Dahl,Robert

Abstract

Robert Allen Dahl (1915–2014) was a founder of the postwar political theory of pluralism. Pluralism and the historically related behavioralist model of science was the dominant paradigm of Anglo‐American political science between the 1940s and the 1970s. Current political science can only be properly understood in the context of the critiques of pluralism and behavioralism. During his whole life Dahl was a staunch social democrat, strongly in favor of the redistribution of income, wealth, education, and power, of welfare state provisions, and of meaningful and widespread political participation and deliberation, both in the political and economic sphere. Methodological individualism in the 1960s brought him to a relatively benign view of the status quo, which he later strongly corrected.