Peter F. Drucker on Business and Society

CHAPTER FIVE

Calhoun’s Pluralism

THE AMERICAN PARTY system has been under attack almost continuously since it took definite form in the time of Andrew Jackson. The criticism has always been directed at the same point: America’s political pluralism, the distinctively American organization of government by compromise of interests, pressure groups, and sections. And the aim of the critics, from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace, has always been to substitute for this “unprincipled” pluralism a government based, as in Europe, on “ideologies” and “principles.” But never before—at least not since the Civil War years—has the crisis been as acute as in ...