One could delve endlessly in such nuances and differences. If we did
so, we would find many complications, intriguing oddities, and a great
number of theoretical outliers. We would also see that many scholars
resist classification and belong to an “eclectic majority” that happily
convenes at what Gabriel Almond called the “cafeteria of the center.”^66
The main cleavages, however, are well defined and profound, too
profound in fact to be only about methods, concepts, or approaches.
They oppose, on each side of the “cafeteria of the center,” tables
occupied by the left and by the right, who distinguish themselves in a
consistent and meaningful manner.
Consider, for instance, conceptions of democracy. In his 1981
presidential address to the American Political Science Association,
Charles Lindblom contrasted the discipline’s mainstream view of
democracy as a “mutual-benefit” arrangement that allowed individ-
uals to resolve conflicts and attack “problems in common,” with a
dissenting synthesis, which understood democracy as the “institu-
tionalized form” of the “struggle” between “advantaged and dis-
advantaged groups.”^67 Lindblom did not exactly say so, but his
presentation left no doubt that he was talking about the right and
the left in political science. It left no doubt either that, in his mind,
political scientists should make it a priority to address this funda-
mental cleavage, to learn from it, and enrich the dialog between
conventional and critical accounts.
The views of power presented above – power as the exercise of
influence and power as a structure of domination – are also obviously
of the right and of the left, as their antecedents in Weber and Marx
indicate. The same can be said of the distinctive understandings of
choice that Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner outline in their discus-
sion of the state of the art. Many political scientists, they explain, are
inspired by the sociological tradition and see as paramount the goal of
understanding the social structures that preside over political choices.
Others, closer to the perspective of economics, place “these confining
structures in the background and [emphasize] acts of choice.”^68 In
other words, those who stand closer to sociology largely see constraints,
(^66) Almond,A Discipline Divided, p. 24.
(^67) Charles Lindblom, “Another State of Mind,” in Farr and Seidelman (eds.),
Discipline and History, pp. 328–30.
(^68) Katznelson and Milner, “American Political Science,” pp. 16–17.
The core currency of political exchange 217