ABSTRACT
For more than twenty-five years, Arnold Rose has fused the liberal ethos with the sociological imagination. An intellectual adventure that began in 1940 with his major role in An American Dilemma has now reached its intellectual culmination with The Power Structure. One genuine problem might well be that Professor Rose's involvement in politics at the local level tends to reinforce a populist image of government, which, while in fact present in American society, does not necessarily reflect the structural dilemmas of the society at the national, or even more noteworthy, at the international level. The attempt of Arnold Rose is clear enough: to effect a reconciliation of power theories by employing the political analyses of the pluralists, from Arthur Bentley to V. O. Key, and the sociological methods of the elitist school, particularly the contemporary work of C. Wright Mills and Hunter.
