Pluralism in National Context

Abstract

The major part of this book has been an illustration of how a flexible use of ideal-typical categories can highlight the internal diversity of a strand of political thought. Pluralism has been studied not as a coherent and self-contained tradition or ideology, even in the subtle sense of these terms used respectively by Greenleaf¹ and Freeden,² but rather as a problematic which raised particular questions about the nature of, and the relations between, state, groups and individuals, the answers to which could be incorporated within wider theoretical frameworks. By combining organic and contractual approaches to individual–group relations with conceptions of state integration and co-ordination, four variants of the state–group–individual triangle were identified.