methodological light as the Marxist and feminist critics discussed
here. However, for convenience, they are discussed in a later chapter.
Lest the idea of repressed political divisions be dismissed out of
hand it is worth considering the case of African-Americans in the
United States. As recently as the 1950s in many parts of the USA,
they were deprived of basic human rights and discriminated against.
Living in a ‘democracy’ and resenting their condition, sometimes
even in a majority in their local community, African-American
concerns still did not even feature on the political agenda. Starting
from this situation, Bachrach and Baratz (1970) put forward an
interesting model of political activity, combining insights from both
the pluralist and Marxist models. They suggest that an apparently
free play of political interests in a ‘democratic’ system may coexist
with suppressed conflicts in which the interests of certain groups
often fail to reach the political agenda. Policies favouring suppressed
groups, even if nominally adopted by governments, will not be fully
implemented by the machinery of government. In short, what
Schattschneider (1960: 71) calls a ‘mobilization of bias’ is built into
the system against them. Whilst Bachrach and Baratz are mainly
concerned with racial biases, clearly these biases can equally well be
those of gender, ethnicity, religion or economy.
The radical writers discussed do not necessarily dismiss the
enterprise of a science of politics – old-style Marxists frequently
claimed that ‘scientific’ socialism gave them a superior insight into
contemporary economy and society. They merely question the
assumptions upon which contemporary analysts work. Postmodernist
critics, influenced by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Foucault,
however, throw doubt upon the possibility of an impartial analysis of
political behaviour. They stress that the very language used to
describe political events is the product of struggles between different
users of language and is ‘internally complex, open, appraisive and
fought over’ (Gibbins and Reiner, 1999: 7). A good illustration of this
is the contemporary concept of ‘a war on terrorism’. There are no
absolute foundations for morality and knowledge so that knowledge
and judgements are inevitably subjective. Traditionally political
science uses a vocabulary that assumes the primacy of the nation state
and political conflicts based upon producer interests. Postmodernist
critics often stress the impact of globalisation and consumerism in
undermining these assumptions (Gibbins and Reiner, 1999: 120–133).22 POLITICS