers, workers and capitalists, there is simply
another group, the big anti-murder interest group?’’ We were avoiding the use of
terms such as ‘‘the national interest’’ or ‘‘the common good’’ as moralistic and non-
operational. Our thinking was still clouded by Charles Beard’s ridicule of ‘‘abstract
ideas’’ as a political force.
The British comparison helped us see the larger context in which pluralism
operated. The Brits had their interest groups and they exercised ‘‘pressure,’’ if by
that you meant ‘‘inXuence.’’ There was, however, in contrast with American
manners, an easy acceptance of group representation in government and quite
diVerent expectations of how groups and government should interact. And how
did I Wnd this out? Often conversations with someone I knew socially—the
old-boy network—were the most revealing source. I enjoy recalling, for instance,
the annual dinner in 1958 of the Chamber of Shipping, the trade association of
the great shipping companies. I attended thanks to a contact I had made at
Harvard with a Commonwealth Fellow who had also gone to Balliol and who
was now the assistant secretary in the appropriate department of the civil service.
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