¹Western Michigan University

^*I thank Andrew Polsky, Nicholas Xenos, and the anonymous reviewers of Polity for their helpful comments, as well as Fred Dallmayr, Joe Buttigieg, David Ruccio, and Neve Gordon for valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Abstract

Despite the unfortunate tendency of some political scientists to theorize and to examine political phenomena with little reference to economic issues, many scholars correctly insist on taking into account the relationship between economics and politics. Yet, even these scholars sometimes employ modes of economic thought that underestimate the diversity and complexity of the ways in which political and economic relations affect each other, including the positive and negative effects different economic practices have on democracy. In this article, I examine the work of Robert Dahl as a case study of just such a scholar, one who is explicitly concerned about the interconnections between economics and politics, but whose theorization of them falls short in several crucial ways. For example, although Dahl rightly refers to the historical, political nature of markets, at other times he adopts economistic conceptualizations of them, conceptualizations that treat the economy as an autonomous realm with its own laws of motion. Such laws set narrow constraints on permissible forms of political "intervention" and thereby curtail not only the scope of democracy but also the possibilities for altering those economic relations that negatively affect democracy—consequences that are counter to Dahl's stated political and theoretical intentions.