The City in the Future of Democracy

Bibliographic Data

ID3763124
AuthorsRobert A Dahl (0000-0002-1120-0417, Yale University, corresponding author)
Year1967
Volume61
Issue4
Pages953-970
Publication date1967-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1953398
OpenAlexW2331304776
LanguageEN
Citations received104
References cited12

I need hardly remind this audience that one of the characteristics of our field is the large number of old and quite elemental questions-elemental but by no means elementary-for which we have no compelling answers. I don't mean that we have no answers to these questions. On the contrary, we often have a rich variety of conflicting answers. But no answer compels acceptance in the same way as a proof of a theorem in mathematics, or a very nice fit between a hypothesis and a satisfactory set of data.Whether the obstacles that prevent us from achieving tight closure on solutions lie in ourselves-our approaches, methods, and theories-or are inherent in the problems is, paradoxically, one of these persistent and elemental questions for which we have a number of conflicting answers. For whatever it may be worth, my private hunch is that the main obstacles to closure are in the problems themselves-in their extraordinary complexity, the number and variety of variables, dimensions qualities, and relationships, and in the impediments to observation and data-gathering.However that may be, a question of this sort often lies dormant for decades or even centuries, not because it has been solved but because it seems irrelevant. For even when no satisfactory theoretical answer exists to a very fundamental question, historical circumstances may allow it to be ignored for long periods of time. Even specialists may refuse to take a question seriously that history seems to have shoved into the attic. What seem like fundamental controversies in one age are very likely to be boring historical curiosities in the next. And conversely it is my impression that a great many of the elemental political questions regarded as settled in one age have a way of surfacing later on

Closure (psychology · Democracy · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Political science · Politics · Pure mathematics · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · sort · Statistics · Variety (cybernetics · Computer Science · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism

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