Charles E. Lindblom

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Edward Lindblom (born 1917) is a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. He is also a former president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies and former director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Lindblom is one of the early developers and advocates of the theory of Incrementalism in policy and decision-making. This view (also called Gradualism) takes a "baby-steps", or "Muddling Through", approach to decision-making processes. In it, policy change is, under most circumstances, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. He came to this view through his extensive studies of Welfare policies and Trade Unions throughout the industrialized world.

Together with his friend, colleague and fellow Yale professor Robert A. Dahl, he was a champion of the Polyarchy (or Pluralistic) view of political elites and governance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to this view, no single, monolithic elite controls government and society, but rather a series of specialized elites compete and bargain with one another for control. It is this peaceful competition and compromise between elites in politics and the marketplace, which drives free-market democracy and allows it to thrive.

However, Lindblom soon began to see the shortcomings of Polyarchy with regards to democratic governance. When certain groups of elites gain crucial advantages, become too successful and begin to collude with one another instead of compete, Polyarchy can easily turn into Corporatism.

In his best known work, Politics And Markets (1977), Lindblom notes the "Privileged position of business in Polyarchy". He also introduces the concept of "circularity", or "controlled volitions" where "even in the democracies, masses are persuaded to ask from elites only what elites wish to give them." Thus any real choices and competition are limited. Worse still, any development of alternative choices or even any serious discussion and consideration of them, is effectively discouraged.

An example of this, is the political party system in the United States, which is almost completely dominated by two powerful parties who often reduce complex issues and decisions down to two simple choices. In conjunction with this, is the concurrent concentration of the U.S. mass communications media into an Oligopoly, who effectively control who gets to participate in the national dialogue.

Politics And Markets, provoked a wide range of critical reactions which extended beyond the realms of academia. General Electric took out a full page ad in the New York Times to denounce it. This helped it achieve greater notoriety which in turn helped it get onto the Time's Best Seller list (a rarity for a scholarly work). Due to his criticism of democratic capitalism and polyarchy, and also for his seeming praise for the political-economy of Tito's Yugoslavia, Lindblom was (perhaps predictably) labeled a "Closet Communist" and a "Creeping Socialist" by conservative critics in the west. Ironically, Marxist and Communist critics, chided him for not going far enough. Dahl too disagreed with many of Lindblom's observations and conclusions originally, but in his recent works he has also become critical of polyarchy in general and its U.S. form in particular.

In The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It (2001), Lindblom eloquently echoes and expands upon many of his concerns raised in Politics And Markets. The most important of which is that while the Market System is the best mechanism yet devised for creating wealth and innovations, it is not very efficient at assigning non-economic values and distributing social or economic justice.

Early in their long academic careers, Lindblom and Dahl dedicated themselves to try and write in a clear style, free of unneeded jargon, which the average, interested reader could understand. By and large they have succeeded in this aim, in a field overrun by obfuscation.

[edit] External links

• The God That Fails a positive review of Lindblom's The Market System
• Making Moral Sense of the Market: A Catholic's perspective on Lindblom
• A Conservative Critique of Lindblom
• A concise but complete summary of Lindblom's The Policy Making Process

[edit] Select bibliography

• The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It, Yale University Press, 2001.
• The Policy-Making Process, 3rd. ed. with Edward J. Woodhouse, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993.
• Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving with David K. Cohen, Yale University Press, 1979
• Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems, New York: Basic, 1977.
• Politics, economics, and welfare : planning and politico-economic systems resolved into basic social processes, with Robert A. Dahl ; with a new pref. by the authors. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1976.
• The Intelligence of Democracy, Free Press, 1965.
• The Science Of Muddling Through, in Public Administration Vol. 19, pp. 79-88, 1959.
• The Policy-Making Process, 2nd edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1948.