INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT AND ANGLO-AMERICAN PLURALISM

Political pluralism is often portrayed as a theory about interest-grou p competition which was developed primarily by post-war American polit ical scientists. This conventional view is mistaken. This analysis exa mines the ways in which advocates of political pluralism have handled the theme of individual development. In the first part, a distinction is drawn between two dimensions of group power. In the second part, th is distinction is used to examine how four different pluralists concei ve the relation between self-development and pluralist politics. The f irst three theorists John Dewey, Harold Laski and Mary Parker Follett, are scholars whose contributions to the pluralist tradition rarely fi gure accurately in contemporary accounts of the doctrine. The fourth p luralist, Robert Dahl offers a more familiar rendition. Even Dahl's th eory contains insights that help to establish a pluralist account of s elf-development. The concluding section considers briefly some lessons relevant to contemporary debates that might be drawn fram pluralism's account of self-development.