Starr PoliTiCs in The orBiT of money Paul

their nearly seven-hundred-page volume comprehensive, except that the other two books reveal some of its limitations. Taking a wholly different approach, Jeffrey Winters’s Oligarchy is a comparative historical study ranging from the ancient world to the contemporary United States and focusing on the political power of extreme wealth—what many today think of as the “1 percent,” though what Winters has in mind is closer to the 0.0001 percent. And David Karpf ’s The MoveOn Effect provides a ray of hope. If there is any way to counter the power of money, it will have to involve the low-cost methods of political mobilization made possible by the Internet. During the mid-twentieth century, the standard pluralist defense of American democracy held that the free play of organized interests expresses the popular will. The authors of The Unheavenly Chorus derive their title from a criticism of that view: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven,” the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider wrote in 1960, “is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” The metaphor may be dated— what is an upper-class accent today?— but the evidence of radical inequalities in political voice is stronger than ever. Schlozman, Verba, and Brady provide the appropriate context for their analysis by first reviewing the central philosophical questions about equality and the long arc of American political development. The United States, they argue, has an “ambivalent” tradition of equality, as expressed, for example, in the history of both the federal and state constitutions. From the beginning, professions of human equality have co-existed uneasily The Unheavenly ChorUs: