Huh, I'm surprised I hadn't run into this before. Though perhaps Billy mentioned it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyarchy I actually rather like the idea of government by "competing elites". The reality is that most of the time most people don't care about governance issues. They just want enough factions fighting it out so that narrow self-interest gets cancelled out. The challenge, of course, is to keep it from degenerating into collusive Corporatism... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Lindblom Together with his friend, colleague and fellow Yale professor Robert A. Dahl, Lindblom was a champion of the Polyarchy (orPluralistic) view of political elites and governance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to this view, no single, monolithicelite 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 that 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. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
