The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America. by G. William DomhoffReview by: Howard KimeldorfSocial Forces, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Sep., 1991), pp. 249-250Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580079 .

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Book Reviews / 249

The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America. By G. William Domhoff Aldine de Gruyter, 1990. 315 pp. Cloth, $47.95; paper, $19.95.

Reviewer: HOWARD KIMELDORF, University of Michigan

The social movements of the 1960s brought into sharper focus the subject of power and its relation to American democracy. Inspired by the pioneering works of Floyd Hunter and C. Wright Mills, and provoked by the reigning liberal apologia in the name of pluralism, insurgent research into community and national power structures emerged as one of the decade's hottest topics. While some of the best work of this genre was produced outside the university by muckraking journalists and political activists, academics contributed significantly to the growth of the new research into the power structure. Perhaps the single most influential scholar in this field was G. William Domhoff, who has written a steady stream of articles and books on the exercise of power at the upper reaches of American society.

Domhoff's work was initially attacked from the right, chiefly by mainstream pluralists, who questioned his argument linking the upper class to the state. But his critics on the left were, if anything, less kind. Neo-Marxist structuralists, rather than engaging the substance of Domhoff's analysis, summarily dismissed his entire enterprise for its alleged instrumentalism. They argued that Domhoff's concem with who rules was largely beside the point. What mattered was the logic of capital accumulation, which to a large degree structured the policies of the state. State- centric theorists, rooted in a left-wing Weberian tradition, were equally dismissive, arguing that Domhoff's concem with the problem of upper-class hegemony led him to underestimate the autonomy of both the state and its agents in formulating public policy. Over the years Domhoff has repeatedly tried to answer such criticisms. Now, with the appearance of The Power Elite and the State, he does so with a compelling blend of theoretical refinement, fresh empirical evidence, reasoned argument, and anger, which, one hopes, will finally force even his most determined critics to sit up and take notice.

The first two chapters offer a lucid overview of Domhoff's theoretical position. His objective is to rescue the study of social power from those theorists who would reduce it to either class structure or state domination. Not that these are incidental features of modem society; indeed, Domhoff argues that social classes and the state are "the most important social actors in the advanced capitalist countries in at least the last 150 years." Thus, for Domhoff the task is to understand the relationship of both of these actors as it has evolved historically through a concrete set of social networks linking members of the upper class to various state institutions. The remainder of the book, consisting of eight case study chapters, applies this social network theory of power to explicate the origins of particular state policies and political processes.

A number of broad themes run through the case studies. Several chapters highlight the significance of class segments. Building on Zeitlin's original for- mulation, Domhoff identifies four distinct segments within the American upper class: an internationalist segment consisting of large corporations, banks, law firms, and other businesses sharing a high overseas profile; a nationalist manufacturing segment oriented toward the more competitive domestic market; a southern segment comprising the backbone of the conservative coalition in Congress; and, at the community level, a local growth coalition tied to real estate and development interests. Domhoff employs his map of class segments to understand such different

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250 / Social Forces 70:1, September 1991

outcomes as the passage of the Wagner Act during the Depression and the rise of New Right conservatism under Reagan.

Other chapters draw attention to the role of subordinate groups in shaping state policy. Such subaltern forms of resistance figure prominently in chapters on the origins of the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Employment Security Act of 1946. This "bottom-up" perspective surfaces again in a most provocative chapter on contemporary politics, where Domhoff closely follows Piven and Cloward in arguing that many of the liberal gains of the 1960s and early 1970s came as a result of mass mobilization and disruption undertaken in the context of upper class dissension. Such arguments should put to rest any doubt that Domhoff is really a "closet elitist.'

Nor can Domhoff be charged with being merely an instrumentalist. While it is true that he finds arguments about structural logics insufficient to explain particular policy outcomes, Domhoff is certainly aware of what he terms "the privileged position of business" in capitalist society. In one of his more combative chapters, he shows that the great discovery of structuralism - that the state itself is constrained by economic imperatives - has a rather long and undistinguished pedigree, stretching back to the 1930s, when it included such diverse adherents as the Democratic president of the United States and a leading figure in the American Communist Party. The Power Elite and the State is filled with such gems, making it a real pleasure to read.

This book covers a lot of ground, both old and new. It may not convince all of Domhoff's critics, but it deserves their close attention, for it demonstrates once again the author's preeminence as one of the most careful and astute observers of power in American society.

Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. By Seymour Martin Lipset. Routledge, 1990. 337 pp. $29.95.

Reviewer: Rmi FEWICK, University of Akron

How are Americans and Canadians different? This is the central question in Seymour Martin Lipset's new book. His answer is more or less the same as it was a generation ago, when he pioneered comparative Canadian-American research in sociology with his books Agrarian Sociology (1950) and The First New Nation (1963). For Lipset, the U.S. is a Whig society, the embodiment of classic nineteenth-century liberalism, emphasizing individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and a lais- sez-faire, antistatist political culture. Canada, on the other hand, "has been and is a more class-aware, elitist, law-abiding, statist, collectivity-oriented, and particularistic (group-oriented) society," i.e., a Tory society. In tum, these differences in "org- anizing principles" are, to a large degree, outcomes of the American Revolution and Canada's refusal to join it - which Lipset refers to as a "counter-revolution." Thus, Canada's values and institutions developed as a result of both its reaction against the Revolution and its continuing ties to Great Britain.

In support of this thesis, Lipset draws on numerous secondary sources, including census data, public opinion polls, and literary criticisms, to illustrate how these differences in organizing principles are reflected in different patterns of intellectual thought, institutional arrangements, and mass attitudes and behavior. For example, Lipset argues that these differences are reflected in literary themes: an emphasis on ambition and success in American literature versus one on losing and

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